/// NO FUN \\\

BACK TO BACK SACROILIAC

2012-01-29T22:03:00.001-08:00

CHANNELING EGGLESTON

2012-01-08T01:09:00.000-08:00

William Eggleston, Untitled (Glass in Airplane), 1965

Alex Prager, Nancy, 2008

William Eggleston, Untitled (Biloxi, Mississippi), 1974

Santa Katkute

AND SOME PRINTS

2011-12-18T16:59:00.000-08:00

An aquatint etching and a silkscreen.

(After a performance by Marina Abramovic)

RECENT COLLAGE WORK

2011-12-18T16:50:00.001-08:00

Well, recent-ish. Bloggin' like it's chopped liver. Made these for a show in October.

DOPPELGÄNGER

2011-10-06T19:55:00.000-07:00

MELTED

2011-08-25T13:01:00.001-07:00

William Degouve de Nuncques, Enfant Au Hibou (1892)

2011-07-04T17:17:00.000-07:00

Stumbled upon this one while researching French Symbolist painting.

Gustav Klimt, Mermaids (1899)

2011-07-04T17:11:00.000-07:00

Shit's weird, right? Good.

DRAWING NOW FESTIVAL

2011-07-04T16:35:00.000-07:00

On March 26 (yowza I am behind), I checked out the Drawing Now Festival at the Carrousel du Louvre, a huge exhibit hosting drawn works from galleries all over Europe. These were my favorites.

ALLYSON MELLBERG

The Galerie L.J. booth was showing a couple works by Allyson, one of my favorite artists working right now. A week later I checked out her whole show at the gallery and was really pleased with the pieces I saw.

LUKE PAINTER

Cool stuff by this Canadian dude. Gorey's landscape artist.

And finally, here is a little doo-dad I dig by Christian Lhopital.

TATE MODERN

2011-03-26T15:33:00.000-07:00

Forgot to post my favorites from my visit to the Tate in January.

Dali, Forgotten Horizon

August Sander, Girl in a Fairground Caravan

They were also screening some films by Jean Painlevé. Really neat surrealist nature documentary films.

Favorites from the Louvre

2011-03-26T14:38:00.000-07:00

My first weeks in Paris were spent regularly returning to the Louvre. Asides from recognizing about every painting Darcy Grigsby has ever shown me in class, I also found a couple new favorites.

Paul Delaroche, La Jeune Martyre, 1855

Francesco Botticini, La Vierge et l'Enfant en gloire, entourés de sainte Marie Madeleine, de saint Bernard, d'anges, de chérubins et de séraphins, 1485

A totally strange altarpiece with really great cherubim and seraphim.

Baron Francois Gerard, Psyché et l'Amour, 1798

Baron Jean-Baptiste Regnault, Les Trois Graces, 1793-94

Andrea Solario, La Tete de St. Jean-Baptiste, approx. 1510-24

Ingres, Roger délivrant Angelique, 1819

I fucking love Ingres-- Angelique's totally impossible anatomy and tortured expression here are absolutely perfect.

Abraham Mignon, Fleurs dans une carafe de cristal placée sur un piedestal en pierre avec une libellule, approx. 1650-75

Impeccable detailing, I especially liked all the little insects and lizards crawling on Mignon's bouquets.

Aedriaen S. Coorte, Cinq Coquillages, 1669

Another great Dutch still-life painter.

Daniel Seghers, Domenico Zampieri, Le Triomphe de l'Amour avec entourage de fleurs

☾☾☾ UPDATE ☽☽☽

2011-01-10T20:52:00.000-08:00

Two new pieces, gifted to my roommates:

I am moving to Paris in three days. Either my abysmal posting habits will be monstrously intensified or I will see super dope art exhibits while abroad and post about them here. See you later.

LEAVING LAS VEGAS

2010-12-06T01:58:00.000-08:00

Something about this particular version of 1960's / 70's travel mania really fascinates me, especially the totally superfluous use of neon in a time when it was still considered a novelty.

Not to mention typographically, this period is such a dream.

