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vivir: a los saltos (1964) by rómulo macció has been my favorite painting at the blanton museum in austin for maybe 5 years now... it's awesome
Mar 23, 2025
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Milton Avery, Bathers, Coney Island, 1934, oil on canvas
the first time i saw this painting in the Portland art museum, walking through the American art section with my free student ticket, i think i hated it a little. it was weird and the colors were queasy and i probably could have painted it myself.
well, i guess it grew on me over the next dozen of visits, because now i have to pay $20 to enter the museum and this is one of my favorite paintings ever. there’s something so unconsciously skillful about it to me, and extremely funny, as if the painter put me in on a joke. i even bought a museum postcard of it from eBay and framed it on my wall. on a particularly bad day in San Francisco i found myself in the de Young museum in Golden Gate Park, and the sight of another Milton Avery painting brought me to tears like i had encountered a close friend. Avery lived a fairly quiet life; he didn’t find success as a painter until later in life. when he did, he wasn’t particularly financially successful. but he created art every day and taught his daughter to do the same, he used color and shape in strange and oddly transformative ways, and he had a friendship with Mark Rothko, a fellow Portland native who i admire very much, that consisted of long nights of tea and talking.
how does any of this relate to how much i love this painting? maybe i just saw it enough times during a transformative period of my life. but i love it for its vague impressions of hot dog vendors, and tough but tender hearted italian dudes, and a working class new-york dream, and imperfect people enjoying themselves at the beach regardless of the queasiness and horrors of everyday life, regardless of strange shadows and monkey people. i love it for being so weird and progressive for 1930 and kind of goth and surreal. i hope you love strange paintings too, but if you don’t, that’s alright.
Jan 30, 2025
Feb 13, 2025
absolutely prolific painter with around 6,000 paintings done over his lifetime, but more than half of them are of the sea and the coast. its feels very romantic and reverent and i like how small the people often are in the composition because it just helps remind the viewer of how powerful the sea is how insignificant we are in comparison to this writhing god.
Jan 24, 2025
Top Recs from @superhellarad
This is a classic combo that is both nutritious and delicious. You can't go wrong with honeycrisp or granny smith apples... Yum...
Apr 1, 2025
I feel like the sun cancels out the blue light poison... or something...
Mar 22, 2025
this is a picture of a cat named penny that was sent to my friend, who then showed it to me, to which i responded "the humble isosceles triangle"
Apr 10, 2025