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Oil painting and color, said Michelangelo, are for “women and the lazy.” His sharp-edged Apollonian style is the only way to beat back mother nature.
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p. 158

 

Camille Paglia

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Some painters, including myself, do not care what chair they are sitting on. It does not even has to be a comfortable one. They are too nervous to find out were they ought to sit. They do not want to ‘sit in style’. Rather they have found that painting – any kind of painting, any style of painting – to be painting at all, in fact – a style of living, so to speak. That is where the form of it lies. It is exactly in its uselessness that it is free. Those artists don’t want to conform. They only want to be inspired.

 

Willem de Kooning

 

I make a little mystique for myself. Since I have no preference or so-called sense of color, I could take almost everything that could be some accident of a previous painting. Or I set out to make a series. I take, for instance, some pictures where I take a color, some arbitrary color I took from some place. Well, this is gray maybe, and I mix the color for that, and then I find out that when I am through with getting the color the way I want it, I have six other colors in it, to get that color; and then I take those six colors and I use them also with this color. It is probably like a composer does a variation on a certain theme. But it isn’t technical, it isn’t just fun.

 

Willem de Kooning

 

With a tongue like a razor he will kiss
the mother, the child,
and we three will color the stars black
in memory of his mother
who kept him chained to the food tree
or turned him on and off like a water faucet
and made women through all these hazy years
the enemy with a heart of lies.

 

Anne Sexton

 

Sex cannot be understood because nature cannot be understood. Science is a method of logical analysis of nature’s operations. It has lessened human anxiety about the cosmos by demonstrating the materiality of nature’s forces, and their frequent predictability. But science is always playing catch-up ball. Nature breaks its own rules whenever it wants. Science cannot avert a single thunderbolt. Western science is a product of the Apollonian mind: its hope is that by naming and classification, by the cold light of intellect, archaic night can be pushed back and defeated.

 

Camille Paglia

 

Unlike the Cult of the Seven-Edged Star, the Church of the Seven Pointed Star believed that God had seven points rather than seven edges. Therefore, rather than worshipping the journey toward self-realization symbolized by the edges, they worshipped the goals of self-realization as symbolized by the points. [...] Adherents to the Church of the Seven-pointed Star used swords with sharp points but no edge, while the Cult of the Seven-Edged Star used swords with sharp edges but no point. Alas, edges proved superior to points in most battles fought in the streets of Nicea. Caroline's followers were forced to either commit sacrilege and switch to edges, or become meals for the ever-present saltwater buzzard. Proving, one could say, the point of the edges.

 

Jeff VanderMeer