Arts

Do you all experience flow? Or rather, as I think everyone does at times, do you experience it often? Obviously I have written plenty of words in my life, but this is not generally something you experience when writing blog posts unless you are maybe excoriating someone in an unnecessarily profane way that is–fundamentally–unfair. Like, I hear from other people that this is a thing that might happen, I personally would never stoop to such levels, not even if I were blogging about J.D. Vance.

So, painting something, not a wall, that lets you achieve flow. Maybe even a wall, truly! I paint things with tiny details, sometimes setting the stork scissors to gnaw at the smallest sable brush till only a few hairs remain, fit for the fishscale mail on a lead orc figurine. Not lately, though. No, because I have been WRITING whole-ass NOVELS. Now, you will hear of my speed and think, huh, those must all suck because that is some Danielle Steele shit and first of all, how dare you. How dare you! Danielle Fernandes Dominique Schuelein-Steel has written 190 books, have you? Separately, her books do actually suck.
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I was walking with my teenage son in a large shop the other day, and we passed by the children’s section. I saw a duvet cover that so much reminded me of Kretk – or, in English translation, the Little Mole. We were recalling which of the Kretk films that we saw we liked most – but basically, we liked almost all of them. Thinking of the Little Mole brought back happy memories.

Krtek is a series of animations that have been made by Zdenek Miler in the 1950s and 1960 in Czechoslovakia. It has a very interesting artistic signature: not only the pleasing and colourful visual arts, and the typical light, cheerful and romantic music that would come with it; lots of anti-modernist themes (such as in this one that I just found on YouTube where the little mole tries to stop the damage a bulldozer will do to its flowers); and, of course, animals that are all humanized, as they are in many movies for children. Not all animals are nice, by the way; one of my favourite Krtek movies is one where there are large animals (wolves?) who are a danger to the other animals, and by painting themselves and standing on each other’s shoulders (and thus pretending to be huge, much more dangerous monsters themselves), they are able to chase away the wolves. (NB – I have this from my memory from watching this a pretty long time ago, so not 100% reliable!).

With for many of our readers the holiday season before the door, I just wanted to share this with those of you who have never heard of the Little Mole. If you have small children, I bet they (and perhaps you too) might like to see some of it, tucked away under a blanket on the couch. Happy holidays!

More than forty years ago, before I went to university, I was living in Paris and became an “organized sympathiser”, a candidate for membership, of the Trotskyist sect Lutte Ouvrière. The training for people like me consisted, of course, of reading some Marxist classics, but also of making one’s way through a list of novels that included, as I recall, Zola’s Germinal, Christiane Rochefort’s Les Stances à Sophie, Malraux’s Les Conquérants and La Condition Humaine, Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, London’s The Iron Heel and certainly some others that I forget. One of the books that I never got round to was Ousmane Sembène’s Les Bouts de bois de Dieu, and I had more or less forgotten about it until a contact on social media with whom I share many mutual friends reported reading it after a trip to Senegal. So I thought I would give it a go.

It is one of the most remarkable novels I have read in the past several years and deserves to be widely knows as a classic. It is an epic constructed somewhat in the manner of a great Russian novel (think of Grossman’s Life and Fate, for example) and centres on a strike of African railway workers, against the French rail company and the colonial administration in 1947-8. The strikers are poor, many of them are illiterate, they are Muslims, many are in polygamous families and they are regarded by the French as savages and by their religious leaders as people who ought to be grateful and know their place. Yet they have their dignity and cannot accept that they are worth less than the whites who work on the railway, that they should have no entitlement to family support, or to a pension in their old age. So they strike, heedless of the advice of their elders who had done the same ten years before.
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I’ve donated some of my art to a fundraiser to benefit various charities supporting Ukrainians. I’m inviting you to participate. If my art doesn’t speak to you – I get it, it’s a very particular style – then I hope you’ll consider bidding on other works representing diverse media from oil to watercolor to mixed media in numerous styles depicting varied topics. Sunflowers are popular, but there is lots of other content to choose from. Don’t think of this as frivolously (is there such a thing?;-) buying art, think of it as making a donation while getting a piece of art in return.

