Mosaic of stars at the Chicago Stained Glass Museum

While on vacation we visited the Smith Museum of Stained Glass Windows on Navy Pier on Chicago. They also had an exhibit of mosaics. This mosaic, "When the Star Line Up For You", by Yulia Hanensen of Baltimore, Maryland in 2009 is made of smalti, coal, glass and gold. It was very beautiful in person and the straight on picture captures some of it, but the stars were three dimensional and bulged out of the mosaic. The picture below from the side captures some of the effect.

I would love this for my home.

The Honest Hypocrite in Pencil

BoingBoing points to the painstaking miniature graphite sculptures of Dalton Ghetti. The letters above (click for larger) are from his alphabet sculpted from the graphite in pencil leads. I copied and pasted the letters from the whole set below.

Mario Paper Art at the UP State Fair

I hope Mason Wellman of Rock, MI, doesn't mind me posting a picture of his really cool Mario Paper Art 4H project on display at the Upper Peninsula State fair in Escanaba. It won a first place ribbon. This artwork is made entirely of colored, glued, torn paper. I think Mario looks suitable plumber like and the heroine looks worth saving. The colors of the sky, the brickwork and the shadows of the dangers that Mario faced to save her are almost surreal. I hope someone encourages this kid's artwork.

ARTCAR Delaware license on Art Car in Southeastern PA

While driving south on Rt 202 from Rt1 into Delaware we saw this Art Car with an ARTCAR Delaware license.


The driver smiled when we took a picture of the side of the car and him at a stop light. I expect he wants the attention.

Dante and Virgil in Union Square by isabel Bishop at the Delaware Art Museum

Dante and Virgil in Union Square by Isabel Bishop (1932).

The two classically dressed figures in the painting are Dante and Virgil from Dante's Inferno. of the author, the description plate says

she was inspired by her reading of a "down-to-earth" and "unpoetical" translation of Dante's Inferno, a version that dwelled on the mundane details of the underworld. The artist connected the hordes of ordinary souls that confront Dante and Virgil in hell with the hordes of human beings that daily passed through Union Square at rush hour.

Meditation by Louis Eilshemius at the Delaware Museum of Art

This painting in the modern art gallery struck me as contemplative and is in fact called Meditation and was painted by Louis Eilshemius in 1919. More interesting was his career as described on the description of the picture. I have italicized the humorous part.

"Louis Eilshemius' paintings appear naive in execution, though he trained in New York and Paris and exhibited at the Armory Show in 1913. His landscapes are peopled with nude women and share some of the dreamy qualities of Aurthur B. Davies' pictures. but he never achieved Davies' level of success. Eccentric, independently wealthy, and unappreciated by critics, Eilshemius quit painting shortly after being given his first one man show in 1920."

He finally got a show, didn't like the criticism and quit.

Botero at the Delaware Art Museum

Last weekend we visited the exhibit, "The Baroque World of Fernando Botero" at the Delaware Art Museum. You will recall that Botero is famous for his voluptuous, corpulent, or even bulbous figures in sculpture and in paintings. He seems to use the style to poke fun at important figures, though he claims that is not his intent. These twin pictures of the "President" and "First Lady" certainly suggest that.


The figures are sitting on his classic bulbous puffy horses that he loves to paint and sculpt.

One of my favorites was the Nuncio (2004), which I found humorous because the Nuncio dwarfs his servant, maybe this is Botero's opinion of the Nuncio's self importance. It was pointed out to me that both are dwarfed by the jungle.

There were several very large sculptures outside in the museum's sculpture garden just for the show.

The cartoony Rape of Europa (1999)


The stocky Hand (1985)

No image is sacred enough to escape the corpulent transformations of his paint brush. This painting of the Crucifixion for instance.


I realized that we have also seen Botero's works in Chile on our honeymoon and this sculpture, Reclining Figure (1984) at the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama.

The Honest Hypocrite as negative space between buildings

In an effort to bring you The Honest Hypocrite in as many typefaces as possible, I bring you negative space.

Lisa Reinermann of the University of Duisberg-Essen has taken pictures of the sky between buildings to generate every letter of the alphabet with the open sky as the letter defined by the buildings around it. Thus the letter is not something, but the absence of something. She was inspired when she looked up and saw the letter "Q" in Barcelona.

I couldn't wait for someone to make a program that takes each letter and allows you to type out a message using this new "font" so I did it the hard way with Microsoft Paint.

Previous fonts for The Honest Hypocrite: Old Timey Graffiti, my back tatoo, as actual buildings, alphabet agates, in lights, on a T-shirt (I really should sell these), Googlized, and with zombies.

(via BoingBoing)

What do these things have in common?

As a hook to go to a news story Fark posed the question

"What do a woman wrapped in sausages, a bag full of elephant manure, and a skinned monkey all have in common?"

What do think of first? I assumed that it was some new art exhibit.

Art?

It turns out it these are some of the things that Canadian border officials have had to confiscate at Toronto's airport customs!

More interesting is the state of art in our modern culture that the first thought is an art exhibit. This would probably fall under postmodern art.

What did you think of?

Sequential paintings by James Collinson interpreted as comics

At the Philadelphia Museum of Art several paintings placed serially suggested their interpretation as comics, if we follow the definition from the book Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art by Scott McCloud.


