Szabolcs Veres at Spencer Brownstone

Remember back when I wrote about the abundance of up-and-coming Romanian painters? In an addendum to the post, I mentioned Szabolcs Veres, another painter from Romania whose work appeals to my twisted sense of beauty and whose name baffles my sense of pronunciation. Anyway, last night, I clicked the wrong bookmark in the browser menu and was taken to Veres's page at the Spencer Brownstone Gallery website. Out of curiosity, I checked the site to see what the current show was - it was Szabolcs Veres, and it was coming down in two days. Needless to say, the following afternoon I was off to SoHo to check it out.

The SoHo gallery scene is pretty much dead now. The vast majority of SoHo galleries are photography galleries, which can be interesting, but when I take an afternoon to visit galleries I prefer to have some variety. Deitch Projects is there, along with the Drawing Center, but most of the other big names have moved to Chelsea by now. Spencer Brownstone is another SoHoldout - it's a decent gallery that shows a variety of (mostly) European artists. The show at Spencer Brownstone is Veres's first American solo show, and his first show in the US in general.

So after waiting fifteen minutes for the subway for no good reason, I finally made it to SoHo and to the gallery. My first impression of the show was: "these paintings look much bigger in person." I had only previously seen Veres's work on the web, and the sense of scale was totally lost in digitization. Because most of his work is portraiture, I expected the paintings to be life-size, kind of like Francis Bacon's triptychs. These paintings were far larger than I had expected - each was about a meter-and-a-half tall.

One thing that seems to be a hallmark of contemporary Romanian painting (or, at least, Ghenie and Veres) is the bold use of contrast. Ghenie's high contrast darks give his paintings the look of colored black-and-white film stills (which is where much of his imagery originates). In Veres's work, shadows are integrated into the forms, intertwined with flesh and matter. This is most prominent in the deeply set eyes in his portraits.

Based on his loose brushwork and seemingly manic paint application, some would argue that Veres is an expressionistic painter. However, I would argue differently - I see his work as using the language of expressionism as a means to reach unrelated ends. To me, Veres's paintings, particularly the large-scale portraits, are finely balanced on the thin line between beauty and horror. The paintings are very beautiful and have a strange allure to them, but the deformity caused by the artist's hand removes them from the realm of "traditional" beauty. I see his use of abstraction as a tool to maintain the balance between beauty and horror, not as the result of any metaphysical "self-expression." Beauty is subjective, of course, but I find the greatest beauty in imperfection - I'd rather look at an image of someone unique rather than at Playboy's flavor-of-the-month models.

One more thing to add - after seeing the show I took a look at the gallery's price list and I was dumbfounded - they're practically giving these paintings away! Most of them are under $6000, and a few are about twice that, but nowhere near the prices I had expected - my estimate was around 15k for the "smaller" pieces, and a bit more for the larger ones. I could have taken one of them home with me, but I just paid off my credit card and I don't want to put it near the maximum again. Also, the paintings look best from about fifteen feet away, and I don't think there's a spot in my apartment where you can get that far back without stepping into the hallway. Still, I can imagine seeing another show of his work in a few years and beating myself up because his work is going for ten times what it is now.

Response to the Art Renewal Center

For those who don't know, the Art Renewal Center is an organization, founded by Bouguereau scholar and art collector Fred Ross, that seeks to restore the values and aesthetics of the French Academy - essentially, turning back the art historical clock a hundred years or so. While I have specific criticisms on academic art in general, I'll save those for a later date and focus on a speech Mr. Ross gave to the Oil Painters of America meeting in 2005. In his address, Mr. Ross essentially makes two points: that modern art is vacant and devoid of any measure of quality and was a scam cooked up by art dealers; and that "real" art is narrative and can be judged by an artist's technical ability.

Ross's first point, unfortunately, was made about thirty years too late. The art he mentions (Pollock, Warhol, et al) is part of art history now and not part of the contemporary art world. The modern era has passed - today the art world is wholly postmodern. Today, an artist can either choose to enter into the discourse of the art world or stay out of it. Entering into the discourse means producing work that draws on art history, cultural issues, critical theory, and the work of other artists. In today's world, art does not exist in a vacuum as a solitary work - there is a constant engagement between works of art, critics, curators, the art market, politics, art history... contemporary discourse can be seen as one giant work of art made of millions of individual pieces and people, constantly influencing its own evolution. Today's art world is a far cry from the straw man Mr. Ross tries to tear down in his speech - art has grown since the days of avant-garde modernism and become more self-reflective, historically aware, and much more diverse.

