Household Surrealism: Clothesline Animals
Multidisciplinary artist Helga Stentzel cleverly hangs laundry items on clotheslines to make abstract animal shapes. You can find more of her household surrealism on Instagram. (via colossal)
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kottke.org posts about art
Chris Ware on Richard Scarry
Well! In the Yale Review, Chris Ware (one of my favorite cartoonists) writes about Richard Scarry (one of my favorite children’s book authors) and Cars and Trucks and Things That Go (one of my favorite books).
This year is the 50th anniversary of Scarry’s 1974 Cars and Trucks and Things That Go, which strikes me as a commemoration worthy of ballyhoo, especially now that, as a dad myself, I’ve spent so much time ferrying my own daughter to and from school and birthday parties in various cars that-well, mostly goed. (I’ve owned five automobiles in my life, all of them cheap, one of which smoked and required the driver’s side door to be kept shut with a bungee cord hooked to the opposite armrest, stretched across both driver and passenger. What can I say? I was a young cartoonist on a cartoonist’s budget.)
Unlike those budget vehicles, however, the new deluxe Penguin Random House anniversary edition of Cars and Trucks and Things That Go is lavishly well-made, attentively reprinted with sharp black lines and warm, rich, watercolors. It includes an especially lively afterword by Scarry’s son Huck, in which he explains, using language even a kid can understand, how his dad wrote and drew the book, as well as hinting at what it was like to grow up as the son of arguably the world’s most popular and successful children’s book author.
Reader, I have never clicked “buy” faster than I did when ordering the 50th anniversary version of Cars and Trucks and Things That Go — I’m very much looking forward to peeking behind the scenes. But also, do read Ware’s whole piece…it’s an inspiring review of Scarry’s career & impact and contains all manner of little observations like these:
(Lowly was perhaps the first children’s book animal character with a real nod to the ADA and the myth of “dis”-ability, and cheerfully makes his linear form work in all sorts of inspiring and disarmingly moving ways.)
And:
But the more one looks at his work, the more one sees how the European daily grocery trip, the walk to a nearby shop or tradesman’s guild, the tiny apple car fit for a worm are not part of the blowout-all-in-for-oneself-oil-fueled-free-for-all toward which America was barreling in the late 1960s.
If Adam Picked the Apple
From Danielle Coffyn, a poem called If Adam Picked the Apple. Here’s the first bit of it:
If Adam Picked the Apple
There would be a parade,
a celebration,
a holiday to commemorate
the day he sought enlightenment.
We would not speak of
temptation by the devil, rather,
we would laud Adam’s curiosity,
his desire for adventure
and knowing.
You can read the rest of the poem here and preorder her poetry collection of the same name.
BTW, the hilarious painting is The Rebuke of Adam and Eve (1626) by Domenichino. That Adam, what a wanker.
Free Rothko
From French street artist OakOak, a reminder that art is everywhere and that art comes from everywhere. From their website and Instagram, here are a few more pieces that caught my eye:
And ha, I just noticed this one, a riff on Hokusai’s The Great Wave.
Artfully Arranged Junkyard Objects
In a continuation and tweak of his Coletivos project (which I posted about previously), Cássio Vasconcellos took aerial photos of scrapyards and arranged the junked cars, planes, trains, and other objects into dense photographic collages.
OVER presents a scenario that seems to point to a dystopian future, but which, in fact, brings together fragments of the present. The exaggerated agglomeration denounces the misleading idea of “disposal”, given that objects do not cease to exist in the world when we throw them away. Rather, they inhabit other places.
This video shows the artist’s process, from hanging out the side of a helicopter to arranging all the items in Photoshop.
The Distorted Paper Collages of Lola Dupré
Collage artist Lola Dupré makes these wonderfully weird images of exaggerated objects, animals, and people. You find more of Dupré’s work on her website and on Instagram. (via colossal)
Imprints of Nature
Maximilian Prüfer makes art in collaboration with nature and animals like ants & snails. Using paper with a very sensitive coating on it, he’s able to record the slightest moments of activity, like a raindrop or an ant’s footstep. Here’s a video of some ants leaving their marks:
And some rain drops:
You can find more of Prüfer’s work on his website and on Instagram.