The auction is hosted by the great art site Daily Paintworks. They are letting artists list their pieces for free and are not taking any commissions. Once you pay for your piece, the artist donates to the charity they designated and ships you your piece. (I will send proof of donation to Médecins Sans Frontières.)

Ukrainians need our help, both those still in Ukraine as well as the millions of refugees (over 3.5 million in less than a month!) who’ve left everything behind. There are countless ways to lend support and if this approach doesn’t inspire you, I hope you are helping in other ways. For those living in Europe, chances are refugees are already in your town. You can donate housing, food, furniture, kitchen appliances, your time, money, the list is endless. Those of you elsewhere can probably help best through donations. Whatever it is, please do assist and encourage others to do the same. Thank you.

Note that when I post this on CT, the second set of images will only have 17 hours left of the auction so by the time you read this, they may be gone. (I’m thrilled to see that they’ve all been bid on already so I won’t be relisting them.) There is lots of other art to choose from so please check out all the work. Or if you are an artist yourself, consider donating your own art.

The Geto Boys Bushwick Bill died Sunday night of pancreatic cancer at 52. The Geto Boys were a band I didn’t much listen to when they were at their peak, although my brother was a huge fan. I was turned off by their misogynistic lyrics, which were extreme. My bro finally convinced me of how awesome they were, easing me into it with “My Mind’s Playing tricks on Me,” their best-known song. I just learned that their iconic cover for “We Can’t Be Stopped” was shot for real in the hospital when Bushwick Bill had been shot in the eye, declared dead, and then hyped up to shoot the cover. Which is insane. As a group they are kind of just nuts, honestly, but in an amazing way–and I would say this craziness helped them introduce the craziness of Southern hip-hop to the world. Not to say the South itself is crazy, ha ha fooled you, it is. My beautiful home state of South Carolina is almost incomprehensibly, baroquely crazy. When there’s one copperhead in the yard, you have to not only shoot it but wait around to shoot the other one, because they’re like Sith Lords and there’s always two of them, and they might bite one of the several pit-bull mix mutts you definitely have! Having to shoot a shark you caught off the edge of the boat because you don’t want a shark thrashing around in the bottom of the boat, and it’s a good thing you had a handgun on your damn boat! Actual voodoo! Anyhoo.

And the song from which the chorus is sampled is also awesome (strangely quiet at link liked bootlegged uploads often are, but correct speed:

Roar has a concept EP about Phil Spector imprisoning his Ronnie Spector (formerly of the Ronettes) in their mansion, surrounded by barbed wire fences and guard dogs. It is the greatest thing to happen to me in months. Actually though. My younger daughter recommended it to me strongly, but I didn’t listen to it right away. More fool me, because that was like a week and a half I wasn’t listening to it on repeat, and I’ll never get those days back. It’s creepy and beautiful and combines wall of sound type sections with terrifyingly beautiful rock I don’t totally know how to characterize. I got to tell her in turn that she would like Apples in Stereo, which she does due to certain transitive properties of liking music. (They were in a loose group of bands including Neutral Milk Hotel, so you know they are good.) There is only one thing for which Roar should be criminally prosecuted, and that is that both the songs and the EP itself are too goddamn short. My second favorite song, Duck or Ape, is 1:39! It’s verse chorus verse chorus achingly beautiful bridge to nowhere that’s two. Lines. Long. I feel that 2:59 (with some wiggle room) is the perfect length for a song, accepting that Sufjan Stevens can make me cry for 6:25 or Joanna Newsom can write songs about the tragic outcome of interstellar battles and I’m cool with that. (More on the 2:59 anon.)