The diversity of today's art world is a point I would like to emphasize - when gallery-hopping through Chelsea last week, I saw figurative paintings, abstract paintings, installation art, monumental sculpture, photography, video installations, conceptual art, and some works that defy categorization. Today, there isn't one particular style that's "relevant." During the height of the modern era, abstract painting was the art form, and artists who didn't paint abstractly had trouble getting their work shown (at least in America). Today, major galleries show an incredible diversity of artists who are connected only by their participation in the give-and-take world of contemporary art.

Mr. Ross likens the history of modernism to the story of the emperor's new clothes - that the fear of being "uncultured" led people to believe that "bad" art was good. This assumes, of course, that modernism was very popular during its time, which may not be the case. Life Magazine ran a famous story on Jackson Pollock, with a line on the cover asking readers if he was the "greatest living painter." This was, of course, meant to be said with a wink and a smirk - the majority of people didn't get Pollock's work at all and thought of it as Mr. Ross does. Henry Geldzhaler, curator of American art at the Met, had to fight considerable resistance in 1969 to put on a retrospective of modern art at the museum, which up to that time had been a bastion of historical art. I also recall watching a Peanuts TV Special that satirized modern art, involving Charlie Brown going to a supermarket instead of an art museum on a field trip. Despite the efforts of critics such as Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, modern art didn't gain critical acceptance until the 1960's. When painter Mark Tobey won the top prize at the 1958 Venice Biennale, the major art publications didn't bother to mention it, despite the fact that Tobey was the first American artist to achieve such an honor since the 19th century. The art world eventually warmed up to the new style of art, but even today there are plenty of people who either dislike or fail to understand it.

Modern art wasn't a scam perpetuated by art dealers - modern artists had to fight tooth-and-nail to get shows and critical praise, and mainstream acceptance was a long time coming for them. A major problem faced by modern artists was, as Mr. Ross pointed out, the fact that their method of art making was far removed from traditional easel painting. Many people at the time thought that their art was a joke - after all, anybody can throw paint at a canvas, right?

This brings us to the issue of technique. According to Mr. Ross, a painting's quality can be judged by the artist's technical ability - composition, color, rendering, line, ad nauseum. The more "realistic" a painting looks, the better it is. In my view, the problem with realistic painting is the fact that we have cameras today. In fact, one can trace the origins of modern painting back to the invention of photography, the medium that was supposed to have spelled the death of painting. Painting had to adapt or die, and modern art was its adaptation to compete with photography. To stay relevant, painters had to do things with paint that only paint could do - something which Greenberg called "medium specificity."

Why couldn't academic painting compete with photography? Academic painting, as Mr. Ross points out, thrives on narrative and storytelling. In fact, up to the beginning of the 20th century, practically all painting involved some manner of narrative. Then, after the rise of modernism, painters began ejecting narrative elements in favor of formal ones, and abstraction was born. Why was narrative painting killed? Because painting is a horribly inefficient medium for transmitting a message. After the introduction of lithography, photography, and cinema, artists realized that they could reach massive audiences with these new media, while a painting, which is a singular object, can only be seen by a few (as Walter Benjamin pointed out in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"). If an artist truly wants to tell a story, why should he or she spend weeks to months laboring over a single painting when the story can be told more effectively to a wider audience in a different medium? Narrative painting served a function in the days before mass media, but today it is a relic of a lost age, and painters who cling to it tend to be thought of as amateurs despite their technical prowess.

There are, of course, excellent, relevant contemporary painters who use traditional techniques in their work - Vincent Desiderio, Odd Nerdrum, and John Currin to name just a few. The thing that makes these painters relevant is the fact that they use traditional techniques for a conceptual purpose rather than just by default. In today's art world, oil on canvas isn't the gold standard anymore - if an artist is going to use traditional materials, he or she should be able to justify their use conceptually. For example, John Currin uses oil paint and renaissance rendering techniques to draw attention to the art historical background in his paintings, and this makes his caricature-like distortions more shocking and ironic. The kind of painting Mr. Ross advocates is, barring conceptual justification and entry into contemporary discourse, completely irrelevant to today's art world.

