Ken's Visual Art Blog

The Adobe Museum of Digital Media (AMDM)

2012-01-18T13:52:00.000-05:00


Adobe Museum of Digital Media, www.adobe.com/adobemuseum

The Adobe Museum of Digital Media (AMDM) is a unique virtual space designed to showcase and preserve groundbreaking digital work and to present expert commentary on how digital media influences culture and society.

The museum is an ever-changing repository of eclectic exhibits from diverse fields ranging from photography to product development to broadcast communications. To inspire fresh conversation on the constantly evolving digital landscape, exhibits are overseen by guest curators, each of whom is a recognized leader in the field of art, technology, or business.

The AMDM is a space unlike any created before. Because it is entirely digital, it is an ideal gallery for displaying and viewing digital media, as well as revealing the innovation and artistry within the work. It is open to the public 365 days a year and is accessible from anywhere in the world. source: http://www.adobe.com/adobemuseum/

de Kooning: A Retrospective - MOMA

2012-01-11T08:44:00.002-05:00

This website includes selected paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints from the MoMA exhibition de Kooning: A Retrospective (September 18, 2011–January 9, 2012) and related publication, both devoted to the full scope of the career of Willem de Kooning (American, b. the Netherlands, 1904–1997). Among these are some of the artist’s most famous, landmark paintings—including Pink Angels (c. 1945), Excavation (1950), and the celebrated third Woman series (1950–53)—plus examples from all of his most important series, ranging from his figurative paintings of the early 1940s to the breakthrough black-and-white compositions of 1948–49, and from the urban abstractions of the mid-1950s to the artist’s return to figurations in the 1960s, and the large gestural abstractions of the following decade. text and image source: http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2011/dekooning/

Link Credits

Chris Jordan

2012-01-03T12:41:00.002-05:00


Gyre II, 40x56 and 60x76. Depicts 50,000 cigarette lighters, equal to the estimated number of pieces of floating plastic in every square mile in the world's oceans.

Chris Jordan is an artist based in Seattle, Washington who is best known for his large scale works depicting mass consumption and waste, particularly garbage. He has been called "the 'it' artist of the green movement".

Many of Jordan's works are created from photographs of garbage and mass consumption, a serendipitous technique which started when he visited an industrial yard to look at patterns of color and order. His industrious passion for conservation and awareness has brought much attention to his photography in recent years. Jordan uses everyday commonalities such as a plastic cup and defines the blind unawareness involved in American consumerism. His work, while often unsettling, is a bold message about unconscious behaviors in our everyday lives, leaving it to the viewer to draw conclusions about the inevitable consequences which will arise from our habits. source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Jordan_%28artist%29

Draw A Stickman

2012-01-02T10:34:00.002-05:00

www.drawastickman.com

Bonnard and Japan

2011-12-04T19:42:00.003-05:00

Brilliant Colors: The Impact of Japanese Prints on Pierre Bonnard as a Colorist
by Suzanne H. Westbrook, Princeton Class of 2008

“One thing is necessary in painting: heightening the tone” —Pierre Bonnard

Color as Logic

...It was this central element of color that led to his later, more thorough exploration of color in his subsequent paintings of the 1890s, in conjunction with the increasing presence of Japanese compositional techniques in his work. By 1892, two years after his first experimentation with Japanese styles, he had gained the confidence to rely solely on color to highlight the subject, abandoning traditional European concepts of depth and three-dimensionality. He expressed this idea in his journal in the following words:

Using only one color as a basis, you structure the entire painting around it. Color represents a logic that is just as unrelenting as the logic of form. (Bonnard, qtd. Phillips)

Here, Bonnard reveals his core theory of colorism: that color can be used as the principal means of organizing a painting. He equates color with form in terms of logical importance, a far cry from the old-fashioned European use of color primarily as a compliment to form...

Letter from Southern France: First Impressions : The New Yorker

2011-11-24T19:03:00.004-05:00

Link - The New Yorker Article

The Nature of Nothingness - New Scientist

2011-11-24T11:35:00.003-05:00


New Scientist

Link - New Scientist Article

Neil Welliver - Painter, PBS Video

2011-11-06T10:20:00.001-05:00

Watch Welliver on PBS. See more from MPBN Specials.

Neil Welliver (July 22, 1929 - April 5, 2005) was an American-born modern artist, best known for his large-scale landscape paintings inspired by the deep woods near his home in Maine.

Welliver was born in Millville, Pennsylvania. He graduated from the Philadelphia College of Art (now part of the University of the Arts) and then received an MFA from Yale University. At Yale, he studied with the abstract artists Burgoyne Diller and Josef Albers, whose theories on color were influential.[1] Welliver taught at Cooper Union from 1953-1957, at Yale from 1956 to 1966, and in 1966 began teaching at, and eventually became chairman of, the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Fine Art, from which he retired in 1989.

While teaching at Yale, Welliver's style evolved from abstract color field painting to the realistic transcription of small-town scenes in watercolor. In the early 1960s he went to Maine, where he began painting figures outdoors, the large oil paintings often focusing on his sons canoeing or female nudes bathing. In 1970 he moved permanently to Lincolnville, and by the mid 1970s the figure as subject had given way to the exclusive study of landscape.