I'm particularly fond of the font in the old Stardust logo:

images via flickr

SEAN MORRIS

2010-12-05T01:54:00.000-08:00

Sean Morris is one of my favorite artists at the moment, he just KILLS it. White trash gymnastics and pregnant Satanists? Yes, please!

Check his website and his flickr for more.

GO FORTH AND THRASH

2010-11-10T22:07:00.000-08:00

LUCAS SOI

2010-10-25T23:16:00.000-07:00

Teenage ennui gone awry. Godforsaken youth, doomsday in suburbia-- all meticulously rendered through clean lines and stippling. Gnarly.

Do yourself a favor and click the images to view larger. And check out his interview on Fecal Face.

REMEMBER ED EMBERLEY?

2010-10-25T23:00:00.000-07:00

I'd half-forgotten Ed Emberley until coming across this interview on My Love For You about a show paying homage to him that took place over the summer. My grandmother was a librarian and gave me a ton of Emberley's books when I was young. I truly do see the lasting influence it's held on me, it seems I've been infatuated with 1960's illustration style ever since. So thanks Grandma, and thanks Ed.

DARIO ROBLETO

2010-10-21T14:19:00.000-07:00

"Who am I? If this once I were to rely on a proverb, then perhaps everything would amount to knowing who I 'haunt.'
(...)
Such a word means much more than it says, makes me, still alive, play a ghostly part, evidently referring to what I must have ceased to be in order to be who I am."
André Breton, Nadja

Hippies and a Ouija Board (Everyone Needs to Cling to Something), 2003

Suitcase: cast and carved dehydrated bone calcium and dust from every bone in the body, microcrystalline cellulose, cold cast iron and brass, rust, antique syringe, crushed velvet, leather, thread, water extendable resin and typeset.

Ouija board, bottles and medicines: cast and carved dehydrated bone calcium and bone dust from every bone in the body, typeset, home-brewed moonshine (potato derived alcohol), wine health tonics (water, sugar, fermented black cherries, yeast, gelatin tartaric acid, pectinase, sulfur dioxide, oak flavoring fortified with 100 year old: hemlock oil, Devil's claw, witch hazel bark, swamp root, powdered rhubarb, pleurisy root, belladonna root, white pine tar, coal tar, dandelion, sarsaparilla, mandrake, mullein, skullcap, cramp bark, elder, ginseng, horny goat weed, tansy, sugar of lead, mercury with chalk and tin-oxide; calcum potassium, creatine, zinc, iron, nickel, copper, boron, vitamin k, crushed amino acids, home-cultured antibiotics, chromium, magnesium, colostrum, ironized yeast, ground pituitary gland, ground wisdom teeth, ground sea horse, shark cartilage, coral calcium iodine and castor oil)

Records: various 1960's 45 rpm records cast in prehistoric whale bone dust, typeset

Living With Death As Something Intimate and Natural, 2005-2006

Oak tree twig carved from dissolved audio tape recording of the heartbeat of an unborn child and the last heartbeats of a loved one, dried flowers picked on foreign battlefields sent home by foot soldiers from various wars, thread and fabric from military uniforms from various wars, veteran's old mason jar, mourning handkerchief, mourning dress fabric and thread, pigments, water extendible resin, willow, glass.

Time Measures Nothing But This Love, 2008

Hand-blown hourglasses, stretched and pulled audio tape recordings of the voices of the world's oldest married couple (80 years), stretched and pulled audio tape of the earliest audio recording of time (experimental clock, 1878), ground resurrection plant, ground rosebuds and rosehips, fir, satin, brass, iron, leather, typeset.

A Homeopathic Treatment for Human Longing, 2008

Glass vials, vintage glass electrode wands, nineteenth-century bloodletting cupping glass, various homemade homeopathic remedies (sound of glaciers melting, voice of oldest ever to live, last heartbeats of loved one, million-year-old blossom, million-year-old raindrop, deceased lovers' heartbeats, extinct animal sounds, extinct languages), various custom-ordered remedies by professional homeopath (black amber, willow, tears, mammoth hair, glacial runoff, voice of oldest widow, black swan bone dust, Sylvia Plath's voice), velvet, silk, leather, ribbon, brass, iron, cork, pine, typeset.

