Don’t Judge a Painting Until You Meet It
Wednesday, June 25th, 2008
This past weekend, I was more excited about horses than art. At least, until I saw the art.
We had ended up vacationing on the farmland of Allen Hirsch, an ambidextrous SoHo painter who works in the New Cubism style. His paintings were all over the property and that enabled me to get an honest good look at them for the first time. I’ve always thought the self-portraits of Hirsch were extremely expressive, but I couldn’t have comprehended the level until I saw the work in front of my face. The brush strokes are incredibly thick, jutting onto the dimension of the viewer. Even though each painting is small portrait size (not much bigger than a sheet of paper), the thick strokes make everything seem larger and more expressive, until it felt like there’s no one else in the world but me and the person in the canvas. The paintings were subtly put up on the most random walls on the property, maybe not even meant to be found, but every time I discovered one, it was an honest treat.