huckabees artwork

Thomas Kinkade

liar

Akira Toriyama

discus

it is not toriyama. unless i missed some dragonball pics, intentionally...

The red painting in the lobby and the yellow w/ red splotches in Bernard's office look vaguely like Joan Miro but I'm not getting any image search matches yet. The bowler hat and umbrella on the hatstand might be a Rene Magritte reference maybe.

Ah. Watching it now and the scene where Bernard actually mentions Magritte as he's taking the hat off the hatrack leads me to believe I may have been correct about that part. Still don't know about the paintings but I don't think it was Miro.

If you don't mind e-stalking then the set director and set decorator are listed in the credits and you could do a search; I'm sure there's contact info somewhere since it's their business to advertise themselves.

you're right about magritte.

though i'm not convinced about miro... with all the work that i'm familiar with, miro tends to create borders with his images. if he's using primary colors against each other, they typically have a black bordering around them--plus, i can't find anything similiar that's as simple (yellow background with red dots falling) in any of miro's work. also; it feels wrong. miro has this wavy thing going on... it's a bit flighty... in every painting, the images seem to want to create a new shape within themselves--beyond the borders, and this picture in the room isn't like that at all. am i making any sense?

and i feel a little icky about e-stalking.

I must have been thinking of the Blue Series of paintings but you're right, the resemblance ends at "blotches on primary-colored ground." The Miros do seem more like watching amoebas or paramecia on a slide glass; they're very agitated or at least have some kind of dynamic tension going on while the ones in the movie have a disquieting stasis or something. In the red painting in Vivian's office there's a bass clef-shaped crescent thing which looked slightly Miroian, so yeah, I wasn't really going on much anyway.

In the director's commentary David O. Russell talks about the color pallette used, mostly blues and greys throughout the movie, excluding reds and greens (except where naturally occurring). Reds are used only
in the office or in relation to Isabelle's character. Russell's talking about the red painting and mentions something about it referring to "the red hot centers of..." before he gets interrupted and doesn't finish his thought.

There's a scene when Albert's in the bag doing his meditation and he's visualising Brad in a tree. When Albert starts hacking at Brad with a machete there are flashes of red and yellow which mirror the color scheme of the painting that's right over the table the bag's lying on.
The interlocking rectangle shapes on the office chalkboard (Russell sez they're influenced by Cy Twombly's work) also show up in the background of Albert's vision so I'm making the assumption that the red and yellow splotches refer back to the painting in the same way. In the commentary Russell talks about fear and anxiety at the same time the red and yellow flashes appear. Maybe I'm being too Wizard of Oz/ Dark Side of the Moon about the whole thing. The rectangle motif also shows up in the cubes that appear when Bernard does the connectedness thing in other parts of the film.

I'm mostly just free associating at this point but the elongated shape of the yellow cavas seemed coffin or tomb-like, with Easter or Lazarus connotations, given the fact that Albert gets zipped into a body bag thing and comes out again.

Anyway, I assumed that the paintings were likely meant to be recognizable or at least obliquely meant to refer to an artist or movement with a known philosophy or aesthetic since there are pointed Magritte and Twombly references, too. It could just as easily be a set piece created just for the film or the work of a relatively unknown. Russell mentions the production designer KK Barrett creating the look of the office and coming up with the Twombly-influenced design for the chalkboard so he probably was directly responsible for picking out the paintings too, but I Googled him and couldn't find any articles or interviews where he talks about the film so that didn't help much.

Here's part of a review of Adaptation, for which Barrett also did the production design, so maybe I'm not all that off in making the association between what goes on in the bag and the painting:

As with his work in Being John Malkovich, production designer KK Barrett's settings for Adaptation were constructed to reflect "what is going on in the character's heads, their emotional state," he says. For example, the character of Charlie Kaufman lives in an oversized, sparsely decorated house. "The surroundings reflect Charlie's state of mind," Barrett explains.

http://www.hollywoodjesus.com/adaptation_about.htm

my room reflects my state of mind: dusty, full of spiders, and wals covered in dry semen

yeah you read me right, wals

Yeah, but that's not art unless you did all that directly onto a canvas and framed it. That's just your life.

i live my art

Touché, D'Artagnan.

http://www.gagosian.com/files/526297f2.jpg

Ah, sorry. That imagery did not require any graphic representation at all.

(that was painted without dust or spiders, but otherwise using the rest of the latebloomer method)