Showing posts with label fine art. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fine art. Show all posts
Jun 7, 2012
Piazza Della Signoria
This place was in my dreams long before I ever went there, and long before I knew it actually existed. i thought I was dreaming an enhanced version of my hometown.
Dec 15, 2010
OK, one more. This one is really cool:
"Which represents good and which represents evil --" he asked me, "the rifle or the rubbery, jiggling, giggling bag of bones we call the body?"
I said that the rifle was evil and the body was good.
"But don't you know that this rifle was designed to be used by Americans defending their homes and honor against wicked enemies?" he said.
So I said a lot depended on whose body and whose rifle we were talking about, that either one of them could be good or evil.
"And who renders the final decision on that?" he said.
"God?" I said.
"I mean here on Earth," he said.
"I don't know," I said.
"Painters -- and storytellers, including poets and playwrights and historians," he said. "They are the justices of the Supreme Court of Good and Evil, of which I am now a member, and to which you may belong someday!"
How was that for delusions of moral grandeur!
Yes, and now that I think about it: maybe the most admirable thing about the Abstract Expressionist painters, since so much senseless bloodshed had been caused by cockeyed history lessons, was their refusal to serve on such a court.
I said that the rifle was evil and the body was good.
"But don't you know that this rifle was designed to be used by Americans defending their homes and honor against wicked enemies?" he said.
So I said a lot depended on whose body and whose rifle we were talking about, that either one of them could be good or evil.
"And who renders the final decision on that?" he said.
"God?" I said.
"I mean here on Earth," he said.
"I don't know," I said.
"Painters -- and storytellers, including poets and playwrights and historians," he said. "They are the justices of the Supreme Court of Good and Evil, of which I am now a member, and to which you may belong someday!"
How was that for delusions of moral grandeur!
Yes, and now that I think about it: maybe the most admirable thing about the Abstract Expressionist painters, since so much senseless bloodshed had been caused by cockeyed history lessons, was their refusal to serve on such a court.
Dec 14, 2010
From Kurt Vonnegut's "Bluebeard"
At the very end, her brain-surgeon husband couldn't talk anymore, but he could still scrawl short messages with his left hand, although he was normally right handed. His left hand was all he had left that still worked a little bit.
According to Circe, this was his ultimate communiqué: "I was a radio repairman."
"Either his damaged brain believed that this was a literal truth," she said, "or he had come to the conclusion that all the brains he had operated on were basically just receivers of signals from someplace else. Do you get the concept?"
"I think I do," I said.
"Just because music comes from a little box we call a radio," she said, and here she came over and rapped me on my pate with her knuckles as though it were a radio, "that doesn't mean there's a symphony orchestra inside."
"What's that got to do with Father and Terry Kitchen?" I said.
"Maybe, when they suddenly started doing something they'd never done before, and their personalities changed, too --" she said, "maybe they had started picking up signals from another station, which had very different ideas about what they should say and do."
* * *
I have since tried out this human-beings-as-nothing-but-radio-receivers theory on Paul Slazinger, and he toyed with it some. "So Green River Cemetery is full of busted radios," he mused, "and the transmitters they were tuned to still go on and on."
"That's the theory," I said.
He said that all he'd been able to receive in his own head for the past twenty years was static and what sounded like weather reports in some foreign language he'd never heard before. He said, too, that toward the end of his marriage to Barbira Mencken, the actress, she acted "as though she was wearing headphones and listening to the 1812 Overture in stereo. That's when she was becoming a real actress, and not just another pretty girl onstage that everybody liked a lot. She wasn't even 'Barbara' anymore. All of a sudden she was 'Bar-beer-ah!' "
He said that the first he heard of the name change was during the divorce proceedings, when her lawyer referred to her as "Barbira," and spelled it for the court stenographer.
Out in the courthouse corridor afterwards, Slazinger asked her: "Whatever happened to Barbara?"
She said Barbara was dead!
So Slazinger said to her: "Then what on Earth did we waste all this money on lawyers for?"
¬
* * *
I said that I had seen the same sort of thing happen to Terry Kitchen the first time he played with a spray rig, shooting bursts of red automobile paint at an old piece of beaverboard he'd leaned against the potato barn. All of a sudden, he, too, was like somebody listening through headphones to a perfectly wonderful radio station I couldn't hear.
Red was the only color he had to play with. We'd gotten two cans of the red paint along with the spray rig, which we'd bought from an automobile repair shop in Montauk a couple of hours before. "Just look at it! Just look at it!" he'd say, after every burst.
