Licensed Dealer in Tea (for Cooper)
Squintina Tabby — Licensed dealer in Tea [detail]. (Pen and grisaille drawing heightened with gouache.) One of the three variations on this drawing known to exist.
[Beatrix] Potter’s aunt and uncle owned a cat called Squintina (Squinty). Dated to about 1895, as a publishing firm adapted the picture that year for a cover of their ‘Comical Customers’.
Jandek’s reference to a BibliOdyssey post featuring ornamental typography prompted me to succumb to temptation and revisit BibliOdyssey (always a danger), where I found lovely Beatrix Potter rarities.
Including many bunnies.
Frank Calloway, 112 year old artist from Alabama
Frank Calloway is a 112 year old artist from Alabama who spends up to 9 hours a day drawing murals sometimes 30 feet long.
He was born on July 2, 1896, and has lived in mental health centers since 1952, when he was diagnosed with schizophrenia.
Details about Calloway’s youth are few. He says he remembers growing up with brothers and, as a “little, bitty, little boy,” playing under the quilts his mother made as if they were tents. He has no known family left and there is no record of his ever being married. He talks frequently about working hard and mentions laying railroad rails, cutting lumber, farming and working for a blacksmith, but there are no records of his life before he entered the Alabama Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation system.
Typography as Art
Typography as Art allows you to play with the 21 different parts of characters in the Roman alphabet. The idea is use these different parts to create atypical forms.
My little contribution. Don’t worry. I won’t quit my day job:
Twenty 120
This year I was invited to have my Vote Free or Die Hard Campaign documented for a festival called Twenty 120. Henry Lu and Joe Rudge directed and our editor is Dan Maloney. This year’s theme is Truth vs. Deception and the website launch party is tomorrow, July 17th at Cinespace in Hollywood. Although the party is too far for me to attend, it is free with RSVP, (through the Twenty120 site) if any of you internet types in CA are out there. It should be a fun time, and the shorts will surely be a good time. More to come here soon.
Leonardo’s lost fresco, The Battle of Anghiari
Maurizio Seracini has been looking for Leonardo da Vinci’s Battle of Anghiari, a fresco presumed to be lost behind layers of other frescoes, and by some estimates, the most beautiful work of the Renaissance.
Until recently, art scholars were confident they knew the fate of da Vinci’s mural of war. The painting, so tradition says, had been botched by Leonardo’s own hand, abandoned in shame and then obliterated by an imperious Medici duke.
In 1977, however, Dr. Seracini, then a young apprentice to noted UCLA art scholar Carlo Pedretti, noticed a curious thing. He was inspecting the vast battle fresco by Giorgio Vasari that since 1563 has covered the long wall once occupied by da Vinci’s work. There, in the clash of armies depicted near the ceiling, he was startled to discover that Vasari had painted two words in white on a tiny green banner all but invisible to view from below: “cerca trova.”
Seek; you will find.
[Removed.]
Thank you for your thoughts about Bruce. We have lost an amazing artist . . . . Bruce was firmly opposed to display of his films on-line, and on his behalf as an attorney I made numerous requests for removal. Now that Bruce has died, all copyrights are now held by Jean Conner (Bruce’s wife), and she has explicitly directed that I request and otherwise take action to have all on-line postings of Bruce Conner movies removed immediately.
Quite a number of links to Bruce Conner films were removed from Movie City Indie, and much as I respect honoring artistic integrity, I am sorry that those of you who do not know his oeuvre cannot whet your appetites online.
But take a look at this from Dennis Cooper.
Update. For now, at any rate, you can whet your appetities online.
The $12 million Stuffed Shark
Tyler Cowen on the contemporary art market:
Should we think such purchases are silly or noble? Many people recoil from the contemporary art market as the home of pretension and human foible, but as expensive pursuits go, the art market is a relatively beneficial one. The dead shark cost $12 million to buy but, of course, it didn’t cost nearly that much to make. So the production process isn’t eating up too many societal resources or causing too much damage to the environment. For the most part, it’s money passing back and forth from one set of hands to another, like a game — and, yes, the game is fun for those who have the money to play it. Don’t laugh, but we do in fact need some means of determining which of the rich people are the cool ones, and the art market surely serves that end.
