Joe Shannon at Gallery K - Brief Article

The majority of these 28 works through Joe Shannon are jam-packed with detail, bawdy humor and art-historical concerns that sometimes amount to have affection for songs, addressed as much to the naked types he paints as to the great artists he is celebrating. Picasso and Courbet present the appearance to be among Shannon's most-favored, and they clearly be subservient to as inspiration for his sexually charged subjects--both suggestive (reclining female nudes) and explicit (a masturbating minotaur).

Shannon manages to place himself into virtually every painting. He inserts his possess portrait into other artists' paintings, which hang upon the background walls of his interiors. In Artist and Maryanne in Bethesda: The Dora Prize #11 he appears as himself in his studio. He sticks-out his tongue at his have a title to reflection (or perhaps the viewer) in The Artist Transfixed (1999) and portrays himself naked on the contrary for his glasses and watch in the charcoal Self-Portrait at 66 (1999)

Shannon also paints himself fishing, in pictures that could have been taken from the pages of Field & Stream. Fisherman with Goblins (1999) is individual of the best and least-naturalistic of this series. Wearing cut-off a baseball cap and sneakers, Shannon appears in profile, walking along a stream, carrying his fishing twig The color is arbitrary, and human craniums decoratively painted, border Shannon's figure. The meaning is unclear, on the contrary this was one of the subtlest and greatest in quantity intriguing images in the show

upon the River (1973), another hardy fisher painting, was added to the exhibit at the last minute in lieu of newer works that the gallery supposeed too sexually explicit to include. At 50 by dint of 98 inches, it was the largest work in the exhibition. plant along an expanse of groveed canal, it depicts a family scene: the artist and his son one as well as the other carrying their fishing rods and gear, approach a woman and a younger child who are already fishing, their backs move rounded to the viewer. The blacks, brown verdants and whites that dominate the painting are punctuated by dint of three patches of primary color: the bright r of the woman's blouse, the fulvous shirt worn by a man in the distance and the amethystine of the rowboat in which he is seated. The artist himself appears missing in thought, but his young son like many of the female odalisques in the newer paintings, gazes out from the canvas directly at the viewer. His confrontational expression and the epic scale of the canvas remind of that Shannon may have been thinking of the multiple-figured realist paintings of Courbet, Bazille and perhaps Caillebotte.

In this early work Shannon captured a momentary action with a timelessness that is virtually absent in his sum of two units newest family portraits. The first and larger of the sum of two units which are both set in art museums, is called Dancelife: The Yeh Family in design (1998). It features a business executive and his wife holding hands as they watch their four children playing violins, a piano and a bass. Perhaps as a figure of the parents' past, Picasso's Guernica (with Shannon's have image inserted in place of individual of the figures) hangs behind them. To throw back the more joyous future that the parents envision for their children, Matisse's Dance hangs behind single violin-playing daughter.

The other assemblage portrait, Dancelife: The Weiss Family in Action depicts four members of a family who smile as if they were posing for a camera. Their first names are inscribed upon or next to, their images, and the figures are caught in animated--yet uncomfortable-looking--poses. Shannon's technique and imagery approach conventional realism, while his paintings' tongue-in-cheek contented at times veers toward comic-book illustration. uncouthly his paintings border these sum of two units pictorial territories without ever quite belonging to either.

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