The End of Painting

It’s an historical statement so audacious that I couldn’t resist reusing it for my portrait of Piet Mondrian as a young man. To make his clothing out of his own paintings is mean, hilarious and loving all at once. The use of extruded impasto for his hair and beard is also a sarcastic homage to the history of thick expressive brushstrokes.

The concept of painting coming to an end goes back to the 19th century invention of photography. Later, during the modern era, Piet Mondrian suggested his own abstract artworks would end the need for making any more paintings.

The earliest Art styles to influence my own teenage creative efforts turned out to have killed painting too. In the 1960s, Pop Art, and then later 1970s Photorealism, poked a rebellious middle finger into the eye of high-minded Modern Art. Ironically, Abstract Expressionism had become accepted as the new academic taste. The lack of content in that non-objective Art now makes it the preferred choice for corporate wallpaper.

Today that reductive aesthetic of Modernism has been replaced by an all-inclusive palette of Postmodern options. Like the Italian Renaissance and French Neoclassical eras, we are currently living in an eclectic time of reprocessing the past. Or as William S. Burroughs famously said,

“When you cut into the present the future leaks out.”

Speak to me.