There is no excellent beauty. Aesthetics are more about permissions than any particular style or look and are the gate through which connections pass. The piercings of post modern criticism and theory have managed to erase and then re-trace armaments of courage and aggression in the body of paintings presented in this series. There are no subtle intertwining of contemporary ideals and no visceral bands of formal nuance. The pictures are work. They represent a gracious motion toward a discipline in subject and fear. They are a part of the underpinnings of discourses in beauty, and political monuments; through the lens of the painter they are discontent. “Beauty is as summer fruits, which are easy to corrupt, and cannot last; and for the most part it makes a dissolute youth, and an age a little out of countenance; but yet certainly again, if it light well, it maketh virtue shine, and vices blush.”1 These works are stick figures and should be discourse productive, yet in manifest they are nine landscapes and thirty-three figures, almost entirely female. The revelation of these images fluctuate and beauty is mobilized and still, “no longer seduced by the rhetoric of beauty that has, unfortunately, once again taken on the legitimacy of a closed system of aesthetic and political judgement.”2 The paintings act as a morphism, a collision of spaces and time. They are subject to meaning in a radically coherent physical world, in which, it is impossible to be or do meaninglessness. The series is a true act and a perfectly valid form of mindful play which inevitably evolves into something. The work is not a discourse of the trappings of aesthetics and conflict, but a genuine gesture of the romantic. 1 Francis Bacon. (1561–1626). Essays, Civil and Moral. The Harvard Classics. 1909–14. 2 Amelia Jones. Beauty Discourse
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1 Bender, 2012 Oil on Panel 30” x 24” $550 2 Summer Fruits and Secrets, 2012 Oil on Panel 30” x 30” $650 3 Feathered Lizards and Flamingo Penguins, 2012 Oil on Canvas 66” x 36” $1500 4 I give you take, you give I take, 2012 Oil on Canvas 28” x 18” $350 5 Will they catch me sometime, 2012 Oil on Canvas 18” x 28” $450 6 Look in the afternoon, 2012 Oil on Panel 18” x 28” $450 7 Gathering, 2012 Oil on Canvas 16” x 21” $300 8 At the Wall, 2012 Oil on Panel 16” x 21” $250 9 There is no excellent beauty, 2012 Oil on Panel 16” x 21” $400
Catalog Creative Director: Jay Merryweather Photographer: Katie Michaelson Designer: Zan Barnett Models: Brandilynn Pahl, Kammie Myers, Mehjabeen Khan © 2012 Merryweather Studios