Some paintings are a seductive opening to an inner world: imagination. It’s like reading the opening lines in a work by Edgar Allen Poe, Ray Bradbury or Stephen King. It can be a leap into the unexplored possibilities of existence. It is your reach to the spirit world.
Andrew Wyeth can lead you there. Just follow the tracks over the hill, or into the sky. It is your decision. Your choice. And the mask over the wide-eyed stare into wonderment? It can be you at any moment in time, or maybe only a flicker of light in a kinetoscope...but it can be the beginning of a dance with fantasy.
The young people in the spellbinding paintings of Katie Miller are floating through a strange period in their lives—suspended in a space inhabited by expectations, demands and influences. Each “tween” is portrayed with emotional ambiguity—with hints of bewilderment, pleasure, confidence wonderment, and fear.
This is the visual language of adolescence. It amplifies the tension of the transition years: the progression from the custody of childhood to the freedom and ultimate servitude of adulthood. You remember those years. It may be where PTSD is rooted, but so is joy.
Cassie Taggart thinks and paints outside the rules. Things begin to assemble like refugees from Inconsequential. A truth begins to break out...outside the rules of drawing, perspective and color.
Cassie Taggart’s art is her liberation—her freedom to explore whatever comes close. And everything, it seems, comes close. It is also her prison, always demanding that she rummage in the dark and cast a beam of light into our interior world, to find something—a something so elusive that it never comes up in one piece so that she is “always coming up short.” But isn’t that what art should be—not AI perfect?
Few artists could travel in an inner world like Yves Tanguy. His vision was always a leap into the unexplored possibilities of existence where he sailed beyond the horizon of reality. It is an open door to the spirit world. It could also be an illustration of PTSD—the disassembled pieces of a personality. Yet somehow, his work is always a portrait of hope. It’s our entry to spirituality and a way up out of the dark times.
1. “Winter Carnival” – Andrew Wyeth
2. “Girl on Blue” - Katie Miller - https://artistkatiemiller.com
3. “Free Hammy” Cassie Taggart - https://cassieart.com
4. “Indefinite Divisibility” – Yves Tanguy
James John Magner www.jamesjohnmagner.com
Andrew Wyeth has always been a favorite. I look at his work when I want to be renewed. He was a master of technique, but he said technique isn't enough...there has to be purpose and meaning way beyond that. That is true of the other three artists in the post as well.
The first image is really something thanks for sharing