Now THIS is what I'm talkin bout !
The work on the right, " Nature", a collage of rice paper on Rives BFK with whitewash, Chinese ink and gouache just about snapped my neck when I was going through some images from his site. The artist - he's Brody Neuenschwander.
He had a show called Textasy at the AFP Galleries straddling Jan, Feb and March this year. Go to their site and you can read 3 paragraphs about him. And talk about minimal, their site is, well, sparse.
But thankfully he has his own web site with lots of his work and a generous, informative biography to boot. http://www.bnart.be/home.html
When I was a youngster and saw a painting by DeKooning, I just had to paint. So down to the basement I went and found 3 or 4 cans of house paint, part of an old sheet and an oversize wooden sliding door panel. And there on my knees with the open paint cans around me I balled up that piece of sheet, dipped it into the paint and let the spirit move me. There are a lot of kinds of freedom, and that was one of them.
Writing in a painting, whether it's legible or not brings back that same feeling of freedom. And so when I encounter work like this, the child in me is once again filled with enthusiasm and glee.
The bottom layer has printing but it's turned so that it becomes abstract. Then there's that wonderful writing that's totally illegible ("my kid could have done that", yeah, right !)and my immediate thought is - was he saying something in his mind when he was writing that. But we'll never know and it doesn't matter. What we have here is that act of writing. That thing that Cy Twombly is so famous for. And it's wonderful to encounter and appreciate that simple human act.
Both images are from his web site.
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