Painting is back

Here is an excellent article about painting. It goes around the arguments developed in this blog.

"We're living in an extremely fruitful and exciting time for those captivated by contemporary art," says Dan Cameron, senior curator at New York's New Museum of Contemporary Art. "I've been in the trenches for 20 years, and there's more good art being produced in more places than I can remember at any one time. We're in a sort of Golden Age."

Yes that's it. We seem to enter the first marches of an artistic renaissance. Painting again is at the forefront of "making sense out of it".
I'am presently deeply engaged in the painting of 30 works and I can't thus spend much time writing but I'll be back at it intensively sometime during the coming fall. My project is to terminate a book based on what I have written as of today in this blog, a book that will act as an introduction to the paintings I'am working on presently.

Can an art form that's been around for centuries still express the zeitgeist? Or "Is it a vampire, feeding off the blood of its history?" as John Weber, curator of education and public programs at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, puts it.
In other words, is the new painting more about nostalgia - a throwback to a time of greater stability - or is it vital and original, shaking up one's assumptions and forcing the viewer to feel and think about the present?

This question is of the uttermost importance and is the reason why this blog is titled "Crucial talk". It makes absolutely no doubt to me that human perception is foremost visual. In one of the last articles that I recommended a scientist was expressing how scientific thought was as flowing along visual representations in the head of the scientist. Visual representations are behind the values and thinking of all of us, most generally unconsciently for sure. Thus goes my personal thinking: visual arts are about making or giving sense to our reality. Presently, to grasp some sense out of our reality, the brush has to follow a brain that is aware simultaneously of 2 forms of knowledge: traditional philosophies and modern sciences of complexity, there is no escaping this in painting. And this is the secret to leap over the following observations:
"They are not tackling very difficult issues, although they are first-rate stylists," Robert Storr, professor of modern art at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts, says of the new painters.
Professor Storr sees none of the younger generation attacking social injustice like the established painters Gerhard Richter or Leon Golub. "New narrative paintings by younger artists are not addressed to large world problems. The new work is much more antiheroic or deliberately modest in ambition."

In the meantime, see the following article.

Painting is back