A Homeopathic Treatment for Human Longing, 2008 (detail)

Love Has Value Because It's Not Eternal, 2008

Hand blown glass beakers, stretched audio tape of field recordings of the sound of glaciers melting (2005-06) intertwined with audio tape of various lovers recording their partners' heartbeats as they reflected on each other, ground passion flower, amber, eternal flower, resurrection plant, silk, satin, leather, ribbon, brass, iron, cork, pine, typeset.

SUMMER PROJECTS

2010-10-21T00:16:00.000-07:00

Over the summer I made two pieces which I posted on tumblr but failed to post here.

The first is gouache on magazine paper, I call it "Kitten Cult":

Because what is better than a creepy Satanic kitten? Well, probably a lot of things, but I liked this one well enough to hang it near our front door. We installed a candelabra into the wall right above it, I'll share a picture of that at a later time.

The second is a collage I made:

I used clippings from an old illustrated encyclopedia, as well as from an old anatomy handbook I found at a yard sale (over a hundred years old if you can believe it, and it cost me a dollar).

UPDATE

2010-10-21T00:08:00.001-07:00

Changed the layout, may change the blog name, more changes and more updates to come.

WEEZY

2010-07-13T18:44:00.000-07:00

OK YOU'RE A GOON, BUT WHAT'S A GOON TO A GOBLIN?

I drew this in my sketchbook today as an ode to the almighty Lil Wayne. It's not my typical style (i.e. precious, dainty, feminine..) but I had a lot of fun drawing it. This definitely doesn't signal a shift in styles since I'm pretty satisfied making cutesy girly tripe but Bryan suggested I make a series illustrating rap lyrics so who knows.

NEW ALEXIS MCKENZIE

2010-04-22T23:46:00.001-07:00

Yes yes yes, a thousand times yes.

(via flickr)

DEATH RATTLES

2010-04-22T23:25:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking a lot about artists who use taxidermied animals in their work. Say what you will about how ubiquitous taxidermy's become within the hipster vernacular (and even within the art world -- ahem, Damien Hirst), but there's loads of interesting work being done with preserved animal remains (COOL).

PETAH COYNE

Coyne uses taxidermied animals, wax, silk flowers, tree branches, chicken wire, ribbon, rubber, tar, and a ton of other stuff to construct her sculptures. I think this museum characterizes Coyne's work well by calling her pieces "three-dimensional vanitas images". She specializes in these incredible atrophying chandeliers that look like they've been frozen in that moment of decay, and her use of taxidermy is especially useful in extending that metaphor of a degeneration that's been suspended in time.

ALEXANDRE JOLY

I'm not as crazy about Joly's work, or all of his use of taxidermy, but when he nails it he really nails it (How much does that furry... thing look like a Hayao Miyazaki character?). The chick piece is maybe a little too reminiscent of Cai Guo Qiang (see below) but the cotton ball trails more than make up for it.

CAI GUO QIANG

So. fucking. cool.

BORRE SAETHRE

Not sure if I'm totally convinced by this guy's work, the titles are totally self-indulgent (ex: Double fantasy, masturbating with the gods) so it's hard to take him seriously. There are some really impressive elements at work here in terms of visuals and installation, but I'm still trying to wrap my head around this one.

THESE DAYS

2010-01-18T18:08:00.000-08:00

Here's a collage series I made last semester for an art class.

And here's a drawing I made a couple days ago.

(Click photos for larger view)

TRYING TO GET BACK INTO THE SWING OF THINGS

2010-01-18T00:12:00.000-08:00

I've saved loads of images over the past few months but never had the willpower to come back and blog regularly. If I had my druthers, I'd update this thing all the time but with school it's hard to do. In any case, here are some cool things.

MAX KLINGER
Some months ago the Legion of Honor had a small exhibit of Klinger's work. I was especially drawn to his "Paraphrase on the Findings of a Glove" series. Not only am I a sucker for good etching, but his work is so fundamentally weird and cryptic, I can't help but be compelled.