“Christmas Kids” is about that time Phil Spector got ahold of a pair of twins and brought the children to Ronnie as a Christmas present. Surprise! Actual human beings as a gift! Bet you wonder where I got them! The children (they adopted one more) came out much later to say that they were imprisoned also and at times kept in cages. Ronnie broke free, barefoot, with the help of her mom. She gave up all future music earnings because she was so terrified he would kill her after she escaped as he had always threatened. Phil Spector didn’t go to jail on the back of any of this? He had to murder someone first? I agree that he’s a towering genius of production and song writing, but uh…how exculpatory is that really? I’m sure Ronnie and the children will feel better if they forgive him.

Strangely quiet but normal speed: Christmas Kids

Last two lines, why you got to pierce my heart like that and then leave me to press repeat until my thirst is slaked? Duck or Ape

I’m done with Art Young, but I had an afterthought. My final quote from Young mentioned earlier imaginative greats – like Jacques Callot. In my experience, everyone knows about Hieronymous Bosch but, oddly, fewer are familiar with Callot. So I uploaded one of his more impressive pieces to Flickr (I just snagged it from Wikimedia). I can’t say it’s Seussian, exactly. But it’s pretty great old stuff. From 1635.

Today I conclude my reflections on Art Young, occasioned by the great new book about him [amazon associates link]. For those disinclined to purchase, I found a copy of one of his books, On My Way (1928), in free PDF form. (Doc announces itself as legal. No copyright renewal, so it seems.) Anyway, in honor of my earlier, literary maps post: say! the endpapers make a swell map!

But the Art path I shall trace in this post is not from Monroe, WI, to Bethel, Conn. A few years back I published a survey article on ‘caricature and comics‘. On the one hand, caricature is a minor art form – not necessarily low but distinctly niche. Funny line drawings of celebrities. On the other hand, formally, caricature is very old and very broad. This produces categorial dissonance. Caricature techniques are at the root of styles we don’t think of as caricature. This is the main thesis of Gombrich’s Art and Illusion, by the by. (No one seems to have noticed, but it’s true.)

In that essay I make some points with reference to the case of caricaturist-turned-Expressionist, Lyonel Feininger, but I could have used Art Young.

But let me start at the beginning, regarding Young. I like reading stories of youthful artistic influence, so here is his, pieced together from the new book and other sources. [click to continue…]

I don’t have time for a full appreciation of Art Young today, but I’ll re-recommend the new Fantagraphics book about him [amazon associates link] and advance one art historical thesis: Young was a significant influence on the style of Dr. Seuss. I have never seen this point made before. I didn’t realize it myself until a week ago. As an avid, amateur Seussologist, and student of lines of graphic influence in American cartoon art in the early 20th Century, I’m interested to see it. [click to continue…]

I went there for the open market, I stayed for the open art studios. It was a warm Fall Sunday and I was excited to check out the street fair at SoWa Open Market to look at local artists’ creative goods. That experience was fine, but, perhaps due to my rather high standards thanks to the numerous excellent street fairs in summer Chicagoland, it did not inspire me too much. This may have been partly due to the fact that such art fairs tend to showcase designs of the geographical locality so my having no emotional connection to Boston left me rather detached. Or I am reading too much into it and the works were just not that exciting.

What really got me engaged instead were the dozens of art studios open to visitors to browse. I looked at all sorts of paintings and photography, but my favorite was Brian Murphy‘s wire art, an example of which illustrates this post. Not only did I like the shapes of the wire sculptures that in many cases were quite expressive, but the artist infuses humor into many of his works through their captions. I spent quite some time browsing his various pieces, some surprising in their simplicity, others impressive in their complexity. Next time you are in the Boston area, I recommend checking out these studios if they happen to be open when you are there. It’s conveniently accessible with public transportation.

