About commission availability or personal news

Contact for info: michele.deadred (at) gmail.com

[updated February 2011]

If you have emailed me regarding possible commissions during this month (February) or earlier, I will still be available for work at the timeframe I have previously mentioned. I'm currently really busy until March. I'm always available for discussing commissions for a later date, of course :)

If any studio is hiring, I'm interested in full-time on-site work.

I'm a quiet and hardworking little geeky girl. I draw real nice, learn new skills fast, and I'd like to think I have a great sense of humor (penis jokes count, right?). I'm also able to move anywhere: I have no pets, no babies and no addictions.. well except for coffee :P If I can get caffeinated at your studio, I'm good to go!

ONE LOVELY DRAWING, part nine

There is obviously no such thing as the single greatest drawing in the history of the world. It would be foolish to think about rating art that way.

However, if there was such a drawing...



...it would probably be this one by Michelangelo. It is a preparatory drawing for Michelangelo's illustrations of the Bible for the Sistine Chapel.



I can't think of any object with more grace or beauty with which to end 2006.

This drawing is of the Libyan Sibyl who foretold "the coming of the day when that which is hidden shall be revealed." She had the power of prophecy because she was by birth half mortal and half divine: "An immortal nymph was my mother, my father an eater of corn."

I am just a lowly corn eater myself but I have enjoyed sharing these lovely images with you in 2006 and I wish all of you the happiest of new years.

ADVICE FROM ARTISTS

I generally sympathize with Matisse's view that artists should cut their tongues out so they won't be tempted to explain their work. It may not show, but I do try on this blog to avoid adding to the sum total of BS written about art in the world.

Here are some comments about the artistic process from illustrators or other artists that I think are particularly insightful:

Don't stop to admire a partly completed sketch.
--Robert Fawcett

On always doing your best work: The argument that "it won't be appreciated anyway" may be true, but in the end this attitude does infinitely more harm to the artist than to his client.
--Robert Fawcett

On being accused of making art like a madman: There is only one difference between a madman and me. I'm not mad
--Salvador Dali

What one has most to strive for is to do the work with a great amount of labor and study in such a way that it may appear, however much it was labored, to have been done almost quickly and almost without any labor, and very easily, although it was not.
--Michelangelo

I ain't yet worked out whether I like girls because I like curvy lines or if I like curvy lines because I like girls.
-- some artist on the internet whose name I forgot to write down

On when to put the finishing touches on an illustration: The longer the idea can be considered in the abstract, the better.
--Robert Fawcett

There are moments when art attains almost to the dignity of manual labor.
-- Oscar Wilde

A FEW SMART DRAWINGS

The illustrator Fred Ludekens said "drawing is thinking." Here are some wonderful examples of what makes visual thinking better than verbal thinking:


copyright The New Yorker

Images can convey complex thoughts with more immediacy, universality and ambiguity than words can offer.



For example, William Steig's drawing above of the blissful young lovers in the cottage makes a wicked statement about the darker, proprietary side of bliss by chaining the flower in the front yard:



As another example, the Foote Cone & Belding drawing below shows that creativity and logic are two sides of the same phenomenon by placing them on opposite sides of a moebius strip-- which only has one side.


copyright Foote, Cone & Belding

Next, the symbols chosen by the brilliant Saul Steinberg-- Uncle Sam facing off against a fatted Thanksgiving turkey in the bull ring, presided over by the statue of liberty and Santa Claus-- juxtapose categories rich with meaning in ways that words with definitions just can't.


copyright The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

How many sentences would it take to explain such thoughts in words? Good visual ideas dance where words cannot go. More importantly, how many related ideas would you miss along the way if you were led to a conclusion by linear sentences, rather than by rolling these images around in your mind?

Some sequential artists and graphic novelists seem to think that intelligent drawings are merely drawings accompanied by word balloons containing intelligent words. For me, this view surrenders the real strength and potency of the visual medium.

