Color Diffusion Acrylic Painting

The Great God Pan Is Dead: The Big Show 2011, part 1--Retina Burn

And in general, the work is shiny and plastic. I don't mean that in a bad way. The hard-edge style of painting, the fragmented incomprehensible objects, the flat planes of color; these qualities signify signify "modern" now just as much as they did when James Rosenquist pioneered this approach. Perhaps at some point in the future, this look will start to seem old-fashioned or nostalgic. For me, it hasn't gotten there yet. Lone Star College Kingwood instructor Julon Pinkston employs a similar approach. The difference is that his objects are a little more recognizable (they are trashed pieces of plastic) and he leaves parts of his canvases white. The white ground visually pushes both the objects and the flat-colored shapes forward. There is a real punch to these compositions. This image comes from the Stanford Binet intelligence test for children . It was a test originally developed shortly after the turn of the last century, but still in use (after many revisions) today. Variations of the test have been used to determine whether incoming soldiers were officer material. Blowing up this image from an earlier version of the test reminds one of the cultural and class biases it contained. Other images, with their middle-class domestic scenes, seem even more biased. That said, a test like this has to measure intelligence within the context of the dominant culture because those taking the test will exist within that culture to some degree or another. Blowing up this card turns it into a striking, poster-like image. It's generic quality belies its somewhat scary bureaucratic social engineering origins. Brian Keith Gardner's The Unicorn takes a more-or-less abstract pattern of colors, then overlays it with black-and-white drawing. The drawing is a comic strip detailing the last bout of a masked wrestler called The Unicorn. The panels of the comic strip are roughly square, and they have little intrusions/extrusions that make them look a bit like jigsaw puzzle pieces. Some of the panels are painted over in white, but even with the blank panels, the story is clear. The Unicorn ends his career fighting a wrestler who is unusually violent--he literally beheads the Unicorn in the ring, to the mindless cheers of the audience. Amusingly, Hogan Kimbrell 's realistic (if somewhat idealized) wrestlers were displayed right next to Gardner's ultraviolent wrestling fantasy.

Chemical abstracts

Chinese pen

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