Bruce Conner (1933-2008)
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Bruce Conner’s “Sound of Two Hand Angel,” 1974.
Bruce Conner died Monday (July 7, 2008). This from a [Smithsonian] Archives of American Art interview, April 16, 1973:
BRUCE CONNER: Well, when I was in high school I was very interested in paleontology and archeology. I had a geology class which I had no real interest in because they were always scratching rocks for the first two-thirds of the semester before it got into paleontology. My instructor in high school, Dr. Barnard, made a claim that there were no trilobites in the Permian strata in Kansas. Nobody had ever found any. Michael and Dave knew of a limestone quarry where there were lots of fossils.
Bill Evans on the creative process
Bill Evans. Oh, Bill Evans! Pardon me, but I’ve got to step away now and listen to How my heart sings!, which is the only Bill Evans Trio CD I have right to hand just now.
Via Coudal.
Hendrix on Pixar et al.
John Hendrix just got back from an illustration conference with lectures and presentations from Pixar story artist Gary Panter, Blue Cube Studios, and Starbucks Visual Development Guru Stanley Hainsworth and he posted his “notes“.
Jen Stark
I’m almost too scared of paper cuts to think about how these sculptures are made. Jen Stark takes multiple pieces of colored paper and painstakingly cuts, folds, and shapes them into incredible forms.
The Andre Gali Art Viewing Experience
Louise Bourgeois
We went up to the Guggenheim today to check out the Louise Bourgeois exhibit.
I was struck - as so many have been before me - by the beauty and pain of her work that followed the death of her father. I did my best to explain to my daughter that she needn’t wait until my untimely demise to find inspiration. She suggested that perhaps I’d flattered myself or something to that effect - I don’t remember, I was only pretending to listen.
After our visit we paid the requisite respects to the Guggenheim café as I’d agreed to mousse, truffles and the like.
My wife ordered a delicate-looking brownie and the girls each went for chocolate cupcakes. When the attendant asked for my order I replied: “I don’t want your Bourgeois dessert.”
I was reminded very quickly of how difficult it can be for most people to appreciate why things are funny to me.
The Boys and the Subway
Just go now:
w/ extra duck
w/ extra duck, the flickr set, via mefi.
umbrellas
In Pittsburgh, some people emphasize the first syllable of umbrella. (These were in the entry to the greenhouse at the Frick Art and Historical Center on another rainy day.)
Financial Times Nudes
Artist Natasha Archdale creates nudes from torn fragments of the Financial Times newspaper.
“Lots of people think I had this clever agenda of mixing the female nude with the Financial Times because the correlation is good: sex and money and business, and art at the moment is so prolific,” Archdale said, sitting in front of five of her pieces at a friend’s house in London’s Notting Hill. “But it wasn’t that well thought out.”
reverse graffiti
via Neatorama
Herron Hill
Looking toward Herron Hill from the Lawrenceville flats in Pittsburgh. (I’ve also drawn this water tower from other angles.)
Zero Dollar Bill
Artist Brian Romero invested many hours to create the monetary vehicle we’ll all need if things keep up at this rate: the zero dollar bill.
Embiggened version here, and it’s very worthwhile. Check out the detail, typography and signatures.
(via Neatorama)
Attack of The Killer Squirrels
Colored pencil drawings of furry and fierce squirrels by Los Angeles-based emerging artist Macha Suzuki.
(via Gen Art Pulse)
LMCC Open Studios last Thursday
Here’s an image from the LMCC Swing Space Open Studios last Friday. Francisca Caporali and I were awarded a Swing Space back in March and just finished up our project for the wine and snacks event. Pictured here was our interactive explosions on the windows at 120 Broadway. Viewers were invited to place explosions on the windows in order to make it look like NYC was being destroyed. We also created 3 videos where painted images of destruction were superimposed on video shot in the city. I will have links to those videos one day.
This Is A Bracelet
This (fucking) beautiful thing is by Tim Noble and Sue Webster. If anyone would like to purchase it for my dainty wrists, it’s available at the Goss-Michael Collection.
Usher’s “Yeah!” - A Cappella
Great rendention by Divisi, the female A Cappella group from the University of Oregon.
(thanks Will)
trolley
Detail of decommissioned Pittsburgh trolley at the Heinz History Center.