Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Lee Lozano, among other things


Have you ever heard a new song and thought, "hey this band is really good!", but when you listen to everything else they do you realize they're not all that fantastic?
I saw this series of paintings by Lee Lozano in the Wadsworth Atheneum. All together, there is eleven of them. I don't know if it's the lighting or if she was just a genius with lost edges, but the way each wave is implied and almost lost at parts is so interesting. They're really cool to see in person. Turns out, Lozano wasn't so serene or simplistic. A good chunk of her career she spent painting old, strange tools, like wrenches and three-headed hammers, with rough, angry, nervous lines. One article describes her as "punk before punk".
Each of the eleven paintings was done using steel combs and wire brushes, applying tiny strokes of paint one at a time, during one sitting so that the paint would not dry out. The eleventh one took her three days. "It was as if the emotional intensity of her artworks - at least the physical ones - had shifted from the content they depicted to the way they were produced."
click here to see the article

As for the other things, I have decided to save every single letter that colleges send me over the next couple years, and turn them into a giant sculpture. I got seven today alone.

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