In summary, I think that Mr. Ross is fighting a battle that's been over for three decades. He reminds me of the Japanese soldiers who refused to believe that the Second World War had ended and defended their remote positions for years following the official surrender. The world has moved on, and he is either ignorant of this fact or simply refuses to believe it. If it is ignorance, I think that Mr. Ross should look at relevant, contemporary painters who use traditional techniques for conceptual purposes. Everyone has their personal tastes, but I feel that the contemporary art world holds something for everyone, and it's simply a matter of finding it.

Famous Balthus Painting Back at MoMA

Balthus is one of my all-time favorite painters. Because of certain American sensibilities, his work tends to cycle between "unknown" and "repugnant" in the popular psyche; even so, many people appreciate him: the author Thomas Harris made his Hannibal Lecter character a relative of Balthus, and there are some contemporary artists (such as Naoto Kawahara) who are quoting from his work.

The Museum of Modern Art has several of Balthus's great paintings in their collection: Joan Miro and his Daughter Dolores, Portrait of Andre Derain, and The Living Room. Unfortunately for a Balthus fan like myself, these haven't been on view in a very long time. However, one painting from their collection has recently seen the light of day: one of Balthus's masterpieces, The Street, is currently on view by the 5th floor restaurant.

The Street is a large painting with a lot going on. It's one of Balthus's most famous and scandalous works - it may not seem particularly offensive today, but the sexual assault taking place in the bottom-left corner raised many eyebrows back in the 1930's, and the artist touched up the painting in the mid-50's, moving the boy's hand away from the girl's groin.

Anyway, if the emergence of this painting is any indication, maybe some of the museum's other Balthus paintings will come out of hiding. This is the first Balthus to be on view at MoMA since I moved to the city. Seriously, you guys: you can have more than one out at a time, you know.

Oliver Arms at Ameringer McEnery and Yohe

First, a confession - I'm not much of a fan of contemporary abstraction. I like many abstract paintings (pieces by Motherwell, Georges Mathieu, Philip Guston, et cetera), but at the same time I am able to view the pieces in a historical setting rather than within the realm of contemporary discourse. I feel that contemporary art, with an emphasis on concept and irony, has pushed abstraction to the side in favor of more "brainy" work. That said, I recently saw a show that renewed my faith in contemporary abstraction: Oliver Arms at Ameringer McEnery and Yohe.

Ameringer McEnery and Yohe is a gallery on 22nd that mainly shows dead or dying modern artists. They have some big names (Calder, Frank Stella, Motherwell, Pollock) in their inventory, and they have a few living artists who show there as well. The last show I saw there, of figurative paintings by west coast painter Rebecca Campbell, I found to be pretty underwhelming. While I usually gravitate towards figurative work, I found Campbell's paintings to lack any kind of staying power. It's usually a bad sign when I have to go to a gallery's website to remind myself of what the paintings looked like, but that's what I had to do with Campbell's show. It wasn't a terrible show, just not a memorable one.

After that experience, I wasn't particularly optimistic about the gallery's following contemporary exhibition - Oliver Arms. Arms is, like Campbell, a west coast painter, but his work is completely abstract. Given my general distaste for contemporary abstraction, I wasn't expecting much, but I decided to check out the show anyway.

Arms's paintings presented themselves to me as mysteries: they are very difficult to describe, which is probably a good thing. The closest comparison I can make is to crinkled-up marbled paper, but even that falls short of accurately describing the paintings. The images on the gallery's website do the paintings no justice - the JPEGs are far too small and there are no up-close details to be seen.

Not only are Arms's paintings difficult to describe, they're also difficult to deconstruct technically. There are no visible brushstrokes, yet they are oil on canvas. I fancy myself to have a decent knowledge of oil painting techniques, and it took me a while to figure out how he got the effects he did. It turns out that the paintings are sanded; my hunch was confirmed by the gallery's press release. Arms builds up layers of paint and sands them down, creating concentric rings of color and different textures across the canvas.

Another painter who is known to sand his work is Odd Nerdrum. I don't care for most of his large multi-figure compositions (they look stiff, posed, and like he's trying too hard to be surreal) but his smaller pieces can be excellent. One of the techniques used by Nerdrum is sanding - he's known to glaze shadows over his figures and sand off parts of it to break up the brushstrokes and create a hazy atmosphere. One enterprising individual claims to have deconstructed Nerdrum's technique and is trying to sell it, against the artist's wishes I imagine. How one can sell "sand your paintings" for $19.95 is beyond me, though...