Between us (and the body). Shen Wei

A Chinese photographer moves to the U.S. Here, he discovers bodies. Bodies as social places. Bodies as identifiers, as the places of definition. How does the place one belongs to relate to the body one owns (isn't this a beautiful expression? to own a body...)?
Shen Wei's series Almost Naked is a guided tour of identity caught in body. Or of the body as caught up in identity. Whichever way you put it, there is a feeling of self, that is, that the pictures are not of the person's body, but of a person as she reveals/hides herself. There is a certain foreigner's curiosity of how the others deal with who they are, what they are, and what they can present to someone else. This curiosity, and the way the subjects deal with it, is one of the most delightful aspects of Wei's work.
There is sometimes a feeling of a dangerous zone, of a fragile state that almost makes one look away, as if there was something indecent about showing oneself. As if it were an exposition and not a capturing of something. Then again, curiosity is stronger and I dare you not to look at all the pictures with great attention. The attraction of intimacy, combined with a gentle sense of humor, is right on the spot. Shen Wei says:

Once I achieve the trust of the model, I can feel their energy and their desire to be seen and be explored but at the same time still reserve some for themselves. It is in those Almost Naked moments that my subjects are the most exquisite, when things occur, and what generally is not displayed initially in public is exposed. I emotionally and physically strip the sitters when the trust and friendship is built between us. The key to building that trust and friendship is to make them feel at ease with conversation and personalized emotion contact. It can sometimes be psychological, sometimes more sensual, sometimes more or less sincere, depending upon the personality of the sitters and the intimate level of the environment. It is the art of psychology within making art.

None of the people smile.

I found this through the placebokatz blog, which to my great joy (as always when that happens) has put a link to this humble page.

ARTISTS IN LOVE, part six

The illustrator Rockwell Kent (1882 - 1971) loved humanity with great passion. Unfortunately, he was an utter jerk when it came to loving individual human beings.

Kent was famous for his illustrations for Moby Dick, Candide, Shakespeare and Chaucer. He was also the author of several acclaimed books, an explorer, an architect, a dairy farmer, a carpenter, a fisherman, a sailor and an outspoken advocate of socialism who was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize by the Soviet Union for his work to achieve peace and brotherhood.



Kent had many wild adventures around the world. He hiked through jungles and over mountains. He explored islands and traveled on freighter ships. Once he attempted to sail around Cape Horn (at the southern tip of South America) in a ramshackle life boat that he bought for a few dollars. Wrote one commentator:

This region, boasting probably the world's worst climate, is buffeted incessantly by winds, swiftly alternating with rain, hail and snow. It is the legendary graveyard of ships and sailors, and Kent [had] the half-formed idea of trying his mettle against the hazardous adventure of sailing "round the Horn."

He was shipwrecked in Greenland and Alaska and lived for extended periods of time north of the Arctic Circle in desolate places like Ubekendt Ejland (Unknown Island). But his first love was painting and he painted almost every day.



Kent's artistic mentor was the painter Abbott Thayer. While living as a guest in Thayer's house, Kent married Thayer's 17 year old niece over the objection of her family. Four months after the wedding, he resumed a love affair with an old flame. Kent went on to have torrid affairs with a variety of girlfriends while his devoted wife stayed at home and bore him five children. (When one of his girlfriends became pregnant, Kent and his wife had to sell everything they owned to pay her off.) When his fifth child was born, Kent decided that his wife's clinging ways were unbearable, so the couple divorced. Kent learned from this experience and made sure all of his future children were illegitimate. Kent's second wife, Frances, may have hoped Kent was willing to settle down because he built a dream house with her out in the country and named it "Asgaard" after the Norse home of the gods. But at the housewarming party that Kent and Frances held for their friends, Kent overheard someone planning a dangerous boat expedition to Greenland and immediately abandoned Frances and Asgaard for this new adventure. Kent did marry a third time, to a woman the age of his youngest daughter.

Kent courted these women using artwork and poetry, and he praised their beauty with great eloquence. He always felt bad (and a little surprised) when they took the news of his infidelity so hard. One former showgirl committed suicide, jumping to her death into the sea. Perhaps it would have been difficult for a wife to accompany Kent on his rugged travels. Kent recounted one particularly horrifying shipwreck in his autobiography, It's Me O Lord:

Against the hurricane that woke us, sweeping down off the lofty plateau of the inland ice... we could do nothing but... hang onto our anchor ropes. And once the anchors failed to hold, the game was up.

