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Authors: Phil Semler
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want to compete with those images, he said. What he did do, he told me, is paint a loaf of bread in a more realistic style, and then scrape away several layers of paint to render his canvas as an atmospheric suggestion, rather than an explicit depiction of a loaf of bread.
So, when one approaches the painting, the image is at the very edge of being recognizable, at the ambiguous point where the information of the painting could be read in many numbers of ways and one would have to approach the painting to create one’s own picture using the artist’s diffuse, ill-defined contours of forms and the apparently brown coded color.
In sum, one would have to mentally reconstitute a likeness that is in effect disintegrating before their very eyes. Kruger’s version of a load of bread, then, was an eroded representation of not only a food, but a way of life, a culture that was now blown to smithereens.
Kruger’s painting was psychic , I initially thought, and could heal a culture. Unfortunately, very few would have understood his painting, let alone enjoy it, and certainly would not trade for or buy it, since we pretty much lacked a marketplace for art, let alone one for any other goods and services.
This was my interest in Kruger. Not as an art appreciator, or god forbid, an art historian, but more in understanding his behavior—his behavior as an artist when the world around him is negative. I wanted to symmetrically study Kruger and his painting in these dreadful conditions. For this reason, I ventured to study him and anything interesting about his quest as an artist.
It’s obvious I considered Kruger to show some of the greatest divergence from type than most others in Old San Francisco.
My interest in him was accepted without comment by Kruger. He told me he understood he was different from others. He said he cared little about facts and what concerned him habitually was observation. He often carried a sketchbook, in which he drew frequently using his charcoal, or his crayons. He wrote a question—or a series of questions, really—both what he called objective and subjective—on the first page of each sketchbook, which, he said, prompted him in his observations.
His current sketchbook had the questions—“How might my drawings help the world, ease the world’s pain, its facelessness, its obsolete past, our lack of selfhood, sense of identity, how can we find ourselves again? If I draw a line, what is the nature of that line? Can I make visible on this paper things and even substance, can I make it more than a habit?”
I used to wonder if we had more Krugers, would the world be better? After all, before the War of Annihilation, we often said our time was the time of the Killed Imagination , a time of such technological resurgence, that this technology had all but killed creativity and the imagination, which, of course, had been one the major traits, which distinguished us from the lower primates. I initially saw Kruger as an anomaly, but a useful anomaly that should be reintroduced into the gene pool, to ensure a happier future. As I said earlier, I was biased, I admit it, and I rooted for him.
After everything, years later, we had to adapt to the new conditions of life. After the initial cowering, it was time to reboot. Science destroyed us. But that didn’t make religious superstition safe now. The vision of an orderly universe superintended by a God who created rational-minded creatures in his own image seemed dated. We were all irrational now, but some would rise with their rationality. However, even naturalism seemed suspect since the collapse. And yet the alternative, seemingly friendlier to science, and its random process of natural selection seemed a bit nightmarish, a lot to swallow, especially in these times.
We had lost belief in a past which formerly may have not been in need of a proof, or the philosophy of humanism, or even in the existence of other minds. All most of us knew is
So, when one approaches the painting, the image is at the very edge of being recognizable, at the ambiguous point where the information of the painting could be read in many numbers of ways and one would have to approach the painting to create one’s own picture using the artist’s diffuse, ill-defined contours of forms and the apparently brown coded color.
In sum, one would have to mentally reconstitute a likeness that is in effect disintegrating before their very eyes. Kruger’s version of a load of bread, then, was an eroded representation of not only a food, but a way of life, a culture that was now blown to smithereens.
Kruger’s painting was psychic , I initially thought, and could heal a culture. Unfortunately, very few would have understood his painting, let alone enjoy it, and certainly would not trade for or buy it, since we pretty much lacked a marketplace for art, let alone one for any other goods and services.
This was my interest in Kruger. Not as an art appreciator, or god forbid, an art historian, but more in understanding his behavior—his behavior as an artist when the world around him is negative. I wanted to symmetrically study Kruger and his painting in these dreadful conditions. For this reason, I ventured to study him and anything interesting about his quest as an artist.
It’s obvious I considered Kruger to show some of the greatest divergence from type than most others in Old San Francisco.
My interest in him was accepted without comment by Kruger. He told me he understood he was different from others. He said he cared little about facts and what concerned him habitually was observation. He often carried a sketchbook, in which he drew frequently using his charcoal, or his crayons. He wrote a question—or a series of questions, really—both what he called objective and subjective—on the first page of each sketchbook, which, he said, prompted him in his observations.
His current sketchbook had the questions—“How might my drawings help the world, ease the world’s pain, its facelessness, its obsolete past, our lack of selfhood, sense of identity, how can we find ourselves again? If I draw a line, what is the nature of that line? Can I make visible on this paper things and even substance, can I make it more than a habit?”
I used to wonder if we had more Krugers, would the world be better? After all, before the War of Annihilation, we often said our time was the time of the Killed Imagination , a time of such technological resurgence, that this technology had all but killed creativity and the imagination, which, of course, had been one the major traits, which distinguished us from the lower primates. I initially saw Kruger as an anomaly, but a useful anomaly that should be reintroduced into the gene pool, to ensure a happier future. As I said earlier, I was biased, I admit it, and I rooted for him.
After everything, years later, we had to adapt to the new conditions of life. After the initial cowering, it was time to reboot. Science destroyed us. But that didn’t make religious superstition safe now. The vision of an orderly universe superintended by a God who created rational-minded creatures in his own image seemed dated. We were all irrational now, but some would rise with their rationality. However, even naturalism seemed suspect since the collapse. And yet the alternative, seemingly friendlier to science, and its random process of natural selection seemed a bit nightmarish, a lot to swallow, especially in these times.
We had lost belief in a past which formerly may have not been in need of a proof, or the philosophy of humanism, or even in the existence of other minds. All most of us knew is
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