Tag Archives: Pastels

Arts and Culture

Modern Art Monday Presents: Georgia O’Keeffe, Goat’s Horns With Blue

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goats horns with blue photo by gail worley
Photo By Gail

In this work of pastel on paper, Goat’s Horns With Blue (1945), Georgia O’Keefe treats the spiral of a goat’s horn as both subject and lens, exploring its distinct materiality, and using it to frame the sky beyond. She found such horns and bones, which she collected in the new Mexican desert, to be “most wonderful against the blue — that blue that will always be there as it is now after all man’s destruction is finished” (a likely reference to World War II, which ended the year this work was made). Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Georgia O’Keeffe, Goat’s Horns With Blue →

Arts and Culture

Modern Art Monday Presents: Joan Miró, Woman (Opera Singer)

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Woman Opera Singer
Photo By Gail

In a series of pastels made in the fall of 1934, Joan Miró pursued what he called “aggressiveness” through color. Rendered in acidic, highly saturated and dissonant hues of thickly applied pastel, the isolated figure of Woman (Opera Singer) appears to protrude from the paper’s surface, Her asymmetrical head, twisted open mouth, overinflated genitalia, and single toenail resist the corporeal ideals embraced by the various fascist parties that were gaining power across Europe at the time.

Photographed as part of the Exhibit Joan Miró, Birth of the World, on View at The Museum of Modern Art Through June 15th, 2019.

Arts and Culture

Modern Art Monday Presents: Wayne Thiebaud, Candy Ball Machine

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Candy Ball Machine
Photo By Gail

Wayne Thiebaud (b. 1920) is an American painter widely known for his colorful works depicting commonplace objects — pies, lipsticks, paint cans, ice cream cones, pastries, and hot dogs — as well as for his landscapes and figure paintings. In his defense of common objects as being suitable for painting, as seen with Candy Ball Machine (1977), Thiebaud often mentions the gumball machine.  “A gumball machine can be a kind of icon, with its simple beauty, its colors, its relationship, its magic — we put in a penny and out comes a brightly colored gumball or prize. It is  a glorious toy which we adults miss the wonder of.”

Photographed as Part of the Exhibit, Wayne Thiebaud, Draftsman, Which is on View at The Morgan Library in NYC Through September 23rd, 2018.