JULIE MORSTAD
LOVE Morstad's work. It's very reminiscent of Edward Gorey, but there's an added dimension of preciousness married to the sinister in Morstad's universe. She also pays amazing attention to detail - I'm just crazy about the missing sock in the piece below.

MICHAEL KRUEGER
Oldie but a goodie (check out his interview on Fecal Face). Perfect application of a simple medium (color pencil) and terrific use of color in Krueger's ahistorical and all-historical questioning of the American landscape. I love the way he depicts the sky as radians of varying color.
TAYLOR MCKIMENS
Here is the COOLEST installation by Taylor McKimens, really rad play between flatness and 3-dimensionality.

FINALS WEEK

2009-12-13T12:26:00.000-08:00

Cannot stop listening to this.

GRIZZLY BEAR // ALLISON SCHULNIK

2009-11-06T16:28:00.000-08:00

Check out the spectacular new music video for Grizzly Bear's "Ready, Able", animated by Allison Schulnik.

I'm pretty keen on Schulnik's work, especially her portraits of clowns and hobos (Take a look at this interview on Fecal Face for more)

Whether it's oil on canvas or claymation, Schulnik manipulates color and texture wonderfully to create works that inspire both a child-like wonder and a kind of sick to your stomach repulsion. Righteous!

SKETCHBOOK SUNDAYS - PT. 2

2009-09-13T23:22:00.000-07:00

Gone fishin'

SKETCHBOOK SUNDAYS - PT. 1

2009-08-30T21:31:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the lack of updates, just got back to school. Here are some things from my sketchbook for the art class I'm taking this semester.

MY LUCKY DAY

2009-08-15T19:41:00.000-07:00

Another new Blu mural. Woof!

(via)

NEW

2009-08-15T14:38:00.000-07:00

(Click to view larger)

Just finished this new piece. Sarah mailed me an awesome children's book from 1966 called "That's Our Cleo! And Other Stories About Cats". There are some rad illustrations in it so I made this new drawing based off one of 'em. Also, my scanner is a piece of shit, totally dulled the colors and made things less sharp, oh well.

SURFIN' - PT. 3

2009-08-07T16:28:00.000-07:00

This and that.

JACOB ESCOBEDO
Jacob is the creative director for Adult Swim and just so happens to make some art of his own. What I'm really digging are these awesomely detailed drawings in which he interprets his friend's favorite animals. Right on!
Still a couple prints left here but get 'em while they're hot.

KAVEL RAFFERTY
Hilarious series called "Spam Head" -- Kavel took the totally bizarre names you get spam e-mails from and created faces to go along with them. Rad idea.

BLU
Finally, I will share with you breaking news on the Blu front -- here is one of his new murals! In Belgrade! Hooray!
(Found it out here)

I was also surprised to see that one of my favorite murals, Blu's collaboration with JR in Berlin, has had a bit of a facelift.
This is how it used to look:
And this is how it looks now:
(via flickr)
I guess the eyes JR pasted on didn't hold up.

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P.S.
Mute this video and play along with Sigur Rós' "Hoppípolla" for optimum viewing pleasure.

SURFIN' - PT. 2

2009-08-02T00:56:00.000-07:00

My eyes have recently been opened to the wonderful world of embroidery.

JANE MOUNT
Totally cute and cuddly. I mean, look at that precision, makes me wish I was even mildly competent with a needle and thread.

SASHA FOSTER
These are part of a Zodiac series and, once again, totally adorable. Love the tangled thread detail on the second boy's red sweater. I also think it's pretty cool that asides from the Zodiac "mittens", the embroidery looks more like line drawing then thread on canvas.

RICHARD SAJA
Saja wryly embroiders over the pastoral scenes on French Toile de Juoy to create unusual, often anachronistic, narratives. Really funny and wonderful use of color here.

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On another note, recently I have been ALL ABOUT this music video:

Track is called "Gee Wiz" by Kindness, sooooo booty-shakin'. Unfortunately, the song is less than 2 minutes long and the info on this band and where to get more of their tunes is pretty scarce.

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Finally, I present to you my photos from the Kathryn Spence exhibit at 49 Geary. Could do with a little more light, but turned out pretty decently!