Kent's tiny boat capsized. He and his two companions dragged themselves to shore and trekked 36 hours over rugged terrain with no shelter before they stumbled across an Inuit fisherman. None of them spoke Inuit, yet Kent managed to negotiate food, shelter and a young Inuit native girl.



Even though Kent had no space for a wife on his journeys, he always managed to find room for his paints, brushes and canvases. Following the shipwreck mentioned above, Kent returned to salvage his art supplies and spent two months painting that "vast wonderland of sea and mountain."

I have long been fascinated by the selfishness of artists. Some artists place the demands of their art above the welfare of their family and friends. Sometimes the resulting art is so beautiful, the trade off seems worth it to those of us who aren't personally affected. But it is always difficult to draw a bright line between artists who make sacrifices to protect their art and those who are merely self centered. Through the generations, a lot of collateral damage has been caused by artists fighting for their artistic lives.

Kent lived to be 89. Despite all his advetures, he seemed to have had a wistful old age. In one of his books, he described a poem-song he had learned from the Eskimoes about an old man who remembers

old times when I had strength to cut and flay great beasts.

Three great beasts could I cut up while the sun slowly went his way across the sky.

A sick old man could no longer hope to hang onto a woman, so he wishes his

woman away in the house of another,

in the house of a man who may be her refuge, firm and sure as the strong winter ice.

Sad at heart, I wish her away in the house of a stronger protector now that I myself lack strength even to rise from where I lie.

Yinka Shonibare and the artist's freedom

Yinka Shonibare, Scramble for Africa (2003)

Shonibare's most famous works play on the idea of origin and power. The first lecture is clear: headless people are scrambling for Africa. They are dressed in European clothes, but made of African fabric. They are false. But this goes further. The type of cloth they use, called batik, is used throughout Africa (and not only) and considered a local tradition. But, as Shonibare says, that is not the case:

...the fabrics are not authentically African – they were produced by the Dutch in the 19th century and then subsequently by the English for sales to the African market.

That makes the situation even more absurd and scary. What is left of Africa? And what can be left for Africa?

But there is another issue related to Shonibare that has been interesting me more. The freedom of the artist vs. the necessity of his functioning well in the system.
Let's start off with this:

Yinka Shonibare, The Swing (after Fragonard) (2001)

How much does the artist need to know about what he is doing?

And really the idea behind it is to draw a parallel with the relationship between the contemporary first world and third-world countries. I want to show that behind excessive lifestyles there are people who have to provide the labour to make this kind of lifestyle happen.

But generally I think I made a piece of work about this painting because I actually admire the work very much. And I like the contradiction of taking something that’s supposedly ‘ethnic’ and putting that onto classical European painting.

All this seems fairly light, naive, compared to what the critics have to say about Yinka Shonibare's works. Does this mean he is unaware of the worlds he is creating? Is he simply using strong imagery that brings about a huge load of references? Possibly. Does that change anything? Does that make him a worse artist? Should the artist be his own critic? Should he be a philosopher as well?

Obviously, the artist part of being an artist is to make art. And then, see what happens. That's in the ideal world. In the one I know, the artist also sells his product, by being who he is, by having the life he has, by speaking the way he speaks. This doesn't signify the impossibility of defending oneself through work alone, but certainly makes it all the more difficult. And brings another issue.

What if Yinka Shonibare didn't make contemporary ethnic art? What if his work were just contemporary, and dealt with, say McDonald's or sex or any other issue? And let's imagine, for the sake of the argument, that it weren't any worse than what he is doing now. Would we know him? Who would he be? Would it matter that he is black, was born in London, lived in Nigeria and studied at Goldsmiths? There is a very irritating way the art world defines itself through basic associations of life and work. Possibly this has to do with the art having moved into a direction that is so difficult to judge (although artists like Shonibare play remixing the old school in a somewhat old-school way) that more is required in order to give it value (clearly also market value).

What happens to the freedom of the artist? What freedom does the artist have? Will we ever know of Shonibare's landscape sketches? And more broadly: how does an artist deal with the fact that many of his better ideas might not actually be better as seen from a social/market perspective, while some of his simpler, more obvious ideas are caught on and bought on the spot? How many more African-dressed figures does Shonibare need to make? How many can he handle? Isn't this exactly the same branding phenomenon as in other areas of commerce? Can we still call this investigation and digging in? How often do we see an artist still digging many, many exhibitions later, when he really shouldn't? I believe Louise Bourgeois said about Francis Bacon that it is true that he always paints the same painting, but it's a very beautiful painting.

