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Inspiration from favourite artists Week 9: Eric Ravilious and Andrea Kowch
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Message
Posted
She certainly paints amazing work. Normally this is what I would describe as ultra-realistic,work which has little appeal for me and in many artists comes across as kitsch but her work is in a class of its own. I'm surprising myself by admitting I could live with one of her works hanging on one of my contemporary minimalist walls.
Posted
I'm not so sure about there necessarily being a background story Tessa. I had a surrealist friend, John Voss now sadly no longer with us, who did the most amazing work. I have one of his - a boat floating in water inside a room lit be a chandelier - and when asked where his inspiration came from would explain that he had no idea - it came to him as he painted - he had no idea where he was going when he started to paint.
Edited
by Michael Edwards
Posted
Thank you for the intro Jenny , I have spent some time this looking at her work , had eye treatment yesterday and everything was to blurry to look at . Her work is excellent different from what I normally look at but then that’s the idea behind this thread . I could have chosen a lot more but these particular ones stand out , can’t really say why the just appeal to me more .
Edited
by Paul (Dixie) Dean
Posted
Jenny, I just read the article you mentioned. Wow, what a fascinating read, and what a huge amount of planning, thought and detailed effort goes into each work: also that many paintings are ‘related’ or connected to each other. I will probably need to read it again and I noticed also an article on John Singer Sargent which I will read later.
Thanks again for the intro.
Posted
I haven't seen Kowch's paintings before and agree they are brilliantly painted technically, but I find them eerily sinister. However they have drawn me in and I have looked at more images of her paintings, and comparing her "Escape into Life" ( Tessa's 1st choice above) with Andrew Wyeth's "Christina's World" gives a clue to the narrative going on. But if you've a got a bit of a bird phobia (from watching Hitchcock's 'The Birds' at an early age) then they are too creepy for me to look at for long.
Posted
First and foremost welcome to the discussions Hilary, good to have you joining us and thank you for commenting as well .
I agree they are a bit creepy but at the same time there is something almost compulsive about them, I just look at them and enjoy the quality of her work and really don’t think about the story line etc. I’m sure they have a slightly different story to tell for each viewer.
Posted
Ah well, that's summat else again ..... I admire Kowch's technique and the complexity of her vision: that's not to say I like the work, or don't find it sinister - it's just that sinister is of interest in its own right; but one doesn't have to be drawn to it.
I'd make a comparison with Francis Bacon - I don't like his work; indeed, I strongly dislike it. I still appreciate its originality, complexity, symbolism, and all the rest of it. Just couldn't live with it - and of all his work, the screaming Popes just seem to me to be trivial, and not to say what critics seem to think they say. I'd completely separate that visceral and critical reaction, the two combining to reflect my own prejudices, from an appreciation of the work aesthetically.
In other words - we don't HAVE to like any work; though you're right of course - it's very hard to separate one's immediate impressions from any more objective analysis - a problem throughout art history, and why it wasn't just the Nazis who hated "entartete Kunst" (degenerate art) - which, hilariously, was an extremely popular exhibition when they put it on: whether they liked it or not, the Berlin public could for the most part see the value in it: they didn't all come to scoff. An unintended success for Dr Goebbels.
Well, I've dragged that point out until the elastic snapped!
Posted
She does very interesting work Jenny. I've not come across it before and I like it. The women in her painting look fearful, yet, accepting of the slightly bizarre, dreamlike situation, they are placed. It made me think about Stephen King and how he transformed his night terrors into best selling books.
