I don't know if it's the part I'm playing - Danny in Cherry Docs - but for some reason, this article, in the New Yorker, really got me. You probably can't read it without a subscription:
But there it is, anyway. I found the descriptions of the art suddenly deeply sensuous, gripping, and emotional. I mean, look at this picture:
Granted, it's kind of hard to see when it looks so small and, well, red - but there's a fever to it that suddenly I find deeply compelling. It probably is Danny who is doing this to me. He is the kind of guy who sees red, a lot, and the kind of guy who is constantly pulling intense spiritual significance out of the most insignificant details. His desperate need for some kind of spiritual grounding, for something to mean SOMETHING, is making me see import in the simplest of things. "There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow." Suddenly I get the frenzied passion behind these strange painters who were looking for something so deeply essential that the paint, the canvas, the deepest colors and simple lines, somehow took them to a =more essential, primitive space than any form or figure could do.
I kinda get it now...
I have heard that with these kinds of paintings how others see them all depends on how the artist was feeling when he/she painted them. So we're supposed to look at texture and layers and that even in a solid colored painting we can be provoked to feel what they were going through when they were painting. I don't know that I have gotten there yet, but I understand why others love them.
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