drawings by Vasco Morao.

Andrea Galvani, La Morte di Un’Immagine #9 (2006)

Have you ever witnessed something so beautiful it makes you angry? Something that makes you angry because it blows your entire scale, because it makes your delicate struggles for harmony ridiculous, petty, insignificant? This beauty that should elevate you, that should lift you up and carry you through the night, the beauty that is the inspiration and the core, is its exact opposite: smashing, unbearable, hard and cruel. It is a sunset that is just too magical, stars that shine too bright, or an event that seemed like the best of all performances. But what I mean is not perfection, it is beauty. It is not unnerving because it doesn’t allow you to access it, like the perfection of the stone. It is unnerving because it takes away your ability to judge it, or what’s worse, it’s a type of beauty that takes away your ability to include it into your appreciation of beauty. It makes it silly to think of art, to create, to go to galleries and museums, to scan art blogs and dwelve into poetry. It leaves you lonely, ridiculously hanging on to an outdated scale or desperately trying to adapt it to something that corresponds more to what Kant calls the sublime – although the problem is, it is not sublime, it is exactly what beauty could have been, had you not already developed a different scale altogether.
I’m lucky: I forget. The taste fades quite quickly from my mouth, the text evaporates from my head, and so does the view of the sea after the storm. It all starts again for me, and what is left is like a bookmark, a sign that says “this was good” and maybe, maybe manages to reproduce some sort of a sensation of a sensation I had when it happened.
And then, sometimes, if one focuses on this memory, the memory starts growing a new head, one that is nothing like the previous one. One that does not compete in these subjective beauty contests, one that is at once much more raw and more constructed, that uses your imagination but somehow fits it together with whatever surrounds you, adapting the memory into an idea, transforming it into this weird creature that still has the body of a horse, but instead of the head has grown a thick, black cloud. Of balloons.
Delicious.
Thank you Andrea Galvani.

(via)

I was writing about 3 weeks spent of a friends boat on lake Erie recreating watercolors lost in Argentina. A day or two after we got Alan’s boat in the water I helped Markus get his new/old 40 foot + wooden sailboat over to his slip with no mishaps. A few days later he called me back and said he and a friend were going to take it out for a little shake down cruise. It was a fairly blustery day, sunny with 3 -4 foot swells. I hadn’t actually made any watercolors yet and wanted to get started but decided I wanted to go with Markus on his new boat instead. It’s a beauty for sure. Newly restored after an Ohio winter’s worth of work in the back yard scraping, sanding and painting the hull and redoing much of the interior. I was supposed to help with some of the hand work but could never get free when Markus was able to work. So Markus did it all. I’m always impressed at his industrious nature, his knowledge and creative resolve. He did nearly all the work himself from bending wood to repair the hull breaches, painting and re-stitching sails. He’s an ace at maintaining a motor and has refit his diesel to burn 30 percent bio-fuel. Remarkable! Normally I’d simply call this green thinking but in this market any saving is appreciated with the price of diesel often above $4.50 a gallon.

We had a little trouble with the boat turning into the wind with only the mainsail up once we left the marina causing the sails to lose wind or luff. Markus jury rigged his working jib. It wasn’t quite the proper rigging. There was an unnatural scalloping along the luff or front line of the sail as it attached to the bow sprit up to the line that kept it to the main mast. Markus said he didn’t have the right fixtures attached so he made it up as he went along. Out of Irons refers to the tri-point or ‘Y’ shaped wind direction device on top of the main mast. A sail boat cannot sail less than 45 degrees against the wind or into the wind. When the directional is between the rear two metal points one is ‘In Irons’. Creative sailing…I love it. And it did the trick of keeping the boat out of irons even if it lead to a rather rough sail. At time we were nearly healed over at about 30 degrees which means the rails or gunnels are nearly in the water. That can be rather exciting on such a large boat. We also had a little trouble keeping the inflatable dinghy from cupping water behind the boat. The rigging tying it to the rear davits was a bit loose so it hung too low to the surface of the water. We eventually tried tying it up tighter but even that failed us a little while later. But it was such a windy day and there was a slow leak that had Markus flustered. We brought her back in after a rather exciting 3 hour sail.

I managed to get my first watercolor started the next day. It was a reworking of the first watercolor I did in Cordoba in 2004 from my hotel window. Originally done in a book of rice paper, the papers in the new book gave a much more vibrant range of color. Rag paper does that, while rice paper tends to absorb the chromatic intensity. I’ve included images of both the original and the new version.