His mature works, often as large as 8 by 10 feet, are at once richly painted abstractions and clear representational images of intimate Maine landscapes, taking as their subjects rocky hills, beaver houses, tree stumps, and rushing water, occasionally opening out to blue cloud-laden skies. Carrying his equipment on his back, Welliver hiked into the woods to make plein-air sketches. His equipment-laden backpack weighed seventy pounds, and included eight colors of oil paint: white, ivory black, cadmium red scarlet, manganese blue, ultramarine blue, lemon yellow, cadmium yellow, and talens green light.[2] These plein-air studies usually took about 9 hours, and were painted in 3 hour increments, after which time the light would change too much to continue.[3] Welliver insisted that he was uninterested in trying to copy the exact colors of objects, desiring instead to find "a color that makes it look like it is, again, surrounded by air."[4] He often painted out of doors in winter, and enjoyed the crystal quality of the air and luminosity created by light reflecting off snow, but acknowledged that the process was not easy...

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Welliver

Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement, Royal Academy of Arts, London

2011-10-08T11:39:00.004-04:00

"This landmark exhibition focuses on Edgar Degas’s preoccupation with movement as an artist of the dance. Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement traces the development of the artist's ballet imagery throughout his career, from the documentary mode of the early 1870s to the sensuous expressiveness of his final years.

The exhibition is the first to present Degas’s progressive engagement with the figure in movement in the context of parallel advances in photography and early film; indeed, the artist was keenly aware of these technological developments and often directly involved with them."

source: http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibitions/degas/

Chardin - Painter

2011-05-30T09:11:00.001-04:00

Basket of Wild Strawberries, Chardin, 1761

"Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin (1699-1779) was one of greatest masters of Still Life in the history of art. The painting style of the establishment in his day was Rococo: a pretentious style crammed with allegorical images from classical mythology swirling with ornate decoration. To Chardin this theatrical approach reduced art to some kind of intellectual conversation piece. It was totally alien to the world that he constructed - a simple world of truth, humility and calm played out in a few square inches on the wall.

The items he portrayed from his own home were selected for their shapes, textures and colours, rather than for any symbolic meaning they may have had. They were simply painted to convey the visual pleasure he experienced in looking at them. As his friend, the critic Diderot put it, “To look at pictures by other artists it seems that I need to borrow a different pair of eyes. To look at those of Chardin, I only have to keep the eyes that nature gave me and make good use of them.”

What Chardin strove for was an overall effect: a unity of tone, colour and form. His still lifes reveal themselves slowly, with his objects gradually emerging from their subtly toned background, summoned as the writer Marcel Proust puts it, “out of the everlasting darkness in which they have been interred.” "

- source: http://www.artyfactory.com/art_appreciation/still_life/chardin/chardin.htm

Link Google Image Search

Howard Hodgkin - Painter

2011-05-30T08:14:00.005-04:00

Reading the Letter, Howard Hodgkin

"Howard Hodgkin is a British printmaker and painter, born in London. He studied at the Camberwell School of Art and the Bath Academy of Art. He began exhibiting seriously at the age of 30. Hodgkin works in generally a small scale, often painting in a gestural style with flat colors. He often refers to memories and private experiences, but deliberately avoids the illustrational. Though his works are small and appear spontaneous, they are the result of a constant process of over-painting, sometimes extending over many years.

Hodgkin has also produced many prints, with a preference for screen-printing and lithography in his earlier works of the 60's and 70's. However, for his more recent work, Hodgkin has favored etchings and aquatint, as these provide a greater emphasis on texture. To further create a layering effect in his prints, Hodgkin sometimes hand-colors the image after printing.

In 1985, Hodgkin won the Turner Prize and took part in the Venice Biennale. He taught for some years at the Charterhouse School, then the Bath Academy of Art, and finally the Chelsea School of Art. He continues to exhibit frequently. The Tate Gallery in London has an impressive collection of his work."

- source: http://www.lesliesacks.com/gallery/artistPages/exhibitbios/hodgkinbio.htm

Link Howard Hodgkin Official Web Site

The Vitruvian Man - Leonardo and Stanford University

2011-05-21T08:21:00.001-04:00

"The Vitruvian Man - you may not know his name, but you've seen him plenty of times before. You know, that multi-limbed man in the square and the circle. You may even know that Leonardo da Vinci drew him. But do you know anything else? Who is this guy, who has somehow become so famous?"

"This site seeks to explain the Vitruvian Man, both as an historical entity and as an image in the modern world. Enjoy!"

