some arts

Rachael Gorchov

Eden Veaudry

Shelby Donnelly

Kendell Carter

Maria Walker

Nancy Shaver
Maria Walker
Maria Walker

cy twombly

Cy Twombly, Bacchanalia: Fall (5 Days in November)” from 1977

Each line he made, he said, was “the actual experience” of making the line, adding: “It does not illustrate. It is the sensation of its own realization.”

Women artists yeah!

Brainstormers is amazing. From their website: "Brainstormers is an art collective that, through public performance, exhibition, publication, internet, and video, has forced discussion on a topic that most would rather avoid: gross gender inequities in the contemporary New York Art World." Check out their current action/project here.

Another item of note: Huff Po's Women Artists Sweep Best of 2010 NYC Arts.

"Having a Coke with You"

Having a Coke with You
by Frank O'Hara

is even more fun than going top San Sebastain, Irun, Hendaye,
Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in
Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better
happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love
for yoghurt
partly because of the fluoresent orange tulips around the
birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people
and statuary
it is hard to believe when I'm with you that there can be
anything as still
as solemn as unpleasently definitive as statuary when right in
front of it
in the warm New York 4 o'clock light we are drifting back and
forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles
and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just
paint
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them
I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in
the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it's
in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven't gone to yet so we can go
together the first time
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes
care of Futurism
just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michaelangleo
that used to wow me
and what good does all the research of the impressionists do
them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree
when the sun sank
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn't pick the rider
as carefully
as the horse
it seems they were all cheated of some
marvelous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I'm
telling you about it.

Historically Inaccurate Toile

Swamp Flowers by Richard Saja of Historically Inaccurate Decorative Arts. I love the swamp monster!

heads

Barbara Stanwyck

Cover of one of my mom's Time "Museums of the World" set

Head of the Buddha, Gandharan style, Victoria and Albert Museum

In honor of Louise Bourgeois

Louise Bourgeois, photo: Pompidou Center

"Everywhere in the modern world there is neglect, the need to be recognized, which is not satisfied. Art is a way of recognizing oneself, which is why it will always be modern."

"It is a great privilege to be able to work with, and I suppose work off, my feelings through sculpture."

order and chaos

I was helping a high school ceamics teacher tame some of the entropy raging in the school ceramics studio. While we did some basic organizing, the next task was to have the students really do the bulk of the clean-up themselves: cleaning tools, sorting glazes, and so forth. The teacher and I talked about how investing art students in every step of the process -- from preparing the clay to clean-up, say, or from stretching canvas to brush clean -up to frame-making-- helps students to uild an "identity as an artist." Learning all of these skills is empowering in general, and helps one go from "art student" to artist.

Anway, amidst the studio mess, I got thinking about the dualities of order and chaos. A colleague of mine at GW is having his painting students address these thematic concerns in their end-of-semester painting projects. So many possibilities...what a good springboard. Beautiful chaos? Destructive chaos? Order as tranquil or sterile? Abstraction? Representaion? As a teacher it is hard to strike just the right balance in setting assignment parameters: the assignment must be open enough to permit wide-ranging investigations of genuine interest to the students, but specific enought to impose useful, practical limitations.

In any case, if I ever riff on this assignment idea, I am thinking I would want to show artwork by, among others, Julie Mehretu, Mia Feuer, and Jessica Braiterman (above), as well as old-school vanitas paintings.

Link to Some Links

Susan Rothenberg Show, photo: NY Times

Good links here to recent articles on Susan Rothebenrg, Matisse, and Julie Mehretu on Midwest Capacity.

In the Dollhouse

Believe It Will Happen, Bridget Sue Lambert

Keep Your Schedule Pretty Full, Bridget Sue Lambert

I love the work of DC artist Bridget Sue Lambert. Her photographs of dollhouse interiors and vignettes with figurines comment on relationships, love, loss, and memory. I recently got to meet her at her studio and see her impressive trove of dollhouse props and people. So cool!

Here's an interesting article on midcentury modern dollhouse furniture devotees.
From one of the profiled collectors:
Finally, on the dollhouse theme: when I visited the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam a few years ago, it was amazing. I thought the art was so beautiful that I almost cried. Amidst the Rembrandts, Vermeers, and other wonders is the Dolls' House of Petronella Oortman. This house (or one like it) is important in In the Image, a novel by Dara Horn that has dollhouses as a recurrent motif. I'll try to find the part of the book that describes the house (far better than I could).

