When I win an MTV video award, in my acceptance speech I will have to give props to my boy, V Go and a shout out to my peeps from Paris of the 1870s. Paint out. As a color theorist, I spent a lot of time with the impressionists. Research is always fun but it is seldom this beautiful. The up side of accumulating an abundance of knowledge on the impressionists is that you have accumulated an abundance of knowledge on the impressionists. The down side of accumulating an abundance of knowledge on the impressionists is that it takes a gadjillion dollars and change to fill just one wall of your home with these works and the topic only comes up once every three years on television game shows. Enter Enver Larney. In a time where most people are absorbed in the “high” art of shock and experiment it was really refreshing to simply enjoy painting for a while on his site. Truth be known, if I see one more basket/suitcase/refrigerator/meat grinder/dresser drawer full of little plastic baby dolls, painted blue that has some esoteric title about abortion being death, I’ll go postal (“postal” is a uniquely USA reference, in Europe it roughly translates to “not liking Mondays”.)
The Impressionists have created a lot of false prophets over the years. In fact, you can walk into any painting studio, in any university and find some student dabbing paint on a canvas, USING A PHOTOGRAPH AS A REFERENCE and claiming the impressionists as their influence. Minor note here: Dabbing paint is pointillism, the overly technical bastard stepchild of impressionism. Every time this happens I would like to see some professor step in and say, “Just put the number six Grumbacher down and back away from the canvas and no aesthetic will get hurt”. But I digress.
The beauty and the pitfall of working this way is, you can not hide the frailties of the human condition. The beauty is nailing it like Enver does in his work. When Enver loves the place or thing he is painting, he totally zones and it shows. Be it still life or landscapes, he draws you into the painting and leads you around to little touches of magic through out the piece. With “Bleik (The Bleaching) Belgium 2001” the meadow is big and plush, the far off building is old but well maintained and the cool shadows in the forest are inviting. I wanted to take my shoes off to look at this painting.
“Mt. San Jacinto From Pipes Canyon 2001” does something that is totally remarkable. Enver makes the harsh, rugged desert intimate. If you were to look at the whole area he is standing in you would see a vast land rolling on forever with no escape that would consume any life unfamiliar with its ways. By just looking at the immediate grounds in front of him he paints a very personal relationship with the unforgiving terrain. There may be large hard objects everywhere but beauty can surface when one takes the time to look. Mr. Larney takes time.
The pitfall is of course, the tendency to be human on occasion. On “Assemblee Nationale And Eiffel Tower, Paris France 2001” he appears to have phoned it in. The brush stokes are dominantly unified, mono-directional things and the color lacks the subtleties he is capable of achieving. He also shortchanges his drawing skills. Okay, I’ve spent nights in Paris and to do anything the day after, other than coffee, is a true test of ones faculties. I’m letting this one slide.
“Yeti, Oman”, painted in 2002, has some funky geometric break down thing going on. It may just be a corrupt JPEG file but still the piece looks rushed. The page mentions it being done at a small fishing village, 20 klicks west of Muscat and that it was “ Painted in July when temperatures rose above 47C”. Just 47 degree Celsius? Artists these days are soft. When Monet was a kid he would paint for hours in a cold lily-filled pond that was UPHILL in both directions and he was very grateful that he had that lily-filled pond at all. Okay, 47C is slightly uncomfortable and you gotta respect Mr. Larney’s need to create under those circumstances.
His web site mentions that he is from Australia but a Google also found him listed in South Africa and Dubai. This may have something to do with the amount of travel this boy does. His frequent flier miles could finance a cure for something. His web site opens with a start page but it loads really quick because it is simply one JPEG file rather than flashy scripting. Through out his site you will experience a lot of frustration from links that do not work and some images that do not download completely. Some images are out of sequence so don’t be surprised if you are clicking through Europe and wind up in Arizona. The image quality is uniformly average. They automatically save as the filing systems names but you can easily copy and paste the titles because he does label each page very clearly. Once downloaded you can blow them up to 170 percent before distortion begins. Maxing your monitor settings really helps in viewing Envers’ work if you have that kind of time, because you may have to reboot the PC, depending on the operating system.
A really sweet feature he uses is a little narrative for each piece on his gallery pages and on the catalogue page. Unfortunately, there are no pictures with the narratives on the catalogue page. Mr. Larney also checks in every now and again to update his journal on the “On The Road” page. I couldn’t tell you what is on there. If there is not a lot of sex, drugs and a dash of gratuitous violence in the first two or three sentences, my interest wanes. There are no prices on his catalogue page. They are all listed as “TBA”. TBA in US Dollar that is. He works mainly in the twenty something inches by twenty something inches size. I would venture a guess that this is entirely based on him traveling so much and keeping the sizes manageable to transport.
There will probably always be a trade off in the viewing of art on the web. You can be frustrated by a site with good paintings that does not function well or you can be frustrated by a site that functions well but has a basket/suitcase/refrigerator/meat grinder/dresser drawer full of little plastic baby dolls, painted blue…
Need a stamp?
Enver Larney web site:
http://www.enver.net/
Rodney Wallace, Web Art Critic. Rodney surfs the web reviewing artists work much the same as the local critic wonders the galleries of their cities and reports. Rodney is an artist that works mostly in the objective, academic genre of color theory and compositional formulation. Rodney’s work is currently being represented by the Andenken Gallery in Denver and can be seen on display at Studio A in the Andenken building. He also runs RAW ART, a national artist and object de art management organization.
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