Tiny Forest? Big Vintage Tech?
Some combination of vintage tech, nature, the ambiguous scale, fog, and color palette in this digital image by Eric Mack is really tickling my brain in all the right ways today. (via @FedeItaliano76)
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kottke.org posts about art
Wild World: a Hand-Drawn Geographic Map of the Earth
You may remember Anton Thomas from the huge hand-drawn map of North America that took him about 5 years to finish. His next effort, already well underway, is Wild World, a geographic map of the Earth.
Commenced in mid-2020, this is a brand new map of the world. Rather than the endless skylines and cultural features of North America: Portrait of a Continent, I wanted the wild character of Earth to shine.
While you won’t find cities or borders on this map, you will find geographic labels. This is important. From mountain ranges to deserts, rivers to rainforests, the labels here offer a detailed, accurate outline of Earth’s natural geography.
He’s aiming to complete the map by mid-2021.
The Spell Checkers Agenda
The piece above is part of a series called Pluralism by artist Deborah Roberts — it’s a collage of dozens of Black names marked as misspelled by Microsoft Word’s built-in spell checker. I don’t know about you, but this makes me think about the neutrality of technology, how software is built, who builds it, and for whom it is designed.
I found this via Seeing Black Futures by Jenna Wortham and Kimberly Drew, which is adapted from their forthcoming book, Black Futures. You can check out more of Roberts’ work on her website or on Instagram.
Paintings by Fire Ants
Ants use pheromone trails to signal to other ants to follow them to food or other desirable destinations. Inspired by this, entomology graduate student Horace Zeng dropped some of the fire ants he uses in his research into some paint pooled on canvases and watched them disperse, leaving behind these colorful patterns. Here’s a video of the ants doing their thing:
Artemisia Gentileschi, Praised and Reappraised
For the New Yorker, Rebecca Mead writes about the 17th-century Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi, whose work has been growing in stature and popularity in recent years.
Increasingly, Artemisia is celebrated less for her handling of private trauma than for her adept management of her public persona. Throughout her career, she demonstrated a sophisticated comprehension of the way her unusual status as a woman added to the value of her paintings. On a formal level, her representation of herself in the guise of different characters and genders prefigures such postmodern artists as Cindy Sherman. Unlike Sherman, however, Artemisia had few female peers. She was not the only woman working as an artist during the early seventeenth century: a slightly older contemporary was the northern-Italian portraitist Fede Galizia, born in 1578, whose father, like Artemisia’s, was also a painter. But Artemisia must often have felt singular. In a series of letters written to one of her most important patrons, the collector Antonio Ruffo, she wittily referred to her gender: “A woman’s name raises doubts until her work is seen,” and, regarding a work in progress, “I will show Your Illustrious Lordship what a woman can do.” In 2001, the scholar Elizabeth Cropper wrote, “We will never understand Artemisia Gentileschi as a painter if we cannot accept that she was not supposed to be a painter at all, and that her own sense of herself — not to mention others’ views of her — as an independent woman, as a marvel, a stupor mundi, as worthy of immortal fame and historical celebration, was entirely justified.” On art-adjacent blogs, Artemisia’s strength and occasionally obnoxious self-assurance are held forth as her most essential qualities. She has become, as the Internet term of approval has it, a badass bitch.
An exhibition of Gentileschi’s work is set to open early next month at the National Gallery in London and is getting rave reviews. Man, I’d love to go see this in person!
BTW, when reading Mead’s piece, I kept stopping to search for the art she referenced and I recommend you do the same. It’s a) frustrating that the New Yorker doesn’t use hyperlinks for this purpose in the online version and b) still wondrous after all these years that this fantastic art is available to view online with a few quick clicks and keystrokes. Imagine reading a piece like this in 1989 and wanting to look at the art - it would take a trip to the library and then probably hours of searching.
Oh hell, I’ll just do this quick…here’s every painting referenced in Mead’s piece:
- “Susanna and the Elders”, Tintoretto: “…he portrayed Susanna as serene and abstracted, towelling a raised foot and regarding herself in a mirror, unaware of a bald man who is concealed behind a rose trellis and peering between her parted thighs.”