"He'd just about given up on being a painter, and was going into law practice with his father before we got that spray rig," I said.
"Barbira was just about to give up being an actress and have a baby instead," said Slazinger. "And then she got the part of Tennessee Williams's sister in The Glass Menagerie."
* * *
Actually, now that I think back: Terry Kitchen went through a radical personality change the moment he saw the spray rig for sale, and not when he fired those first bursts of red at the beaverboard. I happened to spot the rig, and said that it was probably war surplus, since it was identical with rigs I had used in the Army for camouflage.
"Buy it for me," he said.
"What for?" I said.
"Buy it for me," he said again. He had to have it, and he wouldn't even have known what it was if I hadn't told him.
He never had any money, although he was from a very rich old family, and the only money I had was supposed to go for a crib and a youth bed for the house I'd bought in Springs. I was in the process of moving my family, much against their will, from the city to the country.
"Buy it for me," he said again.
And I said, "O.K., take it easy. O.K., O.K."
This is a very Vonneguty month for me :)
According to Circe, this was his ultimate communiqué: "I was a radio repairman."
"Either his damaged brain believed that this was a literal truth," she said, "or he had come to the conclusion that all the brains he had operated on were basically just receivers of signals from someplace else. Do you get the concept?"
"I think I do," I said.
"Just because music comes from a little box we call a radio," she said, and here she came over and rapped me on my pate with her knuckles as though it were a radio, "that doesn't mean there's a symphony orchestra inside."
"What's that got to do with Father and Terry Kitchen?" I said.
"Maybe, when they suddenly started doing something they'd never done before, and their personalities changed, too --" she said, "maybe they had started picking up signals from another station, which had very different ideas about what they should say and do."
* * *
I have since tried out this human-beings-as-nothing-but-radio-receivers theory on Paul Slazinger, and he toyed with it some. "So Green River Cemetery is full of busted radios," he mused, "and the transmitters they were tuned to still go on and on."
"That's the theory," I said.
He said that all he'd been able to receive in his own head for the past twenty years was static and what sounded like weather reports in some foreign language he'd never heard before. He said, too, that toward the end of his marriage to Barbira Mencken, the actress, she acted "as though she was wearing headphones and listening to the 1812 Overture in stereo. That's when she was becoming a real actress, and not just another pretty girl onstage that everybody liked a lot. She wasn't even 'Barbara' anymore. All of a sudden she was 'Bar-beer-ah!' "
He said that the first he heard of the name change was during the divorce proceedings, when her lawyer referred to her as "Barbira," and spelled it for the court stenographer.
Out in the courthouse corridor afterwards, Slazinger asked her: "Whatever happened to Barbara?"
She said Barbara was dead!
So Slazinger said to her: "Then what on Earth did we waste all this money on lawyers for?"
¬
* * *
I said that I had seen the same sort of thing happen to Terry Kitchen the first time he played with a spray rig, shooting bursts of red automobile paint at an old piece of beaverboard he'd leaned against the potato barn. All of a sudden, he, too, was like somebody listening through headphones to a perfectly wonderful radio station I couldn't hear.
Red was the only color he had to play with. We'd gotten two cans of the red paint along with the spray rig, which we'd bought from an automobile repair shop in Montauk a couple of hours before. "Just look at it! Just look at it!" he'd say, after every burst.
"He'd just about given up on being a painter, and was going into law practice with his father before we got that spray rig," I said.
"Barbira was just about to give up being an actress and have a baby instead," said Slazinger. "And then she got the part of Tennessee Williams's sister in The Glass Menagerie."
* * *
Actually, now that I think back: Terry Kitchen went through a radical personality change the moment he saw the spray rig for sale, and not when he fired those first bursts of red at the beaverboard. I happened to spot the rig, and said that it was probably war surplus, since it was identical with rigs I had used in the Army for camouflage.
"Buy it for me," he said.
"What for?" I said.
"Buy it for me," he said again. He had to have it, and he wouldn't even have known what it was if I hadn't told him.
He never had any money, although he was from a very rich old family, and the only money I had was supposed to go for a crib and a youth bed for the house I'd bought in Springs. I was in the process of moving my family, much against their will, from the city to the country.
"Buy it for me," he said again.
And I said, "O.K., take it easy. O.K., O.K."
