Yesterday I caught a glimpse in the newspaper of this drawing by George Seurat, a study in conté-crayon for what would be his 1884 oil painting "Bathers at Asnières" (which hangs in the National Gallery in London). I've never been a Seurat fan but I was taken with the Dreyeresque aspect of this sketch. Working on coarse-grained Michallet paper, which ate up his charcoal, Serurat left a lot of space untouched and so defined his subject not in terms of lines but in the juxtaposition of tones. The effect is beautifully dreamlike, more dreamlike to me than Seurat's color pointillist paintings which, I don't know, are too sweet for my taste. I love the inkiness of "Echo" (as this is called) and I prefer the study to Seurat's finished oil.
Looking at this for a few minutes set my mind to thinking about art. Maybe it's different for other people, but I definitely feel as though there are media that are mind and media that belong to other people. Film, for example, is a medium that I feel close to, even though I know full well that millions of other people feel the same way. Still photography is another - I've always connected to still photography and have haunted many more photography museums than I have portrait galleries. Painting, music, poetry and sculpture are all arts that I admire but I'm definitely on the outside looking in, nose pressed to the glass in awe. I can love a particular painting or a particular style or even admire a particular artist but my appreciation of fine art is still relegated to the nerdy ghetto of what sets off an emotion in me. I love the work of Edward Hopper, because I can connect with his sense of loneliness in a crowd... but I rarely admire artwork in this media solely in terms of technique or context, as I do in cinema or fiction.
My favorite photographer is Ralph Eugene Meatyard. As with the Seurat drawing above, this shot is one I hadn't seen before yesterday. Born in Illinois, Meatyard lived and worked as an ophthalmologist in Lexinton, Kentucky, and his work has a definite Southern Gothic feel to it. He seemed to work exclusively with his family and friends as subjects when he wasn't just snapping away at found objects (torn flags, broken dolls, dime store monster masks), which suggests to me an excessive shyness despite his artistic ambitions.
He seems in this respect a soul mate of Diane Arbus (who was Meatyard's New York contemporary and committed suicide a year before his death from cancer in 1972) but instead of going out and trolling for freaks on the streets of the urban sprawl, Meatyard went native, trucking into the country to channel his inner freak, the ghoulishness and monstrousness within that is not necessarily predatory in nature but defensive, reflective. Without having seen any Meatyard in his lifetime, I was living a Meatyard existence, keeping away from home, shoplifting Halloween masks from the bargain bin at Diskay's Department Store on Main Street and hanging out with my few friends in abandoned houses or sewer runoff pipes that ran along the highway. Meatyard and I seem to have shared a perverse attraction to dead animals, road kill as found art. And I often wore my hood up like the kid in the picture above. I remember getting a plastic skull mask and a raincoat for my birthday one year, putting them on, going out of the house and making a girl next door scream out loud. Her name was Martha and she was tall for a pre-teen, big-boned and blonde. She looked like the St. Paulie Girl. Kind of.
