![ankeny studio: [the process]](http://www.kurtankeny.com/Ankenybloglogo.gif)
I’m currently posting on Tumblr as an experiment to see if that service is less high-maintenance than WP. For the next couple of weeks, you can see posts at: kurtankeny.tumblr.com. I will redirect my domain to use Tumblr permanently if I can find a way to archive the posts from here on WP over on Tumblr. Thanks!
Sep 032010
Aug 162010
Aug 132010
Aug 122010
Aug 112010
I’ve got my head down in the studio and in the reading armchair. More progress and paintings to come soon.
Aug 102010
Detail of work in progress.
(from my notebook)
The limitation of abstracted contemporary art is its seeming incompatibility with narrative. This stems from the problem of embedding a key to deciphering the abstractions when they refer to objects of events which are not self-evident or recognizable. It is impossible to tell a story when your players, plot points and symbols of portent are indistinguishable. Is there a way to resolve this seeming deficiency through means other than borrowing the gestures and ‘marks’ of abstraction in a superficial way and working them into a more traditional narrative frame?
(In a letter to Henri Matisse, 1904)
What does nature offer us? Disorder, chaos, gaping holes. Yet we go into ecstasies before this chaos, and cry “How beautiful!” A work of art can be plucked from this. It is here that you must “organize your sensations.” Offset this disorder, this chance, these holes with order and profusion. From the very fact that we experience sensual emotion, we may conclude that there is something here for us. How to proceed from a practical point of view in order to express this emotion? Select fragments or details of the beauty on offer. Impose order on these fragments, always bearing in mind the end result. At this moment, we make a work of art. We transform, we transpose, we assert power.
Aug 052010
But what should a painter experiment with and why can he not be content to sit down before nature and paint it to the best of his abilities? The answer seems to be that art has lost its bearings because the artists have discovered that the simple demand that they should ‘paint what they see’ is self-contradictory. [...] We have come to realize more and more, since those days, that we can never neatly separate what we see from what we know. [...] If we look out of the window we can see the view in a thousand different ways. Which of them is our sense impression?
Aug 042010
“If one has an originality,” [Flaubert] said, “the first thing necessary is to develop it; if one has none, it is necessary to acquire one.”— Talent is long patience. When one has something to express, he must look at it so long and with such close attention that he discovers in it some aspect that has not been seen and expressed by anyone else. In everything there is something of the unexplored, because we are accustomed to use our eyes only in connection with our memory of what has been thought before us on the subject we contemplate. The least object contains a little of the unknown. Let us find it. In order to describe a fire that flames and a tree on the plain, let us stay in the presence of that fire and that tree until they have ceased to resemble, for us, any other tree or any other fire.
It is in this manner that one becomes original.
Jul 212010
Model Washing, 1930 (via Art Inconnu)
Jul 202010
Jul 192010
Jul 162010
Jul 152010
I have an intense affinity for the way this man used lines.
Jul 142010
Orange Self Portrait, oil on aluminum, 2010.
(Due to an issue I can’t seem to solve, the above image is appearing a bit stretched. For a properly proportioned, though smaller, image, go here.)
Jul 132010
Samson and Delilah (unfinished), oil on aluminum, 2010.
This is a three by four foot piece that’s the start of a six-painting series I’m working on depicting biblical events of men versus women. Many of these themes have been painted by great artists of the past.
This work is almost finished. There are couple of small tweaks that still need to happen, but this is the general impression it will make once done.
It started off like this:
Jul 122010
Still Life with Red Grapes, oil on canvas, 2010.
This is an older painting, done when I was studying with Natasha Mokina at Winter Palace Studio. There were parts of it I thought worth keeping, but no way to finish it without reference, so I took elements and flattened them out, and put a bunch of work into the background. It looks like solid black, but there’s not an ounce of black pigment back there. Under proper light, you can see the rainbow of “blacks” fighting it out behind those grapes.
Jul 092010
Glass Bottles Two, oil on panel, 2009.
…and this is the direction I’m heading in now. More in this vein as I finish up this month of postings.
Jul 082010
Glass Bottles One, oil on panel, 2009.
Here’s where I’ve been for the last two years…
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