“There is a freemasonry... among figurative painters – and I mean the term in the metaphoric sense of a secret club as well as the sense of a guild of highly developed craftsmen, for great skill is required to observe and render the body. And it is both, observation as well as drafting. Over a lifetime of close watching one learns how muscles move and pull and place our bones into postures, and the ways that our bodies and faces can reveal our thoughts; the long, slow, laborious practice of making marks to represent what one sees isn’t as direct as the same thing might be if one takes a photograph, the mark-making also conveys what one senses and feels. The hand is an interpreter, not a copyist…”
(from a review of the exhibition, The Figure in Contemporary Art, Cypress College, curated by Thomas Butler, by Geoff Tuck on the blog Notes on Looking.) Click on the link to see work by Jerome Witkin, Domenic Cretara, Odd Nerdrum, Sigmund Abeles and others.
