Here are some additional, less traditional, art images that I have hanging around in my harddrive. So this is part two, the less snooty sibling of the one I posted the other day. As usual if you click on the image there’ll be a full-sized popup.

Zygmunt Frankel

Sas Christian

Erin Susanne Banks

Glen E Friedman

Loretta Lux
(thank you Miss Erin I just couldn’t remember)

from a catalog or something but I liked it.

Beverly was visiting Chicago last weekend and got to spend some time at the Art Institute Museum (I am SO JEALOUS that’s one of my favorite museums in the entire world). She discovered a wonderful lesser-known Van Gogh painting and has created a new really cool meme about our favorite paintings.

This is the bad part about being an art major: I know a lot about art but I don’t know what I like. Because, to me, I can’t always just view things as “good” or “bad” I have to analyze the shit out of something then end up having ambiguous feelings about it. This seems to be the dilemma for most Democrats these days - complete overanalysis of a situation instead of towing the knee jerk reactionary party line. May the gods help those who think too much it seems.

So to get this narrowed down a bit I decided to limit myself to my favorite black and white line drawings or etchings. And, not-surprisingly considering my whole obsession with women in art, they’re primarily line drawings and etchings of the female form. Not exactly idealized forms, but reflections on how women are seen, by the artist, by society, by themselves. Because that’s an issue I’ve been studying for a very long time.

And I’ll try not to write a dissertation on the images, just say what I like about them. So here goes.

from the 1946-47 Femme Maison series, Louise Bourgeois
Women and houses. Female form and domesticity. Caregiver, birthgiver, home. Inexorably linked no matter what kind of advances are made in feminism and the roles of women in society. I knew a woman in college that had this tattooed on the lower right side of her back. She modelled for one of my painting classes. If she hadn’t already had this tattoed I might have come up with it myself. Unfortunately I’d just be a big copycat now.

Le Violon D’ingres, Man Ray
Technically not a line drawing but it’s in black and white anyway. A woman as an object, an instrument. An instument with lines that many regard as beautiful. But an object. I know a woman who wanted to have the f-holes of a violin tattooed just like this photograph. Also brilliant and something I wish I’d thought of first. Yes, all of my art history training is filtered through nudes and the memory of tattoos. No not really.

Femme - Picasso.
The best example that shows the simplicity derived from years of visual training. Four lines. And you know what it is. The stance and everything. I totally want this tattoed on my…ok just kidding.

Sorrow sketch, Van Gogh
One of the saddest drawings I’ve ever seen. That’s what gets me about Vincent - he was the most melancholy frustrated little guy but could see and reflect beauty in nature like no one else. His portraits and self-portraits are always at least a bit sad. But his reflections of nature are always beautiful.

The Mulberry Tree, Van Gogh
This is from one of my other favorite museums in the world, the Norton Simon in Pasadena. Doesn’t it look like its on fire?

Study of female form for scupltures, Henry Moore
I’ve been a fan of Henry Moore for a long time. Luckily I saw a wonderful exhibition of Moore’s work at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1992 and got to enjoy a lot of his 2-d work in person. Among them was this great etching. A few years later I managed to find and save up for a licensed lithograph of the same piece at a consignment gallery in Santa Fe.

These are two more of my favorite etchings by Moore.

The sculptor’s hands

Sheep
As someone who lived most of his life in the English countryside, this guy drew and sculpted a lot of sheep. I’d never had any contact with them before. After seeing this exhibit and spending some time on sheep farms in Australia I learned more about them. Now that I actually spin and knit with wool it makes me think of his sheep drawings again.

So those are a few of my favorite images anyway.

Why do the comments I write on other people’s sites always seem far more interesting and well thought-out than those on my own damn site these days?
Exhibit A
Exhibit B

At this point I’m considering copying and pasting my very own comments and posting them here for content. How friggin sad is that?

That said I’m going to attempt to write an interesting, (hopefully) well-written little vignette from my day.

Cody was off work today and we decided to go out to lunch. I’m too embarrassed to tell you where I’ll just say it’s a seafood restaurant chain that has surprisingly good gumbo. While there he asked me where I bought the gigantic spool of plastic foodwrap that I’ve had since well before he and I met. He wasn’t sure if it was actually the same one.

“Oh, that. I stole it from Judy Chicago in 1994.”

Then went on to tell him about a workshop I took with her during a summer term at College of Santa Fe where women basically paid a pretty big sum of money to have the privilege of having the famed feminist artist show up once a day, say mean paranoid things about how we’re fighting against her while we really have resentment for men, which occasionally resulted in making the big lesbian biker woman I’d made friends with in class cry, then take credit for all our artwork as a “sponsored group piece” in a gallery show. Made me rethink exactly who’s been doing the actual work in her famed art pieces that’s for sure.

In retaliation I stole the Sam’s club saran wrap from the leftover supplies. And coined the saying “Well she may have had to work hard to get respect in the male-dominated art world but she didn’t have to grow a penis of meanness.”

He knew about some of it because my self-portrait plaster casts from the show are decidedly in the garage and not hanging in the house like he thinks they should. But he was starting to suspect that I’ve been having a clandestine affair with the glad wrap man while he’s away working nights.

