These are all via the wonderful site arttattler.com, except the last, which is from contemporaryartsemar.

Since this is the first “move” or “gesture”, the prompt here for tomorrow’s JPEG wrestler is a straightforward and fun one:

I like Angela Dufresne’s paintings because they appeal to me visually, triggering what I think are personal visual tastes and associations.  In other words, I’m not touting her work displayed here as great or important as a fact, and I wouldn’t try to explain why everybody should like them (though they don’t offend my sensibilities as a critic either), because I don’t believe that’s the case.  In particular, I choose painting as the medium, and I’m not afraid to come out and say that as a twenty-two year old “new media native”, I have had, at least thus far, a tepid, distant relationship with most of the painting I have come across.  I tend towards thinking of most painting as irrelevant…

(as in “what is it doing for anybody? it’s (maybe temporarily) comatose, it can no longer affect any change, it’s been rendered impotent by the jpeg and the rate at which media is consumed today, it perpetuates the dominion of the artwork as a commodity that belongs, by its very physical dimensions, in rich and exploitative people’s apartments, as Bourriaud says. there are too many self-centered painters.  the world needs scientists and activism and research projects and generally more drastic measures than painting!”)

…a term I admit needs much better definition than it currently has in the context of art.  Nonetheless, when I do walk into a gallery or museum and see a painting that strikes me, I know the reasons have little to do with what the painter might have achieved in the work as a painting, but with the peculiar sentiments that arise in me.  In the case of Angela Dufresne, there is whimsicality, loneliness, ether, and the sense that I am looking at something outside time; these paintings remind me of dreams I haven’t necessarily even had but imagine I could, whereas many other painters might try very hard to evoke a dreamscape and never speak to mine in the least.  Peter Doig gets my dreams, and so generally speaking do Kathy Grayson, David Hockney, Liu Wei, Luc Tuymans, and many other completely unrelated painters.  These painters momentarily transport me somewhere that I focus on tenaciously like trying to remember a phone number belonging to a beautiful woman who is calling it to you from the window of a departing train in Nice.   If a painting does that for me, all else is — on a personal level, not necessarily a critical one –  redeemed.

So, my prompt for tomorrow’s invited poster is: artwork that speaks directly to you and your peculiarities, which you feel personal emotion towards, yet which you might not otherwise expect many people to like, at least not for the same reasons.