Dave Hickey and Tyler Green both did their ten favourite paintings from 1880 onwards, here are mine: (difficult i found, because the work i really love are prints, photographs, bookworks installations, drawings, and mixed media work, there are v. few paintings i love, i will make seperate lists for photos, prints and drawings)

1) Warhol Ambulance Disaster, 1963

because of its formal innovation, its co-opting of the white-on-white minimalism, of making something (white, ambulances) frightening, of its refusal to be either a print or a painting, and because i think its the most reflective of warhols work.



2) Freud, Naked Man from Back, 1992

Painterly, and a belief in the corpulence of flesh, of the pleasure of flesh, but also reflective and sort of meloncholy, the colours are perfect, esp that porcine flesh and the crimson rug.


3) Noland, Magus , 1962

All of what we go to Newman for, but better, because he is decorative, and the lack of taking oneself seriously while still making paintings that ravish at 22 feet seems a high wire act (seeing him live, seeing those pencil lines, and how he makes the colour straight, ie his techinique is almost process oriented)



4) Ruscha, Stunt People, 1998 (no image)

not a drawing, or a photograph or a book work, not a peice about language or concept, fireflies in the dark green grass, reminds me of the best of hiroshige.

5) Klee, Angelus Novus, 1921
I like Klee because his super naivitee masks a deep and abiding spirtual sophistication, and this painting, owned by Benjamin, is so lovely, imperceptible with its joy--that something so iconicly hopeful could be made in this fetid century maybe the rest of us can be saved.


6) Cezanne, The Bather, 1885
the weight and the surety


7) Winslow Homer, The Fox Hunt, 1893.
i was driving in the fog last night, with my friend ray, the former edmontonian and now torontonian, and we kept trying to explain the opressive force that the sky, the weather had on the praries, and so few paintings expressed it, and reading about this--everyone pointing out the obvious, the murder of crows circling the downed fox, and the ambiguity of who will eventually eat who, the whirling circular compostion that leads to a feeling of unease and fear, but its the weather in this painting, not the snow, but that tiny snatch of sky, that made me realise how close this was to the indescriable danger of the weather, of the landscape, that we albertans have.


8) Ryman

We have been trained to see painting as “pictures,” with storytelling connotations, abstract or literal, in a space usually limited and enclosed by a frame which isolates the image. It has been shown that there are possibilities other than this manner of “seeing” painting. An image could be said to be “real” if it is not an optical reproduction, if it does not symbolize or describe so as to call up a mental picture. This “real” or “absolute” image is only confined by our limited perception— Robert Ryman

his entire ouervere is one work, about painting, and i cannot imagine 20th century mark making w/o it--he is my picasso.



9) David Hockney, Peter Getting Out of Nick's Pool, 1967
erotic, arcadia, utopia. (its the social freedom, the absorbtion of pleasure, of painting because its fun, and its california, and yr friend has a new pool, and yr bf has one fantastic ass, it reminds me of rembrandt's best paitnings, the one of saskia, where some of it is wealth, and some of it is pleasure, and some of it is that he really loved his wife's tits)


10) Max Beckman, Man in Tuxedo, 1927