Interestingly I realized almost right away that while I had photos of a number of the works done in 2004 and some of the earlier works done in Buenos Aires in 2001 and 2003 I couldn’t just copy them. Maybe its me. But a work, even if it is only a preparatory sketch is also a complete idea in and of itself. There is no copying stroke for stroke. There must always be a new bit of creative response in any work whether directly from life, from imagination or from a preliminary study. In the case of these re done images I began to take a lot of liberties with the color, shaping and broshwork even when there was at the same time a certain loyalty to the original image. While I tend to like both versions of each image I must say that the reprised images have a very different energy to them.

I also quickly realized that to mentally get into each image I almost had to do the same process as I had originally done on location. I often did a small postcard sized image from life, returned to the hotel and then did a larger version from the study and memory and sometimes an even larger variation. I began doing the same thing while working on my friends boat. I’d start a small study, then rework it again at a slightly larger size and finally, if all went well a larger version in the bigger book I’d purchased for the project. Each variation had its own qualities…none were exactly alike, none were ultimately better just different in my mind with perhaps a couple of exceptions. But the process began to unlock certain visual memories that carried me much further than simply copying a photograph would have.

Ultimately I did so many variations on the Sierra Chicas that I felt I could do them blindfolded in my sleep backwards…to the point that I almost sense that this is the ultimate Argentina in my mind. But in the case of the Del Dique (the dike or the dam) works, I had only a color photograph and a pen and ink sketch to work with. The photo wasn’t very large format so much detail was gone. I had to work primarily from memory and what the image gave me to spin off from.

In a week or two I will return to Alan’s boat to continue my journey into the memory of my Argentina. Now I have a better sense of how to work…a more efficient process to access my memories and create a body of work in the shortest amount of time. I have approximately 50 more works to recreate. I hope to get perhaps two thirds of that number accomplished this time if I work with some discipline for about 5 or 6 hours everyday. I think I can create about 4 or 5 images or variations on images every day given that I can work every day. Weekends will be hard as Alan brings friends to the boat. I’ll have to pack things away from Friday night to Sunday evening each week. So I have about 10 days to do 25 – 30 works. It took me 15 days to do 27 works the last time. And that included several days during the middle of the week when Markus came up to sail. I know this sounds like quantity vs. quality. But it is not unlike when I worked as a commercial illustrator. I had to punch a time clock for each project I worked on any given day so my boss could bill for creative time. I became very disciplined during those years. I don’t often practice those disciplines as a fine artist. But in this case it seems to be the right approach. After all I’d already done these works once before. They are now in my head. In that sense they become somewhat like the works I do from imagination in my studio. While the inventive works are also in my head as an idea when I begin them and begin to verge toward and merge with extrapolations as I go these have begun to do the same thing even though they began as simple works from life. It’ll be nice to finally release them and the entire experience which caused me to have to recreate them.

Markus, another of his sailing friends and I went out once more for a second shakedown cruise before I finally came home. We sailed half way to Kelly’s Island. He’d rigged a larger jib with the proper fixtures so it was a much smoother sail. But the leak was still bothering him although the bilge pump seemed to drain it quite nicely. A day later he finally got the leak sealed, at least for the season amd shortly after that I drove back to Columbus. I must admit it was hard to come home to mowing the yard, and the mundane everyday things one does to get by. The solidtude of being on the boat by myself most of the week was itself theraputic. But as I said in another week or two I’ll be back up on the boat painting away. And maybe I’ll manage to get up there a few more times before the summer turns to fall and then time to take the boats out of the water for the winter… at least for a couple of weekend cruises.

Created by Walter King On 07/24/08 At 10:37 AM

I must admit I had no idea Polish design (well, design-related sculpture would be the more correct term I suppose) can be anything like this.
While I’m at it, I must also admit that the moment of becoming a little less ignorant, this moment of moving from a state of nothingness to the sudden illumination by something of this caliber is something delightful.

Last Supper (2003)

Porcelain Carpet (2002)

from the Hygiene series (1995)

from the Hygiene series (1995)

from the Eroticism series (2005)

from the Scatology series (1993)

It does not necessarily make sense. It does not necessarily say something, as in, a thing, as in, a message. It prefers to wink at us, like someone sitting in a waiting room winks at us, right after we finally managed to get our eyes of a gorgeous neighbor. Is that the “I know how you feel” wink? Or is it showing you he knows something both of you know he shouldn’t and yet both of you know he certainly does? Is this something you share? A common interest? A common feeling of guilt? A feeling of risk, maybe? This winking, the one I feel when seeing Cecu?a’s works (not touching them, unfortunately, although that seems a perverse desire), is one of recognition, but also one of daring sensitivity, if not always sensuality. Touching is key? No, come to think of it, the not-touching, here, is what drives the senses right to the matter.
More on Marek Cecu?a at his site.

