Monday, June 18, 2007

# 16 Guest-Jos


Well it's sweet sixteen and very befitting this is my husband extraordinaire. He answered my questions, which amazes me because he's so busy. Jos is probably the one person I know that has more interests than I do. He's complicated and full of great ideas but forced to live his life by the suits rules. One day soon I hope he returns to his roots, because, this I know will make him happy.



1. What is your favorite color?
Over the course of many years I've built up a palette of my favorite colors. These go in and out of favor depending on my mood or circumstances. My favorite colors, in order of their appearance, are: Blue, black, orange, red, yellow, grey

2. Who is your favorite artist?
All my favorite artists are fairly obvious and most, Picasso, Van Gogh,& c. have already been touched upon. With that in mind I wanted to mix things up a bit and go back. Way back. I'm talking 15th century, ya'll. One of my favorite artist/painters is the dutchie Hieronymus Bosch. It surely isn't for the moralizing and church inspired themes that I dug him. And it certainly wasn't the painstaking rendering style (I'm not a fan of hyper-detail). I could see the hellish part of the paintings, but I always approached them as being more creative and imaginative than anything else. Plus each little bit is iconic in it's own way so to me it has a graphic and narrative sense to it. Yes, it definitely appeals to the comic-geek side of me.

If you were a painting, which one would you be? Why?
My painting pick might surprise pg, who thinks she knows me so well. But Caspar David Friedrich's paintings have always struck a chord with me.Again, I don't really delve too much into the religious aspects of the work, (and I'm no fan of the Romantic movement) but I can relate to the spiritual yearnings and searching themes. Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog is one of the handful of paintings which I can project myself into.

2 comments:

JC said...

Great painting, I've never seen that one before.

David Cauchi said...

I recommend 'The secret heresy of Hieronymus Bosch' (from the library of course!). The book's argument is that Bosch was a gnostic heretic who encoded his philosophy into his paintings. Good stuff.

Oh yeah, if you check out the reviews on the amazon link, bear in mind Roberto Longhi's dictum that paintings are primary sources in and of themselves.