FORUM.TERMINAL_LEVY

For example, “I’ve been thinking about Fragonard’s “The Swing” a lot lately, a painting so famous everyone has seen it eight jillion times. But I’m really giving it a good stare lately, as if for the first time. I guess because of the foliage treatment, which I want to absorb into my DNA. The way the greens melt into their surroundings (and the shapes themselves) is all so smokey and dynamic, as if it’s mid-shuffle and sizzle and flight. It’s really sexy.”

That’s what I’d say if I had been thinking about it. I wasn’t though. That was a trick.

Also: in before Klee.

i gots to get back to the proper seattle art museum downtown, even after being to a few other mid size town museums i think that one has been really good

got drunk and fixated on delaunay "Rhythme II" one time at an upscale office party where they rented the entire gimmick after hours lol

"The Swing" always makes me think about how fast I run through rococo sections in art museums. The 18th century might be the most washed period in European art history.

I'll have to think of a panting to think about... I've been thinking about prints a lot more recently.

i've been thinking about getting a print of paul sérusier's the talisman (aka the aven river at the bois d’amour), 1888 to put on my wall



i saw it irl a few years ago and it's really tiny

saw this weird cezanne at i think the courtauld recently. after months of sifting through his paintings for papers i was struck by this one, which had evaded my notice until i stumbled upon it in person.

obviously plenty of his pictures feature figures, and he did a bunch of portraits, but the caspar david friedrich BOTW style little guy against this landscape which i've been staring at chunks of all year caught me off guard. all of the multiperspectival compressed surfaces make it pretty #likegaming too if you imagine it as a top-down jrpg screen.

there's something that would be on the nose about how subsumed the character is by the bibemus quarry (notable to set someone so vaguely intrepid within the landscape rather than above- although either positio kinda has little purchase within the frame,) but it's offset by playful ornamentation in the bottom third of the image.
(which again makes it feel like an outlier since it's such a late-period piece for him....)

there's a compelling (confusing? -mysterious) contrast between these planes of roaring colour, and the miscellaneous oomf wandering through them in a way that feels like almost profaning lol

Couple years ago I was in Honolulu and the art museum had this one - Mount Kilauea, House of Everlasting Fire by Ambrose Patterson.



I haven't seen a lot of paintings in person, I've been realizing! This one really kind of made me "get it" when I didn't realize there was even something I wasn't getting. Really got up close with the texture of it and it kind of shocked me how much depth there is to seeing one up close and not just as a jpeg.

Just now I am thinking about Henry Ossawa Tanner's Christ with the Canaanite Woman and Her Daughter. I had not heard of this guy beforetoday, but he's really interesting. I'm very struck by his use of blue and indigo in his nocturnes. I'm kind of fascinated by the use of purple here which to my digital eye almost makes the painting read like a low-light photo with a cheap digicam. I really want to see this in person some day. I'm also kind of entranced by his Angels Appearing before the Shepherds.

no_stunts wrote: Sun Oct 12, 2025 3:42 pm saw this weird cezanne at i think the courtauld recently. after months of sifting through his paintings for papers i was struck by this one, which had evaded my notice until i stumbled upon it in person.

This was a really enjoyable writeup to read, thank you!

whoaaaa wow this one goes hard, i see exactly what you mean with the digicam feel

once again i am thinking of The Lantern Bearers (1908) by Maxfield Parrish



the colors on this one always make me stop and stare for a while. particularly fond of the lantern haloing the middle figure

I visited MoMA in 2013 and Georgia O'Keefe's Abstraction Blue has lodged itself firmly in my mind ever since
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/78677