This is a very Vonneguty month for me :)
Aug 22, 2010
Jun 20, 2010
Felipe Bedoya
I've had three attempts so far to use Facebook. The first one was just to see what the hell - under a false name, and just for a few weeks. The second time I went in there for marketing reasons, to publicize my portfolio. That time I used my real name, and I tried to "befriend" everyone I saw that had some kind of artwork in their profile picture. The I left again, and a couple of months ago I went back with three distinct purposes: one, to keep up with my friend Karen who moved to Canada. Two, to draw attention to my blog (hello new followers!). And three, to find an artist who's name I forgot to save, but who's works, especially the one below, left an enormous impression. When I revived my Facebook account I couldn't find him, and I was pretty depressed about it, but last week I finally saw his familiar icon in the "suggestions" box. So this time I don't intend to lose him - his name is Felipe Bedoya, he's from Columbia, and he seems to be enjoying some well-deserved success, which makes me very happy.
This is his website: http://www.felipebedoya.com/
This is his website: http://www.felipebedoya.com/
Labels:
fine art,
me me me,
people,
photography
Mar 29, 2010
Well, I stand up next to a mountain, and I chop it down with the edge of my hand.
Some days you wake up, and you don't know that you're about to have an experience that will change the way you think forever. Then again, some days you wake up in Paris, with plans to visit the Orsay museum, and it's pretty safe to expect one of these experiences.
In the Orsay museum, there is a painting by Claude Monet named "Effet de neige à Vétheuil". It hangs in a room that I'd like to be buried in, but let's leave that for another discussion. For the point I'm making today, I was lucky enough to find an online reproduction that is clear enough to show what I mean.
So, whenever I look at impressionist paintings, I like to first come up very close and swim in the brush strokes of a while, and only then walk back and watch them turning into shapes. If I manage to get my nose up to the canvas without being really sure what the whole painting looks like, that's my favorite thing.
This "Effet de neige à Vétheuil", when seen up close, has a grayish-green area with these happy, bold white brush strokes on top of it, and I couldn't figure out what they were. Clearly it's a snow landscape, but what are the straight-up pieces of snow?
Then, as I walk back, I realize it's a fence, and the white stripes are the snow behind it!
Does it look exactly how it should? Absolutely. Could I ever have thought until then that it's right to paint the background thing over the foreground thing? Hell no! Will I ever, having seen that, be that liberated in my art? Remains to be seen. Could I ever think of it all by myself the way Monet did? The inevitable answer: not in a million years.
I have managed to carry with me that lesson about how important it is to be daring and free of preconception in art. Last week I came back to it when I heard my friend and colleague Doron talk about a scene he once animated, where the character is pushing a huge boulder uphill. Knowing that in reality it's the character that moves the boulder, he first hid the boulder and put all his effort into animating the character. When it looked almost done, he brought the boulder back and tried to fit it in - it didn't work. Then he realized that the way to solve this scene was to first animate the boulder, and then to build the pushing around it.
In Hebrew there's a beautiful cynical saying: "don't let the facts confuse you". In art, when we're creating new worlds, or re-creating this world in our image, we need to first be free enough from what we know to be true.
In the Orsay museum, there is a painting by Claude Monet named "Effet de neige à Vétheuil". It hangs in a room that I'd like to be buried in, but let's leave that for another discussion. For the point I'm making today, I was lucky enough to find an online reproduction that is clear enough to show what I mean.
So, whenever I look at impressionist paintings, I like to first come up very close and swim in the brush strokes of a while, and only then walk back and watch them turning into shapes. If I manage to get my nose up to the canvas without being really sure what the whole painting looks like, that's my favorite thing.
This "Effet de neige à Vétheuil", when seen up close, has a grayish-green area with these happy, bold white brush strokes on top of it, and I couldn't figure out what they were. Clearly it's a snow landscape, but what are the straight-up pieces of snow?
Then, as I walk back, I realize it's a fence, and the white stripes are the snow behind it!
Does it look exactly how it should? Absolutely. Could I ever have thought until then that it's right to paint the background thing over the foreground thing? Hell no! Will I ever, having seen that, be that liberated in my art? Remains to be seen. Could I ever think of it all by myself the way Monet did? The inevitable answer: not in a million years.
I have managed to carry with me that lesson about how important it is to be daring and free of preconception in art. Last week I came back to it when I heard my friend and colleague Doron talk about a scene he once animated, where the character is pushing a huge boulder uphill. Knowing that in reality it's the character that moves the boulder, he first hid the boulder and put all his effort into animating the character. When it looked almost done, he brought the boulder back and tried to fit it in - it didn't work. Then he realized that the way to solve this scene was to first animate the boulder, and then to build the pushing around it.
In Hebrew there's a beautiful cynical saying: "don't let the facts confuse you". In art, when we're creating new worlds, or re-creating this world in our image, we need to first be free enough from what we know to be true.
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