(via)

Once again, Peter Fuss (remember his “For the Laugh of God“?) manages to poke the finger in the right spot.
His most recent work, exhibited at the Out Of Sth exhibition in Wroc?aw (Poland) (which also has blu’s animation on display) plays on our sense of reality.
What I like most about this work is something I didn’t notice at first. The first reading, to me, was simple: knowing the fate of the liberal Americans who came to positions of power, it is difficult not to think of the risk Obama is facing. This also might be seen as a cool and lucid way of looking at politics. Can any ideal manage to survive? Isn’t Obama, the Obama we know as fighting for “change”, somewhat dead, already? Who killed him?
But what I really like about this work is not this seemingly political message. It is the way it portraits us and our own patterns of looking at reality.

The problem is not that Obama may get killed. The problem is our thinking of it as a fact. It is not Fuss’s work that is cynical. We are.
Seeing the work on a billboard makes it even more obvious: we take it for granted that things are the way they are, and even if they aren’t, too bad for the facts. The billboard is there, so Obama is dead. Who killed him? Guess who.

update/ps: A couple of months ago an Israeli designer created a shirt with a similar text. I think the differences between the two projects prove my point. Having/seeing this on a T-shirt and seeing it on a billboard are two completely different experiences. (Not to mention the completely different level of design). And that’s what sets apart a good artpiece from a, well, another one. (Also notice the context – one is set in NY, the other- in Wroc?aw). Suffice it to say that already a few days after the opening of the exhibition two French tourists entered the gallery (you can see the entrance to the right on the second picture) saying they haven’t had the chance to follow the news and they were quite terrified. Now, just to add another level of artsy-fartsy commenting, the person attending them answered they weren’t to worry because it was “just an art installation”. Ouch, now that’s not what I would call effective art guidance. Or what she being ironic?

Sometimes summer afternoons aren’t meant for lounging outdoors – they’re occasionally better spent finding artful surprises in bookstores.

Such was the case on this day, an unremarkable one until my wandering eye locked onto something of promising note. A book. By the way, most people would agree that they venture into bookstores seeking books. After my experience today, I must say that I disagree. People shop in bookstores because they crave surprises. Yes, in all likelihood, the thing you’ve been looking for will indeed be a book, but is it the book or the thrill of surprise that has you hooked? Hmm. Mystery and philosophy. Do questions never cease?

Anyway, as my gaze ventured down the frittering possibilities among the art book shelf, suddenly a love connection. I saw the book “Actors As Artists. “Hmm, I thought. “Let’s take a look. What a nice surprise.

First of all, “Actors As Artists” authored by actors Jim McMullan and Dick Gautier (Charles E. Tuttle Company, Inc.) was first published back in 1992. That’s not so long ago, but they could certainly give it an update. It’s truly a remarkable book about actors, some more famous than others, who paint in their private time. I’ve just finished flipping through and reading some of it.

It’s really everything an art book should be. With every turn of the page, a surprise. I knew that Anthony Quinn and Jane Seymour painted, but did you know that Zero Mostel and Claudette Colbert were artists? I knew that Billy Dee Williams and Phyllis Diller dabbled, but what about Henry Fonda and Lionel Barrymore? I’m sure Drew knew, but who else had a clue? Mystery revealed. The book is wonderfully unpretentious and it’s so clear that the actors true love may not be acting at all. They paint because they love art.

As I’m sitting here writing and flipping through the book again, a reminder comes to mind. There’s no law of the universe that says we MUST do one and only one thing for our entire lives. In fact, it’s probably just the opposite. If you listen to your creative voice, you can do many things in a single lifetime. That’s how it should be. After all, we’re only here once. While actors get comebacks, no one gets to come back. THIS IS IT. Of course, being an actor doesn’t mean you can pick up a paintbrush and become Paul Gauguin in one stroke. It just means that you went for it. You heard your calling, gathered up the courage and got busy. When you follow your creative leanings, life is full of surprises.

Oh, another thing. Your career is what you do for a living, but what you do in your free time is who you really are. It may not be the WHOLE you, but it’s certainly the REAL you. It’s who you are down in your soul. If you’re an artist down in your soul, you’ve got it goin’ on. In a way, we’re all actors, but how long can you go on ignoring the role of your soul? Ahh, philosophy. What better time than on a summer afternoon?

One of my favorite passages in the book comes from actor Michael Moriarity who says, “Art is not an avocation for me. It is more like a periodic urge to pray in a different way. My pieces exist because there was no other way to reveal what was going on within in me.