- “Susanna and the Elders”, Peter Paul Rubens: “…Susanna is shown reaching for a shawl, realizing with horror that she has been exposed to two leering men.”
- “Susannah and the Elders”, Ludovico Carracci: “Sometimes the violence threatened against Susanna is indicated in the tableau…”
- “Susanna and the Elders” (1610), Artemisia Gentileschi (pictured above): “Her head and her body torque away from the onlookers as she raises a hand toward them, in what looks like ineffectual self-defense.”
- “Self-Portrait as St. Catherine of Alexandria”, Artemisia Gentileschi: “…the subject gazes at the viewer, her brow dimpled in concentration, while wearing a gauzy turban and other finery.”
- “Judith and Her Maidservant with the Head of Holofernes”, Artemisia Gentileschi: “…offers a masterly execution of the technique, with its subjects illuminated, mid-action, by raking lamplight.”
- “Judith Beheading Holofernes”, Artemisia Gentileschi: “It shows the Biblical heroine with her sleeves rolled up over muscular arms, her mouth set, deftly butchering the Assyrian general.”
- “Crucifixion of Saint Peter”, Caravaggio: “…the elderly martyr is being raised, upside down, on a cross…”
- “The Conversion on the Way to Damascus”, Caravaggio: “…a young, muscled St. Paul is sprawled on the ground after receiving a heavenly vision.”
- “Young Woman with a Violin (Saint Cecilia)”, Orazio Gentileschi: “…shows a musician with a cleft chin, a rounded cheek, and an alert expression.”
- “David and Goliath”, Artemisia Gentileschi: “…a painting that shows David sitting triumphantly next to Goliath’s severed head…”
- “Cleopatra”, Artemisia Gentileschi: “…the ‘uncompromising sensuality’ of the recumbent nude…”
- “Danaë”, Artemisia Gentileschi: “Creases around the figure’s armpits and swells in the stomach reveal an awareness of the way a woman’s flesh settles and subsides.”
- “Danaë and the Shower of Gold”, Orazio Gentileschi: “…features bed linens so realistic that the viewer feels she could climb between them, but the princess’s breasts defy gravity with an almost comical perkiness.”
- “Self-Portrait as a Lute Player”, Artemisia Gentileschi: “…the delicacy and articulation of the hands, shown mid-strum on the instrument.”
- “Allegory of Inclination”, Artemisia Gentileschi: “…a female nude sitting on a tuft of cloud.”
- “Judith Slaying Holofernes”, Artemisia Gentileschi: “…a maidservant, Abra, forcefully holds Holofernes down while Judith confidently hacks away at his neck.”
- “Judith Beheading Holofernes”, Caravaggio: “She hardly seems to have the oomph required for decapitation.”
- “The Birth of Saint John the Baptist”, Artemisia Gentileschi: “…Artemisia’s version underlines her intimacy with the dynamics of the birthing room.”
- “Madonna and Child”, Artemisia Gentileschi: “Mary swoons, eyes closed, as the infant Jesus reaches for her cheek, his eyes locked on her face with palpably needy attachment.”
- “Susanna and the Elders” (1652), Artemisia Gentileschi: “…this Susanna draws the elders’ attention away from her body not by blocking their gaze but by meeting it with her own — staring at them just as they stare at her, and obliging them to acknowledge her as a human being.”
- “Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy”, Artemisia Gentileschi: “…her slight smile seems labile, indicating that Artemisia understood a woman’s sensuality from the inside out.”
- “Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting”, Artemisia Gentileschi: “Rather than looking out of the frame, as is typical with self-portraits, the figure is looking at a prepared canvas, with a raised brush in one hand and a palette in the other.”
Viewing, comparing, and contrasting these paintings is a great little tour through one brief moment in the long history of art. Have fun!
Artist “Logos” from Iconic Jazz Album Covers
Reagan Ray (previously) surveyed 100s of iconic covers of jazz albums (Blue Note, anyone?) and isolated the lettering of the artists’ names. I love these sorts of compilations — this is like a mini-tour through the history of graphic design in the 20th century.