- source: http://leonardodavinci.stanford.edu/submissions/clabaugh/welcome.html

On Painting and Algorithms by Duane Keiser

2011-04-25T14:14:00.003-04:00

"With an apple I will astonish Paris."
- Paul Cezanne

Paul Cezanne

"If you placed an apple on a table and wanted to paint it in the manner of Cezanne, you would need to have an extensive knowledge of his work and a strong sense of his aesthetic intentions. Every brushstroke would need to be accompanied by the question, “what would Cezanne do?” You might stop frequently to refer to his paintings to see how he handled certain visual situations. As your painting progressed you would gradually develop perhaps a dozen general stylistic guidelines for yourself. These guidelines would be instructions along the lines of “when you see this, do this.” Of course, much of the process would be based on wordless intuition; a vague sense of when a group of marks looked “Cezanne-esque.”

"On a basic level, this is not unlike a how a computer algorithm works. An algorithm is "a finite sequence of instructions, logic, an explicit, step-by-step procedure for solving a problem, often used for calculation and data processing and many other fields." It acts as a kind of flow chart which guides a computer through a series of evaluations and decisions. When translating, say, a Shakespeare sonnet from one language to another, a computer will use an algorithm to evaluate and substitute words and phrases into the other language. This is called “gisting” because computers are still not capable of making a translation that is much more than 80% accurate—for all their processing power, computers have a difficult time processing the complexities and nuances of contextual meaning. In art of literary translation there are no clear-cut right or wrong rules for choosing a phrase that means the same thing in one language as it does in another and that keeps the same rhythmic or emotional characteristics. From Wikepedia:"

"Fidelity (or faithfulness) and transparency are two qualities that, for millennia, have been regarded as ideals to be striven for in translation, particularly literary translation. These two ideals are often at odds. Thus a 17th-century French critic coined the phrase les belles infidèles to suggest that translations, like women, could be either faithful or beautiful, but not both at the same time."

"Here is a Shakespeare sonnet translated from German into English by a computer program:"

I am to compare one summer day you, which you
lovelier and moderate are? Mays expensive buds
drehn in the impact of the storm, and is all too short
summer period.

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date.

"You get a general idea of the what the words mean but the poetry is obviously missing. The best a computer can strive for is faithful-- beautiful, for the time being, is out of the question."

"In painting a Cezannesque apple you would, in essence, be acting as a kind of translator. Specifically you would be trying to translate one visual language (Nature’s) into another’s (Cezanne’s.) Or, in Photoshop parlance, you would be acting as a Cezanne filter..."

- source: http://keiseronpainting.blogspot.com/2011/04/on-painting-and-algorithms.html

Link Full Text, On Painting and Algorithms by Duane Keiser, 4/24/11, from On Painting, What I've learned about painting and the business of art - a Blog by Duane Keiser.

Frank Hobbs - Painter

2011-04-22T10:31:00.001-04:00


Bridge Over Scioto River, Oil on Panel, 16x12, Frank Hobbs (all images copyright Frank Hobbs)

"Frank Hobbs is a painter, printmaker and draftsman. Since 2007 he has been Professor of Art at Ohio Wesleyan University in Delaware, Ohio, where he teaches painting and drawing. From 2006-2007 he was Visiting Artist at Colby College in Waterville, Maine.

Hobbs was born in Lynchburg, VA. He studied art at Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, and later at American University in Washington, DC, where he earned his M.F.A in1984. He lived and had a studio in Staunton, VA for 15 years, teaching at Washington and Lee University from 1987 until 2004, and for 11 years at the Beverley Street Studio School in Staunton, which he co-founded in 1992.

Hobbs is a recipient of fellowships and grants by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Virginia Commission for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. His work has been shown in the American Embassies of Ankara, Turkey, Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and Bermuda, and is included in numerous corporate and private collections in America and abroad." - source: www.frank-hobbsart.com

Link Frank Hobbs web site

Banksy - Graffiti Artist and Filmmaker

2011-04-02T09:48:00.007-04:00

Banksy is an anonymous British graffiti artist, political activist, film director and painter. His satirical street art and subversive epigrams combine irreverent dark humour with graffiti done in a distinctive stencilling technique. Such artistic works of political and social commentary have been featured on streets, walls, and bridges of cities throughout the world... source: Wikipedia

Exit Through the Gift Shop, a Banksy film about an obsessive amateur videographer, who documents graffiti artists and then decides to 'become an artist', contains significant messages about the art market, the nature of art, and becoming an 'artist'. It was nominated for an academy award for best documentary. Bloggers and writers have proposed the entire film was staged. Does it matter and what role does the public play?

Link Banksy Web Site
Link Full Text, Wikipedia
Link Exit Through the Gift Shop

The Prisoner's Dilemma: The Key to Creativity - August Turak, Forbes

2011-03-27T11:04:00.000-04:00

"I was having lunch with one of my clients, the CEO of a rapidly growing mid-size company, when I casually asked for his job description.
He smiled and said, “Well, if you followed me around you’d probably think I do lots of things. But I only have one job. I build passion. Most people think talent is in short supply. Hell, the papers are full of stories about regular folks working miracles when something they really care about is on the line. Talent is not in short supply. Passion is. My job is showing people that what we’re doing is worth doing. I provide thewhys so our people can provide the hows. Once passion is in place,” he said with a big grin, “my job becomes insisting that people use their vacation and trying to stay out of the way.

