Looming Shadows: Rick Amor

I remember seeing Amor's paintings for the first time at school. Much of his art, especially the urban and seascapes, have a way of arresting you with their silence and mystery; a way of compelling reflection and evoking memories - the blurred and barely discernible ones with little context and those redolent of childlike sensations and wonder.

I dream about my childhood in the same dark tonality of my paintings. The sky is always lowering in to the sea, the beach is deserted and something awful has happened or is about to happen. ~Rick Amor

thedog1989

You enter into Amor's world, his imagination, and it becomes your own for a time. You are left wondering where the long shadows will lead you, what (if anything) the cascades of light will disclose. Aside from being well constructed, his works embody and convey something of the unspeakable in the way great paintings that confront engima have always done - through vision, application and nuance. I see these works and am quietly reminded of the spaces and light in Balthus and Hopper.

celestiallane_3trees

It's not what Amor's painting compels me to think, but how it leave me feeling that continues to resonate with me some fifteen years after first seeing them. 

-------------

Rick Amor - A Single Mind

This Unfinished Business

Inside the studio, April 2011. the studio is a place sanctuary and uncertainty. 

Drawing continues in between bouts of painting. These also undergo various states of transition, and the energy that comes from this feeds into painting.

studio drawing

drawing

Distressing Outlines

The destructive element which is present in painters, and is part of the reason why their lives have sometimes had these distressing outlines, is absolutely essential. [You should] become violently impatient with the inadequate in your painting and be prepared to do absolutely anything arbitrary to kick the painting into a sort of life..

~Frank Auerbach

Auction House Alien (Part 2): Reclaiming A Cultural Encounter

In response to my mini post concerning  the auction house, reader Nick Johnston writes,

"Following the recent sales here in London of Picasso’s painting La Lecteur at c. £25m and now Bacon’s small triptych of Lucien Freud at c. £23m – both to vanish into private, anonymous collections I presume – it’s a salutary reminder that art can always be reduced by the global art trade to secure and lucrative personal investments. No doubt, in 10-20 years’ time, the same paintings will reappear in the major auction houses, and fetch even greater sums for their new owners. Can these works now ever hope to escape the celebrity status of becoming auction house blockbusters and be seen again as paintings, as ART – made not for money but for some kind of love – when the price tags threaten to eclipse them?"

This is partly a question of perspective. It could be argued their celebrity has considerably diminished their potential for being experienced as individual works of art  - where they are approached in purely commercial terms,  instead of as objects made by an individual, as works with their own historical context.

La Lecture c. 1932

Cheyenne Westphal says Bacon's was "an artwork that radiates 'wall-power'". 

Whether a work has 'wall-power' or any cultural resonance is a curiosity that is best explored, not an opinion to be blindly accepted. What we do with our curiosity is key. Without the effort to seek out and experience the work first hand, the artists, and not just their works, remain far removed from any kind of artistic or cultural experience that can be called worthwhile. We are too easily saturated with the digital image, instead of transformed or provoked by the physical matter of a created work encountered in real space and time. In the face of cult celebrity, alienation and vulnerable art market, this is the one physical response we should be encouraging people to have.