Artists Top Ten List

Tyler Green has asked art bloggers to list their ten favorite artists as of the moment of typing them. His list amazed me for the simple reason that he includes four artists from my list along with an artist I completely loathe. I would like to see him talk more about this, but I find it amazing that someone who lists Diebenkorn and Matisse would like Newman.

Anyway, here it is:

1. Richard Diebenkorn
2. Henri Matisse
3. Paul Cezanne
4. Pierre Bonnard
5. Robert Ryman
6. Piero della Francesco
7. Giotto
8. Rembrandt
9. Wayne Thiebaud
10. Frank Lobdell

Ask me tomorrow and it might be different. Who knows? It might not be. I think that this is pretty much the usual list for the last couple of years. Perhaps Rembrandt is sometimes replaced with Van Gogh or Goya or Sargent or Winslow Homer, perhaps Lobdell sometimes loses out to August Gay or Louis Siegriest (later works) or Constable or Turner (watercolors in particular). If I am in one of those moods, Robert Arneson probably sneaks on there once in awhile. If I am in the throes of Kalifornia Uber Alles sentiment, then Gregory Kondos, Raymond Staprans, Thomas Hill, and William Keith might pop up there. I suppose that Pierre Puvis de Chavanne and di Chirico make the cut at times (not to mention Lucian Freud and Howard Hodgkins). Sometimes Hockney or Miro might make the cut (although rarely).

My list also changes with frequency of museum visits. There are some artists who really get to me when I have been seeing their work a lot (Motherwell and a whole host of baroque painters come to mind). Others I tend to like more in theory and reproduction (hello Mr. De Kooning), but when I am seeing too much of their actual paintings, my enthusiasm wanes.

When it comes down to it, the only artist who is probably guaranteed a permanent spot on this list is Richard Diebenkorn. I have seen a lot of his work, most of the pieces multiple times. I have studied his work, including his drawings and the wonderful intaglio works he did for Crown Point Press. There is something about his command of line and space, not to mention color, that just grips me deep down and will not let go.

Probably a big part of my love of Diebenkorn is that he was not afraid to show his own influences. He rejected the Nietzchean balderdash put forth by Clyfford Still (an artist I run hot-cold on. When he was good, he was very good. When he was bad, he was as hysterical as a thirteen year old who has read too much Edgar Allen Poe). In my own painting I do not hide my influences. My art does not spring from my innermost being like Athena, fully grown in armor. Neither did Still's, although that was his story, and he stuck to it.

Diebenkorn never seemed to have been affected by that posturing. He was frank about his admiration for Matisse, for Bonnard, for Hopper, as well as for some of his gifted contemporaries in the artistic hot house that was the San Francisco Art Institute back in the late 1940's and early 1950's.

Two artists who are noteworthy in their exclusion from my list are, of course, David Park and Elmer Bischoff. Both artists I enjoy tremendously, but neither one of them grips me to the extent that the others on the list do. There are some Bischoff paintings that I can get lost in. There are some Park paintings that make me tremble in the face of their power, but as a whole, neither artist comes close to their good friend and colleague, Richard Diebenkorn.

Another artist who probably should be on my list is Nell Sinton. The only reason she is not on there is that I have just not seen enough of her work. What I have seen was powerful stuff, but I need to see more before I consider her for inclusion on my top 10.