May was a transitional month for me. We went to Italy for two weeks but the trip was cut short by the passing of my father. He was 85 years old and in very fragile health for several years. He was the greatest human being that I had the pleasure of knowing and the world is much impoverished by his passing. Gone is a great and gentle sense of humor, a deeply spiritual belief in God and passing with him is an unspeakable kindness toward all living things. Each and every day he will be missed. During the time in Venice we tried to see every major work in churches and museums. It was an unbelievable immersion in pure and glorious art. I hope that it will pay dividends in the quality of the work. May 2, 2006I believe that the greatest canvas painter working today is Odd Nerdrum. Although I have reservations about the imagery, there is no one working today that can make paint on canvas look quite so beautiful. His content and related imagery strikes me as contrived and a little on the edge of bad illustrative art, but his figures are well developed and very dimensional. The NeoBaroque style that he uses is exquisite and his sense of light and shade is awe inspiring. I can't believe the amount of black that he uses in the flesh shadows but it seems to work very well for him and is tied closely to the use of black in his Icelandic landscapes. It is pure pleasure for a painter to view close-up photos of work from his various monographs. The tactility of the paint, the layering of contrasting tones and implied dimension of his figures is breathtaking. The paintings that I like best are straight forward renderings such as a figures back, or simple bricks, or portraits that do not wreak of a primitive sci-fi Omni magazine illustrative narrative. Even his self-portraits seem so honest and pure in contrast to the more contrived narrative efforts. But if Odd wants to paint narratives, God Bless him. Any painter with such pure ability can do whatever he wants and I'll be the first to defend his right. Gregory Gillespie was the greatest panel painter since about the 1500's. You talk about making paint look good. His ability to make paint on panel come alive is totally unchallenged in the last 5 centuries. Having worked with him, and knowing his technique and protocol does not take any away from the absolute mystery of his ability. I believe that one of his greatest assets was that he was, first and foremost, an abstract painter by instinct. The reason that his realism worked so brilliantly was that he was well grounded in abstraction. His underpaintings and the early development of his panels were loose and gestural and the constant push and pull of creation and destruction infused his work with an inner tension that was commanding. His development of skin textures through crosshatching, sanding and scraping over endless layers of translucent paint came about as close to actual skin as a painter could hope to achieve. I could go on and on about what a brilliant artist that he was but compared to his kindness and generosity of spirit his talent pales in comparison.