Oldies

Here's a classic.  I've been thinking quite a bit about it lately, and thought I'd pop it up:

Painted and annotated to coincide with Sotheby's auction of the Lehman Brothers' art collection, it's the final installment of my Fuld quadrumvirate.  If I do say so myself.

Painted in profile is interesting.  So is the fact that I dated it specifically--usually I'm just a month and year guy.  I guess that was the day of the auction.

And I love the gnarly distortion of his face.  It's almost Cubist, in the least Cubist way imaginable.  To amplify:  Cubism is, on its most basic level, about seeing things from a variety of directions and perspectives.  So you look at my boy Fuld and the side of his head is painted straight, the mouth and jaw are painted from a point of view that has been rotated down and to the right.  And his left brow is likely being pushed up and out of the way by his left eye, desperate, in perhaps its own little eyeball mind, to climb over the nose and position itself in the foreground, next to its buddy, and really go all Picasso on everybody.

Cubism is also, just while we're on this ridiculous tangent, about the flattening of three dimensional forms into two dimensions.  In The Liquidated Fuld, you also get the feeling that the entire side of his face was pushed down by some great weight so it squished flat against the canvas, and in doing so distorted the jaw, nose, eyes, etc.

Truth be told, you could perhaps resolve all this by repainting his right eye about half an inch higher and the same amount to the left.  Too late for that ... I'm just saying.

Finally is the circular annotation pattern.

Very cool painting.