In a previous article, 8 Keys to Innovation: Building Brands by Killing Frogs, I noted that prisoners are some of the most creative and innovative people. Turning toothpaste tubes into lethal weapons demonstrates their improvisational knack for engineering and product development; their creative selling skills, though usually manipulative, are legendary; and when it comes to applying the law in creative ways, jail house lawyers are second to none.
Obviously, education, training, prior experience, financial rewards, and traditional ways of measuring intelligence don’t account for all this creative achievement. So what does? More importantly if great leaders are creative leaders, what can we learn from prisoners?
The first secret is that prisoners have a high overarching mission that transcends engineering, product development, sales, or law. Whether applied to their fellow prisoners, prison regulations, or the prison itself the prisoner’s mission is freedom. Acquiring all the requisite skills is merely the by-product. The lesson here is that if we don’t have a galvanizing mission personally and organizationally all the skills in the world won’t spare us mediocrity.
Next, prisoners are not only emotionally committed to this mission they are in fact institutionally committed. Like Cortez burning his ships, they have no line of retreat. Freedom is not just a mission. It is mission critical. Prisoners live the old adage that necessity is the mother of invention, and they are living proof that great inspiration depends on some desperation.
Most of us are not creative because we fear commitment. We want guarantees that commitment will always produce successful outcomes, and since this is an impossible demand, we end up frittering away our creative juices “hedging our bets” and rationalizing that hedging represents a “balanced life.”
A high overarching mission coupled with commitment produces urgency. Urgency in turn produces the single minded focus that is the prisoner’s third innovative hallmark. While single minded, it is important to remember that his focus is anything but narrow. Instead the prisoner becomes a generalist. His world is gradually transformed into a vast box of jigsaw pieces that he continually sifts looking for the piece that might quench his thirst for freedom. What to us and the guards may look like a scrap of paper becomes for him a tiny piece of his ticket to freedom.
The fourth element is that prisoners are willing to pay the price. Innovation may end with eureka, but it is usually preceded by an incubation period that varies in length in rough proportion to the problem’s degree of difficulty.
As mortal human beings, time is our scarcest resource and this precious resource is the price that a prisoner is willing to invest. The prisoner is not just willing to invest time, he is doing time, and we usually fail to reach our own creative potential because we are unwilling to make time.
The fifth prison secret to creativity is patience. Patience isn’t just endurance or tenacity. We must be willing to tenaciously endure frustration. We often mistake frustration for a negative emotion because it is uncomfortable when it is actually a symptomatic by-product of the buildup of creative energy. To reach our potential we must make friends with frustration and this means resisting the temptation to “blow off steam” through distraction whenever we are frustrated..."

Link: Full Text, The Prisoner's Dilemma: The Key to Creativity, August Turak, Forbes

Sarah Kay: If I should have a daughter...TED, March 2011

2011-03-20T09:59:00.000-04:00

About This Talk

"If I should have a daughter, instead of Mom, she's gonna call me Point B ... " began spoken word poet Sarah Kay, in a talk that inspired two standing ovations at TED2011. She tells the story of her metamorphosis -- from a wide-eyed teenager soaking in verse at New York's Bowery Poetry Club to a teacher connecting kids with the power of self-expression through Project V.O.I.C.E. -- and gives two breathtaking performances of "B" and "Hiroshima."

source: http://www.ted.com/talks/sarah_kay_if_i_should_have_a_daughter.html

Project V.O.I.C.E. http://www.project-voice.net/

If the Impressionists had been dentists, Woody Allen, 1978

2011-03-20T09:39:00.002-04:00

Dear Theo,

Will life never treat me decently? I am wracked by despair! My head is pounding. Mrs Sol Schwimmer is suing me because I made her bridge as I felt it and not to fit her ridiculous mouth. That's right! I can't work to order like a common tradesman. I decided her bridge should be enormous and billowing and wild, explosive teeth flaring up in every direction like fire! Now she is upset becuase it won't fit in her mouth! She is so bourgeois and stupid, I want to smash her. I tried forcing the false plate in but it sticks out like a star burst chandelier. Still, I find it beautiful. She claims she can't chew! What do I care whether she can chew or not! Theo, I can't go on like this much longer! I asked Cezanne if he would share an office with me but he is old and infirm and unable to hold the instruments and they must be tied to his wrists but then he lacks accuracy and once inside a mouth, he knocks out more teeth than he saves. What to do? - Vincent

Dear Theo,

I took some dental X-rays this week that I thought were good. Degas saw them and was critical. He said the composition was bad. All the cavities were bunched in the lower left corner. I explained to him that that's how Mrs Stotkin's mouth looks, but he wouldn't listen. He said he hated the frames and mahogany was too heavy. When he left, I tore them to shreds! As if that was not enough, I attempted some root-canal work on Mrs Wilma Zardis, but half-way through I became despondent. I realised suddenly that root-canal work is not what I want to do! I grew flushed and dizzy. I ran from the office into the air where I could breathe! I blacked out for several days and woke up at the seashore. When I returned, she was still in the chair. I completed her mouth out of obligation but I couldn't bring myself to sign it. - Vincent