The right one is For Sale, while the left one is To Let and are painted by James Collinson. The paintings are hung right next to each other at the museum, I stitched my two digital photos together. The many interpretations of the titles are left to the viewer, but Wikipedia describes them as such: "the best-known of which are To Let and For Sale, both of which lightheartedly depict pretty women in situations that suggest moral temptation."

Are William Maw Egley's sequential paintings comics?

I have been reading the book Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art by Scott McCloud. It attempts to describe not only what comics are, but also to teach about the various tools of comics as well as relating these tools and comics to art and literature in general. He starts with a definition.

Comics - juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer.

One other hallmark of comics is the space between the panels. Much of the action in a comic can take place there within that space. The reader fills in what happens between the panels and takes part in telling the story.

The definition of comics could include a lot of art that you might not expect and so I began to see comics in all kinds of art during yesterday's visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I noticed some paintings that fit the definition and had an interesting story to tell in the blank space between them.


These paintings hang next to each other at the museum (I took two digital photos and joined them together) and are called "Just as the Twig is Bent" (left) and "The Tree's Inclined" (right) which William Maw Egley (see a short biography here) painted in 1861. The first picture shows the young boy playing at being soldier to impress the blond sister while the brunette looks on and then in the blank space between the pictures they have grown. Yet the scene is the same and the boy, now a young man and a real soldier, is still courting the blond sister while the dark haired sister looks on in jealousy.

How do you know?


The brunette sister can be seen in the mirror at the top of the painting on the right, fuming away. I suggest that these pictures taken together form a comic of the sort described by Scott McCloud, and tell an interesting story besides.

MoMA has the Van Gogh

One of the more popular paintings that the Museum of Modern Art in new York has is the painting The Starry Night by Van Gogh. This was at least eveident by the constant crowd of art appreciators gathered around the painting. I was excited to see the Van Gogh with my own eyes (if necessarily through the glass on the painting). Van Gogh did cut off his ear lobe, but there is a lively debate as to why and what medical condition caused him to do so.

here is the list from Wikipedia, all of these have advocates and naysayers:

• Epilepsy
• Bipolar disorder
• Sunstroke
• Ménière's disease
• Lead poisoning
• Acute Intermittent Porphyria
• Syphilis
• Absinthe Intoxication
  

I myself am a big fan of Acute Intermittent Porphyria because it sounds so cool.

How do you pronounce that name anyway? van go? van gawff? The dutch pronunciation is not "f" but more of a guttural h. It sounds pretentious when you pronounce it differently from everyone else in the English Speaking world (especially if you speak English). Or perhaps we should pronounce all names the way they are pronounced in the language of their origin. God help the Welsh!

MoMA has THE Dali

I had never been to the Museum of Modern Art in New York before, and we were not going to get to spend all day or the several days there as required so we wanted to see some of the most famous works. As we looked around I was star struck (art struck? start struck?) to find that they had the signature paintings of many of the world's most famous artists. I kept referring to them as the painting or the artist.

For instance, MoMA has the Dali, "Persistence of Memory"


I am awestruck. Surprisingly, this paining is very tiny, smaller than a regular 8.5"x11' sheet of paper. It was very detailed and vivid in real life. I am afraid that no picture I take will do these paintings justice.

This is not to be confused with the Dali Llama, which I coincidentally found today. (found here drawn by John).


Am I an art criminal for pairing these two together here? I don't think so, Dali would have perhaps approved, and the whole idea of the current post-modern age is to pair the sacred with the profane, or the transcendent with the banal.

The web helps everyone to be an animator!

The visit to MoMA inspired me to doodle. Drawn pointed to PicTaps, the work of motion designer Masayuki Kido. (They found it through Cartoonist Dave Roman)

I drew my traditional Spike and the magic of the web and a person with some creative programming skills brings him to life. Click on the embedded player above or on this link to see my creation.

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There are almost three hundred thousand of these things. Some people would think nothing of a dancing crucifix, Mickey Mouse or other sacred images from our culture, plus other pictures you might see in a stall in the toilet at the bus station and other profane images of our culture (not going to link to those). Put links to your own or your favorites in the comments.

Meet the Artist in Santiago

When we were at the Museo de Bellas Artes we were captivated by the work of the artist Sergio Roggerone set off in a gallery off the main hall. He has a modern style, with an almost cartoony flair yet is evocative of baroque and byzantine religious art.

While we were there (11/17/2006) we wanted to get a program of his exhibit and we copied all of the web addresses down in the seemingly impossible hope of acquiring one of these pieces some day. As we hunted down a program, the woman in the gift shop was monopolized by a group. Lynn found the program and starts frantically pointing at the leader of the group in the gift shop. It was Sergio Roggerone himself! That day was the opening of the exhibit so he was there to see it. We got his autograph and information that purchasing the art was possible (www.roggerone.net seems to be defunct, don't bother with that one). I do love the chance to meet an artist or author of works which I admire.

Here is my favorite, a triptych called Madona Intergalactica. It is very three dimensional and Byzantine. Unfortunately it is sold.

La Reina Azul - The Blue Queen.

A mermaid.

There were many other interesting works there which can be seen at his website. Please do pardon the quality of my pictures, I had to sneak them with my crappy Treo camera instead of a good one.