Saturday, April 16, 2011

The Dark Side of Beauty

The earliest records of painting on cave walls record the kill of hunt. Caravaggio presented his bodiless head on canvas to a pope, and Frieda Kahlo painted herself skewered by a rod through her abdomen depicting the most painful moment of life to her at the time. Then perhaps most gripping was "The Scream" by Edvard Munch.
 Beauty is sometimes in the countrysides, sunsets and billowing impressionistic parasols...
Othertimes it reaches into taboo, those things we'd alternately rather not think about, or we think about them when no one is watching....

"Kneeling Nude (The Prayer)"
11x14
Acrylic on Canvas

2 comments:

  1. And of course there's Bosch, and works like "Guernica"... even Van Gogh's Potato Eaters has a stark beauty which lies not in the subject, but in the work itself. And, really, beauty arising from perfection is often cold, almost non-human, simply because perfection is not human.

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  2. Ray, Thankyou for you well thought out comments! I love Van Gogh's "Potato Eaters" for it's honesty in color and mood. Prettying it up would have destroyed the piece. Guernica is almost violently beautiful and Bosh's stories in paintings show a beautifully human and often even irreverent side of humor the imagination. Thanks again!
    tina

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