Sanding isn't a widely-used technique in oil painting, probably because it can kill you. Many popular oil colors contain lead and cadmium, heavy metals that can easily enter your body when their dust is inhaled, potentially causing nerve damage, poisoning, and cancer. For example, according to the company's MSDS, most Winsor and Newton whites contain some amount of lead. Winsor and Newton is a very popular brand, and white is probably the most used color in oil painting, so sanding a painting can be risky. It even says right on the tubes not to sand cadmium-based paints because of the risk of lung cancer.

While Nerdrum is thought to only sand parts of his paintings (and I'm not paying $20 to find out for sure), Arms seems to sand the entire thing. I imagine he must use a power sander - sanding a 72x72 inch canvas by hand would be a painful ordeal. Whatever his method may be, the results are astounding. It's the kind of art that shows the failings of language - there's not really much to say about it. I'm at a loss for words, even more so than usual when trying to talk about abstract art. My inability to criticize this show in a sophisticated manner shouldn't be held against it, though. Silence is golden, and for work like this, the less that has to be said, the better.

Les Rogers at Leo Koenig

So, for the past week or so I've had a nasty cold, my second one of the season (not as severe as the case of the flu I had in October, which had me laid out for two weeks). After a week spent lying in bed drinking ginger ale and eating cough drops by the bag, I was ready to finally get back on my feet and into some galleries. I had an hour and a half to kill before meeting some friends in Flatiron, so I decided to check out what's new in Chelsea. I saw a couple shows that were worth mentioning, and over the next few days I'll get to writing about them, but first I'd like to talk about one show that particularly stood out in my mind.

Leo Koenig Inc. is a gallery on 23rd Street that I went to quite often when I worked for a framer on 11th Ave. I would go to Brownstein's (RIP) for lunch, since they were the closest restaurant to the frame shop, and spend the rest of my break eating picnic salad and going into the galleries on 23rd, Leo Koenig being one of them. Since that time, the gallery has expanded - there's the main space, and next door is Leo Koenig Projekte, a smaller space that follows the recent trend of galleries setting aside small spaces to experiment with new artists without devoting their entire gallery to them. The group show (curated by one of the gallery's artists) in the project space didn't do much for me, but Les Rogers's solo show in the main gallery exceeded my expectations.

Practically all of the paintings in the show were massive - the canvases wouldn't fit on any of the walls in my apartment... if they could even get up the stairs and in the door. The large "white cube" spaces in most galleries (including Leo Koenig) tend to shrink work, but Rogers's paintings stay massive. Each painting is a mix of representation and abstraction that takes a while to sort out visually and mentally. One painting in particular, "Tall Vanity," is particularly bewildering. Sure, a lot of detail is lost when looking at a five inch JPEG of an eight-foot-tall painting, but even up close in the gallery I had no idea what was going on.

That's what I like about the paintings in this show - they exist in the ambiguous space between representation and abstraction, motion and stillness, memory and fact. The palette itself is dark and mysterious (for the most part) with hints of vibrant color.

Looking back on things, I believe the reason I was so drawn to this show is its similarity to some of the Romanian Painters I've been looking at recently. His palette and color usage are similar to that of Adrian Ghenie, and the themes of memory, confusion, and amnesia remind me of Sergiu Toma's work. At the same time, though, Rogers is also tapping into American art history - his canvases are massive and the surfaces hint at the influence of DeKooning. The paintings definitely have passages of high abstraction, and the paintings' apparent grounding in "real" space makes these passages all the more mysterious. In a few of the paintings, there are jumbles of stuff that remind me of the debris left over from a disaster - a fire, a flood, or a nasty storm. Having lived through a few such events, I know the feeling of seeing a destroyed place and knowing that it will never again resemble the place in my memories.

UPDATE: To all Metal Gear fans: there's a clothing store on Broadway and 25th in Flatiron called "Big Boss Enterprises." The kicker: all the clothes are laid out on top of cardboard boxes in the center of the store. Was this intentional? I don't know, but it is awesome!

Romanian Painters: Coincidence?

