Yoga at the Coral Reef Park

Influenced by both Richter and Seurat and a day of painting at the studio. I love pushing around pigment like both of those artists do and did. An interesting movie, if you like to watch paint be slowly spread across a surface, (I actually fell asleep twice), is 97 minutes of the German artist Gerhard Richter Painting. He is my dad's age and has a very young wife and toddler who both make cameo appearances... all that aside, just watching makes you want to paint.

In my painting classes this week, as we begin color theory, I showed them a movie about Seurat from a series called The Secret Lives of Masterpieces. Art history today takes in a lot wider viewpoints that the art history I was taught in school. There is the feminist analysis and the global revision of what influenced the artists subject matter and style. Apparently the Ile de la Grande Jatte, the island park on the Parisian Seine, was a notorious place for prostitutes to advertize their wares. And Seurat lines up his figures in either a frontal or side profile just like the Egyptian sculptures that would have been on view at the Louvre right then! So he must have been using the ancient construct of social storytelling to tell the story of a young male in Paris. For whatever reason- and not the technique of the painting- several impressionists refused to let their work hang next to his because they found it offensive! He had to hang it alone in it's own room.

Hopefully my yoga painting won't be so offensive! I'm just illustrating a personal narrative of a morning gathering through an exuberant handling of liquid paint. Have a great day!!!!