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Scary Faces

Hole (Dirt Dauber)

Perg-Check: Photos

"One whole day I sit, contrite, dirt, L.A."

Galef

Review of My Drawing Show...

Landscape with Dogs
by Karri Paul

...by T.J. Hunt for Pastelgram, August 11, 2011: http://pastelegram.org/reviews/46

An excerpt:

At their most successful the works encapsulate the beauty and violence of nature. Nowhere does the artist more explicitly pair these attributes than in Landscape with Dogs (2010). Large and snarling canine mandibles arc menacingly downward towards a lone leaping deer gracefully highlighted against a dense forest. The deer appears fragile and ethereal under the weight of the powerful jaws that dominate the composition. Paul’s mark-making echoes this dichotomy, alternately forceful and exquisitely delicate. Upon close inspection, even the drawing’s deep blacks reveal a rich layering of varied line work. Like the shades of meaning that emerge from an oft-read poem, the works are better appreciated with repeated viewing.

Masaccio's fresco
Trinity (1425)
Santa Maria Novella
picasaweb.google.com

 

Nice! I also like that Hunt makes a connection between some of my drawings (this one and this one) and the memento mori ("remember your mortality") tradition. It's something I think about a lot, often involuntarily. 

"Io fu già quel che voi sete: e quel chi son voi ancor sarete," the inscription on the tomb at the bottom of Masaccio's Trinity, which I am so lucky to have spent time with in Florence, translates to, "I once was what you are; what I am, you will become." Those words send chills down my spine even now.

Images like Jean Morin's The Skull (1650) also come to mind. Andreas Vesalius's anatomical drawings fascinate me: the poses, the facial expressions, the landscapes and settings these half-dissected or skeletonized figures are placed in. (Example, example, example.) Some of my collages (not included in the show) are translations of these.

Masaccio's Trinity (detail)

I don't know if my fascination with death (and/or reminders of death) is anything more than anyone else's, but I found an audio tape recording from when I was five, singing a song of my own invention. It's refrain: "I don't want to die... 'cause I'm only five." 

(compose      project      this   image, is on view through September 2, 2011.)

Steps: Photo

Fun with Google Image Search

Photo by Karri Paul

Above: The image, my own, that I image searched.  Below: Top two images that "match."

Source: http://www.gaellelepetit.fr/blog/

Source: http://193.190.56.244/abk/onderzoek.htm

Below: Screen grab of top sixteen results that are "visually similar."

Fun with Google Image Search

Source: http://www.karripaul.com

 Above: Image of the drawing (mine, Landscape with Wasps' Nest) that I image searched.  Below: Top "visually similar" result.  Last: Screen grab of top twenty similar images.

Source: http://www.bloody-disgusting.com/news/comics/1188/

Fun with Google Image Search

Karri Paul    http://upum.blogspot.com/

My photo (above) and visually similar results from Google (below).

My picture of the life-size wooden bear in Minocqua, Wisconsin, upper-left corner of the picture below. The rest are the visually similar results from Google.

Birch, Pine

Pine (Snowmobile Trailer)