The Artists "Review" Artists Project was launched on June 30, 2008. Below is a "review" of M. Trigos' work, Birds at Nature, written by Molly Norris. M. Trigos provided the second jpeg, an image of Tea at the Zoo, as well as a brief response to Molly's "review."
M. Trigos currently resides in Northeast Louisiana, and Molly lives in Seattle, WA.
If you would like to participate in this project, please email me at jtkirkland [at] gmail [dot] com.
Birds at Nature
Oil on Canvas
24" x 36"
2008
The "Review"
The painting Birds at Nature could be made out of frosting because some of the marks appear squeezed from the tube like Alden Mason does and did. Add to this the graphic nature i.e. big areas of color and fantasy flowers and art brut birds plus that the painting has the dimensions of a sheet cake's top and one may cry "Let them eat painting!"
I often want to see things cut out. Like, "hey, cut it out!" I tire of the rectangle. I tire of the default nature of oil paint on canvas. This artwork would look cool if done in frosting on top of a cake! It would then also be about temporality, sustenance and celebration. One could interview everyone who ate a piece of it and make a video of that and then x-ray the contents in people's stomachs and make an installation with the x-ray films, like, hang them on the windows of a museum so that the sunlight shines through like medical lanterns. This way the artist will get into Artforum and live happily ever after.
Formally the palette of tertiary colors is individual. I think they are food coloring because you can't get a black. Also a net of shingled scalloped cloud shapes has been painted atop the main picture plane. This makes your eye move all over because you want to look through the 'net' made of squeezed paint tube lines. You long to see because it's like looking through fishnet stockings into the possibilities of flesh.
The tulip smack at the center grounds the viewer. We move our vision all around the surface, carried by the map of colors and subjects and net lines. But we keep coming back to the schematically authoritative tulip that stands at the composition’s center like some domestic lotus blossom.
Who cannot liken this painting to Florine Stettheimer's Family Portrait, II oil on canvas painted in 1933 and owned by the Museum of Modern Art? There are the same oversized fantastic flowers, the overall symmetry and near identical palette. Yet Stettheimer's painting is psychologically charged via figures poised in a drawing room while Birds at Nature is about the viewer peering into a stylized landscape -- not unlike works by Henri Rousseau.
If I were pitching this painting to Hollywood I'd say, "it’s Florine Stettheimer meets Gauguin meets Aboriginal art meets a pastry chef."
Interesting is that the marks and textures both shape the flowers and birds and imbue them with a jittery anxiety. The birds might be thinking behind their red circle eyes, "a forest fire is coming our way!" or "we've got to find some water," or even "dude, I don't know about you but I am really trippin' -- where did you get this acid?"
By Molly Norris
Tea at the Zoo
Oil on canvas
36" x 24"
2008
The Response
Well, I had to find out who is Alden Mason plus I had to do the same thing with Florine Stettheimer. So that part did humble me. I am glad that my painting wasn’t part of a birthday party’s cake. Oh, and quite a charming conversation you imagined between the birds, but I am not so sure that they would use words like dude and trippin.
By M. Trigos
Previous "Reviews":
Pam Farrell on Ken Weathersby
Paula McCullough on Aric Calfee
Lee Gainer on Leigh Waldron-Taylor
Aric Calfee on Paula McCullough
Matthew Ballou on Heather Levy
Giovanni Garcia-Fenech on TJ Norris
TJ Norris on Giovanni Garcia-Fenech
Susan Tolbert on Mary Klein
Heather Levy on Gail Vollrath
Sharon Butler on Matthew Ballou
Mark L. Power on Steven Alexander
Steven Alexander on Mark L. Power
Comments