Isn't there something wrong with this picture? Some sort of an obsession that has more to do with the way one is seen than with the way one sees? Of course, Bacon had enough guts to spill them over and over again on the canvas. But let's put it bluntly: most of us, most of artists, are not Francis Bacon. And still, they keep on painting the same painting. Looking for what? Perfection? Style? Truth? Exploring? Or self-branding, self-censoring?

Yinka Shonibare, Toy Painting 26 & Toy Painting 27 (2005)

Technorati: visual art, fine art, painting, art, contemporary art, vvoi

Shadowing light. Jindřich Štreit.

This magnificent artist has been recommended to me by my brother. Just look:

And more...





I feel like showing most of the images on the site which represents him, www.talent.cz.
One thing makes me wonder. All of the pictures above were taken in Czechoslovakia before 1989. The question that comes to mind is: what can be the role of the circumstances on a photographer's quality? If a photographer is a document-maker (in a broad sense, and I mean a photographer that goes out of the studio), than doesn't the reality he has access to play a crucial role? How would he deal with a less unreal reality?
Jindřich Štreit tried. Many of the pictures were taken in France, some in Germany (?). And they do look more pale. Some of them are very pretty, some play with the idea of social criticism, but it seems far from the quality of the Czech works:
So is this a question of time? Does the world today have less to offer to the eye of a photographer? Apparently not:

The picture was taken in 1997. But in Siberia. Which still remains somewhat exotic. Exotic. There's the rub. Maybe the politician that bows while saying hello is just as exotic to someone from a different culture as many of those pictures are to us? (And then, of course, what is "us"? Isn't it an impossible word when publishing something on this site?)
So the question is: can the world be really becoming boring, or is it just becoming more alike to a certain standard we are used to, and this standard is just as ex-centric to someone from somewhere else as this someone is to us? And another, more specific point: what is the artists position in this mutating situation? Or rather, what are his possible positions? How does the role of a witness change in these changing times?

Technorati: photography, visual art, art, contemporary art, vvoi

Imagining we would like abstract painting and would actually accept things that don't say anything, don't even smile or bark, simply have colors

Lori Herbserger, New Paintings Installation (Untitled), 2002 (acrylic on canvas and wall)

Technorati: painting, visual art, fine art, art, contemporary art, vvoi

RONALD SEARLE

Here are the 5 things I love most about the work of the great Ronald Searle (1920 - ).

1.) He is absolutely fearless with ink: the bite and splatter of his drawing remind you how people used to draw before software was invented.



Searle makes a serious commitment with ink, one that requires not only skill but courage. His drawings have the potential to go horribly awry if Searle ends up an inch to the left or right of his goal.

2.) Searle is able to step back from familar shapes and reinvent them: It is very hard to unlearn our basic assumptions about anatomy. Most artists who try end up merely exagggerating. But look at how Searle reinvents the human form. Think it's easy? Try it yourself. Or ask Picasso.









3.) Searle draws with great visual intelligence. You can tell from his artistic solutions that there is a radiant mind at work here.



4.) Even as an old man, Searle's work is playful and humorous (with all the subversiveness that implies).



5.) Finally, I like the path Searle followed. If I drew as badly as Searle did when he started out as an illustrator, I would have given up and gone in search of honest work.



Yet, Searle persevered and became one of the most influential illustrators of the second half of the 20th century. You can see his strong influence on Mort Drucker, Pat Oliphant and a whole generation of pen and ink artists who followed him. What happened to transform Searle's work? Was he hit by a lightning bolt? Did he have a mystic vision in the night? No one can say for sure, but I suspect part of the answer lies in the following quote:

At the Cambridge art school it was drummed into us that we should not eat, drink or sleep without a sketchbook in the hand. Consequently the habit of looking and drawing became as natural as breathing.

Searle never stopped drawing, and over the years his powerful style gradually emerged, as natural and organic as breathing.

Make art to experience and not art to read about

"7. Don’t make modern art.