SURFIN' - PT. 1

2009-07-30T22:09:00.000-07:00

Here is some cool art I've come across surfin' the net these past few days.

LIU BOLIN
Bolin explores humanity's fundamental alienation from the animal instinct that equips other organisms with the ability to survive.

ROBERT HUNTER
Sweet UK-based illustrator with a really nice, whimsical eye.

I especially recommend checking out what he's scanned from his sketchbook, so lovely.

STACEY ROZICH
Rad stuff coming from this SF/Seattle illustrator, striking images of a strange folktale past.

JOHN KENN
I'm really digging this guy's most recent drawings-- monochromatic little renderings finely wrought on Post-It notes. They're very Edward Gorey-esque, not quite as unsettling but still a bit dark and certainly just as peculiar.

NEW WORK

2009-07-26T19:30:00.000-07:00

Finally got around to scanning some new art.
My first piece in a while, "Samson's Revenge". Kindly refer to the Biblical myth of Samson and Delilah:
(Click image to view larger)
Stained the paper with coffee and tea, used some Prismacolor pencils for the hand, and got to experiment with a nice Staedler pencil set, my first time working with a wide variety of degrees in terms of my pencil use. I wish I hadn't used that inky black pen to line the hand, or that I'd at least used one with a finer point, but overall I'm happy with it.

Otherwise, I've been experimenting with watercolor in my moleskine, just painting random images and then going over them with a Micron pen.
This one's vaguely based on an old comic book panel I found online, it's alright.

Here's one I did looking at an old shot of Sylvie Vartan, all about the summer vibes.

This is my favorite of the bunch. Just a couple of choir boys. I was listening to Department of Eagles while I made it, which I thought was rather appropriate.

Anyways, many apologies for the shitty scan quality, the colors aren't quite as vibrant on a screen as they are in person. There are one or two other old, oooold sketches from my moleskine that I scanned as well -- you can see them on my flickr.

RECENT GALLERY VISITS

2009-07-19T23:33:00.000-07:00

Within the past couple weeks I've seen a lot of neat art.

Ever impressive are the newest works by the terrific Alexis McKenzie, which I had the pleasure of viewing up close and personal at Park Life Gallery (where I also happen to intern). I've been a big fan of Alexis' work ever since coming across her artist interview on Fecal Face.

Alexis' collage pieces serve a curious blend of images of Victorian restraint and those of unfettered flora and fauna, creating these wonderfully fantastical surrealist dreamscapes where lovely women grow fish tails and seashells sprout from their skulls. This show was especially interesting in that it was almost entirely text-reliant. Save for one larger piece, all of the collages spelled out different phrases -- "Never Be Sad", "True Love", "Just This Once"... Not only were the works a marvel to look at just in terms of the precision and attention of detail used to clip out each image, but it was super fun to try and decipher what the words spelled out.

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I also stopped by 49 Geary Galleries a little over a week ago.
Fraenkel Gallery has usually got some pretty great work but I was more impressed by the photos in the backroom, namely a couple of Diane Arbus shots and 3 E.J. Bellocq prints that were so interesting to see in person. Having those scratched out faces but a few inches away from my own was really powerful.

Jack Fischer Gallery was showing some interesting work by Lora Fosberg. I was especially intrigued by her colorful sound wave spectrums, full of idioms and expressions familiar and alien, sad and funny, contrived and painfully sincere. Lora states in her artist's statement that "The work is attempting to bring the viewer into a place where I am able to disarm them with imagery allowing them to regress back to a particular memory; a specific moment forever embedded in the brain......whether it be truth or a complete fabrication of the subconscious, the memory has created it nonetheless."

My favorite work currently being shown at 49 Geary would have to be Kathryn Spence's wonderful installations at the Stephen Wirtz Gallery.

Kathryn makes these incredible models of animals out of random found materials -- things like newspaper, beanie baby bits, and fabric scraps from used clothing. Her pieces raise interesting questions about the relation between the man-made and the organic. They are also adorable. I took some photos of them on my Olympus which I hope will turn out well.

