About Painting

I'm a sucker for movies about writers and artists. Always eager to learn some secret to success, I suppose. As if there is one. Local Color (2006), written and directed by George Gallo, is too simplistic and sentimental to be truly inspirational. The acting by Armin Mueller-Stahl (Nicholi Seroff, the older artist) and Trevor Morgan (John Talia, Jr., the younger artist) makes the film watchable.

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I did not know David Hockney started out as an Abstract Expressionist at the Royal Academy. That was probably the greatest revelation of the Met show. In those early works, there was already a keen sense of color. The Room Tarzana (1967) is my favorite of the works on show, beating out all the swimming pools, glass-curtain buildings, Californian landscapes. It has this wonderful sense of coolness about its sexual heat. The most penetrating, psychologically, is "Henry Geldzahler & Christopher Scott" (1969), about the Met curator, ensconced on his throne, and his supplicant, the trench-coated boyfriend and artist.








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