For a dancer, there’s nothing like watching dance to make your legs jittery. As a painter, watching a film about painting makes me want to run into my studio and throw paint around to a rousing soundtrack (and hopefully not a sticky end). These are my top 5 movies about artists making art.

• Frida    The brilliantly visual Julie Taymor made me snivel at the Lion King on Broadway. Yes, I’m a sap, but her love letter to Frida Kahlo is as textured and rich as the late artist’s paintings themselves. Each scene is so rich and fulfilling and screaming with colour. Now I want to watch it again.
• Basquiat   Directed by painter Julian Schnabel (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly made me shudder it was so beautiful), Basquiat features David Bowie as Andy Warhol (how fab!) who delivers one of the films many great lines: “you’re painting out everything I do. I can’t even see what’s good anymore”.
• Klimt    This one is actually a bit painful to get through, but it’s such a feast for the eyes it’s worth the Vaseline-slow plot. How does Saffron Burrows live with herself? She’s a walking painting.
• Pollock    Harsh, but marvellous. I  love the homage to Pollock’s own suggestion to a documentary-filmmaker to film him from below through the pane of glass Pollock is dripping paint onto. 
• Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus      This one’s not about a painter, but the inimitable photographer Diane Arbus and her fascination with people on the fringe of society. Though this film focuses less on her art-making and more on the imaginary love story, it’s just so haunting and delicious it could be real.

Tags: Basquiat, Diane Arbus, films about art, Frida, Fur, Klimt, Pollock

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 14th, 2009 at 10:03 pm and is filed under Films. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.