New paintings added (1 Viewer)

Excellent additions mjp. I like seeing his art and this is pretty much the ONLY place I've ever seen it. I've always been curious as to why there's no book of it.

Also... there's some stuff that at UC Santa Barbara and a couple for sale online (at crazy prices)... How much has survived that isn't a part of the books?
 
Purple Stickpin said:
Damn fine job, mjp. Where'd you find these?
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Most of the recent ones were lifted from various auctions or listings. Some of the batch before that came from the substantial collection of a forum member who wishes to remain anonymous. Basically they are just scraps from here and there.

LickTheStar said:
...there's...a couple for sale online (at crazy prices)... How much has survived that isn't a part of the books?
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We own a few pieces of his art (only one of them is up there in the Art section). You can still get it, though, yeah, the prices have gone up. Where did you see some for sale? The prices may seem crazy, but if you can possibly manage it, you may want to take a stab at getting whatever you can. There are thousands of manuscripts out there, tens of thousands of signed books, but in comparison, the art is scarce (if you don't count drawings and paintings in letters).

I prefer the piece to be outside of a book, but after seeing a couple hundred examples of his work I think it's safe to say he did the best work on the pages that went into the books, so the strong hang-it-on-the-wall stuff is very rare.

I suspect that a book has never been done because this stuff isn't in public collections for the most part, and it would be a real chore to find and photograph a couple hundred pieces for a good book. I have been contacted by a couple of art book publishers asking about permissions and where they can find the art, but really, I think it would be very difficult to photograph a good representative sample. You could get a couple prominent collections maybe, but I don't know that that would be enough for a book.

I think Linda would be in favor of a book of art though, so if anyone ever did work it out logistically, permissions would probably be easy to get. But it would be a shitload of work for a book that would probably only sell a few hundred copies (assuming an expensive large format "coffee table" book was made).
 
Thanks for the info mjp. The painting I saw was $4000 on sweetbooks.com. Seemed fairly reasonable for the size and date, but... Still a bit out of range for me. Still, a man can dream. A man can dream.
 
It is nice to see more. Thanks to our host and our donors :)
 
Dunno. I don't do anything to the images but crop them, and (sometimes) sharpen them a tiny bit. It just looks like he used bright paint in that one.

Maybe it was done at the beginning of a painting session, before he mixed all the colors together and everything became brown. ;)
 
Nice. What I love about his painting is that he never seems to repeat himself. Each painting is a new exploration, whereas in his doodles and drawings, you do see a lot of repetition. He had no set approach in painting. It's very free.
 
That could also be because there were hundreds of paintings in books that have not been seen for decades. I can imagine that he did repeat himself, but we may have only seen 2 of each run of books. It would be an interesting project to try to locate as many copies as possible from one title and see how they compare to each other. Tracking some titles down could be very tough if they are in private collections and are not people on this forum.

mjp,
Do you have these saved by title and letter number?

Bill
 
bospress.net said:
That could also be because there were hundreds of paintings in books that have not been seen for decades. I can imagine that he did repeat himself, but we may have only seen 2 of each run of books...
Click to expand...

You're right, of course. If you compared several paintings from one book, you'd probably find stylistic similarities. And if he spent several days doing the art for a single edition, you might find different styles from the different days. But, even so, I think there's more variety in all the paintings I've seen, taken as a whole, than in all the drawings I've seen. He seems to have been more daring, or simply to have worked harder, in his paintings than in his drawings. He did drawings like he'd sign his name, almost by rote (spelling?), whereas a painting was more of an exploration. That's the feeling I get looking at his art. It may be due to the fact that paint offers more opportunity for variety, because of the colors and textures, thick impasto and thin washes, various brushes, damp or dry paper, etc. Drawing is by nature more restrictive. All you have (aside from the compostion) is the line.

Not that I don't like his drawings, I do. But I love his paintings.
 
Rekrab said:
Nice. What I love about his painting is that he never seems to repeat himself. Each painting is a new exploration, whereas in his doodles and drawings, you do see a lot of repetition. He had no set approach in painting. It's very free.
Click to expand...

I could be wrong, but it strikes me that somewhere in the neighborhood of 90% of his paintings are basically abstract human faces. Or maybe I'm just seeing things. Again.
 
I was thinking along those lines too. The outline of the human form - face or body - and its interactions with "OUTSIDE" things. Contact, conflict, in a kind of geometric display. They kind of look like cave-paintings on the wall inside the drunkest mountain ever. Focused and No BS. Just like his poems...
 
I hadn't noticed that, Chronic, but now that you point it out, he did do a lot of faces. I guess the variety I see is in the style, not subject.
 
painting 32 that petey mentioned(that has the spirit of his 5 yr old son) has always reminded me of the doodle he did in my copy of "it catches". and now that i'm comparing the dates for the first time, they were done 2 months apart! must have been buk's abstract phase...

scan0014-1.jpg
 
Added 25 or so paintings to the page (at the bottom). Like the photos added today, most of you have probably already seen them.

It's getting progressively more difficult to do that, I keep adding things that were already there. It's hard to find the duplicates..."Is the squiggle with grey triangle there? I don't see it..."
 
Has anyone here ever seen the painting as described by Buk in the novel Women as "a wolf fucking a redhead" when he was in Galveston with Joanna Dover tripping on Mescaline?
 

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