Modern art tends to be ironical, cynical, self referential, afraid of beauty, afraid of meaning
-other than the trendy discourse of the day-,
afraid of technology, anti-artistry.
Furthermore contemporary art is a marginal niche.
The audience is elsewhere.
Go to them rather then expecting them to come to the museum.
Contemporary art is a style, a genre, a format.
Think!

Do not fear beauty.
Do not fear pleasure.

(...)

Real people are starving for meaningful experiences.
And what’s more:

society needs you.

Contemporary civilisations are declining at an unsurpassed rate.
Fundamentalism.
Fascism.
Populism.
War.
Pollution.
The world is collapsing while the Artists twiddle their thumbs in the museums.

Step into the world.
Into the private worlds of individuals.
Share your vision.

Connect.
Connect.
Communicate.

8. Reject conceptualism.

Make art for people,
not for documentation.
Make art to experience
and not to read about.
Use the language of your medium to communicate all there is to know.
The user should never be required to read a description or a manual.

Don’t parody things that are better than you.

(...)

Don’t settle yourself in the position of the underdog: surpass them!
Go over their heads!
Dominate them!
Show them how it’s done!

Put the artistry back in Art.
Reject conceptualism.
Make art for people, not for documentation.
Make art to experience and not art to read about. Use the language of your work to communicate its content. The audience should never be required to read the description.
The work should communicate all that is required to understand it. "

-
Realtime art manifesto (fragment)
by Auriea Harvey & Michaël Samyn

(but see e.g. the comment to this post at networkable social object for a critical view of the above)

Technorati: digital art, internet art, art theory, art criticism, art, contemporary art, vvoi

WORDS AND PICTURES

[No pictures today-- I am writing from Beijing, China, far away from my art collection, my scanner and my sweetheart (hi, Nell!). But I'll be home in a few days, when I can update my blog with fewer words and lots of good pictures.]

My feeble attempts to analyze pictures using words reminds me of Flaubert's lament:

Human language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when all the time we are longing to move the stars to pity.

Don't get me wrong-- I'm a big fan of words. They have a tough job: to tame a wild, omnidimensional universe of feelings, thoughts and sensory impressions into a straight line with punctuation and spelling. All I'm saying is that pictures manage to take me a few inches closer to Flaubert's stars than words do.

Beethoven said, "music is a higher form of revelation than philosophy," and listening to Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 5, we surely believe him. Music is able to achieve that exalted height in part by leaving behind the limitations of words, just as the abstract part of art-- the shapes and colors and design-- leaves words behind. It is as close to music as the visual arts can come.

Call me sentimental, but I prefer illustration to abstract art precisely because illustration combines abstract visual design with those limiting, confining words that provide the content. Some people see the words part as an anchor. I see it as ballast.

Delicious.
The only thing that irritates me here - and I suppose that's just a silly problem - is that the brilliant guys that created this, Winkler and Noah, have absolutely no problem whatsoever selling these wonderful, environmentally friendly messages...

... and next to them, selling some of the most environmentally unfriendly ones. It's as if there was no difference. Who are they, you might say, to decide on that? They simply do their job, and that is, to come up with something that sells well whatever it is its supposed to sell. Hmmm... I guess you're right.
But just go beyond the surface of it's all the same and compare this to Adbusters. While Adbusters try to be the Good Guys (with all the risks that are part of it), Winkler and Noah would be an example of the UnGuys - neither good or bad. Excellent quality for sale. Sound right?

(via)

Technorati: design, publicity, photography, art, contemporary art, vvoi

The Perfect Gift

Keep the world full of surprises.
If you don't have any books to cross, and are really not in the mood for a birthday party performance, then think of something else. Make it fluffy, hard, shiny, matte, transparent, sticky, disgusting, funny, shocking, simple, personal, whatever you make it,
hide it.
Anywhere you want, as long as it's a place accessible to anyone.
Then, go to Drop Spots, and put your drop spot on the map. So far, it seems to have been extremely popular around Belgium and the Netherlands. I suppose the authors - Brijetta Hall, Dan Phiffer and Ed Purver - might have something to do with it?
So far, there is only one drop spot in Lisbon. Hopefully this will quickly change. I'll try to participate as well.
(There isn't a single drop spot in Poland! Get to work, people!)

