Turns out, I’m pretty specific about what I like in artwork. Aside from Sargent, I’m fascinated by Belgian artist Jan de Vliegher. These two share a lot, in my opinion. When I first saw his work via the internet a few years ago, it knocked my socks off. This is exactly the type of artwork I am so drawn to, and it didn’t really occur to me why until I was sacked out on the couch watching “Brain Games” the other night, instead of doing something productive like painting or cooking dinner. The topic of the show was about how our brains are wired to fill in the gaps of what our eyes are looking at, so that even without precise detail we know what we’re seeing. What makes de Vliegher’s pieces so fascinating to me is everything he suggests, purely by using color. His brush work is hardly even a factor. He is a master at laying down the perfect value in the perfect place. This is arguably one of my biggest struggles with painting, getting the colors to work properly together so that your eye can recognize what I’m trying to say without spelling it out in painstaking (read: boring) detail. Like Sargent, subject matter is not of importance to de Vliegher. He is more concerned with accurate representation through color and value. It’s up to our minds to distinguish what we’re looking at in his paintings, and because of his superb use of color, it’s not a tricky thing to do.
His series of plates recently shown at the Mike Weiss Gallery in NYC is unbelievable – how he can take such abstracted and “messy” brushwork and use it to depict something as elegant as fine china is beyond me.
Here you can really see the scale of the plates
His earlier work also has some focus on china and glassware
And other subjects
If you’ll excuse me, I need to go bang my head against a wall. Seeing all his work in succession like this makes me feel both totally inspired and utterly hopeless.