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Finally, I visited SFMOMA to check out the recently opened Richard Avedon retrospective as well as Robert Frank's "The Americans".
Avedon's work is outstanding. He had a magical way of using the portrait to capture both artifice and frankness. Even the most posed of his portraits can be totally telling of the subject's character, the way he or she wanted to construct his or her image saying just as much as a more candid shot would.
As much as I love Avedon, however, I left the exhibit feeling slightly underwhelmed. My main problem was not so much with Avedon's work as it was with MOMA's presentation of it. I'd already seen the grand majority of the photos in person during a visit to another Avedon exhibit in Paris last summer, and I feel the Parisian curators definitely had a keener sense of how to present the images powerfully. For instance, in Paris, Avedon's photos of working class Americans were shown in a room painted completely black from floor to ceiling, these massive, striking, black-and-white images illuminated on the walls surrounding, totally spellbinding you, whereas the MOMA exhibit just sort of had a winding labyrinth of overall white-wall gallery space. In any case, the MOMA visit was beneficial in that I did see a handful of shots I'd never seen before, and I was happy to give second thought to some of the images previously viewed in Paris. The image below in particular struck a new chord with me, James Story, coal miner, looking to me almost like a blue-collar Jesus -- the way coal had mixed with sweat to form blood-like trickles on his forehead, all he was missing was a barbed-wire crown.

While I may have had a few misgivings about the Avedon exhibit, I was completely floored by Frank's "Americans".
Frank did a brilliant job at organizing his sprawling photo essay on Americana into several pointed critiques on contemporary America's icons and values, unmasking the disparities in American society and the hypocrisy of its leaders. I can only imagine what kind of uproar this would've caused at the time of the book's release, and I'm totally tickled at the thought of it. The sequencing of the exhibit was super powerful, juxtapositions of images often producing more compelling results than the singular photos themselves. I highly recommend a visit.

That's about it for this long-winded blog entry. Go check out these galleries and exhibits for yourself!

A METROPOLITAN OPHELIA

2009-07-13T00:17:00.000-07:00

"He is much better off without me … I wouldn’t make a good wife for anybody"

On May 1, 1947, 21 year old Evelyn McHale plunged to her death, leaping off the Empire State Building and leaving these words scrawled, and then crossed out, on her suicide letter. 86 stories and four minutes later, photographer student Robert Wiles snapped this photograph of her lifeless corpse. There is no blood, there are no mangled limbs. Her nylons are ripped and lace her ankles together in dancerly contortion, her face is made up and her fingers daintily gloved, as her immobile body lies cradled in a bed of glossy black limousine.

"Dying is an art, like everything else." - Sylvia Plath

I GOT A LOT (NEW NEW NEW)

2009-07-12T23:53:00.000-07:00

Truly pathetic how long I've gone without writing in this, but having just turned a year older (but probably not a year wiser) I hereby pledge to become more engaged in this darn blog! In any case, expect a hodgepodge of different things inspiring me at the moment, a patchwork of varying creative stimuli if you will. I've also made a new drawing but don't have a scanner so that'll have to wait... but it's on its way!

BLACK LIPS MUXTAPE CONTEST

2009-02-14T12:08:00.000-08:00

From black-lips.com:

"The Black Lips are releasing their new album '200 Million Thousand' in America on the 24th February and Europe the 16th March. To celebrate they are putting together a muxtape for you all to enjoy featuring new tunes and a selection of old belters, from February 24th. This is no less than an essential part to any fans collection and its free! What's more, we are offering fans the chance to design the artwork for the muxtape. The winner will be chosen by the band and achieve immortal fame and help the band get 200 Million Thousand plays. All you have to do is go to their official flickr group and upload your designs. You must tag them black lips muxtape and the winner will be selected on Friday 20th February."

Here is my entry:

2009-02-07T12:56:00.000-08:00

This scarcely counts as art but they're the first drawings I've made in a while. I present to you a series of... birthday cards, haha.

2008-12-11T00:09:00.000-08:00

I apologize for the recent lack of posts. School has been fairly stressful the past few weeks. Here is my peace offering, a mix of the music I have been listening to of late.

