"scout"

5 april 2010

inspiration: richard phillips' painting "scout"
location: gossip girl
what i love: the painterly-ness

irony of all ironies. i watch gossip girl. yes. feel free to judge, i don't care. i think the story is silly too and i think the actors could use some help delivering some of their lines, but it's no pun-ridden CSI, or cheesy sitcom with little to no comedy involved. so i enjoy it. and my favorite part of it has to be the set design.

i don't know what my problem is, but my favorite thing about watching television shows is looking at the set design and artistic choices art direction and set design have taken to create the character environments. maybe it comes from my art history background, or my job and looking for so much detail, but it's really my favorite thing...i only wish that could be my job. combining my two loves, shopping and detail orientation...heaven.

so this week on gossip girl, well, the story isn't all that important to what i'm talking about, but there is a painting being taken off the wall, and i just was finally struck enough by it to try to look it up. here's the picture i took...



well, turns out it is a painting by richard phillips, called "scout," and just ask me how much i want it. it's just breathtaking. i love this painting.

i used to hate portraiture. i really did. when i took art of mexico in college, i hated the portrait section. it just seemed so frivolous and pompous for people to commission portraits of themselves. but then i started studying renaissance and dutch paintings, and something shifted. i started really looking into the eyes of the subjects, looking for meaning and subject matter, and i started to like them more. i think its come full circle too with the show up at the CAMH right now. we have a retrospective up of Barkley L Hendricks, which is primarily portraits. i have really started looking at some of my favorite modern artists lately, and portraiture is actually in most of my favorites...yoshitomo nara, richard prince, elizabeth peyton, richard diebenkorn, hiroshi sugimoto, etc....so tricky. how i wish i hadn't been so quick to decide my feelings in the past...haha

but this painting, with its smooth strokes of hair and almost cartoon-like style, i just love it. the big sunglasses. the play on the boy scout uniform and the color contrast. i just love it. the whole painting is just beautiful. trust me.



my picture for this one isn't as awesome as the original, but there's some nudity in the original, and i didn't feel like i could post that on my blog since i'm not sure how many of the mommy friends read this while their kiddos play....so nixes on the nudes, but the whole painting is really beautiful, so check it out if you like.