———-

http://www.tomcruiseisnuts.com/

I don’t even want to go into what he said about people who need antidepressants because his statements are just too ridiculous for me to feel justified in acknowledging. He’s clearly going through an extreme mid-life crisis of the narcissistic celebrity kind. I just hope that his statements haven’t made anyone with any form of depression reconsider getting the help they need. There’s enough of a stigma against people with mental illnesses a celebrity anti-spokesperson leading a crusade really isn’t necessary.

Oh, I can now say that I’ve tasted wasabi ginger and black licorice ice creams. And I probably never will again.

That’s pretty much what I’ve been doing. Sitting on the sofa with the dog next to me, her head on my knee while I knitknitknit and watch tv. Haven’t been on the computer in three days. And I have a four foot long purple garter stitch scarf so far. In the ugliest tackiest acrylic yarn you’ve ever seen that came with my learn to knit and crochet kits. It’s not easy to find nice yarn at the mega craft stores. It’s all gross speckly acrylic stuff in totally uninteresting colors. Now I know.

The other day out of curiosity I looked up “Albuquerque Yarn Store” on google and realized that, hell, we’re in New Mexico - of course there’s going to be gorgeous wool yarn here - what did I think all those beautiful rugs and blankets were made from? As a matter of fact, I found out that there was a yarn factory right here - and they had an outlet store. They have the most beautiful, vivid colors that really capture the New Mexico palette. And I realized, it would be such a waste to use boring colors and make boring preppie crap. Especially with access to such beautiful yarn. So we went to their outlet store today and I bought some fun new yarns. Can’t wait to play with them.

So that was my valentine’s day present: some beautiful stuff from Fiesta Yarns.

Cody got a few t shirts from thinkgeek. Including this:

And for us both we’re getting a water cooler.

Happy V Day. Crafty thirsty nerds of the world unite!

Garbage men in Frankfurt, Germany, think art installation project is refuse and haul it to the dump. Are now being sent to art remedial school.

Apparently the installation materials looked like they were discarded construction materials.

I know the feeling. My poor found art roller disco chicken from my freshman 3d design class met the same fate. It was so cool. Made me think of Picasso’s toy car head monkey. My chicken was made out of a portable gas tank, spray bottles, duct tape, toilet brushes, and old thrift store roller skates. This was when a lot of my ’supplies’ were purchased at thrift stores or on my parents’ Exxon card.

Sculptor makes money by sculpting food

Reminds me of that weird “art for all the senses” idea I had in 92 but never did anything about. It’s in a refrigerated room but damn you know that butter smell gets old.

Young Prospective Artist Finds Herself in a ‘No Sketch’ Zone

A second grader was scolded by a security guard for sketching some of her favorite paintings at a traveling show entitled “School of Paris: Masterpieces from the Baltimore Museum of Art” which included works by Matisse, Picasso, Monet, and Degas. The guard claimed that the artwork was copyright protected.

The museum has since issued an apology and is inviting artists to sketch to their artistic hearts’ content as long as they don’t get in another viewer’s way. Sketching other artists’ works is an extremely common practice among all ages of art students and is encouraged and sometimes required in undergraduate and master level classes.

Seems Mr Big Time museum security guard has recently read the infamous failure to copyright is akin to communism interview and thought he was doing his bit to prevent artistic terrorism. (Please note my restraint in making a bad performance art joke at this juncture)

according to a a survey of 500 artists, curators, critics and dealers.

1. R Mutt’s Fountain, 1917 - better known as Marcel Duchamp’s “readymade” urinal

2. Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907

3. Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych, 1962

4. Picasso’s Guernica, 1937

5. Henri Matisse’s The Red Studio, 1911

6 Joseph Beuys - I Like America and America Likes Me, 1974 - a performance piece in the top ten? wow.

7 Constantin Brancusi - Endless Column, 1938

8 Jackson Pollock - One: No 31, 1950

9 Donald Judd - 100 untitled works in mill aluminium, 1982-1986

10 Henry Moore Reclining Figure 1929

from the Guardian Unlimited

Imagine you were once really really good at something. You went to school to study it for a long time. You started out thinking you’d never be as good as the others at it but worked your ass off. Seemed like you were living and breathing it. That and a bit of luck and you were doing pretty well for a while.

Then stuff happened and you stopped doing it. Cynicism about the seemingly arbitary prices mixed with the business of starting a life with another person and you just forget to do it. There was a small part of it in your daily life. You thought about it often but you never acted on it. After a while you were afraid you’d never be that good again. Then six years passed.

One thing everyone in my life agrees on is that I should make art again. My mother, sister, husband, best friend, dad. Everyone. They say it in different ways but that’s the general consensus. It’s been scary to think just how out of practice I would be.

Then I read about this sketchcrawl and thought I should try making art again…

(please look in extended entry) *warning! fairly large images!*
(more…)

So I decided to cheer myself up by going out in the sunshine to play with the dog in the backyard. I took the el cheapo twenty dollar digital camera with me. But two months seems to be its limit. When I downloaded the newest pictures they were mostly fuzzy gross messes. But then I started looking closer to see if any had a salvagable image I could just crop. Then I noticed that some came out looking like really cool collages.

And in the spirit of Toy Camera.com I decided to embrace the flaws and just enjoy art for art’s sake.