Hyman Bloom's "Old Woman Dying"
Unloved No. 8
Without a doubt Hyman Bloom had an impact on me when I came upon his artwork years back. I’m not one to rattle off lists of my “favorites” of anything, since I am not a definitive person by any means. I have no favorite color, favorite song, or favorite food et al. But it was this image of Old Woman Dying (or sometimes incorrectly titled “Dreaming”) that infiltrated my mind and never left. This painting is something that makes me empathize and ponder beyond what maybe even Bloom intended.
Hyman Bloom was once regarded as the “greatest painter in the United States” for a short period in the 1940′s. He was a leading member of a group known as the Boston Expressionists, a movement that pathed the way for the more known Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock. Though very non-religious, he painted images of rabbis, seances, human corpses, and christmas trees among of the many other varied subjects. He was fairly well-known among artists of his day, but never really had great public exposure. Perhaps this is what made him even more important in my opinion of him as one the great masters of 20/21st century art. His art was never really predicated on trends. Hyman Bloom died just last year at the age of 96 still relatively unknown to the greater public. I really wish I had made an attempt to meet him since he was painting in my lifetime [as a contemporary]. I really believe his art will become more popular as time goes on, as he was so far ahead in thinking we will all have to just catch up.
I am by no means trying to compare myself to or even ride his coat-tails with my piece Unloved No. 8. My artistic style is not so much as Bloom’s impasto oils, but a modern designer’s pencils, pens, spray paints and wash sketches (my training) in a late medieval sense of non-perspective portraiture. Seeing the small medieval portraits at the Toledo Museum of Art as a child set my style in motion years ago. But when I decided to create the Unloved series, Bloom’s piece was firmly rooted in my approach. Unloved is a conceptual piece started in 2007 that is essentially “never-ending” for me (as there is an unending supply of subjects). My subjects are from within my mind, they are the recently dead and dying elderly found alone, abandoned, unknown and basically uncared for in assisted living facilities etc. It is pure pessimism and a reality that one can live a miserable life and receive an even more miserable death. This is happening everyday and has happened always. To our societies, they are worthless and barely obtain an obituary chronicling their lives. This is who we are.
Old Woman Dying by Hyman Bloom image obtained from the now defunct site ‘Mental Blog’
