Thank you for joining me for the festivities Thursday. Felt really good to be amidst friends, colleagues, collectors, students and alumni. Flattered to see the painting on a student’s iPhone as a screen saver, I suppose. Laura Eastes called it “vibrant” in the yesterday’s Georgetown paper. Very flattering.
Last summer, I thought about building on something that I have done earlier last year at The Cincy Fringe (in the Academy lobby) and re-consideration of Bronzino (his paintings shaped late mannerism, as Holland Cotter puts it “the profane, twisty, prosthetic style that erupted like a repressed libido, between the humanist sanctities of the Renaissance and the smells and bells of the Counter-Reformation.”) The very first sketch thereafter was a seascape of jagged coastline. A view of surf formations kin to the Adriatic (my sea growing up) or the Aegean (where I occasionally teach in the summer). Growing up in Northern Serbia, landlocked, much like we here in Northern Kentucky, this thought of seagulls’ squawking and waves crashing, was as close we could come to a place and sound of a getaway pleasure. For me, it is by the same token, a ghastly fairytale, too. An ironic displacement, think of Jan Van Eyck on Bondi Beach, or something odd like it. Beyond that, it was a lengthy and exciting journey of sketching, drawing and taking notes. (The Gallery leaflet by Laura Stewart contains some of them)
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