Benedict Oddi

Here's a contemporary artist that I just discovered... Benedict Oddi, of Pittsburgh, PA.  His website can be reached here!  In particular I enjoy the paintings listed under his "Eternal Escape Unknown" heading. These paintings are of a surrealist nature, and we can see the possible influence of several different artists here.  Primarily Oddi's works are reminiscent of Yves Tanguy, except that they contain more lurid color.  His painting "F Your Sailboat" also reminds me of a Roberto Matta work, with its possible depiction of the landscape of the mind.  The bird figure in "Flight of Icarus" is suggestive of the same expressionless animal seen in several of Salvador Dali's paintings, such as "Little Ashes", in combination with Dali's frequent self portrait in which he paints himself face downwards and with a distinctive nose, as in The Great Masturbator.  Also the bird seems to be evocative of the figures found in Joan Miro's famous painting "Dog Barking at the Moon", with the primarily white body marked by splashes of color.  Anyway, lots of influences here!  Or so it seems to me.  If I get out to the Pittsburgh area one day, I wouldn't mind looking up this artist and maybe catching an available show.  

A Day at the Library

When I was young, my interest in art was almost exclusively limited to comic strips.  That's what I read, and that's what I drew.  But when I was in my early twenties,  a friend asked if I was interested in Modern Art.  I had never given it much thought for some reason, but felt open to exploring it a bit.  So one day at the library, I opened a book on artist Salvador Dali, and saw these two paintings side by side:

The paintings are (top) "Dismal Sport" and (bottom) "The First Days of Spring", by Dali.

My impression upon viewing these two paintings was that I had seen these images before, but I had been so young at the time, that I couldn't recall the actual event or circumstances.  Some time later, I was surprised to read what Dali's thoughts were, when he painted "Dismal Sport".  He was visualizing images "which I (Dali) could not localize precisely in time or space but which I knew with certainty I had seen when I was little".    (Ref.- "Dali", by Dawn Ades).  

I immediately loved these paintings when I saw them at the library that day, and my appetite for Modern Art was realized.  There was something about those clear blue skies meeting the hard artificial concrete, which brought out the dream images so easily and in full color.  Before long I would also admire Giorgio De Chirico, Rene Magritte, Henri Rousseau and Paul Klee.  Sometime after that I started appreciating horror comics art, with its blood stained indulgences in peril and alluring excitement. We'll pretend that never happened, at least for today.  Modern Art rocks!