Involving, fascinating.
And to think I'd missed out on Odd Nerdrum for so long.
His website categories:
Youth | Male | Female | Loving Couples | Mother and Child | Babies | Lack of
Darkness
Boats | Water | Icons | Drifting | Hermaphrodites | Transformations | Still
Lives
Self-portraits | Song and Dance | Refugee Portraits | Void
Kitsch |
!!!
N's self-portrait (with erection, yike) appears under Hermaphrodites...
On 11/1/08 1:08 PM, "Frederick Pollack" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Girl in White
>
>
> She appears in *Summer, 1982,
> and *Early Morning*, ¹84.
> The same tight-wrapped white robe, and bathing cap,
> and look; same paradisal Northern beach,
> empty except for the group she¹s with
> and not with. In the first, two girls,
> seated on sand and watching her;
> in the second, a mother and kids.
> All nude but her. She stands
> apart on the shoreline, straight and firm,
> her expression sealed, the light so broadly
> and intensely of this world it might
> suggest another.
>
> There are many doors
> to the other world. They open
> at moments of political frustration.
> She is the one that stood ajar
> in Œ82 and ¹84.
> Behind the annealed, self-heedful features
> she is communing with her painter, Nerdrum.
> ³I was in the crowd,² she says,
> ³that opened the prisons and welcomed
> those who were capable of welcome into
> a world whose walls we had also broken.
> The girl who sat astride the man,
> discovering power I was she,
> or in the next room, and the next cell
> when Baader was gunned down.
> I helped to lead the refugees ashore,
> my eyes shone on the selfless hero Š
> How lovely freedom would be
> if we could see it! It deserves
> your careful underpainting and impasto,
> your agonized and speaking flesh.
> When I leave this beach, descending night
> will bring the starving men in scraps of leather,
> chained, imitating clouds,
> seeking their sons, holding pitiful leaves,
> or with high-powered rifles
> defending what remains of grain and water.
> They will be followed by the stupid myth
> of the Androgyne; your duller insistence
> that what you¹re doing isn¹t art but Kitsch,
> eternally warm; wispy nudes
> protecting a globe; and those full-length erections
> I mean, who cares about your horrible cock!²
>
> The painter¹s hand trembles
> as he blends the right amount of cinnabar
> into the border between her and sky.
> ³Bitch,² he mutters, remembering
> the student who, in a few years,
> will in his manner paint herself as Judith
> holding a knife in one hand, his head in the other.
> And his growl comes from a rheumy, stubbled throat,
> not from the droop-eyed
> angel of the Œ81 self-portrait.
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