In short, I think Michael is saying, “Who needs a Tony, Emmy and Oscar sandwich when you’ve got art feeding you? And let me say, “That’s quite a sandwich!

But seriously, I’m not an art critic, but as a collector, I must say that I’d be thrilled to own anything that I’ve seen in this book. Actor As Artists. I’m so glad that I found this book. You never know what surprise may be lurking around the shelf. Little surprises are the spice of life. One minute, you’re depressed and the next moment, you find something unexpected and you’re laughing at the foolishness of past thoughts.

John Forsythe, an artist? Eve Plumb, who played Jan on “The Brady Bunch, an artist? Who knew? One thing I know for sure Eve probably never yells, “Marcia! Marcia! Marcia! in HER free time.

MICHAEL CORBIN IS AN AVID ART COLLECTOR AND AUTHOR OF THE NEW BOOK, “THE ART OF EVERYDAY JOE: A COLLECTOR’S JOURNAL.” CHECK HIM OUT AT WWW.ARTMAESTROGALLERY.COM

Created by Michael Corbin On 07/21/08 At 10:06 AM

When I last left this subject, I had a studio on the property of a luxury hotel on the Greek island of Mykonos. Since then, a lot has changed. I always feel that the interest of someone in what I do is defined clearly in the moment they buy one of my pieces. The depth of that interest is made clear by the amount they are willing to spend, and the effort it will take them to accommodate what I’ve made.
Some have gone to the extent of re-engineering suspended floors to support not only the weight of a statue, but also the transport across open stretches of such a floor, as was the case with the Gewiss Corporation in Bergamo, Italy. Others, like Alabama Power, have constructed pedestals that may have cost more than the statues themselves. In both cases, I was offered a stay in a five star hotel and had only to submit receipts of my expenses in order to be compensated, no questions asked.

These two companies managed me with teams of paid employees, who did everything they were supposed to do, and saw to all my needs, but there was nothing personal between eventual buyer and me in these relationships. I felt outside of something, and knew I wouldn’t be going downtown to have a beer with the president of either of these companies. Both were among the easiest customers I’ve ever had in terms of money. They did what they said they’d do.
So did the owners of the Hotel Tharroe, albeit with some minor changes along the way. Last year, they bought ‘Amarilli and Corisca’ and in doing so, convinced me that they really were passionate about art. It’s one thing to talk about something, and quite another to commit to something this substantial in terms of money and the effort required to make the piece a vital part of the business under whose roof it sits.

In speaking about our next round last year, this summer that has just started, we worked together on deciding what kind of a new piece should be roughed out in Italy, and brought to Mykonos for me to finish. We agreed on a female Minotauress, and probably they knew more about this subject than I did. It seems that in one account, the labyrinth represents the subconscious, and therefore the Minotaur is metaphorical. It could be anything. I only learned this as I began to study the subject and its origins, much as I had done with earlier figures, and as with them, the profound and multifaceted nature of it only emerged after I had started.
My original idea was to have Theseus, whose worth as a warrior was without question, meet something that would challenge him in a way that he was not used to. I gave my Minotauress a roll of string with which to confuse him during his exit from the maze, and designed her so that if seen from the back, it isn’t apparent that she has a cows head. I imagined Theseus finding her lying nude on her pedestal, approaching from her back side, and going weak in the knees.
This morphed into Theseus being challenged by himself, by his own subconscious, and his feelings about matriarchal power, another theme that emerges in discussions of the Minotaur that I have read. Think about doing something, anything, and knowing that each thing has some part which makes it dangerous, something unexpected, like the string, which is a thing we carry within ourselves. We may be the most dangerous part of anything we try to do.
In an active life, we are constantly challenged by the decision to turn left, or right. We live, in that sense, within the contours of a labyrinth.
We decided I would work near the pool, where guests could see what I was doing, and talk to me about it if they felt like it. The Tharroe maintenance people constructed a roofed over area at one end of the pool, and a platform in cement on which the statue would be placed.
I started the piece in February, going up to the La Cappella, or, the chapel, quarry, and choosing a piece of dark grey Bardiglio. As I worked it, I heard that as I chipped it, a crystal ringing came out of the stone, much like a chapel bell. Perhaps this was the reason why the quarry had been called the chapel, and not because of any nearby churches as I had always believed.

