Search

This section features the portrait paintings created by the author, artist Eugene Palmer, for his 2018 art exhibition "Didn't It Rain," that was presented at the James Hockey Gallery of the University of the Creative Arts in Farnham, England. Topics discussed include the capability of painting to address issues concerning cultural identity, the representation of the Black subjects of his paintings, and the narrative that said paintings intend to convey to the audience.

In 1982 the Polish American artist Jan Sawka executed an extraordinary painting, 15 Strange Things on the Clean Morning Sky. Contradicting the title, the sky depicted is covered with sketches and cryptic writing. This suggests a common hallucinatory experience had by pilots navigating an empty sky, the ganzfeld effect. When vision encounters any undifferentiated field, such as total darkness, it will create something to see, in the form of hallucinations. Maurice Merleau-Ponty has asserted that hallucination is an integral part of visual perception: it is a kind of preseeing, which Jacques Lacan calls the screen. For Lacan, the screen is a "locus of mediation" between actual perceptions and the expectations or models that shape our seeing; it works without any conscious awareness on our part. This is not so with the "15 strange things" of Sawka's title: small, framed images in a dusky cluster near the top of the painting. Their subjects reflect three modes in which conscious thought is conceived out of the torrent of visual impressions: diagrams, words, and clouds. Sawka plays with the screen in various ways, making it visible in other works of his. His preoccupation with the nature of seeing is not confined to images from the material world but has implications as well for memory, fiction, and painting itself—since a canvas is also a screen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article revisits the eighteenth-century pinturas de castas (caste painting) tradition by juxtaposing it with the artistic production of contemporary Latinx artist Michael Menchaca. Enigmatic and haunting, casta paintings blatantly reveal the workings of colonial miscegenation. The paintings have been interpreted as souvenirs for wealthy European patrons, as "exotica" for eclectic Wunderkammers, and as ethnographic confirmation of mestizaje (racial mixing). Regularly incorporated in art history courses and texts about global early modernisms, casta paintings are invoked as evidence of a deeply troubling colonial past in which racial taxonomies placed a hierarchical premium on "whiteness." Arguably one of the most important contemporary Latinx artists, Menchaca explicitly summons the canonical type in his suite of sixteen screen prints, La Raza Cósmica 20XX. Bold and graphically appealing, Menchaca's series visualizes the colonial sistema de castas (caste system) as a world populated by animal hybrids and surveilled by Big Tech. Menchaca's interpretation of and dialogue with the casta painting tradition calls attention to the endurance of casta thinking in the twenty-first century. By interrogating the multivalent layers of Menchaca's images alongside their early modern "sources," it is possible to better understand the mechanisms of a modern process of mestizaje. In this way, contemporary artists like Menchaca animate the art of the past and, as this essay suggests, redirect our art historical gaze toward a more just future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early 1980s, Bridget Riley produced a series of paintings distinguished by their use of the same group of colours, said to have been inspired by the vividly preserved painted tombs that she encountered during a visit to Egypt in the winter of 1979–80. Though clearly related to the black‐and‐white paintings that propelled Riley to international fame in the 1960s, these new works represented a notable change in the artist's methods, combining an intuitive arrangement of colour with a simple compositional motif: the stripe. While determinedly abstract, the imaginative origins of Riley's stripe paintings are registered in many of the titles that they carry: Ka (1980); Ra (1981); Luxor (1982); Winter Palace (1981). This essay reconsiders the making, display and reception of Riley's so‐called 'Egyptian palette' within a longer history of encounter and exchange between Britain and Egypt, ranging across more than a century of military occupation and resistance, Cold War entrenchment, and neoliberal diplomacy. In doing so, it situates Riley's work between colonial and post‐colonial ways of seeing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1855, the Pre-Raphaelite artist–poet Elizabeth Siddal was invited to examine John Ruskin's collection of medieval manuscripts. Two years later, a manuscript—a Book of Hours, the popular late medieval prayer-book—appeared in Siddal's painting Clerk Saunders. Siddal's decision to include a Book of Hours in a scene from a medieval ballad encourages us to explore the painting's creative strategies in new ways. This article examines how Clerk Saunders reinterprets the art of such prayer-books, focusing on Siddal's reworking of the Annunciation. I shall explore the collision between this visual iconography and the language of the ballads from which the subject is taken, and trace how this literary-inspired pictorial dismemberment unsettles the medievalism of other Pre-Raphaelite works. I will demonstrate how Siddal's disruptive medievalism is illuminated by queer theory; there have been queer readings of 'Siddal' the mythologized figure, but I will show how Siddal takes a queering approach to ballads and iconography in her art and poetry. My article will affirm Siddal's work with the Book of Hours as an important contribution to Pre-Raphaelite medievalism, which speaks to anxieties about the destabilizing power of nineteenth-century creativity, and the tempestuous relationship between words and images across historical periods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]