RIP Robert Bechtle
Speaking of realism, while researching this post on Arinze Stanley, I noticed that American realist painter Robert Bechtle died yesterday. I can’t exactly remember which of the paintings shown above (‘61 Pontiac at the Whitney, Alameda Gran Torino, 1974 at SFMoMA) I saw in person first, but I do remember being instantly drawn to his work. The level of detail combined with objects of such mundanity sent my mind spinning off into all kinds of interesting realms.
The Surreal Hyperrealism of Arinze Stanley
Nigerian artist Arinze Stanley uses hyperrealistic techniques to draw surreal portraits in stunning detail. From his artist statement:
I draw inspiration from life experiences and basically everything that sparks a feeling of necessity, I find myself spending countless hours working on an artwork to stimulate deep and strong emotions in order to connect more intimately with my viewers
Most times it’s almost like I lose control of my pencils and the art flows through me to the paper.
I work with my Principle of the Three P’s namely Patience, Practice and Persistence. These have guided me over the years towards perfecting my craft.”
Great Big Story did a feature on Stanley and his work last year that’s worth watching:
(via colossal)
FKA twigs on Artemisia Gentileschi’s Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy
Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy is a painting made in the 1620s by Artemisia Gentileschi. The painting was presumed lost until it was rediscovered in a private collection in France and sold at auction for more than $1 million in 2014.
As part of season 2 of Google Arts & Culture’s Art Zoom project (previously), British singer/songwriter FKA twigs gives her personal interpretation of the painting in the video above.
Scholars assumed it was painted in the 1620s, when Artemisia Gentileschi left Florence and moved back to Rome. She had separated from her husband and become an independent woman, the head of her own household, a rarity at that time.
When making my own album, entitled “Magdalene,” it was a time of great healing for me. When I was researching about Mary Magdalene and I was looking at a lot of paintings of her, she seemed so poised and so together. But the irony is in finishing my music, I found a deep wildness, a looseness, an acceptance, a release. And that’s exactly what I’m experiencing in this painting.
I found this incredibly soothing to watch and listen to…almost ASMR-like. And as usual, you can zoom around the painting yourself; this is not even halfway zoomed in…at full zoom you can see individual brushstrokes and cracks in the painting.
Update: FKA twigs gives tours of two additional Gentileschi paintings: Self-Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria and Judith Beheading Holofernes.
(via @norabz)
Study of the Creative Specimens
Study of the Creative Specimens is a collection of fantastical hybrid creatures created for Adobe’s 99U conference by Mark Brooks and illustration studio alademosca. Prints are available from Paper Chase Press. (via colossal)
Rise Up. Show Up. Unite!
A group of creatives led by Jessica Hische are creating unofficial posters for the Biden/Harris campaign in order to increase visibility of the campaign.
Last week, I [Jessica Hische] had a good conversation with the Biden creative team. I shared that one of my concerns for the upcoming election was the lack of visible support for the campaign. There are a lot of folx within the creative world and beyond posting on social media about voting (a wonderful and necessary message), but few of those posts mention the candidates by name. It’s somewhat implied that if you’re promoting voting or voting rights that you’re likely voting Biden and encouraging a Biden vote, but it’s not explicit. There’s a “I guess I’ll vote for him if I have to” vibe throughout leftist social media, but exasperated resignation doesn’t get people to the polls.
From top to bottom, art by Jessica Hische, Mary Kate McDevitt, Lauren Hom, and Joanna Muñoz. You can participate by downloading a template that includes the Biden/Harris logo — you can find the link at the bottom of the article.
Works of Fine Art (feat. The Simpsons)
These mashups of fine art with The Simpsons are entertaining, but this one featuring Bart Simpson’s iconic blackboard subtly replaced by Cy Twombly’s 1968 chalkboard drawing Untitled (New York City) — perhaps the ultimate “my kid could have done that” piece of modern art — is a little bit of genius.
Stop Motion Stone Loops
I love Benoît Leva’s simple stop motion animated loops made from rocks and stones. This bouncing one is my favorite:
You can check out more stone animations on his Instagram. (via colossal)
Honoring Jacob Blake
To pass the time during the pandemic, artist and designer Sho Shibuya has been painting sunrise views from his apartment using the front page of the NY Times as a canvas and posting them to Instagram. But he’s also done special editions, like the one above honoring Jacob Blake, the seven holes in the paper representing the seven bullets fired at Blake’s back by a Kenosha police officer trying to murder him. The juxtaposition with that headline is… something.