I'm not sure why, but lately I've been seeing Adrian Ghenie's work everywhere. Not "opium-and-shrooms-at-the-same-time-get-kicked-out-of-college-for-hallucinating-about-your-stat-teacher" everywhere - I'm talking about the major art magazines. The most recent Flash Art has a Ghenie piece on the cover and an interview inside. The most recent Artforum has an ad for a Ghenie show at Mihai Nicodim in LA (Maybe my little sister, who lives in LA, would be interested in seeing the show and reporting back about it. Hint, hint, kiddo.). And I remember seeing several more references to him in the half-dozen or so magazines I read each month, but I have so many goddamn magazines in my apartment and studio that trying to find one particular review would be a full-time job.

At any rate, you could say that I dream of Ghenie. It's no surprise - in his work, I see many things I'd like my own work to be. His paintings maintain a delicate balance of order and chaos - everything seems rational even though it's been scraped with a trowel and repainted a dozen times. His color palette frequently switches between monochrome and vibrant and it works either way. At least on a formal level, I look at Ghenie's work with envy.

One series of paintings, "The Collector," shows the infamous Nazi looter Hermann Goering looking at his collection of stolen artwork. Another series is called "Pie Fight" and depicts serious-looking suited men throwing pies at each other (like the famous deleted ending from Dr. Strangelove). Other uplifting themes in Ghenie's oeuvre include Lenin's corpse, wolves coming out of the darkness, and seemingly silent scenes of interiors cloaked in shadows. Also, roadside executions.

Ghenie's work also ties in nicely to an exhibition I saw last night. I had been in Chelsea working with a friend on some changes to his website, and once we were done I decided, since it was Thursday, to try and score some free wine at gallery openings. I peeked in a few galleries but didn't see anything amazing until, on 25th street, something caught my eye - a cat.

A brief aside: my little sister, who lives out in LA, loves cats. A lot. Like, way more than most people. She and her fiancee have two of them, and her neighbors (who are practically part of the family) have six. Anyway, here in Williamsburg, there are a lot of cats. Most convenience stores have at least one on the payroll as a mousetrap. Recently, I started taking pictures for her of all the neighborhood cats that I could track down. I saw the cat in Chelsea as an extension of this little project, so I went into the building to snap a few pictures of the little guy.

The little bastard who started it all...

After I had finished photographing the cat, I looked up and noticed some wine bottles on a table down the hall. Finally, an actual opening reception! I followed the smell of cheap wine to a small gallery, called "Slag", hidden in a back hallway. The gallery was, indeed, having an opening for a group show that had just gone up that day. It just so happens that one of the four artists in the show is, like Ghenie, also Romanian.

I don't want to make hasty assumptions, but if these two are any indication, then damn, there's some good art coming out of Romania these days!

The Romanian artist in the group show "Realm" at Slag Gallery is named Sergiu Toma. One wall of the gallery was devoted to his work. Like his countryman Ghenie, Toma's work is mainly monochromatic with touches of color. The childlike figures look like they were taken from old photographs, but the faces are all blurred or otherwise distorted, like curse victims in The Ring. The nostalgic colors and subjects coupled with the fuzzy rendering brought to mind themes of forgetfulness - forgetting the faces of lost friends from long ago. One large painting, called "Time Machine," had a boy peering into a strange green machine that appeared to be a combination water cooler/drill press. Like the other paintings, the coloration was bleak, save for the viridian green machine. A smaller version, without the boy, was also in the show. I know there have been many times in my life when I wish I had a time machine, or at least the ability to go into a coma at will to sleep through stressful situations.

The forgetfulness that accompanies the endless march of time... and the fact that there are many situations in our lives we would like to forget. Given some of the settings in which Toma placed his characters, I imagine there are things they would like to forget as well.

UPDATE 1/27: Here's another excellent Romanian painter I found. I'm seeing Romanian painters everywhere... someone call Health Services, I think I just saw Szabolcs Veres on my toast!

