Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Not long after the death of magic realist painter George Tooker comes the death of another major painter in this school. From the NYT yesterday, by William Grimes: “Robert Vickrey, Magic-Realist Painter, Dies at 84”:

Robert Vickrey, a painter whose often unnerving depictions of shadow-streaked streets populated by nuns, clowns or children at play made him a leading figure of the magic realism school, died on Sunday at his home in Naples, Fla. He was 84.

… Mr. Vickrey, who mastered the Renaissance technique of egg tempera painting [a technique he shared with Tooker] as a student at Yale, used his consummate skill to create, in his early work, hyper-real scenes suffused by an atmosphere of dread or impending disaster. He was an avant-garde filmmaker on the side, with a deep knowledge of expressionism and film noir, whose shadows, angles and distortions he introduced into his paintings.

His later paintings were less menacing and more playful, but continued to use light and shadows strikingly. Two examples:

This entry was posted on April 21, 2011 at 6:23 am and is filed under Art/lit/music/film, Death notices. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.