Eric Godal’s Anti-Fascist Illustrations Updated for 2020
In the 1930s and 40s, artist Eric Godal drew some anti-fascist political cartoons that urged people not to listen to right-wing authoritarians who want to destroy and pillage society for their own ends. Godal, a German Jew, had escaped the clutches of Nazi Germany in the 30s and labored to warn America and the world about the fate of the Jews in Europe.1
Illustrator Chris Piascik has updated Godal’s drawings for 2020 to feature our own corrupt crackpot wannabe dictator. Calling Donald Trump a fascist is hardly controversial these days — he clearly is. What his supporters need to reckon with is: are they?
Godal’s mother was able to get out of Germany on a boat but was denied entry to the United States as a refugee by the Roosevelt administration. She was sent back and eventually murdered in a Nazi death camp.↩
Banksy Finances a Mediterranean Refugee Rescue Boat
Meet the M.V. Louise Michel, a rescue boat operating in the Mediterranean Sea that answers emergency calls from “non-Europeans” seeking refuge in Europe from war, persecution, and authoritarian governments.
Here’s the stated mission of the vessel’s crew:
To uphold maritime law and rescue anyone in peril without prejudice. We onboard the Louise Michel believe we are all individuals, nationality should not make a difference to what rights one has and how we treat each other. We answer the SOS call of all those in distress, not just to save their souls — but our own.
According to the Guardian, the project came about when Banksy reached out to experienced activist and experienced rescue boat captain Pia Klemp via email:
Hello Pia, I’ve read about your story in the papers. You sound like a badass,” he wrote. “I am an artist from the UK and I’ve made some work about the migrant crisis, obviously I can’t keep the money. Could you use it to buy a new boat or something? Please let me know. Well done. Banksy.
Polluted Water Popsicles
Three art students, Hung I-chen, Guo Yi-hui, and Cheng Yu-ti, collected polluted water from all over Taiwan and turned them into popsicles.
Hung and her teammates visited 100 locations across Taiwan to collect waste. They then placed the samples — complete with dirt, bugs, and trash — into a freezer, turning them into popsicles. In order to preserve them, they encased the popsicles in a polyester resin.
Hung tells Quartz she hopes the project will raise awareness about water pollution. Her team chose to use popsicles as a motif because they are translucent and because popsicles typically look appealing to the eye. “Such pretty popsicles, would you still want to eat them?” she asks.
The same group did a similar polluted soap project for Hong Kong. (thx, naomi)
Dollar Bill Portraits of Powerful Women
Artist Claire Salvo is painting portraits of women — mainly women of color — over the depictions of slave-holding Presidents on the front of US currency. You can see her work on Instagram; here are the portraits of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Kamala Harris, Cardi B, Billie Eilish, and Michelle Obama. Each portrait is accompanied by a time lapse video of its creation.
Amy Sherald’s Portrait of Breonna Taylor for Vanity Fair
For the cover of Vanity Fair’s September 2020 issue, guest-edited by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Amy Sherald painted a stunning portrait of Breonna Taylor.
For more than 20 years, Amy Sherald has been putting the narratives of Black families and Black people to canvas. In 2016, she became the first woman and first African American to win the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, which led to her painting Michelle Obama for the National Portrait Gallery in 2018. That oil-on-linen portrait was her first commissioned work — until Breonna Taylor.
Taylor is an “American girl, she is a sister, a daughter, and a hard worker. Those are the kinds of people that I am drawn towards,” says Sherald, who is immunosuppressed and has been unable to participate in protests. She calls this portrait a contribution to the “moment and to activism—producing this image keeps Breonna alive forever.”
Sherald’s process typically begins with taking a picture of her subject. Painting Taylor, a person she had never met, who would never be able to sit for her, presented a unique challenge. Sherald took extraordinary care in reimagining Taylor, inflecting her portrait with symbols of the 26-year-old’s life. Sherald found a young woman with similar physical attributes, studied Taylor’s hairstyles and fashion choices, and drew inspiration from things she learned about the young woman — that she had been a frontline worker in the battle against COVID-19; that her boyfriend had been about to propose marriage; that she was self-possessed, brave, loving, loved.
