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Colacello takes audience inside Warhol’s psyche

The Gazette (Colorado Springs, CO) October 21, 2005 | MARK ARNEST THE GAZETTE Author Bob Colacello shed light on Andy Warhol — and Ronald Reagan — in a lecture at the Fine Arts Center last week.

In “From Warhol to Reagan,” Colacello drew parallels between the two men; the former was Colacello’s employer for for 13 years, and the latter he’s written a two-volume biography about.

Colacello made two important points on Warhol’s art. During the lecture, he pointed to the influence of Orthodox icons on Warhol’s portrait style. He saw them for hours a day during his childhood, when his mother was a member of a Byzantine Catholic Church in Pittsburgh — basically an Orthodox church that recognized the pope.

An anecdote about Warhol’s portraits highlighted the artist’s basic seriousness about his work — a seriousness that’s sometimes obscured in the pop-art subject matter. Although he was flexible about the colors and composition of his numerous commissioned portraits, Warhol insisted on a standard 40-inchby-40-inch format. He told Colacello that someday the Metropolitan Museum of Art would do a retrospective of his work, and the portraits would look better as a group if they were the same size. web site art of war quotes

AT CAMP CASEY: A weekend art show at Camp Casey — the makeshift Iraq war memorial in front of Toons at Nevada Avenue and Dale Street – - was modest in size but provocative in content, displaying a range of ways artists react to war. go to website art of war quotes

“I Still Like Ike,” Kim Sayers’s collection of anti-war quotes by Eisenhower, proved that it’s possible to make a powerful statement with a light touch. The quotes were printed without comment on wallet- sized pictures of the former president, letting Eisenhower speak for himself.

A light touch is not Daniel Lowenstein’s goal in his sculpture, “Feeding”: A skeletal figure feeds gasoline to an infant George W. Bush, who’s wrapped in swaddling clothes of the flag. It’s blunt — and not everyone will agree with the artist’s assumptions — but the conceptual consistency gives the piece great power.

The class of the show — for its subtle craftsmanship, its audacious blending of contrasting textures, and its complex message about the relationship between fear and violence — was Pat Musick’s “ForgetMeNot.” This heart-shaped piece takes the viewer on a journey. It begins with a plush, vulnerable exterior, continues through a desolate layer of barbed wire and jagged, shattered patterns (in which drops of blood pick up the red border), and ends in an exquisitely crafted interior, in which a tiny naked male figure cowers, protected by his gun and helmet.

MARK ARNEST THE GAZETTE