From the Rijksmuseum website: "Seventeenth-century doll's houses were not children's toys, they were a hobby [among wealthy women]... This house is remarkable in that all of the components are made exactly to scale. Petronella ordered miniature porcelain objects from China and commissioned furniture makers and artists to decorate the interior."

RijksmuseumDolls' House

william kentridge and darwyn cooke

William Kentridge's "Automatic Writing" -- Watch it! Watch it! Since I've started teaching drawing, I've always used Kentridge's work to wow my students. Last semester we took a field trip to see some of his prints at the Kreeger Museum. I've loved his work since 2001, when I saw a big show of his work at the Hirshhorn, and I can't wait to see the upcoming MOMA show I read about in the New Yorker:



Another cool art thing: this weekend I went with a friend to the Smithsonian American Art Museum for a booktalk and signing by comic book artist/"storyteller" Darwyn Cooke. He recently published a graphic novel adaptation of an intense crime novel, and he drew everything by hand using ink and wash -- apparently a rarity in contemporary mainstream comics since the advent of digital technology. I always mention comic book art -- and show Kentridge's work, too -- when I teach a drawing unit on narrative art. And now I know a little more about it. My students have done some pretty cool stuff.

Darwyn Cooke, The Hunter

Cute ABCs

I've been working on a DC ABC book (from the Anacostia River to the National Zoo), but I decided to try out a few collage alphabet pages too:



Also, more QWERTY than ABC, and totally cool: Chris Delorenzo's keyboard stickers. B for Bowie is definitely my favorite:

Devorah Sperber

This is incedible. Devorah Sperber recreates masterworks using spools of thread. See her work here: http://www.devorahsperber.com/.

Coptic Bookbinding with Mary

I learned how to do chain stitch bookbinding in college. It is a cool way of making a book with braid-like stitching across an exposed spine. You use four needles at a time! My sister Mary, very crafty, wanted a refresher course on the technique. So we spent an afternoon making books, pictures of her work-in-progress follow. This technique is often called Coptic Bookbinding after the Egyptian Copts, and a there's a similar stitch called Ethiopian chain stitch. I think both were used to bind early Christian texts; for more history see:


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coptic_binding

http://www.bookbindingteam.com/2007/10/chain-stitch.html

cool cover

Happy Birthday (early) to Me

Just an excuse to toot my own horn and also post this sweeeet illustration from "I Know How to Cook," illustrations by blexbolex.

Yinka Shonibare, MBE

A year ago I got a copy of Art in America with an arresting image on the cover: a photograph restaging Goya's fabulous, nightmarish "El Sueno de la razon produce monstruos" ("The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters"). Quite faithful to the original, although here the color is rich and the sleeping figure is clad in brightly patterned dress. I loved this piece but didn't really register much about the artist, Yinka Shonibare.

Well, this month through March, Shonibare has a massive show at the National Museum of African Art, and I will certainly not forget about him from now on! INCREDIBLE! I bought the exhibition catalogue as a birthday present to myself. And now I know that the bright fabric in the Goya remix is Dutch wax cloth from West Africa. Shonibare uses swathes of it to clothe the characters in his gorgeous, delightful, disturbing, and naughty tableaus. Go see this show if you are interested in fashion, textiles, postcolonialism, race, Oscar Wilde, Fragonard and/or sex! From http://www.nmafa.si.edu/exhibits/shonibare/index.html:

"British-born Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare MBE (b. 1962) works across diverse artistic media to explore ideas about African contemporary identity and the legacy of European colonialism in the present... Shonibare's sculptural works often feature headless mannequins clothed in elaborate costumes from the period just before the French Revolution, when the European aristocracy controlled vast wealth, land and power. Referencing art history and the paintings of Jean-Honoré Fragonard in particular, with their depictions of luxury and privilege, Shonibare's sculptural tableaux portray idyllic, romanticized narratives as well as imagined scenarios of sexual decadence and violence."

I've been borrowing characters in fancy dress from Watteau for my paintings, as well as depicting headless figures, but with nothing like the power/cohesiveness of Shonibare. Very cool.

Collage Class

I took a fun collage class at Pyramid Atlantic in Silver Spring. Here are my little collages inspired by artist Judy Pfaff.

And here are some pieces from a great activity we did with sculptor Richard Serra's verb list. We each picked slips of paper from a box and made a collage according to out chosen verb (drop, spill, dilute, rotate, laminate, fire...) I can't wait to try this with students.

Some artists that I am into...

Here are some artists I am into:

Megan Mueller (took a cool class w/her at Pyramid Atlantic)
Julie Heffernan
Tjelda vander Meijden