My top 10 favorite paintings (as of 7 am this morning and guaranteed to change by 7pm tonight)
I could create a new top 10 painting list every day for the rest of my life without a painting making a second appearance. There are just too many paintings worthy of a spot in my top ten bracket.
Today, at the exact moment that I hit send, these are my top ten paintings. The list would be different if I sent it a few hours later. Totally different tomorrow.
What paintings are on your Top Ten Paintings list? Leave me a comment or a Notes and let’s see if we can jump start a contentious debate.
Henni Alftan, Corduroy, 2020
This painting of a pair of legs crossed at the knee and shrouded in corduroy is a study of line. The rails of darkness in the fabric, the creases, the crossed legs. That amazing moody nocturne blue shadow on the wall with a hint of green at the edge and that stripe of light on the top of the canvas is not just a wonderful composition, it is a storytelling device. Clues hint at the life of this model. Maybe they are the legs of a mundane moment, a finance bro waiting to see a therapist or a mom waiting for a child to finish dance class. But what if this painting is cropped in a way to conceal something or offer the subject some privacy? Maybe this is a murder suspect being interrogated by the police or maybe the person sitting there is getting terminal news from a doctor. These minimal bits of portraiture are proof that humans lead secret lives, their interior ones and the ones we see. To me this painting is a reminder that we must tread softly with other people because we don’t know what their condition is but they are worthy of me caring what their condition is. As Einstein said, “From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: That we are here for the sake of other men —above all for those upon whose smile and well-being our own happiness depends, for the countless unknown souls with whose fate we are connected by a bond of sympathy.”
Paul Cezanne, The Large Bathers, 1900-1906
Do I have to defend this choice? Really? But why? Look at the color, the way Cezanne applies the paint like he is throwing clay at an armature instead of establishing making marks with paint. The rich earth tones, warm enough to make that purplish blue skies shine, the legs on the model on the right emerging from the canvas, the white clouds clustering in the middle of the bending trees. Of course it s on my list.
Jade Fadojutimi, Rebirth
This painting takes me to a place where light is powerful enough to fight its way through darkness. It is all about the light.
I was just at the aquarium in Baltimore where I learned that the reason that the roots of the rainforest trees wrap themselves up the trunks of the tree trunks so that they can reach the light above the leaves. That’s what I feel here, life reaching for light. The artist is supremely skilled with the paint. The red stripes on the bottom right the black/dark green leaves clustered on either side of the bottom, the energy of the marks. It creates a naturalist’s chapel, a James Turrell full of leaves and stems.
The Fourteenth of July Celebration in Paris, 1886, Vincent van Gogh
I had never seen this Van Gogh before this week and I love it because I see so much of what was to come after. (For context, it was only two years later that Van Gogh painted Starry Night) I imagine Van Gogh completing this, staring at his easel and thinking either how terrible it was or how great it was and how everybody would think it was terrible. I’m most obsessed with that thick, bold red, white and blue French flag on the middle right. That is a breakthrough moment to toss on three thick gobs of bold color. I wonder if those are the first marks of his new style. Has anybody written their PhD thesis on those three marks? I think they should.
William Thon, Spruce Woods, Winter, 1952
Before I discovered this painting on a list of Andrew Wyeth’s favorite watercolor painters I had never heard of William Thon. And honestly, the rest of his work does not have the drama and contrast I usually respond to in a painting. But I love a good woods painting. I like a French forest from Courbet and Rousseau, Munch’s yellow, fallen log and trippy woods from Emily Carr or Charles Burchfield. And I like a a stark winter day where the woods have become cinematic and the energy of the marks are powerful enough to make the words look charred and dangerous.
Faye Wei Wei, I Want to See the Stars with My Own, 2017
I see a sphinx, arrows, people of uncertain gender, a peach waterfall flowing in the sky, a variety of brush marks and a pattern of sunbursts. The title tells me they are probably stars. To use actual arrows to move our eyes around the page is so simple and effective that it is unbelievable that more people don’t use such a successful compositional device. But then those arrows make me feel like this might actually be a story from mythology or a bunch of hieroglyphics. I love the palette and the story.
Danielle McKinney, Twilight, 2021
I could do so many Top Ten lists with only Danielle McKinney paintings in all ten spots. You know what I feel when I look at her work? ENVY. JEALOUSY. CRAVING. DELIGHT. The Luminosity in her paint, the storytelling, the pops of neon, the way she plays with the light illuminating or concealing her subjects. And why aren’t more people painting the glamour of a woman with a cigarette anymore? I want to sit in a dark LA bar with this woman and hear all about her broken heart.
Pierre Boncompain - Nude Back
I am a new super fan of Boncampain, a contemporary painter living in France. The confidence required to make a painting like this, where a strange human-like shape fills the center of the page like this. What is this anyway? An orange blob settling into a sea of blue fabric? What the hell. Very little shadow makes this a graphic idea of a nude woman, more like a figure on a Greek vase than anything modeled from life. This would get like a C- in a life drawing class. But yet…. There is something perfect about it in that gesture of grayish hair, the mark giving us the spine, the single leg rising up on the right. It is perfect in the way a Matisse is perfect - artistic confidence meeting passion meeting form.
Remedios Varo, Malaria, 1947
This is the most unusual Remedios Varo painting as it feels like a page in an old children’s book about the life of a dragonfly. The beautiful palette gives us the strange light emerging from a misty swamp. But the Mexican surrealist was more likely to paint a human head on a dragonfly that is speaking with a flame or a ghost or some other such nonsense than the scene depicted in this painting. The painter was interested in the occult and was buddy buddy with another amazing lady painter with one foot in the otherworld, Leonara Carrington. But this painting speaks to me because she has attached that fascination in the other worlds that surround us and used her focus on allegory to turn this bit of naturalism into the story of being vulnerable in a scary world.
Alex Katz Luna Park, 1960
As with all Katz paintings, he wins by restraining himself and making every single mark matter. He wins with the bold lightening bold of reflected light that seems to rip open that water. The two perfectly aligned trees. The dark shore cutting up a third of the painting. The leaves mere blobs. There is a reason why Alex Katz is Alex Katz.