The Trinity Cube
When the world’s first atomic weapon exploded in New Mexico in July 1945, the energy from the blast formed a new mineral called trinitite from the desert sand. For his 2015 Trinity Cube project, artist Trevor Paglen took irradiated glass gathered from the area around where the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster occurred in 2011 and combined it with trinitite to form a blue cube. He then installed the cube in the Fukushima Exclusion Zone to continue to be irradiated.
The artwork will be viewable by the public when the Exclusion Zone opens again, anytime between 3 and 30,000 years from the present.
Turntable Acrobats Performing Centripetal Illusions
This is a short but mesmerizing clip of a performance of choreographer Yoann Bourgeois’ “Celui qui tombe” (He who falls) in which six performers move about a spinning platform. The spinning allows them to run without appearing to go anywhere and lean at seemingly impossible angles without Michael Jackson’s patented Smooth Criminal shoes. From a review in the Guardian:
Lowered into a horizontal position, this structure begins to revolve, slowly at first, then faster. Subjected to increasing centrifugal force, the dancers cluster together, their bodies inclining inwards at ever more acute angles. Individuals depart the group and make exploratory sorties, circling the platform as if battling against a great wind.
(Brief science interlude: my high school physics teacher told us never to use “centrifugal force” instead of “centripetal force” because it wasn’t actually a thing. More on that here.)
Anyway, it’s an amazing physical performance to watch. I’ve featured Bourgeois’ choreography on the site before: The Mechanics of History and A Relaxing Acrobatic Performance to Debussy’s Clair de Lune — both use trampolines to create illusions that mess with the viewer’s intuitions about gravity.
Turning Stock Charts into Landscape Art
Inspired by the charts on Robinhood and Yahoo Finance, Gladys Orteza is turning the charts of notable stocks into landscape artworks, inserting references to the company into the art. The Ford chart at the top has a truck, the Tesla chart features a rocket (a reference to SpaceX), and the Disney one includes the twin suns of Tatooine & a Jawa Sandcrawler.
Reminds me of Michael Najjar’s High Altitude series (stock market charts represented by jagged Andean mountain peaks) and Jill Pelto turning climate change graphs into art. (via waxy)
Bill Murray’s Face Inserted Into Famous Paintings
These photoshopped images of Bill Murray by Eddy Torigoe are silly and perfect. The George Washington and American Gothic are uncanny; the Napoleon one is quite good too. (via moss & fog)
A.I. Claudius
For his Roman Emperor Project, Daniel Voshart (whose day job includes making VR sets for Star Trek: Discovery) used a neural-net tool and images of 800 sculptures to create photorealistic portraits of every Roman emperor from 27 BCE to 285 ACE. From the introduction to the project:
Artistic interpretations are, by their nature, more art than science but I’ve made an effort to cross-reference their appearance (hair, eyes, ethnicity etc.) to historical texts and coinage. I’ve striven to age them according to the year of death — their appearance prior to any major illness.
My goal was not to romanticize emperors or make them seem heroic. In choosing bust / sculptures, my approach was to favor the bust that was made when the emperor was alive. Otherwise, I favored the bust made with the greatest craftsmanship and where the emperor was stereotypically uglier — my pet theory being that artists were likely trying to flatter their subjects.
Some emperors (latter dynasties, short reigns) did not have surviving busts. For this, I researched multiple coin depictions, family tree and birthplaces. Sometimes I created my own composites.
You can buy a print featuring the likenesses of all 54 emperors on Etsy.
See also Hand-Sculpted Archaeological Reconstructions of Ancient Faces and The Myth of Whiteness in Classical Sculpture.
The British Museum Is Full of Stolen Artifacts
The British Museum contains hundreds of contested items, the spoils of the British Empire’s reach (and smash n’ grab) across the globe. Some of the museum’s most popular and prized items are included: the Parthenon Marbles, the Rosetta Stone, and the Benin Bronzes. The countries from which these artifacts were taken are increasingly asking for their return.
