New Nik Painting

Portrait of a Nerd God. http://www.nikart.com/new/39.html

Comments and death threats and idle chatter are all welcome.

Nik

I would seriously consider another avenue of expression...perhaps psycho-drama...

put up a smaller image with an option to click for a larger detailed image or you can design specifically for 19 inch monitors and larger. You could add a line to your page that tells the rest of us that your images are best viewed on 19 inch plus monitor.

I am not going to download and resize just to get a good look at the overall image.

keith

That's probably a good idea

Your notion that someone would threaten you with death is pretentious and self-important.

As for the portrait: how many times are you going to do the same thing until even you get tired of repetition lacking evolution? It's basically cartoon work (nothing wrong with that) but more interesting examples can be found in any randomly selected Zap Comix. your work just doesn't seem to project anything that the photo doesn't project, and - in fact - loses most of what is interesting about the subject's face.

But what's the point? You only like people who think you're a genius of production, and seem incapable of accepting criticism except as a sign of mental depravity.

Soooo, what did Jacques have to say about his portrait???

As for me, I still think you need to explore more than one rendition of whatever portrait it is you're currently working with. Make some new tracks! The chicken tracks are getting much too overwrought, IMO. Let's see some new application of marks in portraiture. If you are a fan of Chuck Close, you'll know that's what his lifetime of portraiture had been all about - finding ever new ways of 'making faces.'

The issue is screen settings not monitor size. The image size is 400 x 577 pixels. Your screen settings must be set larger that 800 x 600 pixels to see the complete image in the browser.

Scott

On Wed, 03 Apr 2002 18:15:02 GMT, 'keith o'connor (tinmangallery.com'

If he baked a bad pizza every time I would feel little regret in at least informing him that - despite his obvious joy in the act - his enthusiasm seems either misplaced or badly manifested. This might save him a lot of embarassment eventually. At any rate, I haven't heard many people (here at least) telling you to quit painting faces: an obsessional subject is fine. But I do think you approach the subject with little or no specific interest. I just think you need to widen your approach to portraiture, so as to produce something that is at least as interesting as the faces themselves, as seen in the photos. This may not be your opinion (obviously not) but it hardly represents a total rejection of your chosen obsession, and - in its way - is a fairly valid response to your plethora of repetitious images.

As for your use of color, I can't say it is vastly intriguing either, as the colors appear to have no connotative power, and merely seem (despite your best efforts) to be a matter of filling up the spaces between the outlines of the faces. You certainly use a lot of them, and I suppose that is exciting to some, but to me it seems to flatten out any effect you might have (or might not have) been attempting. As I've said before, it is rather good that you provide explanatory captions for the images, because they are otherwise mostly unproductive of their own story.

But - and I repeat because you seem to have difficulty understanding - it isn't a matter of anyone telling you to choose a different subject - the subject is of little import. But your chosen means of expression are mostly just superficial and the wild coloring and endless doodling almosts seems to exist to cover up the inadequacies of your work.

I am not a particular fan of his myself, having investigated him closely for a time, mainly because an art professor wanted us to report on a huge show of his that was in town. Although his techniques are as far removed from Nik's rather crude renditions as art allows, I still find his spectrum rather narrow, although I found some of his smaller studies more intriguing. I still find the same problem in him as I find in Nik (although with a bit more appreciation of base technical matters): no matter how large he makes the portraits, I still find almost nothing in them that is much more interesting than in the photos he works from. I have lost contact with his work of late (and with most of the art 'scene' for that matter) and he may have evolved some new approach I am unaware of, so this opinion is tentative enough. Maybe it's the depressing cold irony of post-modern thought in general I find most frustrating. It's as if everyone has given up on depth (even pretensions of same), and on the marvelous, but still wants to take up a lot of gallery space and be represented in magazines. Or maybe I am finally jaded by art in toto, except for 'outsider,' naive, and children's art. A pile of labeled sticks here, a line of yellow powder there, and a few gargantuan bone fragments painted fuschia and installed with loud speakers playing ska over in the corner. Oh well...

I never suggested you should paint anything other than what you desire to paint - and you've stated clearly that you are 'obsessed with faces.' You didn't have to tell ME that - it's obvious.

But I think your method is lacking passion, which Freud's certainly does NOT. I don't know Freud's history well enough to say 'how' or 'if' he evolved to his present psychologically charged methods, but I'll bet he did. Freud and Bacon both for that matter.

OHMIGOD! Are you in for your epiphany or what! Run, race, speed etc to your nearest book source, be it library or book store, and look for him. I'll see if I can find some recent publications to refer you to. Not that you'll relate to Close's HUGENESS - as both an artist and in his subject matter. It's his 'evolution' while painting nothing but faces that I think should be of interest to you - his 'obsessiveness' with the face for his entire art career. He went from hyper-realism in gigantic 20 ft high faces to his present pixel-like breakup of the faces.

BTW, he suffered a severely disabling problem that put him in a wheelchair in recent years, but it hasn't kept him from continuing to paint his gigantic canvases. He devised a way to raise and lower his gigantic canvases into a well in his studio floor as he works them.

It is amusing that a person who has made such a program of harrassing people over personal details for so many years seems totally incapable of getting any personality into his work, but a frenetic and irrelevant 'love' of color that is entirely the result of his own impenetrable ego and unopeness to evaluation and - thus - evolution. He has spoken so much (in a sentimental way) of the vivacity and imagination of children, and so I imagine he thinks this sort of frantic coloration approaches that ideal, but its almost total lack of spontanaiety and exploration destroys that effect. But it is all of package with his adolescent poetry and prose and static notions of converse.