Whether we know who Steve Cannon is or not is secondary. Artist, sitter, viewer - we’re all in it together.Ī viewer gets slyly connected to the art, where “reading” its visual language becomes dynamic participation in the genre scene of daily life being represented. And that’s what we’re doing too, checking out Taylor’s painting. Cannon is concentrating, engaged with art, lost in thought. In short: The artist’s composition reflects exactly what the subject is himself engaged in doing. Taylor visually suspends his figure within the space of painting, constructed as a sensuous field of scrutiny and contemplation. The dark blue pants - jeans? - on the crossed legs of his flatly rendered clothing just abruptly end. In one of the more disconcertingly inventive (but effective) passages, one that recalls many of Willem de Kooning’s iconic paintings of women, the writer has no feet. His right hand is hidden behind his knee, sensible for holding an unseen book, while the left hand is held at his jaw, where a pinky finger brushes his lips. Patches of exposed white canvas add to the general glow.Ĭannon’s head is slightly lowered apparently, he’s reading something unseen in his lap (his eyes are shaded behind sunglasses). ![]() Like his crossed legs, Cannon’s head and upper torso are framed in flickering swipes of green, as if this is a depiction of a holy man surrounded by an incandescent aureole. ![]() The ground above is variegated brownish grays, brushed in broad strokes wet-on-wet, while below a liquid field of green is muddied with dribbles of brown. The canvas is split in two, the dividing line cutting across Cannon’s body at the waist. Taylor depicts Cannon seated, but - notably - he sits in a pool of green paint rather than a chair. Cannon, an eminent writer, founded A Gathering of the Tribes, a well-known multicultural literary magazine that emphasized Black writers and artists in the 1990s, before morphing into an exhibition and general cultural organization on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
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