Dear Theo,

Once again I am in need of funds. I know what a burden I must be to you, but who can I turn to? I need money for materials! I am working almost exclusively with dental floss now, improvising as I go along, and the results are exciting. God! I have not even a penny left for Novocaine! Today I pulled a tooth and had to anesthetize the patient by reading him some Dreiser. Help. - Vincent

Dear Theo,

Have decided to share office with Gauguin. He is a fine dentist who specialises in bridgework, and he seems to like me. He was very complimentary about my work on Mr Jay Greenglass. If you recall, I filled his lower seven, then despised the filling and tried to remove it. Greenglass was adamant and we went to court. There was a legal question of ownership, and on my lawyer's advice, I cleverly sued for the whole tooth and settled for the filling. Well, someone saw it lying in the corner of my office and he wants to put it in a show! They are already talking about a retrospective! - Vincent

Dear Theo,

I think it is a mistake to share offices with Gauguin. He is a disturbed man. He drinks Lavoris in large quantities. When I accused him, he flew into a rage and pulled my D.D.S off the wall. In a calmer moment, I convinced him to try filling teeth outdoors and we worked in a meadow surrounded by greens and gold. He put caps on a Miss Angela Tonnato and I gave a temporary filling to Mr Louis Kaufman. There we were, working together in the open air! Rows of blinding white teeth in the sunlight! Then a wind came up and blew Mr Kaufman's toupee into the bushes. He darted for it and knocked Gauguin's instruments to the ground. Gauguin blamed me and tried to strike out but pushed Mr Kaufman by mistake, causing him to sit down on the high speed drill. Mr Kaufman rocketed past me on a fly, taking Miss Tonnato with him. The upshot, Theo, is that Rifkin, Rifkin, Rifkin and Meltzer have attached my earnings. Send whatever you can. - Vincent

Dear Theo,

Toulouse-Lautrec is the saddest man in the world. He longs more than anything to be a great dentist, and he has real talent, but he's too short to reach his patients' mouths and too proud to stand on anything. Arms over his head, he gropes around their lips blindly, and yesterday, instead of putting caps on Mrs Fitelson's teeth, he capped her chin. Meanwhile, my old friend Monet refuses to work on anything but very, very large mouths and Seurat, who is quite moody, has developed a method of cleaning one tooth at a time until he builds up what he calls 'a full, fresh mouth'. It has an architectural solidity to it, but is it dental work? - Vincent

Dear Theo,

I am in love. Claire Memling came in last week for an oral prophylaxis. (I had sent her a postcard telling her it had been six months since her last cleaning even though it had been only four days.) Theo, she drives me mad! Wild with desire! Her bite! I've never seen such a bite! Her teeth come together perfectly! Not like Mrs Itkin's, whose lower teeth are forward of her uppers and inch, giving her an underbite that resembles that of a werewolf! No! Claire's teeth close and meet! When this happens you know there is a God! And yet she's not too perfect. Not so flawless as to be uninteresting. She has a space between her lower nine and eleven. Ten was lost during her adolescense. Suddenly and without warning it developed a cavity. It was removed rather easily (actually it fell out while she was talking) and never replaced. 'Nothing could replace lower ten' she told me. 'It was more than a tooth, it had been my life to that point.' The tooth was rarely discussed as she got older and I think she was only willing to speak of it to me because she trusts me. Oh, Theo, I love her. I was looking down into her mouth today and I was like a nervous young dental student again, dropping swabs and mirrors in there. Later I had my arms around her, showing her the proper way to brush. The sweet little fool was used to holding the brush still and moving her head side to side. Next Thursday I will give her gas and ask her to marry me. - Vincent

Dear Theo,

Gauguin and I had another fight and he has left for Tahiti! He was in the midst of an extraction when I disturbed him. He had his knee on Mr Nat Feldman's chest with the pliers around the man's upper right molar. There was the usual struggle and I had the misfortune to enter and ask Gauguin if he had seen my felt hat. Distracted, Gauguin lost his grip on the tooth and Feldman took advantage of the lapse to bolt from the chair and race out of the office. Gauguin flew into a frenzy. He held my head under the Xray machine for ten straight minutes and for several hours after I could not blink my eyes in unison. Now I am lonely. - Vincent

Dear Theo,

All is lost! Today being the day I planned to ask Claire to marry me, I was a bit tense. She was magnificent in her white organdy dress, straw hat, and receeding gums. As she sat in the chair, the draining hook in her mouth, my heart thundered. I tried to be romantic. I lowered the lights and tried to move the conversation to gay topics. We both took a little gas. When the moment seemed correct, I looked her directly in the eye and said, 'Please rinse'. And she laughed! Yes, Theo! She laughed at me and then grew angry! 'do you think I could rinse for a man like you!? What a joke!' I said, 'Please, you don't understand.' She said, 'I understand quite well! I could never rinse with anyone but a licensed orthodontist! Why, the thought I would rinse here! Get away from me!' And with that she ran out weeping. Theo! I want to die! I see my face in the mirror and I want to smash it! Smash it! Hope you are well. - Vincent

