Word: ranking
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...SOME obscure sense that his life was meant to go crosswise and be led in defiance of nature rather than in the easy expression of it." So speaks I rank Harland, an intense young painter growing up in Australia in David Maloul's latest novel. Harland's Hall Acre. The book spans the pre Depression to post World War II ears and details I rank's life and struggle to succeed...
...family, once rich in land, has recklessly lost all their wealth and I rank's ambition is to regain it--first physically, by selling his paintings and second spiritually, by recapturing on canvas the images of the lost land. In attempting to fulfill his ambition, however, he believes he must go against his own nature. His ambition to regain land goes beyond wishing to succeed to an obsession with punishing himself...
...rank works relentlessly. He refuses to take the easy way out by supporting his father at home and prefers to contradict his naturally affectionate nature and become a drifting loner. He defies and hides his familial devotion and sacrifices almost all human comforts for his work. Yet he is still tied to his family by his ambition to restore it to its former glory. He is bound to support and maintain his father and brothers by a deep sense of loyalty and pride, but he shuns any personal contacts...
...rank, as he loses his community and family ties, sinking deeper into an almost unbroken isolation, also loses sight of any sort of purpose or joy in living--besides slapping down paint. An acquaintance of his says...
...their own style. The face of Matisse's Portrait of Madame Matisse, 1913, possibly one of the dozen greatest portraits of the 20th century, was based on a mediocre Fang mask from Gabon. Sometimes, though, a modernist work would take off from an African object of the first rank. Such was the case with Picasso's bronze of Marie-Therese Walter, 1931, whose erotically swollen blimp of a nose is based on an effigy he owned of the fertility goddess Nimba from the Baga. The sight of these two sculptures confronting each other is as much a spectacle...