Langdon Quin and Craig Hood

I was lucky to have some amazing artists as professors as an undergrad and in grad school. Here is work by two of them, and I'll gladly post some work by others more in the near future.

This painting by Craig Hood is, I think, one of my favorite paintings ever. Hobos, babies, parenting manuals? Hood says the piece is about love, really. The color and composition, the light and shadow, the small details and large shapes of beautiful mixed, layered paint -- I like everything about this.

Drummer Boy, another painting by Craig Hood.

Still Life with Kitchen Glove, Langdon Quin

Great painting class. Now that I am teaching a painting class, I've amassed a pretty sizeable heap of still life objects, including some distinctively colored dishwashing gloves. Whenever I put them in a still life I think of them as my Langdon gloves. If students have trouble mixing the color of them, I tell them that cerulean blue plus a lemony yellow is a good start...

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

Great Painting Blog

Painter and teacher Catherine Kehoe has a wonderful blog geared towards painters and painting students. She is doing a great series on artists and their palettes, provides wonderful quotes on painting, and summarizes some great kernels of wisdom from artists like Charles Hawthorne, E. Dickenson, etc.

On related note, I am lookng forward to seeing "For The Common Object," a show by the Zeuxis group of still life painters, of which Kehoe and one of my former professors are members. The participating "artists...agreed to produce a still life incorporating an ordinary dishtowel. Their approaches to this humble tool of daily life demonstrate the many ways in which still life painters can, in the words of John Updike, 'give the mundane its beautiful due.'"


Mark Karnes

Devorah Sperber

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

Student Work

My drawing students are pretty great. Take a look at their work, here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/77039077@N00/sets/

Holiday Crafts Workshop

I am teaching a holiday craft workshop for all ages. Here are some pics of my project ideas: clothespin family ornaments, snowflake-decorated tiles, rubber-stamp books, and holiday cards using templates (dreidel not shown). I'm also posting some pics of the lovely handiwork of workshop participants!

the middle one is a dinosaur (duh):

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

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.

Calvino and 2 wonderful peoms

For my drawing class, I recently had my students do a mini-unit on interior space and urban spaces. We watched the awesome art21 segment on Mark Bradford, an LA artist who uses old ad posters and other materials from the street to make massive collage/paintings reminiscent of map or aerial photos. Then I had them read some excerpts from Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino; they had to invent their own city, complete with description and one- or two-point perspective drawing. Some great, creative products! We also did graphite drawings around campus, also with some good results. I love this, from Calvino:

In Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city's life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or gray or black-and-white according to whether they mark a relationship of blood, of trade, authority, agency. When the strings become so numerous that you can no longer pass among them, the inhabitants leave: the houses are dismantled; only the strings and their supports remain.

From a mountainside, camping with their household goods, Ersilia's refugees look at the labyrinth of taut strings and poles that rise in the plain. That is the city of Ersilia still, and they are nothing.

They rebuild Ersilia elsewhere. They weave a similar pattern of strings which they would like to be more complex and at the same time more regular than the other. Then they abandon it and take themselves and their houses still farther away.

Thus, when traveling in the territory of Ersilia, you come upon the ruins of abandoned cities, without the walls which do not last, without the bones of the dead which the wind rolls away: spiderwebs of intricate relationships seeking a form.

Also, 2 fab poems (or peoms):
Monet Refuses the Operation by Lisa Moeller
Maybe All This by Wislawa Szymborska (included in a great book by Lawrence Weschler, Vermeer in Bosnia)

*peoms is my intended spelling as a tribute to LeVar Burton*