Dear Theo,

Yes, it's true. The ear on sale at Fleishman Brothers Novelty Shop is mine. I guess it was a foolish thing to do but I wanted to send Claire a birthday present last Sunday and every place was closed. Oh, Well. Sometimes I wish I had listened to father and become a great painter. It's not exciting but the life is regular. - Vincent

JR's TED Prize wish: Use art to turn the world inside out | Video on TED.com

2011-03-07T13:09:00.000-05:00

JR's TED Prize wish: Use art to turn the world inside out | Video on TED.com

The Mona Lisa Curse - Robert Hughes, Part 1

2011-02-05T19:48:00.006-05:00

...The Mona Lisa Curse is a Grierson award-winning polemic documentary by art critic Robert Hughes that examines how the world's most famous painting came to influence the art world. With his trademark style, Hughes explores how museums, the production of art and the way we experience it have radically changed in the last 50 years, telling the story of the rise of contemporary art and looking back over a life spent talking and writing about the art he loves, and loathes. Director: Mandy Chang; Executive Producer: Nick Kent; Prod Co: Oxford Film and TV... - source: Channel 4

Link: YouTube, The Mona Lisa Curse, Robert Hughes

Art Project by Google

2011-02-03T21:53:00.000-05:00

Explore museums from around the world, discover and view hundreds of artworks at incredible zoom levels, and even create and share your own collection of masterpieces. - source: Art Project web site

Link: http://www.googleartproject.com/

'The H.D. Book' Could Save American Art | The New Republic

2011-01-30T10:23:00.002-05:00

Magnum Opus

The book that could save American art.

Jed Perl
January 4, 2011 | 4:38 pm

I am besotted with a new book that is also an old book. This is The H.D. Book, by Robert Duncan, a wild, dazzling, idiosyncratic magnum opus that the poet composed between 1959 and 1964 and that is only now being published in its complete form, by the University of California Press. What began with a request for a brief birthday homage to the American poet known as H.D.—she had been born Hilda Doolittle—morphed into one of the greatest of all meditations on the nature not only of modern poetry but of the modern artistic imagination in its bewitching complexity. Art, Duncan exclaims, makes “what is not actual real.” I am glad to be reading Duncan’s text as we head into 2011—the second decade of the century after the modern century. There is no nostalgia in The H.D. Book. Duncan’s modernism is at once lofty, optimistic, activist, and open-minded. Published a half-century after it was written, The H.D. Book reads like a clarion call. At a time such as ours, when artists are either embattled or co-opted, either locked away in some ivory tower of their own invention or overtaken by market forces and political forces, Duncan argues for the most strenuous artistic ambitions as a dynamic democratic possibility.

In The H.D. Book the great enemy is T.S. Eliot. Although Duncan cannot but admire The Waste Land, he will never forgive Eliot for being so quick to isolate tradition from the present, for giving art, as Duncan puts it, “a histrionic remove.” While Duncan welcomes all the difficulties and obscurities of modern art, he sees them as inextricably related to the pluralism of modern experience. This, I believe, could be Duncan’s great contribution to the arguments that are going on in the art world and the literary world right now. The modern masterwork, according to Duncan, is a new kind of symposium, richer than the Platonic dialogues because it involves gathering together so many more elements. “To compose such a symposium of the whole, such a totality, all the old excluded orders must be included,” he writes. “The female, the lumpen-proletariat, the foreign; the animal and vegetative; the unconscious and the unknown; the criminal and failure—all that has been outcast and vagabond in our consideration of the figure of Man—must return to be admitted in the creation of what we are.” Where Clement Greenberg, in his 1939 essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” saw the modern artist in flight from the heterogeneity of modern life, for Duncan the task of the modern artist is precisely to wrest some new alchemy from life’s crazy quilt richness. No wonder Duncan speaks so warmly about collage—the art brilliantly practiced by his life partner, Jess—where “from what has been disregarded or fallen into disregard, genres are mixed, exchanges are made, mutations begun from scraps and excerpts from different pictures …form the figures of a new composition.”

The H.D. Book is itself a literary collage that contains both polemical rhapsodies and plangent autobiographical passages. Duncan begins with a recollection of a high school classroom and a salute to a teacher he never forgot, Miss Keough, who from time to time “would present some poem or story as if it belonged not to what every well-read person must know, the matter of a public establishment, but to that earlier, atavistic, inner life of the person.” It is with Miss Keough that Duncan first encounters the work of H.D., the words “Fruit cannot drop/through this thick air…,” heard in “that early summer of my sixteenth or seventeenth year.” “Just beyond the voice of the poem,” he continues, “the hum and buzz of student voices and the whirr of water sprinklers merging comes distantly from the world outside an open window.” The juxtaposition of inside and outside, the masterwork and the ephemeral, is essential to Duncan’s story. Duncan never wants us to forget that his brave and unconventional modernism is a product not of London or Paris but of Northern California, where “in smoky rooms in Berkeley, in painters’ studios in San Francisco,” he read the work of Ezra Pound, H.D., William Carlos Williams, Edith Sitwell. “I read these works aloud; dreamed about them; took my life in them; studied them as my anatomy of what Poetry must be.” High art, he tells us over and over again, is an American possibility. While some readers of The H.D. Book will be put off by the seriousness with which Duncan addresses the pop-esoteric texts of another era, especially Madame Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine, Duncan is making a decisive point here, arguing that the roots of modern artistic expression are as broad as they are deep...source: The New Republic, 'The H.D. Book' Could Save American Art

