Painting with blood and guts
Marc Quinn’s Alison Lapper Pregnant is a beautiful, difficult work that would not have been possible before the modern era. One of my children works with severely handicapped adults. His duties include stopping clients from smearing feces on the walls. These non-verbal, intellectually-broken adults share a means of communication with some of the more rarified intellects in …
Painting the absurd
Still life by Sandy Quang. About 18X24, oil on canvas. I’ve had several students painting and drawing a sprawling still life over the last few weeks. Sandy Quang has done a bang-up job with it. Sandy has a BFA from Pratt and is finishing her MA from Hunter College, so I must share some credit …
I do love me a good conspiracy theory
January, from the fresco cycle Cycle of the Months by the Bohemian master Venceslao, c. 1400, in Trento. A Facebook friend posted a photo of a snowball he’d attempted to melt with a lighter. Turns out he was responding to a conspiracy theory that the stuff that fell over Atlanta wasn’t real snow. (It’s pretty exhaustively debunked …
This is just the coolest thing
MegaFaces: Kinetic Facade Shows Giant 3D ‘Selfies’ from iart on Vimeo. Sometimes the coolest art is made by engineers. Consider the giant morphing wall at the entrance to Olympic Park in Sochi. The designers originally designed the wall to add realistic color, but found that too creepy. “It looked like a giant was there. I mean, it was really …
What is the lesson here?
Underpainting of lime tailings in Rockport. I was a little confused about what I intended to do with those rocks at the bottom; that’s the problem with having your work so rudely interrupted. Every day I get up wondering how much I can work. It’s been a stop-and-start recovery, and I haven’t enjoyed my enforced …