I somehow stumbled across an old bookmark for Jon Keegan, a Brooklyn-based illustrator whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, U.S. News & World Report among others.
His technique is tremendous, but most of all I love the expressions. Just classic. I love his ability to render complex emotions and group dynamics. He’s also got a number of sketchbooks up for our perusal, spanning from 2002 all the way back to 1998. If you can spare 20 minutes or so, browse through them chronologically starting from the earliest; always interesting to see someone’s style evolve and develop, elaborating on certain themes and dropping others. Since I’m pretty much still working on getting my stick figures down, it’s fascinating to see someone working on variations of expressions with mouths and brows drawn over and over in various permutations.
Julian Barnes has brilliant review of Alex Danchev’s Georges Braque: A Life. My favorite part, only because it would seem to vindicate yesterday’s post in some small way, follows:
He disliked museums, preferring to sit outside and send Mme Braque in to see if there was anything worth attending to (which sounds like an instruction inviting the answer no). At times this seems to border on affectation: when the Tate put on a Braque-Rouault show in 1946, he chose to attend its closing rather than its opening (or, indeed, any other day).
Barnes’ best analysis is reserved for Braques’ at times close and infinitely complicated relationship with Picasso, with whom he shared studio space and a part in the formation of Cubism.
We visited the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe today. It’s a lovely, if small, museum. I would have enjoyed it immensely had I not realized that all museums are evil soul-sucking chasms of significance-mongering. Bummer.
I imagine that at one time O’Keeffe’s paintings may have lived in the homes of ardent collectors where became part of their surroundings, neatly accentuating an adobe wall or as an oasis of color facing a drap city skyline. As the original owners sold the pieces or died, perhaps they became tokens of the person who passed them on, a reflection of their taste and personality, a glance at which might immediately call that person to mind.
Their new home has all the warmth and charm of a mausoleum. They hang dwarfed and aesthetically impotent in cavernous halls of 20 foot high optic white walls made resoundingly hollow by polished oak floors. Like a naturalist’s stunning array of butterflies impaled on cork board, an appreciation of their beauty is diminished somewhat by their fate.
Why should this be the case? Here is my theory - the design of museums is focused neither on making the most rewarding museum-going experience nor in presenting the artwork in the most pleasing manner. The design of museums is predicated solely on making the artwork, and of course the museum, seem important.
It does this in a number of ways. First, the space is essentially empty except for the artwork. Walls and floors make every effort to be neutral. The architecture is intended to awe. There are few places where one feels smaller than in a museum. One might assume this were intended to allow us to focus on the art, yet even O’Keeffe’s giant canvases are made somehow small. Artwork is not decorative, we are told, it is an important event which should be witnessed. This is part of the reason we feel obliged to stand and stare at a painting long after we are done looking.
Information about the artist is unsubtle hero worship. Artists are divine creative entities. Like Midas, whatever they touch turns to art. Implicit in this, is that some are born to watch and a few to be watched. This is a view I think would be instinctively abhorred by most of the artist who are subjected to it, save a few gifted megalomaniacs.
So there’s my rant. I can’t imagine anything will come of it. I love art too much to stop going to museums.
I don’t have any spare walls at the moment, but if I did, I would be on these like white on rice - band posters from Minnesota print and design shop Aesthetic Apparatus:
I was innocently browsing Coolhomepages.com looking for things to steal, um inspiration, when whoa, wait a minute, I know that girl. Every once in a great while an Emerson alum actually does something with themselves. What a great site. When your site gets props right next to Radiohead’s, you done good.
Patrick Wright writes on the contribution of artists to advancing the practice of camouflage in World War I:
‘I well remember at the beginning of the war,’ Gertrude Stein wrote in 1938, ‘being with Picasso on the Boulevard Raspail when the first camouflaged truck passed. It was at night, we had heard of camouflage but we had not seen it and Picasso, amazed, looked at it and then cried out, yes it is we who made it, that is Cubism.’ Stein went on to suggest that the entire First World War had been an exercise in Cubism. Hailing Picasso as the first to register an epoch-making change in the ‘composition’ of the world, she concluded that a great convulsion had been necessary to awaken the masses to his discovery: ‘Wars are only a means of publicising the thing already accomplished.’
Now it seems hard to imagine the military without camouflage, but before WWI, such tactics were derided by military commanders as dishonorable. Wright outlines the debate and early experiments, some ludicrous, such as Thayer’s attempt to paint tanks to match the pink sunsets he imagined them blending with. Interesting read.
Filmmaker and photographer David Lachapelle appeared on Charlie Rose a few days ago to discuss Rize, his new film on krumping (or clown dancing), with dancers Tommy Johnson (Tommy the Clown) and Christopher Toler (Lil’ C). Lachapelle outlines the appeal the movement had for him beyond the artistic expression:
Well hip hop has now finally been considered a true american art form and this is the next generation, what they’re doing right now is the next generation… every generation of artists will buck the establishment and want to go and do something completely different. What they’re doing is they’re rejecting the establishment of hip hop which is a commercial, bling bling, buy a big house, all of that stuff. They’re the opposite they don’t buy into any of that. Not only in the style and the dance and all that stuff but idealistically in their whole way of thinking is completely different. So it wasn’t just, the dance, yes, it blew my mind. I had never seen anything like it. The dance will blow your mind, but when you get into the story and find out about their lives, it becomes much more profound.
I’ve become mildly obsessed with the Jason Wheatley’s artwork, a young painter from Utah who does some really interesting still lifes with animals. No website, unfortunately, but a little googling has turned up some galleries that represent him (Coda Gallery, Jenkins Johnson) and an article from the Springville Museum of Art
UK artist Benedict Carpenter is taking submissions for his Drawing Description Game in which you describe a common object as accurately and completely without tipping him off as to what it is, then he draws it. Simple premise…. amazing results. Here is my own rather long-winded submission:
This object consists of a long cylindrical shaft, an inch in diameter. The lower half of the shaft is tightly wrapped in a sheath.
The upper half, above the sheath tapers slightly. The top 5% of the shaft is capped with a separate part of the object, made from a much harder material. This top part of the object, when viewed head on, appears to have a circular front 3/4″ in diameter, which recedes into a square body which is only slightly larger on all sides, at least from what is visible. When viewed in profile, however, it appears balanced on the head of the shaft, jutting out 2 inches on either side. The left side, originally described as the front when viewed head-on, is like cylinder viewed from the side, with the curvature aligned north-south.
This cylinder, which is 3/4″ high at the left-hand side begins to taper at a point 1.5 inches from the middle when travelling toward the center, to a cylinder only 1/2″ wide which then wides into the larger cap which fits over the shaft. On the other side of the top part of the object, the same material tapers sharply to a flattened cylinder which projects about 2″ from the cap at a 35 degree angle beneath the horizontal axis.
I’ll post the drawing if he gets around to it. Why don’t I think of things like this? Oh right, I can’t draw…..
So this is a bit of an odd one, but my friend Joy Goodgame recently did an album cover for musician Randall Goodgame (cousin, it’s all in the family) that plays off of Randall’s very strange, though apparently benign obsession with Charles Schultz, and it turned into a great website, but now that I am “attuned” to the undercurrents of Charles Shultz, I’m a little freaked out that I’m starting to see Peanuts stuff EVERYWHERE.