***

How far are we today from the first experiences with 'pervasive internet' by the folks from Blast Theory? Not very far. The gaming industry is getting all happy, there are new initiatives (especially with locative media, but not only - see this absolutely amazing site with pretty much everything you thought was possible already cataloged). But one can feel all this is still very young. Artists don't really know what to do of all these possibilities. It seems like the world is suddenly too large, not too small. And so these are small experiments for something that, I think, will be much more impressive, overwhelming, and deep-going than anything we see around today. Are you as curious as I am?

Layers

Of course, of course. This is not what it seems.
This is not a concrete column. This is not graffiti. This is something entirely different. It is a picture, a photo of graffiti. It is printed on dibond, the type of aluminum that is used for traffic signs, for example. And these metal sheets are then screwed onto a plywood construction. And all this is put in a different, non-street setting (in this case, the «lovely Dicken's Library of the Mary Ward House, Bloomsbury, London», but in another, more gallery-like setting, which make it seem much poorer, almost as if it were a strictly site-specific installation).
But what is striking about this is that it is exactly what it seems - a dislocated object, a rupture in reality, an addition that questions its context. In that sense, it is correct to say this is a column with graffiti. Because here, in this space, that is what works, what creates the tension. And then, all the other levels come into play, in this sort of a hide-and-seek of «objectiveness». It all stops somewhere, because it is a self-commenting (self-referential, if you like) convention. It plays on the very fact that it's a fake. And that it is still incredibly near to reality. So near, the showing fragments of plywood actually seem glued onto the concrete pillar.
The fact that the installation is in a library seems crucial (no matter why it actually got there). It speaks volumes about what we are, who we are. Our «means of expression» and aesthetic values and the gut need for destruction (or is this just me?). At the same time, it is a taming object. It tames the defying attitude of the original by turning it into a slick, clean, savvy copy of itself. Now, this is the pillar of knowledge. Of civilization. Of us. It is what sustains - or what makes us believe it sustains the heavy walls of our libraries. And if we ridicule it for being a fake structure, we might just bee too confident in our own walls. Underestimating the actual proximity of the object, and the image.
Kristin Posehn, Replicant (2005-2006)

Technorati: art installation, installation, architecture, visual art, fine art, art, contemporary art, vvoi

Magdalena Jetelová. How much should we know?

See this>
These are powerful images. Dark, quite genuine in their landartishness, in their hands-on approach to the material. No gimmicking with the pictures here, just plain, gloomy black-and-white pulp.
My recent lectures, concerning Shakespeare, his work and times, put these images in a great perspective. What is the disappearance of the battleground? And the rupture between violence and human territory? Is it about the transmitting of the violence as a value, from generation to generation? An ever-available tool? Then the battleground disappears, since war becomes a state of mind rather than an act, which is but its realization. It is the possibility of all wars against evil, be it another culture ("barbarians" means "the foreign ones") or another, more sophisticated concept required to execute the inherited right to violence ("war on terror", of course...). So the battleground disappears, and there is a rupture between violence and human territory - because it isn't about the land any more. It is about identity. About preserving what is mine, because it is mine, and because it is what it is and is in danger of becoming what it is not. Suddenly, seen from this point of view, war is everywhere. It is unbearably flexible. It becomes this dark, black mass that is there.
Then there is another level. Atlantic Wall is the title of the series of pictures by Czech-born artist Magdalena Jetelová. The Atlantic Wall, (ever heard of the Siegfried Line?), were huge fortifications made by Hitler during WW2 along the coast of the Atlantic. What does that knowledge change? How different is the spectator's position? Now go a step further in the mythological aspects of the Atlantic Wall. And now, go for an informed review. How does your response to the work change as you discover the various layer? Does it necessarily get «better»? You don't need a spoiler to make it a spoiler. In this particular case, the Atlantic Wall looked at with all the info, seems like a mere illustration to a book. A beautiful illustration, but not more. It is very difficult to forget. Go back to all this Shakespeare, which from this perspective can seem like naive babbling of an ignorant.

Among Jetelová's many great projects, one of the most powerful ones is the Domestication of a Pyramid (to see more pics, on her site go to global-pyramids, then click on pyramid corners).




