Stuart Fullerton and Ronald Guzman

Ronald Guzman

Perhaps because he was born in Puerto Rico,

Judge Guzman seems especially sensitive to Chicago winters.

These two pieces make me shiver.

… and feel lonely, too.

Stuart Fullerton

This piece might well have hung in the "Modern Landscape" show that recently closed at the Art Institute - even if it was painted 136 years after the Van Gogh and Seurat pieces in that show,

And it would have been one of the better pieces on those walls.

Van Gogh, Factories at Clichy, 1887

Call it the poetry of desolation.

It’s Man destroying the planet,

and the bill is finally coming due.

Stuart Fullerton

Hasn’t Stuart shown this piece before?

No matter - I really like how that the appeal of fresh young female buttocks 

has  been overwhelmed by delight in composition.

That  hip is so perfectly drawn and toned.

It glows.

I immediately thought of William Merritt Chase,

and as it turns out, he painted a similar pose.

William Merritt Chase, 1888

But Stuart’s piece is better.

(at least in reproduction)

Chase just shows us a sleeping model.

Stuart presents a lover who has turned away from us in bed,

Stuart Fullerton

There has always seemed to be some sad or morbid backstory lurking behind Stuart’s pieces, and here it jumps out from the foreground.

A cemetery on a bright sunny day.

The well-ordered aspiration of the steeple 

versus the chaotic dispersal left by death.