Brush with Peril - Chris Wisnia Arts

Brush with Peril, page 010 – The Art

PAGE TEN:

Panel One: Edward Hopper, Early Sunday Morning (1930), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City.

Panel Three: detail from Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) Museum of Modern Art, New York City.

Panel Four: Edward Hopper, Pennsylvania Coal Town (1947), Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown.

Chris with Edward Hopper, *Pennsylvania Coal Town* (1947), Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown.

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Brush with Peril, page 011 – The Art

PAGE ELEVEN:

Panel One: Francis Bacon, Study for Portrait II (1956), private collection.

Panel Two: Detail from Francis Bacon, Study for a Pope (1955), private collection.

Panel Three: Detail from Robert Arneson, California Artist (1982), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA.

Panel Four: Francis Bacon, Pope III (1951), destroyed.

Panel Five: Georges Rouault, Porter from Réincarnations du Père Ubu (1932), etching, Museum of Modern Art, New York City,
and Kemper Art Museum, Washington University, St. Louis, MO, and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Panel Six: Alexander Calder, Suitcase Filled With Elements From Calder’s Circus (1926-31), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City.

Panel Eight: Detail from Francis Bacon, Study for Portrait III (1953), private collection.

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Brush with Peril, page 009 – The Art

PAGE NINE:

Panel One: Robert Arneson, Nasal Flat (1981), Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami.

Panel Three: Wayne Thiebaud, Lighted City (1987-88), private collection.

Panel Four: Wayne Thiebaud, Ocean City (2006-07), private collection.

Panel Five: Details from Paul Gauguin, And the Gold of their Bodies (1901), Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

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Brush with Peril, page 008 – The Art

PAGE EIGHT:

Panel One: Detail from Lucian Freud, Self-Portrait (1963), National Portrait Gallery, London, and

Details from Gustav Klimt, The Bride (1917-1918), Belvedere, Vienna, and

Details from Gustav Klimt, The Virgin (unfinished) (1913), National Gallery Prague.

Panel Two: Robert Arneson, Breathless (Self-Portrait in Blue) (1976), Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City.

Panel Three: Lucian Freud, Self Portrait (1974), watercolor, UBS Art Collection.

Panel Four: Details from Paul Gauguin, The Seed of the Areoi (1892), Museum of Modern Art, New York City.

Panel Five: Wayne Thiebaud, Apartment Hill (1980), Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City.

Chris with Gustav Klimt, *The Virgin* (unfinished) (1913), National Gallery Prague

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A Small List of Great Artists – Lucian Freud’s Self-Portraits

also see A Small List of Great Artists : Lucian Freud

LUCIAN FREUD (British, 1922-2011) had a massive exhibit called “Recent Works” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York during my Winter Break 1993, and when I flew out and visited my sister there, we wound up in this exhibit, even though we stumbled on it, I wasn’t familiar wtih Freud’s work, and I wasn’t prepared for it. I was truly disturbed but fascinated by his work. The paint was thickly applied on his portraits in a way that appeared like sickly, discolored, mottled, rash-or-scab-covered skin. The subjects looked like ugly, rotting, nude corpses to me, many of them obese. The imagery felt psychologically unsettling, and it hung over me long afterwards. Even though it repelled me, I couldn’t shake the thought of it. The psychology inherent in the work became so obviously self-evident when I realized he was the grandson of FREUD. I later learned how his thick layers of paint could accumulate over hours and months or longer of painting, recording the large commitment of time from his subjects, as he fanatically examined and endeavored to reproduce every fold and blemish he could see.

Lucian Freud, *Self-Portrait* (1963), National Portrait Gallery, London

Chris with Lucian Freud, *Self-Portrait -Reflection* (2004), private collection

Read the comic book, “Brush with Peril”:

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Arneson’s Self-Portraits

see A Small List of Great Artists : ROBERT ARNESON (American, 1930-1992)

All through my college experience at UC Davis, Robert Arneson had a larger-than-life presence, even though he had passed away within a couple years of my arriving in town. He had been a UC Davis faculty member for four decades! His work continues to pop up on banners along the streets or on campus, in a mural in the downtown parking garage, in local art shows, and of course dotted all over campus as egghead sculptures.

So I feel like I regularly saw his work. It was certainly everywhere in the ether in the art building on campus too. That bearded balding white-haired man that was always portrayed making those “funny” faces. Bulging eyes. Sticking tongue out. Picking nose. Vomiting. It was just around, wherever I happened to be in town. But it never really spoke to me while I was studying art in college. Partially because I never found much personal attraction to sculpture. But partly, I think I found the humor of “self-effacing artist” just not to be that funny to me. I wasn’t really thinking about what it meant for an artist to be creating self-defacing work about being an “Artist.” I certainly never laughed out loud, or even smiled, I don’t think. It felt to me like it was trying to be offensive or edgy, but it wasn’t really that offensive or edgy. I was held back by quality of the artwork itself (kind of cartoony, kind of kitschy), and not really thinking about how that adds to the feel of the piece, not really reaching past to enjoy the message behind it.