Finals Mix
Tracklist:
1. Weed Demon - Wavves
2. Brothersport - Animal Collective
3. Breaking It Up - Lykke Li
4. Ballroom Of Mars - T. Rex
5. Hooves - Bowerbirds
6. Dead Deers & Other Animals - Thanksgiving
7. Remember (Walking In The Sand) - The Shangri-Las
8. Beach Baby - Bon Iver
9. Chain Gang - Sam Cooke
10. Palmitos Park - El Guincho
11. Transmission - Joy Division
12. After Laughter (Comes Tears) - Wendy Rene
13. Nothing Ever Happened - Deerhunter
14. The Garden - Mirah
15. I Don't Wanna (Smoke Marijuana) - Nodzzz
16. 21st Century Pop Song - Hymie's Basement
17. California - Joni Mitchell

I promise more posts to come as soon as I'm on Winter Break!

RALPH EUGENE MEATYARD

2008-11-21T01:35:00.000-08:00

Ralph Eugene Meatyard easily fits into my top favorite 5 photographers of all time, so it's difficult for me not to make a post comprised solely of his pictures, just because there are so many great ones to choose from.

In his lifetime, Meatyard was an established optometrist in Lexington, Kentucky, married with three children, president of the P.T.A., and coach of the basketball team. This wholesome family man image at first appears incompatible with the darkly atmospheric photographs he took in his free time during the weekends. Upon closer inspection, however, it becomes apparent that it's precisely this seemingly picturesque lifestyle that informs Meatyard's unique artistic vision.

Meatyard reveled in theatricality: his photographs were clearly staged, often employing images of family members and friends in monster masks posing in abandoned mansions and farmhouses or picket-fenced backyards, actors in a southern-gothic drama about those living in the suburban sprawl. The most obvious example of this is his magnum opus, The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater, a photo-series of grotesque masked figures strolling through suburbia, inhabiting the ordinary, everyday world as if even in their abnormality they belonged.

Meatyard's work seems to use this juxtaposition of the placid with the peculiar to make a comment not so much on suburbia itself but rather the interior dramas of those who live in it, metaphysical contemplations on American identity -- what it is to be other, to be similar, to be young or to grow old... These questions of selfhood are never clearly answered. At the same time that Meatyard opens the viewer's eyes to these haunting self-interrogations, so too he clouds their eyes.

Meatyard, like other artistic greats (particularly those featured on this blog, ha ha ha), died young before he hit it big. While he was alive, he never really received recognition outside of the photography world, and found himself disappointed that he never made a significant impact on any large-scale audiences. Rather than mourn the sort of tragic implications of such unrecognized talent, I'll just post some more photos.

MANET, "DEAD MATADOR", 1864-1865

2008-11-17T01:23:00.000-08:00

Man oh man, a quick Wikipedia search has just revealed to me this Manet painting, which I'd never seen before. I don't quite know what to make of it yet but I think it's so visually striking. Wowee Zowee!

MANET, "YOUNG FLAUTIST, OR THE FIFER", 1866

2008-11-17T01:10:00.000-08:00

I don't know a thing about Manet but I think he's brilliant simply on the basis of this one painting. Fell head over heels for it the moment I saw it at the Musée d'Orsay this past summer. I just love that even though he's using these impressionist techniques of kind of soft, blurred brush strokes, without any distinct, defined lines, there's still a sharpness to the painting as a result of the interplay of contrasting colors, shadow and light. It's the kind of paradox you find in the sound of a flute itself -- a sharp, shrill high note that all the while manages to be ambient and resonate and reverberate in the space around it.

EGON SCHIELE

2008-11-08T20:23:00.000-08:00

I'll start off by saying that the second I saw Egon Schiele's "Seated Woman With Bent Knee", I fell in love.

Schiele's backstory is a peculiar one: dissatisfied by the stuffiness of Vienna's traditional art schools, at age 17 Schiele sought mentorship under Art Nouveau master Gustav Klimt, who not only took Schiele under his wing, but bought some of his drawings, arranged models for him, and introduced him to potential clients. This eventually inspired him to drop out of school and seek out his own artistic vision free from the constraints of conventional art instruction. More specifically, it allowed him to get into some really freaky shit.