Link, Full Text: 'The H.D. Book' Could Save American Art | The New Republic

Stanley Lewis - Painter

2011-01-29T21:46:00.001-05:00

Stanley Lewis View of 12th St and 4th Ave, Brooklyn, NY 2006 oil on canvas, 35 x 40 inches Courtesy Bowery Gallery

"Stanley Lewis is a powerful painter. His vision is independent, original, raw.His latest work is to be seen at the Bowery Gallery, an artist- run cooperative dedicated to painters working in the tradition of French modernist figuration. This setting allowshim to work without commercial constraints but also without the resources to promote him and his work effectively. Nevertheless he has built an impressive reputation among artists and his prices have risen quite a bit just lately, due to a committed group of patrons.
Lewis emerged from the circle surrounding the painter, teacher and charismatic outsider, Leland Bell with whom he studied at Yale. Bell saw the influence of French modernism as way of deepening figurative painting through greater consciousness of form, and was a great admirer of Giacometti, Balthus and the later work of Andre Derain. Lewis also admires the English painters Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff with their perceptual approach and aggressively activated paint surfaces.
Like them, his gloppy paint surfaces are aggressive and sensual though he differs in that he is much more involved with a direct naturalistic transcription of the casual, disheveled, white bread American subjects. These he paints directly and laboriously on the spot, including everything in his field of vision, weeds, trash, cars, power lines, etc.
The supports are roplex- soaked corrugated cardboard, old splintering plywood, cotton duck and/or crinkled paper glued or mounted and stapled on masonite – he’s an alchemist who can turn trash to gold.
Lewis is a master colorist. His unfailingly authoritative skill for painting real, rich and crystalline light, joined to his muscular composition, is the key to his power and success. An occasional pitfall for Lewis in his early work (as for Bell himself) was an uncomfortable stylization resulting from an effort to force formalism onto perception. Recently, he has resolved the problem in the direction of a more direct long- form rendering of nature. For example in his “12th St. and 4th Ave” 2006, painted in Brooklyn, he continues exploration of direct optical perspective in a fisheye view of a rather carefully characterized parked car (a Saab), tenements behind, street signs, tree in the foreground, all tense as a bent knife blade. Objects suggesting human presence such as the Saab in the foreground, seem to function as subject focus, replacing the role of the figure in the landscapes of Poussin and Corot.
The “View of the West Side of House” 2003- 07, is a loving rendering of the artist’s own porch with its gently curving trees, the sky punching through. A w-shaped jacknife torsion is seen in the triangular compressions of in the “View from the Porch- East Side of House” 2003- 06. “Mayville Court House” 2006 is a studiedly casual presentation of a small town scene with a characteristic wildly tilted horizon line. An even wilder tilt can be observed in the “Monroe Marina” 2007, where it is as if a photographer dropped the camera while framing the scene.
The drawings, well represented here, are often made with such physical intensity that there are holes in the paper. The large snow scene “Winter View from West side of Houses” 2004- 07, for instance, entails a process of drawing and correcting by pasting paper repeatedly producing a scarred, heavily textured surface resembling impasto. The drawing is so sharply observed and intensely abstract that Lewis is able to demonstrate that the most powerful formal solutions can be found, at least sometimes, by giving oneself over to the direct study of nature, and the best way of finding high style can be found by turning one’s back on the direct pursuit of it." - source: Artcritical, 2008, by Morgan Taylor,

http://artcritical.com/2008/03/14/stanley-lewis/

National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC - Video Podcasts

2011-01-04T20:42:00.002-05:00

Stay up to date with video podcasts from the National Gallery of Art, which include documentary excerpts, lectures, and other films about the Gallery's history, exhibitions, and collections. - source: NGA web site Subscribe to the Gallery's RSS feed. Help Video