Chautauqua: A Continuum of Creativity at Denise Bibro

First, a disclaimer: I'm not a fan of the kind of work usually shown at Denise Bibro. It's a gallery that shows C-grade artists who are smart enough to stay away from the vanity galleries, but their work isn't contemporary enough to be noticed by any of the more respected cutting-edge spaces. The work in question is the sort of work that isn't self aware - it's work that seems to be done for its own sake, which was a justification that worked back in the days of modernism and before but doesn't quite fly today. It's work that doesn't connect to art history, or to contemporary discourse, or to anything outside of the canvas. That said, I'm not going to deny that there's a market for this sort of work, and I'm not trying to disrespect the artists who show at the gallery - I'm just trying to make known my expectations going into this show. Also, on my way to the opening the elevator I was in almost crashed and I had to help pull people out of the stuck car, but that's another story.

The only reason I went to this show is because a friend of mine had a piece in it. The show itself was divided into two rooms: one room had work by the faculty of the Chautauqua school, and the other room had work by the school's alumni (including my friend). Most of the work in the student room was, to put it politely, assballs. A few pieces stood out as being decent: my friend's piece (and I'm not just saying that to be nice; it would have been one of my favorite pieces even if I didn't know it was his), a two-panel oil, latex, and ink on paper painting of highly stylized islands, was one of the best pieces in the show. It's the kind of painting that's really hard to describe, so here is a link to a whole page of them (the one in the show is "Island Series 1".)

Another piece that stood out was a large Rococo-style porcelain sculpture, "Paradise" by Chris Antemann. It had a degree of finish and Jeff Koons-like professionalism that seemed out of place next to awkward student paintings and toilet-brush sculptures. It's one of the better pieces in the show - the gallery is using it on all the promotional materials. Surprisingly, it was done by an alumnus, not a professor.

Few of the professors' pieces really stood out to me - one memorable piece was "Premise" by Don Kimes: a large photograph printed on canvas of what might have been a microscope slide or maybe someone licking a camera lens. Whatever it was, it was (to me) the strongest piece among the teachers' work. Another piece that caught my eye looked like intestines or maybe saucy spaghetti ("Plot" by Tom Butter). There was a lot of predictable and average work (an academic nude, some geometric abstraction, a couple portraits) and then there was one piece that looked like it came straight from my grandma's living room. This sort of work is the norm at Denise Bibro, and not surprisingly the artist actually shows at the gallery; I imagine that she had a hand in getting this show set up. If she did, I'm thankful, because my friend has another notch on his resume and I had a chance to conquer my long-running phobia of dying in an elevator crash.

Sue Williams at David Zwirner

Sue Williams's current exhibition at David Zwirner, called "Project for the New American Century," was one of the most thought provoking shows I've seen in a long time. The show's main content consists of several very large oil and acrylic paintings that, from across the room, look like mundane ab-ex works.. Upon closer examination, the paintings depict a lacy web of guts, gore, and entrails.

Although the imagery depicted is visceral and shocking, the paintings themselves are more fun and playful than they are disgusting. Part of their playfulness comes from the lowbrow-inspired color and linework. The paintings have only a few colors each, and although they were done in oil and acrylic, they look like they were silkscreened or otherwise printed onto the canvases. There aren't any visible brushstrokes or areas of impasto or anything to suggest a connection to "traditional" painting. Although they use the scale of masterpiece paintings, they look like they would be more comfortable in the pages of a Robert Crumb comic or painted on the side of a motorcycle. Comic books, particularly underground comics, are known for their depictions of violence (like Fritz the Cat being murdered with an icepick), and these paintings take that stereotype and blow it up to be wall-sized.

While looking at the paintings, I began to deconstruct their possible meanings. One of my first thoughts involved ancient divination rites in which priests would gut an animal and tell the future from the patterns in the entrails. What if, in the tradition of Francis Bacon, these paintings were a memento mori telling the viewer that he or she is simply made out of meat?

On the way out of the gallery, I took copies of everything on the reception desk and stuffed them in my messenger bag. One of the papers I took was a document explaining, down to the most minute reference, the artist's intended meaning of each piece in the show. Apparently the artist wanted to critique the Bush Administration's foreign policy, but the paintings didn't make that view explicit enough, so the gallery printed up a little cheat sheet.

I liked the paintings before I found out what they were about. The whole idea of printing up a sheet explaining what the paintings are about is awfully patronizing to the gallery-goer. I like looking at art and coming up with my own critical interpretations -- that's why I write these reviews. The revelation of the artist's "intentions" has poisoned my ability to view the work from my own perspective. The paintings were great on their own, but the artist stepped in and ruined everything for me.