Once again, my silly question: How much should we know? In this case, I preferred to remain innocent and not inquire. After all, once I know, I cannot unknow, can I?

Technorati: art installation, installation, photography, visual art, art, contemporary art, vvoi

AN ARTIST

A few days ago I posted a segment on Stanley Meltzoff's paintings of ancient Greece. I always wanted to meet the artist behind those glorious paintings, but now I never will. As I was posting my blog, Mr. Meltzoff was lying ill in a hospital. Today he passed away.


Diver's farewell to Blue Marlin by Stanley Meltzoff

Meltzoff was a gifted author, teacher and artist who painted images from science for Scientific American, historical illustrations for National Geographic and Life, and science fiction covers for a host of publishers.

Like thousands of others, I was enriched by his beautiful work. But I was most inspired by his astonishing intellectual curiosity and his deep artistic purpose. Meltzoff wrote about surviving in the years when the bottom dropped out of the illustration market:

My wife was ill, my children needed college money and I was almost 60 years old. I stood on the corner of 56th and Lexington Avenue in the rain with a soggy portfolio in my hands and improvised a sad little song about defeat, flat feet and flat broke while I tried to think of something to do.

Meltzoff responded to adversity with great artistic potency. He single handedly created a new market for paintings of seascapes and gamefish, which enabled him to combine his expertise in diving with his passion for art. In his spare time he compiled an art reliquarium and wrote a major scholarly treatise, Botticelli, Signorelli and Savanorola, Theologica Poetica from Boccacio to Poliziano. The book is a marvelous work of history, written with great lucidity, insight and humor-- the kind of epic accomplishment that would have capped an entire career for most historians. I recommend it to you.

Please join me in sending thoughts and prayers to Mr. Meltzoff's family. Irene Gallo of the Art Department blog tells me that we can look forward to a book about Meltzoff from publisher Donald Grant books. I will be first in line.

Most people who gamble on earning a living from their creativity have those moments of standing in the rain with a soggy portfolio. William Hazlitt wrote that, "In the end, all that is worth remembering of life is the poetry of it." Whatever else happened in his life, Mr. Meltzoff's gamble paid off royally. One only has to look at his art to know that his life was rich with poetry.

Discreet vulgar and artsy

Both works are created by Mexican artist Amor Muñoz.

Technorati: fine art, visual art, design, sex, art, contemporary art, vvoi

The Thought Project by Simon Hogsberg is very close to the spirit of Sophie Calle, with a slight postsecret twist. Here, too, the idea is simple: ask strangers what they were thinking at the very moment you stopped them. What impresses is the quality of the answers. It seems everyone here is either a writer or a character in a book. That is the impression I have gotten when (rarely) I had the chance to see/read Sophie Calle's work. How can the world be so filled with these amazing characters, these wild thinkers, these witty artistes... Don't get me wrong - not necessarily complex, deep thinkers. But... good people. Ben Harper asks Where'd all the good people go. To the Thought Project.
Then again, Hogsberg interviewed 150 strangers. And on the web page have 55 of them speaking. How was the choice made? In this case, isn't art the sort of science which can allow itself to be subjective, to be flawed, to be partisan? Don't we deserve some hope?

Technorati: installation, art installation, net art, performance art, performance, art, contemporary art, vvoi

MELTZOFF'S PAINTINGS OF ANCIENT GREECE

In 1963, Life Magazine commissioned artist Stanley Meltzoff to illustrate an article about ancient Greece. The result was a set of glowing masterpieces that brought ancient Greece vividly to life.



In addition to the beauty of the images, Meltzoff labored long and hard to make his paintings historically accurate. A meticulous craftsman, he even distinguished the uniforms of the Persians from the uniforms of the Scythians and the Medes.

His illustrations conveyed everything from the pathos of an a individual dying in the streets from the plague...



...to the grand sweep of the world's largest army storming across the Hellespont to invade Greece.



These are works of enduring value. They appeared for one brief moment in a 25 cent weekly magazine, then disappeared as Life moved on to a different topic the following week. They aren't displayed in a museum or gallery for the public to admire.



And yet, having appeared once, they are not gone. I can personally attest that these dramatic images were seared permanently into the memories and imaginations of ten year old boys of that time. I am reproducing them here in the hope that there is another generation out there watching.