10-Minute Art Challenge: Hiroshige’s ‘Sudden Rain’
The NY Times has been doing these challenges every Friday where you sit and look at one piece of art for 10 minutes. Last week featured a woodblock print by Utagawa Hiroshige called Great Bridge: Sudden Rain at Atake, a piece that Vincent van Gogh had in his personal collection and painted a version of himself.
I didn’t expect to last the entire 10 minutes — a slow start to the day (dentist, errands) had me feeling rushed and a computer with an infinite number of apps & websites just a tab or click away is not the ideal medium for this exercise — but once I got going (or, rather, once I slowed down), it was pretty easy. (via laura olin)
Great Art Explained: Van Gogh’s Last Painting
It’s been awhile since I’d checked in on one of my favorite YouTube channels, Great Art Explained. In the past year, curator James Payne has done videos on Duchamp, Manet, Magritte, and that one painting by Caspar David Friedrich (you know the one). But this one, on Vincent van Gogh’s final painting, particularly caught my attention:
The mystery of what [his final painting] was and where it was painted would take over a century to solve, and that was only thanks to a worldwide epidemic. What it means is that we now have a deeper insight into what van Gogh’s final last hours were like — before his tragic death.
“The Work of a Madman”
“Barbaric.” A “nightmare of vulgarity.” “Monstrous.” “A violent mess.” “The work of a madman.” Those are just some of the reactions that Henri Matisse’s Dance received after its public debut in 1910. In this video, Evan Puschak shares How Matisse Revolutionized Color In Art with this painting and other Fauvist work.
Layered People
I quite like these layered oil paintings by Moldovan artist Pon Arsher. You can find her latest work, as well as several behind-the-scenes videos, on Instagram.
Irving Penn: Small Trades
In 1950, master photographer Irving Penn set up a simple studio in Paris and started to photograph people of all kinds of professions, each wearing their work clothes and carrying the tools of their trade.
Working in the tradition of representing the petits métiers, Penn photographed fishmongers, firefighters, butchers, bakers, divers, baseball umpires, chefs, bike messengers, and sellers of goods of all kinds.
Penn continued photographing workers in New York and London, collecting the photos into a project called Small Trades.
Penn said of the project:
Like everyone else who has recorded the look of tradesmen and workers, the author of this book was motivated by the fact that individuality and occupational pride seem on the wane. To a degree everyone has proved right, and since these photographs were made, London chimney sweeps have all but disappeared and in New York horseshoers — hard to find in 1950 — now scarcely exist.
A possible companion to Penn’s photographs: Studs Terkel’s Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do. (Fun fact: Terkel and his editor got the idea for Working from Richard Scarry’s children’s book, What Do People Do All Day?)
Hokusai’s The Great Wave Now on Display at the Art Institute of Chicago
The Art Institute of Chicago has three copies of Katsushika Hokusai’s iconic work The Great Wave Off Kanagawa in its collection and one of them has been removed from storage and is back on display in the museum until Jan 6, 2025.
The Great Wave has not been on view in the Art Institute galleries for five years because, like all prints, it is susceptible to light damage and must rest a minimum of five years between showings to preserve its colors and vibrance.
Here’s a video of the print being removed from storage as well as a brief comparison of their three prints:
For other places you can see The Great Wave on display, check out Great Wave Today.
Big Hockey Players, Itty-Bitty Rink
For his 2012-13 piece The Obstruction of Action by the Existence of Form, artist R. Eric McMaster built a hockey rink less than 1/10th the size of a regulation rink and had two full hockey teams play what has to be the most frustrating game of hockey ever. This is definitely a metaphor for something but I don’t quite know what.
Detailed Miniature “Sculptures of Urban Decay”
Australian artist Joshua Smith makes extremely detailed and realistic miniatures of grimy, graffitied buildings — he calls them “sculptures of Urban Decay”.
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