Some of the world’s greatest cultural and historical treasures are housed in London’s British Museum, and a significant number of them were taken during Britain’s centuries-long imperial rule. In recent years, many of the countries missing their cultural heritage have been asking for some of these items back.
Benin City in Nigeria is one of those places. They’ve been calling for the return of the Benin Bronzes, hundreds of artifacts looted in 1897 when British soldiers embarked a punitive expedition to Benin. Many are now housed in the British Museum.
And it’s just the beginning. As the world reckons with the damage inflicted during Europe’s colonial global takeover, the calls for these items to be returned are getting louder and louder.
See also this piece from the NY Times: This Art Was Looted 123 Years Ago. Will It Ever Be Returned?
Lovely Interactive Display of Early 19th-Century Hand-Drawn Illustrations of Minerals
I love this zoomable interactive display of British & Exotic Mineralogy. To create it, Nicholas Rougeux collected 718 hand-drawn mineral illustrations by James Sowerby sourced from a pair of multi-volume books called British Mineralogy and Exotic Mineralogy, published between 1802 and 1817. Then he arranged them according to hue and brightness in a collage worthy of Knoll.
British Mineralogy and Exotic Mineralogy comprise 718 illustrations by James Sowerby in an effort to illustrate the topographical mineralogy of Great Britain and minerals not then known to it. Sowerby’s plates are some of the finest examples of hand-drawn mineral illustrations ever created. The detail and care with which these illustrations were created is incredible and worthy of close examination. See the samples below.
And, oh boy, he’s selling posters of it too.
Ballpoint Pen Portraits by Mark Powell
Artist Mark Powell draws portraits on repurposed canvases (old maps, newspapers, ads, postcards) with a ballpoint pen. I could have sworn I’d featured Powell’s work before, but I was probably thinking of the work of Ed Fairburn or Matthew Cusick.
The best way to check out Powell’s work is on Behance or on his website (where he has prints and originals for sale). (via colossal)
Bisa Butler’s Colorful Quilted Portraits of Black Americans
Using colorful African textiles, Bisa Butler makes large quilted portraits of Black Americans. From a statement on her gallery’s website:
In my work, I am telling the story — this African American side — of the American life. History is the story of men and women, but the narrative is controlled by those who hold the pen.
My community has been marginalized for hundreds of years. While we have been right beside our white counterparts experiencing and creating history, our contributions and perspectives have been ignored, unrecorded, and lost. It is only a few years ago that it was acknowledged that the White House was built by slaves. Right there in the seat of power of our country African Americans were creating and contributing while their names were lost to history.
In this short video, you can see how Butler creates her portraits. Look at the amazing sewing machine she uses — it’s got a steering wheel!
You can see more of her work on Instagram and in person at the Katonah Museum of Art in New York through Oct 4, 2020 and at the Art Institute of Chicago starting in November.
Update: I swapped out the previous video embedded above for a longer one that includes sound and an interview w/ Butler. (via @10engines)
Basketball Court Repaired Using the Traditional Japanese Art of Kintsugi
As part of his Literally Balling project, artist Victor Solomon fixed up a rundown basketball court, repairing the blacktop using the Japanese art of kintsugi. Traditionally, the kintsugi method involves repairing pottery with glue mixed with gold powder, which results in visible cracks, a reminder of the pottery’s past and what it’s been through. Says Solomon of the project:
With the heartbreaking beginning to 2020 and this weekend’s return of basketball — I’ve been thinking about the parallels between sport as a uniting platform to inspire healing and my ongoing experiments with the technique of Kintsugi that embellishes an objects repair with gold to celebrate it’s healing as formative part of the journey.
(via the kid should see this)
Fantastical Overclocked Urban Scenes by Cássio Vasconcellos
For his Collectives series, Cássio Vasconcellos takes crowded urban scenes and stitches them together to form fantastical patterns of human activity that look abstract from far away but detailed close up. These are great onscreen, but I’d love to see them in person someday. I could imagine looking at the highways one for hours, zooming in and out on all the details.
See also Sporting Events Compressed into Single Composite Photos. (via print)
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