(About art rather than language.)
“Earth Angel” by Peter Schjeldahl, in the New Yorker 8/5/13:
The compact Ken Price retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum is a chamber of wonderments. The ceramics artist, who died last year at his home in New Mexico, spent half a century flirting with greatness in a disrespected medium. His confidence owed to timing – a brief renaissance of ceramic art in Southern California in the late fifties, led by Price’s teacher Peter Voulkos – and his quality to wit and (no other word will quite do) genius. Price’s manipulation of cup forms, variously geometric and biomorphic, amounted to a surprise attack on the history and the aesthetics of modern art, spankingly refreshed and made the artist’s own. His later mode of globular masses with sanded, speckled patinas is sui generis. It exalts color to practically metaphysical intensities.
Three examples, of different sorts:
(#1)
(#2)
(#3)
From Wikipedia:
The compact Ken Price retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum is a chamber of wonderments. The ceramics artist, who died last year at his home in New Mexico, spent half a century flirting with greatness in a disrespected medium. His confidence owed to timing – a brief renaissance of ceramic art in Southern California in the late fifties, led by Price’s teacher Peter Voulkos – and his quality to wit and (no other word will quite do) genius. Price’s manipulation of cup forms, variously geometric and biomorphic, amounted to a surprise attack on the history and the aesthetics of modern art, spankingly refreshed and made the artist’s own. His later mode of globular masses with sanded, speckled patinas is sui generis. It exalts color to practically metaphysical intensities.
Leave a Reply