Walter Knestrick & Red Grooms

Portraits by lifelong friends Red Grooms and Walter Knestrick:




Walter Knestrick, self portrait
[Image: realistic, though slightly primitive watercolor of man with grey hair, glasses, friendly smile, blue and white checked shirt, swirly dark blue background. Looks like a painting of a snapshot.]





Walter Knestrick by Red Grooms
[Image: scratchy, cartoon-y watercolor and pencil sketch of exaggeratedly emaciated, tall thin man with glasses consisting of two white circles and crazy hair. He stands off-kilter and wears a dark blue shirt. Piece is about five times as tall as it is wide, figure has giraffe neck and the arms and torso are about four times as long as they should realistically be. Brushstrokes are messy and expressive.]

Self Portrait today, by me.

[Image description: self-portrait of slack slouching head and shoulders in marker and charcoal on white paper. Kind of cubist, kind of cartoony, a little grotesque. Contoured shapes of pure fauvist (exaggerated) colors along the face and body, some lines descriptive of shoulder muscles, with spine and skeletal teeth showing through. Slightly unfinished looking.]

I'll be back tomorrow

I got really burnt out this past week or two but I'll be back blogging (and in contact with the outside world) tomorrow. I've half-written about the rest of the artist lectures: Greg Hart, Nina Garner and DH Cooper, and maybe an overview kind of thing too, and I want to get those up.

wet sponges and the dark abysm of pish

I was looking up the origins of "butt-hurt" on Urban Dictionary to prove a point when I ran across this:

"H.L. Mencken said of U.S. President Warren G. Harding, 'He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.'"

I wish that the pressure visual artists experience to prove their dedication to craft through slavish repetition or to make the same point continuously for a lifetime did not cause us to toss succinctness out the window. Also, "flap and doodle" is now my go-to private assessment of most things.