"Boxers Under Lights"
Shorter post today. A picture is, after all, a thousand words. This acrylic painting is by eighty-year-old Katherine Bradford, a New York artist who identifies as lesbian. I stumbled upon an exhibit of hers at The Frye Art Museum in Seattle which I’d gone to because there was an exhibition of paintings by Marsden Hartley, a gay American artist whom I want to learn more about. It turned out that the museum only had a handful of Hartley’s landscape paintings, all confined to a single room, creating a cozy viewing experience. While Hartley is the better-known artist, his work was overshadowed by Katherine Bradford’s large, colorful, simplified works, not all of which resonated with me, but those that did, excited me and drew me in.
I’ll give you the snotty, highfalutin assessment of Bradford, the artist, as per the kaufmann repetto art gallery. This is the highest level of art criticism, as evidenced by the lack of capital letters. (Perhaps it’s merely a case of a broken shift key.)
vast expanses of color divide her canvases
into distinct horizontal planes while the
variations in saturation and tone evoke
an elusive yet almost palpable atmo-
sphere. lighter and darker hues are
interchangeable and used without
functional or hierarchical distinction,
introducing spatial elements such as the
sea and the sky, beaches and poolsides.
these monochromatic backgrounds are
occupied by human figures, often
swimmers and bathers, whose androgynous,
featureless bodies are roughly sketched.
I get it, on the artsy level, but my Sunday afternoon brain, still only half caffeinated, had a simpler take: “This is cool!” If they’d been so gauche as to have happy face and sad face buttons at the end of the exhibit, I’d have definitely pressed happy. I might have pressed it multiple times, hand sanitizer be damned, as people do with pedestrian crossing buttons. Can we all agree that excess happiness is far better than extreme impatience?
My favorites in the exhibit depicted swimmers and people gathered outside under the night sky. The scenes evoked a playfulness and portrayed activity instead of that sort of still life, uh…stillness. Blue was often the base—that “monochromatic background” which the esteemed lowercase gallery mentioned. It had the effect of drawing my eye into the figures and what they were doing. “Woman Flying” (1999), a painting of a loosely drawn superwoman, nude except for a red cape, suspended in the sky, greeted patrons at the entry. Bradford describes the work as a self-portrait and confesses that her style is “crude” because she struggles with anatomical accuracy. I love an artist who keeps it real.
“Boxers Under Lights” (2018) will likely stay with me the most. I’m not pugilist obsessive. I’ve never seen Brad Pitt in “Fight Club” and I barely glanced at the boxing pics this past month of Jake Gyllenhaal. (Okay, I glanced, but I didn’t click to read what that was all about. Sometimes context isn’t required.) I think boxing is barbaric, the human equivalent to cockfighting. Weirdly, a line from the pop song “The Girl Is Mine,” comes to mind, Michael Jackson telling Sir McCartney, “Paul, I think I told you, I’m a lover, not a fighter.”
I suppose painting boxers in an embrace, kissing, makes the simple display of affection more striking, especially in the boxing ring, presuming there are spectators in the audience. All that testosterone and sweat, broken nose brushing against broken nose, fewer teeth to get in the way if things progress to Frenching. It’s like Rocky smooching with The Champ. No, not The Champ. Jon Voight’s gotten all weird. Make that Sly necking with Ryan O’Neal à la “The Main Event.” (Sorry, Barbra.) I prefer to imagine that instead of Mike Tyson biting someone’s ear off.
“What a match!” takes on a new connotation.
If I were scoring this fight, I’d call it a draw or a split decision or whatever—I Googled “Can there be a tie in boxing?” but then didn’t really care to read the answers with various nuances.
They both won, didn’t they?
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