Giorgio Morandi and Luc Tuymans

Girogio Morandi

Luc Tuymans

I have been thinking about Giorgio Morandi for a few days now. It started when I was thinking about Luc Tuymans, because I read an interview with Luc Tuymans in Art Review (the British Magazine), and I was thinking that Luc Tuymans paintings are like a cross between Gerhard Richter and Giorgio Morandi. Sophisticated and slick sometimes, and clunky and awkward at times too, and using a muted palette.

Having been criticized over the time I have been painting for making images that seem old, I have become sensitive to using older or dead artists as sources to draw from, and have been spending years looking for cultural sources to look at, and things in my life to use as motivation. But I was happiest painting when I was thinking about other painting, and my mind was living with the medium, I was thinking in color and paint, the viscosity, the way an image almost could congeal by magic out of something that was walking a thin line between an image and a messy scribble. It was exciting. Having started painting alot again I am starting to feel that way again.

I was thinking about colors and getting so excited on my drive home from my class tonight I could barely contain myself.

I also think oil paint is alot more exciting than acrylic, because acrylics are too hard to rework after you put them down. They are great to use as a watercolor medium to tone pencil and ink drawings, but I do not think they work to make serious paintings. Serious drawings, yes, serious paintings, no.

Painting is a weird mute. It has to talk in symbols and feeling.

Luminous like the plexiglass storefront of a seven eleven when you drive by at midnight and nothing else is open.

Neo-Books

Printed books are about to undergo the same transition that hit painting when photography became popular and widely available in the late 19th century.

At the advent of photography, painting lost a lot of what had made it a viable career, and also seemed to be outdone by the verisimilitude of photography's perfect simulacrums of people in the form of portraits. If some normal person can guarantee you a perfect and lifelike portrait, why do you need an artist?

This sent painting into the identity crisis we call Modernism, and all of its sub-movements, and the denial of picture, image, and eventually object. Which can be seen as a narrative of painting trying to find the place where only it could exist and have value. Eventually we reach Danto's death of history and Postmodernism, where there are no rules - except that everything is a reference and that religion is largely considered bad form.

Well I think McSweeneys Quarterly Concern is the first (wonderful) symptom of a Neo-Modernism of the Printed book, and it foretells all the identity issues, deconstruction, reconstruction, destruction, and reinvention that the photograph meant to painting. When you get a book of short stories and it comes in the form of a batch of misdelivered mail, or folds out and has a playing card and hair comb you can view that as inventive, but you can not dismiss the possibility of a reaction.

If McSweeneys is the symptom, then the Kindle (digital book from Amazon) is the cause. Photography is a good thing, but it shook things up for art. If anyone can get a book cheaper, carry it with less burden, reference any phrase, and buy a new book in their car on the way to the airport a real printed book is going to have to do something new that makes it different.

I predict an exciting and interesting reinvention of the printed book over the course of the next decade. It will have similarities to other reactionary movements like Modernism, or the British Arts and Crafts movement, and the world wide current DIY scene.

I would like to hear from you about this issue.

-Bill