	Vermeer: In the Light of Delft Vermeer's classic painting A Lady Writing inspired this evocative film. The exquisite skills of this 17th-century Dutch artist evoke nuances of light, texture, and reflection that describe both the artist's native city of Delft and the details of this much-loved work. Painted ermine, pearls, velvet, brass, and wood are illuminated by the sensitive touch of an unparalleled master. Hi-Res \| Lo-Res \| iTunes \| Watch on ArtBabble \| RSS (6:30 mins.)
	Turner on the Tyne The moon rises high over water and becomes one with Joseph Mallord William Turner's evocative image of the sights and sounds on the River Tyne at Newcastle in his 1835 painting Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Moonlight. Time-lapse photography interweaves with close details of Turner's painting to capture both the stillness of the night and the work of loading coals by moonlight and torch. Hi-Res \| Lo-Res \| iTunes \| Watch on ArtBabble \| RSS (6:30 mins.)
	Arcimboldo: Nature and Fantasy Narrated by Isabella Rossellini and produced by the National Gallery of Art, this film traces the career of Giuseppe Arcimboldo, an artist whose work thrilled and delighted the Habsburg courts of the later 16th century. Arcimboldo was best known for his "composite heads"—faces composed of fruits, vegetables, fish, flowers, and beasts of all kinds. The film explores the connection between his paintings and the burgeoning natural sciences, the voyages of discovery, and the atmosphere of intellectual curiosity at the courts of Europe. The 30-minute version of the film is on view and for sale at the National Gallery of Art. The film is made possible by the HRH Foundation. Produced in conjunction with the exhibition Arcimboldo, 1526–1593: Nature and Fantasy. Hi-Res \| Lo-Res \| iTunes \| RSS (14:12 mins.)
	The Lions of Peter Paul Rubens This film captures the power of faith in the face of danger, illustrated in the famous Old Testament story of Daniel in the lions' den and in Peter Paul Rubens' full-scale painting at the National Gallery. Daniel's travail in a closed cave unfolds here through a series of comparative frames: Rubens' preparatory drawings, painted lions with human bones at their feet, and footage of actual lions, similar to those Rubens saw at the royal menagerie in Brussels. Hi-Res \| Lo-Res \| iTunes \| Watch on ArtBabble \| RSS (9:00 mins.)

MOMA - Abstract Expressionist New York, October 3, 2010–April 25, 2011

2010-12-27T18:50:00.002-05:00

More than sixty years have passed since the critic Robert Coates, writing in the New Yorker in 1946, first used the term “Abstract Expressionism” to describe the richly colored canvases of Hans Hofmann. Over the years the name has come to designate the paintings and sculptures of artists as different as Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko, Lee Krasner and David Smith. Beginning in the 1940s, under the aegis of Director Alfred H. Barr, Jr., works by these artists began to enter the Museum’s collection. Thanks to the sustained support of the curators, the trustees, and the artists themselves, these ambitious acquisitions continued throughout the second half of the last century and produced a collection of Abstract Expressionist art of unrivaled breadth and depth.

Drawn entirely from the Museum’s vast holdings, Abstract Expressionist New York underscores the achievements of a generation that catapulted New York City to the center of the international art world during the 1950s, and left as its legacy some of the twentieth century’s greatest masterpieces...source: MOMA website

Link Abstract Expressionist New York, MOMA website

Stay up to date with video podcasts from the National Gallery of Art, which include documentary excerpts, lectures, and other films about the Gallery's history, exhibitions, and collections. - source: NGA web site Subscribe to the Gallery's RSS feed. Help Video

	Vermeer: In the Light of Delft Vermeer's classic painting A Lady Writing inspired this evocative film. The exquisite skills of this 17th-century Dutch artist evoke nuances of light, texture, and reflection that describe both the artist's native city of Delft and the details of this much-loved work. Painted ermine, pearls, velvet, brass, and wood are illuminated by the sensitive touch of an unparalleled master. Hi-Res \| Lo-Res \| iTunes \| Watch on ArtBabble \| RSS (6:30 mins.)
	Turner on the Tyne The moon rises high over water and becomes one with Joseph Mallord William Turner's evocative image of the sights and sounds on the River Tyne at Newcastle in his 1835 painting Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Moonlight. Time-lapse photography interweaves with close details of Turner's painting to capture both the stillness of the night and the work of loading coals by moonlight and torch. Hi-Res \| Lo-Res \| iTunes \| Watch on ArtBabble \| RSS (6:30 mins.)
	Arcimboldo: Nature and Fantasy Narrated by Isabella Rossellini and produced by the National Gallery of Art, this film traces the career of Giuseppe Arcimboldo, an artist whose work thrilled and delighted the Habsburg courts of the later 16th century. Arcimboldo was best known for his "composite heads"—faces composed of fruits, vegetables, fish, flowers, and beasts of all kinds. The film explores the connection between his paintings and the burgeoning natural sciences, the voyages of discovery, and the atmosphere of intellectual curiosity at the courts of Europe. The 30-minute version of the film is on view and for sale at the National Gallery of Art. The film is made possible by the HRH Foundation. Produced in conjunction with the exhibition Arcimboldo, 1526–1593: Nature and Fantasy. Hi-Res \| Lo-Res \| iTunes \| RSS (14:12 mins.)
	The Lions of Peter Paul Rubens This film captures the power of faith in the face of danger, illustrated in the famous Old Testament story of Daniel in the lions' den and in Peter Paul Rubens' full-scale painting at the National Gallery. Daniel's travail in a closed cave unfolds here through a series of comparative frames: Rubens' preparatory drawings, painted lions with human bones at their feet, and footage of actual lions, similar to those Rubens saw at the royal menagerie in Brussels. Hi-Res \| Lo-Res \| iTunes \| Watch on ArtBabble \| RSS (9:00 mins.)