I do remember, in college, seeing one of his sculptures, on campus, on display, that was of his home. It reminded me a little of how a kid might sculpt a model of their own home – simple, a little silly. That one I liked! I was kind of enchanted that he would choose his home as subject matter.

**Robert Arneson**, The Palace at 9 am (1974), Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, UC Davis

When I graduated from college, I realized UC Davis had never offered any info to me on how to make a living with a studio art degree, and I suddenly realized I needed to get a job, and what was I going to do? I wasn’t going to be a doctor or lawyer or engineer. So I found work at minimum wage, doing retail and picture framing (My degree, actually, helped me negotiate up from the then-minimum wage of $4.75 to $5.00! On my application, I just rounded up, and didn’t find out until much later that the managers deliberated and had to fight for getting me that $5, because it was unheard of for this retail outlet to waste money like that on some dumb employee!) Experience there worked its way up to me managing a framing shop back in Davis, where the owner regularly did work for the John Natsoulas Gallery. As a result, I wound up framing a few of Arneson’s prints, including a self-portrait he’d made in front of his Davis home, 1303 Alice Street, at the corner of L Street. I had to stop and take the piece in. Another framer there and I were looking it over, together. Yep, he lived here in town, and that’s his house, and he lived there for years. It’s the subject of a bunch of his artwork. That’s his address. You can drive by it and see it; it’s still there.

Something about this just captivated me, that he would draw himself in front of his own home. And then the image was covered with little details everywhere, little personal details about his life. About who he is (or how he wants to be presented, or thinks he’s perceived). It was an autobiography as much by the image as by the almost graphitti-style inclusions of weird textual and symbollic details. And once again, I was delighted by how personal I realized this autobiography was. It was an art piece that I thought to myself, Natsoulas Gallery is selling this, and this is a piece I could see myself wanting to save money and buy, and enjoy looking at on my wall.

I never bought this piece or any other art “like this”. But that’s really something, right?, to be moved enough by a piece to consider it, for the first time, when you’re a struggling artist making a little over minimum wage. To feel inside you that this is something special that moves you, that you want to support, to be more a part of, and make more a part of your life in this way.

**Robert Arneson**,*House of Alice* (1987), private collection

When it came time to begin my Brush with Peril graphic novel, I really wanted to represent Arneson, EVEN THOUGH I still wasn’t quite yet a fan. And it was when I began surrounding myself with his imagery, and trying to draw it, I began to really have fun with it, and with him, and really appreciating him, as an artist, and what he’s SAYING. (What I THINK he’s saying.) What I think he’s saying is, Art is high-falutin’ and absurd and pompous, and I’m an artist, so I’m going to be an absurd and pompous high-falutin’ artist making fun of high-falutin’ absurd pomposity. I’m gonna relish in the absurd pompous high-falutin’ pomposity of it all. I think? This dichotomy of ridiculing the pomposity of “Art” and “Artist” while simultaneousy elevating himself to, and reveling in the pomposity of, being an “Artist.” As Mazzy Star sang, he made himself the “superstar of [his] own private movie.” I’m sorry I was too young, and time was too short, and I didn’t yet speak or understand the language, and I was too unaware to have worked harder to go out of my way to meet him. But that’s just life sometimes, that you don’t realize your potential opportunities you could have had until you’ve missed them. How lucky for us all that people like him created so much work that lives on for us to enjoy, long after they’re gone.

Robert Arneson, *Breathless (Self-Portrait in Blue)* (1976), Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City

Chris with Robert Arneson, *No Pain* (1991), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Read the comic book, “Brush with Peril”:

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A Small List of Great Artists – GUSTAV KLIMT (Austrian, 1862-1918)

GUSTAV KLIMT (Austrian, 1862-1918) was a symbolist painter (seeking to represent absolute truth symbolically through metaphor) and mentor of Egon Schiele, whose primary subject was the raw eroticism of female nudes. He was influenced by the flatness, spirals, swirls, patterns, and design of Japanese art, and he often included gold leaf that he’d admired from Byzantine mozaics. He found fame and critical success at a young age; visitors frequented his home, he was a lifelong bachelor with countless affairs (often with models) and fourteen children, and while in his twenties, he was awarded by the emperor for his murals painted in Vienna. Since I was young, I admired his work, but as I grew older, I found that it was his later work – landscapes of shrub-surrounded villas along the water, parks and lakes, or the trees of forests, with every little leaf or fallen leaf carefully rendered – that I found most awe-inspiring and moving.