New Text: A Vision of the Nude (Abridged for Linea)

We've decided to delete one of our earlier entries containing the essay A Vision of the Nude by Francis Cunningham, because it's too difficult to read as one block of text. At the same time Dick has recently ironed out a more readable version of A Vision of the Nude (Abridged for Linea), which I put up on his website in place of the older version. Enjoy the read. Let us know if you have questions or comments. Dick will try to respond in some form.

"The lack of rigorous training directed toward a specific visual goal – the nude – combined with a view of humanity that saw the model as more than a studio prop for learning to draw, paint and sculpt, led my sculptor colleague, Barney Hodes, and myself to develop new approaches. By focusing on the model, we were working on a nude that was neither idealized and classical nor modernist and anti-classical. It wasn’t a nude people expected or could readily categorize – a Venus or Apollo, say, or a Picasso or a Modigliani. It would be a different nude, and when we founded the New Brooklyn School of Life Drawing, Painting & Sculpture, Inc. (1979-82), we were on our way to articulating what that nude could be." -Francis Cunningham
excerpt from A Vision of the Nude (Abridged for Linea)

Another reason (a less important detail) to remove that previews version of A Vision of the Nude from this blog was the confusion about the authorship of the essay, due to an image of the bust of Francis Cunningham by Barney Hodes, which I'd originally used to break up the text.
Dick still thinks that the bust is a good illustration to his text.


"Francis Cunningham" by Barney Hodes

Here is another bust by the same hand of Barney Hodes:


"Mason Harding" by Barney Hodes. Photograph: by Christopher Wood

About this blog and its bloggers.

This blog idea came about after Dick and I, Aneta aka perke, made a short YouTube video on the occasion of his show "Saints" at St. Francis College, few months back in March 2009. We did not know how to best incorporate the video and the new essays that Dick worked on recently, so we started blogging them.
That was the beginning, but now we're hoping to record more than that.
From now on, assisted by Dick, I'll be writing casual entries, accompanied by images, in an attempt to record current developments in Dick's painting studio and country barn, on his website and more.

Another Few Nudes

We've put up another few nudes on Dick's website. As we're putting them up, we're arranging them in chronological order.
We're referring to the originals around the studio to get the colors right on the website.

Dick tells me that the image that years ago got him "in trouble" was the frontal nude of Patrick Brown (1973-75)

There is a story here to be told. It'll come soon.

New nudes, portraits and more on my website.

Summer. Normally, you'd expect Dick away from NYC in his cabin in Sheffield Mass. Today however he's back in the city to run a few errands till the end of the week. We're taking the opportunity to finally put his website in shape. It'll take some time before we have all the representative images on the site and have them arrange chronologically. Yes, we finally decided that chronology is the best guide to his work.

We've added and re-arrange chronologically some landscapes and portraits and saints, and premier coup and of course nudes that we'll work a lot more on.

Here is Dick in his studio.

Here is the living room we worked from most of the day.


While not painting around his barn in western Massachusetts, Dick is re-working his paper "The Art of Painting: Reflections on Edwin Dickinson and Representation."