VIEW IN MY ROOM
The Punishment Painting
United States
Painting, Oil on Canvas
Size: 36 W x 48 H x 1.5 D in
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Artist featured in a collection
About The Artwork
This image, I think, evolved out of a conflation of two things. One, I was working on a drawing based on the myth of Tityus, a bastard son of Zeus, who hit on one of Zeus's girlfriends, Leto. Bad idea. Leto's kids were Apollo and Artemis, who, apparently inspired by Zeus's punishment of Prometheus (for first creating us mortals and then, adding insult to injury, giving us fire), punished Tityus in Tartarus by having two vultures feast on his liver, which grows back in time for their dinner the next day. That is, I was working on a drawing of me working on a drawing of this subject, inspired by a drawing of Tityus by Michelangelo, in which I had substituted crows for buzzards, which had escaped the drawing and were flying out into my studio. (See additional images) Two, I had read a story about John Keats, in which Keats, dying in Greece of tuberculosis, suspected that his girlfriend back in England had poisoned him. In that context, Keats and Tityus seemed to go together, both victims of their passion. So the second punishment became the foreground of my painting, and the other one is on the easel in the middle ground. And looking at Victorian portraits, which usually have a view of a landscape through a window, gave me the view on the right, a romanticized version of the pond in my backyard. The Golden Spiral which ties this composition together was something I discover after I painted it. Creativity is mostly unconscious. (For more on this composition - if you haven't had enough already - see page 3 of my lecture "The Membrane": www.warrencriswell.com/The%20Membrane/fugitaboutit3.html ) PAINTINGS I use the materials and styles of the Old Masters to express images and ideas of the present, or timeless archetypes and myths set in our present day environments. But I have no formula or rules except to express the truth as I see it. Each of my paintings is a discovery, each with its own formula and rules. I never know what's coming next, I only hope it's something. The worst thing that can happen to a painter is to learn to paint. I approach each painting with fear and trembling, pretending it's my first and hoping it's not my last.
Details & Dimensions
Painting:Oil on Canvas
Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork
Size:36 W x 48 H x 1.5 D in
Frame:Not Framed
Ready to Hang:No
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United States
"I was a loner as a kid, an only child, the kind that grow up to be terrorists, bank robbers or artists. I wasn't interested in terror but tried robbery, stole a watch in the third grade but got caught and took up art. They haven't caught me at that yet." (Warren Criswell) --- “I am saying that a journey is called that because you cannot know what you will discover on the journey, what you will do, what you will find, or what you find will do to you.” (James Baldwin) --- Warren Criswell was born in West Palm Beach, Florida in 1936 and has lived in Arkansas with his wife Janet since their bus broke down there in 1978. Primarily a self-taught painter, Criswell is also a printmaker, sculptor and animator. He has had 41 solo exhibitions in the United States and one in Taiwan. His work has been included in 77 group exhibitions in New York, Atlanta, Washington DC, Arkansas, Virginia, North Carolina, Germany and Taiwan, and is represented in the permanent collections of many institutions, including: The Arkansas Arts Center; the McKissick Museum of the University of South Carolina; The Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, GA; Historic Arkansas Museum, Little Rock, AR; the University of Arkansas at Little Rock; Capital Arts Center, Taipei, China; the University of Central Arkansas; Hendrix College; the Center for Arts & Science of SE Arkansas; and the Central Arkansas Library System, as well as in private and corporate collections in the United States, Europe and Asia. --- In 2021 he won the Arksnsas Governor's Award for Individual artist. In 1996 he was awarded a fellowship grant for painting and works on paper by the Mid-America Arts Alliance and the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 2003 an Individual Artist Fellowship Grant for painting and drawing by the Arkansas Arts Council. Warren Criswell is currently represented by M2 Gallery in Little Rock and Saatchi Art.
Artist Recognition
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