10 Painters, 10 Lessons

As a disclaimer, I do not believe the meaning of a painting should--or can--be summarized into a single sentence. It would be like playing someone a Beethoven-inspired ringtone as an introduction to classical music. But I hope this post inspires many of you to learn more about these painters, look at their actual works in real life, and find your own deep and wonderful meanings that are oftentimes impossible to pin down into words. This is my homage to painting in all its possibilities and limitations. 1. Claude Monet (1840 - 1926) "Perception changes everything." Perception comes before nature in Monet's world. An aging church in late morning looks completely different from that very same church at sunset. Something that looks like hasty dabs of paint on a canvas become a lily pad when you step further away and look again. Our mundane world is reborn with every passing moment. Our own reality is dependent upon the flux of our own perceptions. 2. Vincent Van Gogh (1853 - 1890) "Beauty exists in the midst of suffering." Van Gogh, as many of us know, lived most of his life in poverty, cut off his own ear, and shot himself in the chest at the ripe age of 37. He also happened to bless humanity with some of the most beautiful paintings in the history of art. 3. Edvard Munch (1863 - 1944) "Death is inevitable." Somber spectres of death are present in many of Munch's paintings--lurking behind forest trees or masquerading as a guest at a dinner party, eyeing their flesh-and-blood doppelgangers with gaunt eyes and sallow faces. They accompany small children, lovers and the elderly. No matter who we are or where we are in life, we are all equally in the presence of death. 4. Marc Chagall (1887 1985) "Look at the world through your heart." Rumor has it that when asked by a teacher why he included angels and mythological animals in his drawings, Chagall replied that he was simply drawing what he actually saw. 5. Rene Magritte (1898 - 1967) "Things are seldom what they seem." The French words in the painting above translates to: "This is not a pipe." This is not a pipe. This is actually an image of an idea of a pipe painted onto a canvas in a two-dimensional world, which is completely different from a physical pipe that you can actually hold in your own hand. Duh. 6. Mark Rothko (1903 - 1970) "Return to the source." Sometime in the twentieth century, painters got bored of depicting images and decided, instead, to explore the very building blocks of what makes an image an image: color, shape, composition. Rothko's color fields are seductive and meditative. They draw us into a primordial world before language and thought exist. 7. Frida Kahlo (1907 - 1954) "No matter what happens to you, you are your own goddess." When Mexican Surrealist painter Frida Kahlo was 17, she was a passenger on a bus that collided with a trolley car. As a result of the accident, she broke her spinal column, collarbone, ribs, pelvis and her right leg. Her shoulder was dislocated, and an iron handrail pierced her uterus and abdomen. For the rest of her life, she suffered extreme bouts of physical pain, and was hospitalized again and again for months at a time. Frida, however, will always be immortalized as a goddess in her many self-portraits for the rest of history. Whether she is holding her own bleeding heart in her hand or wearing a necklace of thorn in her paintings, Frida always looks at her viewers straight in the eye, undaunted by the judgment of others and the fragility of her own mortal body. 8. Andy Warhol (1928 - 1987) "Change the rules of the game; no one is stopping you." Andy Warhol painted Campbell soupcans and made a film of a man sleeping for six hours. He also founded "The Factory," where he hired workers to mass-produce his silkscreen prints of celebrities, car crashes and sensational newspaper photos. Not surprisingly, Andy Warhol stirred a lot of controversy and made quite a few enemies for turning the whole notion of art and artistry upside the head. 9. Inka Essenhigh (1969 -- Present) "Be seduced by the unusual." Inka Essenhigh's oil paintings are defy categorization, and straddle many visual paradoxes. They are both mythological and hypermodern. They are both cartoonish and somber. Her strange imagery completely takes us by surprise and drop us off into a completely unexplored universe of our own imaginations. 10. Kara Walker (1969 -- Present) "Nothing is ever in black and white." Kara Walker's paintings, videos and room installations create a disturbing, seductive narrative of the Antebellum South, where white slave owners and African American slaves play the classic archtypes of fools, lovers, conspirators, rulers and murderers. Racial stereotypes are exploited, then distorted, upturning our own preconceived ideas of what is right and what is wrong. Who is the victim and the vicitmizer? Are we sympathizers or are we voyeurs? Who holds the real power in this dynamic? Race relations and human history have no easy answers in Kara Walker's silhouette world. Neither does life.