LOUIS LE BROCQUY
Until Helen mentioned him in a comment to my misbegotten self-portrait post, I had never heard of this Irish artist. If you haven't followed her links yet, try this one. I respond to his portrait heads the same way I do to Francis Bacon: the initial horrific impression, and then, as you penetrate the layers, the horror put into context, as an essential part of the human condition, but a part through which we persevere somehow. God knows how we keep going; we just do. Sometimes I think we're not doing justice to the various horrors of life, not honoring them, unless we explode and vaporize, which we refuse to do, and I guess that's some kind of testament to our tenacity or courage or blindness, I don't know what. One of the most shocking and profound lessons I've gotten through my thick head is that no matter what horrors befall you, you keep going. You just keep going. I don't know what to think about that.
Sparky Donatello
11 Comments
Reader Comments (11)
It's interesting he called the series Ancestral Heads, as if they were trying to warn us about something. The future's coming for us all.
The howling ones affect me the most I think. It's as if they're still trying for something to save them when the others know there's nothing to be done. All that anguish gives me the jitters to look at, but I'm compelled to look.
The dread reminds me a bit of Goya's black paintings.
This one .. http://www.anne-madden.com/LeBPages/ancestral36.html .. struck me as very much painted like Bacon with those brushstrokes in that blank expanse but it felt warm and cheerful. It's like you're sat accross the table from him sharing a few.
Bacon said in an interview that he could never paint a smile no matter how hard he tried.
(you Sparky on the other hand can paint the fuckin lot smiles an'all, and on a daily basis!)
Gosh, you just never know where the conversation is going to go at this site. One day it's fart jokes, the next it's deconstructing Francis Bacon.
Actually, Dr. Research, there's a whole school of thought that says the fart jokes are what keep us going through the horror, the horror.
Well, maybe not a whole school of thought, but Woody Allen in "Hannah and Her Sisters."
In the movie, Woody's father responds to his son's existential question "Why were there Nazis?", with one of my favorite lines ever:
"How the hell do I know why there were Nazis? I don't know how the can opener works."
Another great line: Woody's character rules out wanting to believe in Nietzsche's theory of eternal recurrence because it means he'd have to sit through the Ice Capades again. "It's not worth it."
Finally, Woody cures himself of the funk by going to a Marx Brothers movie.
And then they all live happily ever after.
So, there's really not much of a gap between the idea of threesomes and foursomes by obese people in assisted living and Le Brocquy's heads!
Sparky's musing to that line attributed to Robert Frost (I'd love to know where he said/wrote it, if it is indeed his): In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life it goes on.
Sorry - there should have been a colon between 'life' and 'it' up there.
*musing*
There is a colon between life and it, isn't there?
*end musing*
Uh, more like a duodenum, dude, like duh.
As far as I've ever been able to work out, "one day at a time" is the only answer that matters practically*.
* USER DANGER! - It won't work practically as an answer to "Compare and contrast Milton's use of allegory with Spenser's Faerie Queen" or What is 7x9? but if someone were to ask the common enough horticultural question Mary, Mary quite contrary, how does your garden grow? then it would be spot on.
Please come to me for all your wisdom needs, folks! I'm doing a two-wise-things-for-one-deal right through to the end of the political conventions! Tell your friends!
This is the best blog on the Internets.
I finally remembered what this printed reminded me of (of what this print reminded me?).
Anyway. Matt Mahurin. I have a print (okay, poster) of his from the 1980s of a figure chained to a warhead, calmly munching away on his/her wrist.