Art for Thought
Ialways joke that picking the magazine’s cover is my favorite meeting of the month. (Don’t tell anyone but actually it’s true).
It brings us all to the first time we stood before a work of art—or saw a performance, listened to a piece of music, or read a line of prose—and it stirred something in us. It moved us. It evoked a response—and that was exciting. We wanted more.
It’s also a bonding experience for our team—a reminder of our shared appreciation of visual art and contemporary realism in particular. Of the pleasure we take in responding to a piece viscerally, and discussing it critically, with people who enjoy doing so as much as we do.
Some spirited debate led up to settling on Iain Faulkner’s Pebble Beach for this month’s cover. People had strong feelings about his work, what they liked and what they didn’t, why it was too much of this and not enough of that, and whether perhaps that was the point. Ultimately, all the differing opinions, rather than muddying the waters, made the choice clear—in addition to being visually arresting, art is especially valuable when it sparks reactions, consideration and conversation.
You can read more about Faulkner, who has a solo exhibition in February at Friedrichs Pontone in New York City, his work and this viewer’s perception of it in the feature Scenes of Solitude beginning on Page 34.
In last month’s issue we published a story about how elements of abstraction are increasingly showing up on the canvases of artists associated with the genre of contemporary realism. Apparently, we aren’t the only ones taking note of the trend. This month Principle Gallery is hosting a large international group show curated by John Seed, who coined the term Disrupted Realism and is the author of two books on the subject. The preview of the show takes a deeper dive into the state of realism today, not only bringing attention to it, but exploring how the world we live in is shaping it.
Seed and the artists featured in the piece have a lot of thoughts on the matter, which they share beginning on Page 46. Although Seed attributes the emergence of this hybrid style to being “the most distracted society in the history of the world,” fear not, this is not a doomsday piece. Seed assures us, “Painting has survived, adapted and thrived and will continue to do so.”