Men of a Certain Age

January 7, 2010

Just a quickie:

Last night at VSC 6 artists/painters/visual artists showed slides  and spoke briefly of their work. All of them were impressive and interesting and thought-provoking. I loved hearing about process and goals and intents, and seeing the varied forms of art– whether paint, wood, computer-generated, poured, poked.

One really moved me: Matt McConville and his paintings of nude men called “Figures in Landscape.” They were not all what I would expect from a title like which was his intention. These were nude men of a particular age and size– none of them perfect or buff or especially ‘handsome’–but in that honesty they were oddly beautiful. One article I found online explains that “McConville’s nudes aren’t the idealized youths of antiquity, but the pudgy guys next door, with all their rolls, holes, hair loss, and hairy guts.”

Some of the men are wrestling or on top of each other, but not sexual. Some are posed playfully– whimsically? [I'm not going to post photos of his paintings, as I don't have permission, but check them out on his website]

I was so taken by the humor and candor, and inspired because in a way, I felt the paintings speaking to me now that I’m a man of a certain age, with the little belly forming and the bits of hair sprouting from my ears (that I shave a couple of times a week).

Then, when I opened my [school] email this morning, this is what I found! How fitting.

Are they trying to tell me something?

Account: robert.williams

This is your quarantine summary from the Barracuda Spam Firewall.

You have 14 messages in your spam quarantine inbox.

• Click on the Deliver link to have a message delivered to your mailbox.
• Click on the Whitelist link to have a message delivered to your mailbox and whitelist the sender so that his/her messages will no longer be quarantined.
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