As luck would have it, the quarry was closed just after I got the block out, as some townspeople below had complained about the risk of an avalanche. So now I had seven tons of something that you just couldn’t get any more. I had the bottom cut smooth and flat at a saw mill, and removed the top just above the statue by drilling holes through it and using stone splitting wedges. I wasn’t about to waste any. I worked six days a week straight for three months, and when I saw that it was down to two tons and far enough along that I could do the rest without using power tools, I arranged the shipment to Mykonos.
Once there, I had the piece unloaded as far up the hill alongside the hotel as the crane’s reach would allow. The pool is behind the building, and getting there was over rough ground. Laying fourteen foot beams down as a sort of railway, with log rollers we were able to go over rocks, gullies, and up the incline using a chain hoist and three men.
And past the tomb. Tharroe, the Mycenaean queen who had given her name to the hotel, had been buried here nearly four thousand years before. The tomb is in surprisingly good shape, a sort of large underground igloo made only of dry stone wall, rocks that had been found and not shaped. When the hotel was to be constructed, the tomb was discovered during the groundbreaking, and the owners called the cultural authorities and moved the site of the building significantly so as not to disturb it.
Today I find myself with just the stone wall behind the statue between me and the tomb. The sculpture and me are the same distance from the edge of the igloo as the center section is, where the grave was. The figure looks, in its setting, alarmingly like an idol in a pagan temple. When I started to research the origins of the Minotaur in Crete, I found out that it had its roots in more ancient cultures, like those of the Phoenicians, and the Carthaginians. These cultures may or may not have practiced child sacrifice, but the figure that blood was given to was a ‘golden calf’ as mentioned in the Bible. There is also a relationship with figures coming from other cultures, such as Baal and Moloch. The Egyptians have some human figures with animal heads, most notably birds of prey, but also bulls. In their culture these sometimes represent the Sun god. Crete traded with all three of these populations, and never had a war with anyone until after their decline. The final crushing blow came when the volcano that today is Santorini erupted, sending a tsunami wave four hundred fifty feet high against the shores of Crete, and wiping its culture out. We saw what happened with a thirty foot wave.
I am in no way superstitious, but during the past few weeks, am often struck by the thought that this theme may not have been just my own doing. Maybe this ancient queen from a culture with no written language that we know of had some influence? They say that the ancients were in touch with timeless powers we no longer have access to. I have seen first hand how animals know about earthquakes and tornados before they happen, and can’t help but compare that to how we’re no longer able to do much anything without technical and electronic aid, and despite that still do not know the way they do in advance. I suppose that if I don’t die minutes after completing this piece, then I can rest easy for a while longer.
Carving this sculpture with so many stories intertwining, while gazing at the Greek islands and the sea from a perch so high above everything, is a sensation that inspires me. I don’t have any plans for this piece, I have no idea who I’m going to sell it to, or if I even can sell it. That a hotel gave me the opportunity to do what I’m doing, using their pool area as if it were my own studio, is remarkable, and sets the Tharroe of Mykonos apart from any hotel I’ve ever been in. It truly is exceptional, in every sense of the word, because the passion of the owners overpowers what might be called good sense. Passion is that special something that makes everything possible. And in being passionate about the carving, the polishing, and the detailing, forgetting about everything else if I can, perhaps I can make this piece as exceptional as the setting in which it was made.

Created by Andrew Wielawski On 07/18/08 At 01:07 PM

More stuff by Blu here.

I was invited to curate a digital art show at the Islip Art Museum in Sayville, New York (Long Island). I named the show “A Passion for Pixels.” Fifty-two artists are on display June 18 to September 7th.

The main thing that has struck me about digital over the last 10 years is that most people understand nothing about it. Sadly, the local media do a dreadful job of explaining. So, one of my concerns about this show is that it be educational.

Instead of Realism, Abstract and such, I tried to group the works according to how much digital they contained and the methods used. For example, the biggest room is titled “The Altered Image” and contains, as a note explains, only works that started with a digital photograph which was then altered in a program such as Photoshop. I’m betting that even a simple device like this pulls visitors into the digital process. I like to imagine they go home talking like connoisseurs.

The main thing to report about the show is that digital has moved quickly from being an exotic new medium to being another option that adventurous artists toss into the mix. A big percentage of the work was digital IN SOME SENSE. I and the two people helping me would often stare at a piece asking, “Wait, is that part digital??” Boundaries have become a blur.

Also interesting, a number of pieces referenced pixels but were done in traditional media. Didn’t expect that!!

Mary Lou Cohalan, the Director of the Islip Art Museum, commented: “This show is a crash course in digital art. Bruce Price, our insightful curator, is also a noted educator. He has put together a wonderful exhibition that is strong on aesthetics and long on digital education. There have already been tours and people respond well.”

Created by Bruce Price On 07/13/08 At 06:49 PM