For instance, Schiele took up a fascination with pubescent children, particularly young girls, and often had them pose as the subjects of his drawings and paintings. Sure enough, Schiele soon became infatuated with a seventeen-year-old girl named Wally, who was to move into his studio and model for some of his most famous paintings. Schiele and Wally ran away together, staying mainly in small towns peripheral to Vienna. Needless to say, the inhabitants of these towns were none too pleased with Schiele's erratic, bohemian lifestyle. Eventually, their animosity escalated and resulted in a 1912 arrest -- he was charged for seduction and abduction of a young girl below the age of consent. The charges were soon dropped, though he was found guilty of exhibiting erotic drawings in a place where children could readily see them.

In time, Schiele settled down with a nice Protestant girl, Edith Harms, intending to continue his relations with Wally on the side. When Wally caught wind of the marriage, she left and never saw Schiele again. In 1918, a pregnant Edith caught Spanish influenza and died. A devestated Schiele died three days later of the same illness. He was 28 years old.

Part of me is attracted to Schiele's work simply for the fact that his life was so unusual.
But what truly draws me to his artwork is its expressivity -- his technique is visceral, raw, and unrefined, qualities wherein lies all his charm. The pieces are not particularly realistic: backgrounds are left blank, brush strokes clearly visible, lines taper off and are left unfinished... and yet I think its precisely this kind of impulsive resistance to conventional depictions that make the work perhaps more real than any verisimilar, "true-to-life" painting ever could. This reality-grounded viscerality is also mirrored thematically speaking, with pieces focusing on sex, death, identity, self-exploration... Really, Schiele made pieces that reach to the very depths of human experience, allowing for a sort of universalized, timeless body of work that remains relevant nearly 100 years after his death.

A SIDENOTE:

2008-11-04T15:13:00.000-08:00

I hereby vow to make Dali eyes in as many pictures taken of me as possible.

FRANCESCA WOODMAN

2008-11-04T00:37:00.000-08:00

Working most prolifically between 1975 and 1980, Francesca Woodman left behind a legacy of haunting black-and-white photographs that question notions of female identity, depiction of the female form and the human anatomy, relations between artist and spectator, author and subject, reality and representation...

Woodman's photographs reflect a veritable patchwork of influences ranging from Dada and Surrealism to Gothic Horror, as lone female subjects, often nude, contort their bodies, faces obscured or blurred in motion, in seemingly decrepit or abandoned spaces. However phantasmagorical or unreal the atmospheres created in these photographs are, there is something distinctly anchored in reality about the subjects of Woodman's work (perhaps due the corporeality and tangibility of the nude female figure) which allows for thematic implications that ring true in both an everyday, realist sense as well as on a more metaphysical, spiritual level.

What resonates most for me in Woodman's work is her complete and utter submergence in the artistic process in order to fully explore this idea of female identity. Woodman herself was both photographer and subject in many of her photographs, bearing all both literally and figuratively -- literally in the sense that she presented her naked body to the viewer, figuratively in the sense that once you become object of your own art, there's no backing down: your work is completely personal (really you become your art) and your own problems, vulnerabilities, insecurities, et al. become the very foundation of the artwork which you present to the public to be gawked at and scrutinized.

In fact, even when she wasn't the subject of her own photos, she often employed look-a-likes and doppelgangers who maintained (albeit to a lesser extent) this level of personalization (Now that I think of it, really reminds of Sylvia Plath's Bell Jar...) Speaking of Plath-ian undertones, unfortunately, perhaps as a result of this total exertion of herself into her work, Woodman committed suicide at the age of 22. Years after her demise, her work would finally come to be the subject of the attention it deserves, with a number of posthumous books published and exhibitions traveling across the nation. To this day, Woodman's surreal depictions of troubled young females continue to haunt and inspire art critics and plebeians alike -- unsettling, spectral apparitions of the female selfhood that float in and out of the collective consciousness, hovering over us all like Esther Greenwood's Bell Jar.

And so it begins.

2008-11-03T22:47:00.000-08:00

This is a test.