art | ZETEO

Jane Horton, Sue Tilley portrait, 2022 ('stab himself')

Sue Tilley after Lucian Freud (Art as Conversation)

January 31, 2022 by William Eaton

Sue Tilley came to fame as a model for the painter Lucian Freud (who died in 2011). She began posing for him in 1991, when she was also working as a full-time benefits supervisor at a London employment agency. Thus, for example, among the several large nude portraits of Tilley painted by Freud, two were named Benefits Supervisor Resting (1994) and Benefits Supervisor Sleeping (1995). In January 2022, Tilley modeled for an online drawing session hosted by Deryck Henley of […]

Categories: art • Tags: art, dialogue, illustration, portaits

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Cy Twombly, Vengeance of Achilles, 1978 (Kunsthaus, Zurich)

Cy Twombly, Charles White — Art & the Unspeakable

October 3, 2019 by William Eaton

Twombly’s work is a win-win because it does not force us to think or feel at all, except insofar as the work reminds us that most of what we think and feel we are afraid to speak publicly about. (And this, perhaps, for good reason?)

Categories: William Eaton, ZiLL • Tags: African-Americans, art, art museums, Museum of Modern Art

Jackson Pollock, Blue Poles - Number 11, 1952 (National Gallery of Australia)

Valéry, Landscapes, the Whole Human

May 22, 2019 by William Eaton

Re-translation and notes regarding a chapter from Paul Valéry’s Degas Danse Dessin. Thus: reflections on landscape painting and many other things, including the idea that « L’homme complet se meurt. » The whole human being is dying. With images from Aelbert Cuyp, Claude le Lorrain, Claude Monet, Jackson Pollock, Jenny Holzer, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Mark Bradford, Judith Bernstein, the Cranachs, and William Eaton (the re-translator).

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: art, featured, France, Impressionism, landscape, literature, Marcel Duchamp, painting

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view of Alberto Burri’s Cretto di Gibellina, Sicily

Smithson, Tuymans; Art & Explication

September 6, 2016 by William Eaton

Beauty is a form of genius—is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. — Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray I Robert Smithson’s Mirrors and Shelly Sand (images above) is a long, low, floor-lying crest of sand (approximately 30 feet by 5 feet), which is divided in equal parts by 50 double-sided mirrors.[1] Division and reflection—reflection in the sense of light, images, and ideas being thrown back without being absorbed—are central concepts here. As regards division, […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiLL • Tags: art, beauty, capitalism, cultural criticism, intellectuals, Oscar Wilde

Philip Guston, "Aggressor," 1978, private collection

Guston, Schapiro, Rosenberg, . . . Dialogue

July 13, 2016 by William Eaton

Why do we think Guston made paintings like these? This becomes a question, too, about how we are compelled, how we respond. By William Eaton I think every good painter here in New York really paints a self-portrait. I think a painter has two choices: he paints the world or himself. And I think the best painting that’s done here is when he paints himself, and by himself I mean himself in this environment, in this total situation. […]

Categories: William Eaton • Tags: Abstract Expressionism, art, CIA, Clement Greenberg, Cold War, Harold Rosenberg, McCarthyism, Meyer Schapiro

Glory, Surprise, Salman Rushdie

May 15, 2016 by Ed Mooney

Five mysteries hold the keys to the unseen: the act of love, and the birth of a baby, and the contemplation of great art, and being in the presence of death or disaster, and hearing the human voice lifted in song. — Salman Rushdie There […]

Categories: Ed Mooney, ZiR • Tags: art, children, death, love, poetry, reading, writing

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Look Rich or Go Bankrupt Trying

May 8, 2016 by fritztucker

I’m not the only person who finds 50 Cent a fascinating figure. His landmark album, Get Rich or Die Tryin’, is one of the top ten best selling albums in rap history, and is perhaps the only rap album ever to have a feature film made of it. While living in Belize during the summer of 2005, I stumbled upon a middle-schooler’s yearbook in a house I was doing construction on. Nearly every child’s yearbook quote was either a line from Get Rich or Die […]

Categories: Fritz Tucker, ZiLL • Tags: art, capitalism, politics

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Berlinde De Bruyckere, No Life Lost II, Installation view, Hauser & Wirth, 2016, photo by Mirjam Devriendt

De Bruyckere, Ibsen, Gatsby, Graceland

March 31, 2016 by William Eaton

Or, Dying, “What does it feel like?” First approach Torvald Helmer: Oh, you think and talk like a heedless child. Nora, his wife: Maybe. But you neither think nor talk like the man I could bind myself to. As soon as your fear was over—and it was not fear for what threatened me, but for what might happen to you—when the whole thing was past, as far as you were concerned it was exactly as if nothing at all […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiLL • Tags: Adorno, aporia, art, Belgium, Berlinde De Bruyckere, death, dying, Gatsby, Ibsen, Jean-François Lyotard, juxtaposition, Paul Simon, popular music, reverie, sculpture

Quixote, Carnival, Brussels, Easter

March 27, 2016 by Ed Mooney

Bakhtin coined the term “carnivalesque’ to mark literary works with multiple, contrasting, and forever-competing centers of gravity. These paintings above have multiple, contrasting, and forever-competing centers of gravity. They’re done by someone new in my world, Octavio Ocampo. These images help with Dostoevsky, Bakhtin, and Cervantes — with Paris, 9/11, Easter, and Brussels And they just won’t hold still! One is called “Kiss […]

Categories: Ed Mooney, ZiR • Tags: art, death, literature, philosophy, writing