The sign of the piece pictured here reads:
Brian Murphy, While Alice Was Ready To Admit He Was A Rather Amazing Egg She Feared The Mess He Would Make When He Inevitably Fell, Wire Sculpture, $200

Today’s art post inspiration comes from an unlikely source: JAMA Opthamalogy. The article “Evidence That Leonardo da Vinci Had Strabismus” makes the case that the artist’s exceptional rendering of 3-D in 2-D was in part thanks to his eye condition sometimes referred to as wandering eye. The author, opthomologist Christopher Tyler of City, University of London, examined six pieces thought to be depicting Leonardo da Vinci: “David (Andrea del Verrocchio); Young Warrior (Andrea del Verrocchio); Salvator Mundi (da Vinci); Young John the Baptist (da Vinci); Vitruvian Man (da Vinci) and another possible da Vinci self-portrait.” (quoted from the university’s press release). Ars Technica’s coverage of the piece has helpful visuals. There seems to be disagreement in the art community about whether all of those art pieces depict Leonardo da Vinci, but this is a topic Tyler had already researched earlier. His argument seems convincing to me and is an interesting revelation about the condition under which some artists did that work. Apparently other famous artists also had strabismus (e.g., Rembrandt) or other vision impairments (e.g., Monet, O’Keeffe). I appreciate the angle the Washington Post’s coverage takes on this at the end noting that this should give people with eye-alignment disorders some boost in confidence to counter the discrimination they sometimes face both on the job market and in social situations.

One fun aspect of public art is that you can stumble into it without any planning on your part to have an artistic experience. Such was the case when I found myself staring at columns of colanders and looking up at fruits and vegetables hanging from pots and pans in City Hall Park in New York. The exhibition is by B. Wurtz who likes to draw on everyday objects in his work. Since I am a huge fan of reusing objects, this appeals to me a great deal.

Another neat aspect of public art in such a location is that by taking a step, you can get an entirely different visual experience. With both trees and scyscrapers in the background, this is not an exaggeration. The pictures on the exhibition site were taken in daylight while mine (see album on Flickr) were taking during dusk so they offer different views from that perspective as well. The trees will be on display in this park through December 7, 2018.

In a small town in the French-speaking part of Switzerland is a fantastic exhibit dedicated entirely to Star Wars. It showcases several artists using very different media to pay homage to the popular series. From digitally-edited photographs of classical sculptures to various creative 3D-renderings of well-known characters, from photos of lego scenes to drawings in countless styles, the exhibit offers lots of interesting visual stimuli. It’s hard to pick a favorite. I very much appreciated Kyle Hagey’s pieces and can’t believe I had never come across them before. Conveniently, you can view and buy copies of his work on Etsy. There is also a free-to-play Star Wars pinball machine on the top floor of the museum as well as an old-school video game. This is a must-see for any Star Wars fan. The show runs through Oct 14th. That doesn’t leave a lot of time to visit and as far as I can tell, sadly it is not a traveling exhibition. While not the same experience, I did upload some of my photos here for those who are interested, but can’t make it there in person.

We visited the Cave of Pech Merle yesterday, which is famous for its prehistorical paintings of bisons, mammoths, horses, and other animals. Those paintings have been made by people who, according to our guide, were almost identical to us, except, she said, that they were taller than us – on average 1 meter 85 centimeter. Pech Merle has a website that is a bit slow (at least, given my present internet-conditions), but it has a very interesting part where you can enter the cave virtually.
I’ve visited many caves in my life, but never one with prehistorical paintings, and was very impressed. If you ever get a chance to see them, do go see them! Although the crown piece of the cave are two dotted horses, which are large and in excellent condition and include something of an optical illusion (avant la lettre?) — I was especially touched by the painting of the hands of the people. There are a number of hands, painted in black, close to the dotted horses, presumably by a man (or several men); and then there is this single hand in red, which is presumably from a woman. At first, I was surprised to note that the hands touched me more than the animals (which may be seen as artistically more sophisticated). I guess that seeing a hand brings the presence of the human being closer than seeing a non-human animal. People, almost identical to us, who made paintings in a cave, some 20.000 years ago, that we can still watch today…