03.22.10
Respecting the Empire
An Impirial Cruiser hovering over the Golden Gate Bridge.
Uncredited photo from the web. If anyone knows who’s work this is or where more of it can be found, please drop me an email
12.19.09
Tim Burton Exhibition at MoMA
With my schedule full of decidedly non-NYC things to do over the next few weeks, I seized the opportunity to go see the Tim Burton exhibition now featured at the Museum of Modern Art in Midtown, NYC. The special showing is sponsored by the SyFy channel and is a collection of Tim Burton’s art including drawings, sketches, paintings, sculptures, and other related items from his movies and animated shorts he’s directed and produced over the course of several decades.
03.12.09
I can not explain it
I’m in such an surge of what I’d consider creative fire I don’t know what to do with myself. I’m not an artist at all but I like to experiment and dabble with stuff and I’ve been hitting it hard these last few weeks. I think things like this come in cycles but it’s never been this intense before and I’ve never followed up with it like I’m doing now. The house looks like a bomb went off with all the paint and stuff all over the place.
But I like it..I like where I am right now. Things are good.
02.06.09
A Merry Old Soul
I have an unwritten list of things that I would like to do or should like to do in New York City before the end of my days here and I marked one off last night, finally.
Whenever you talk to people who live here, most have common NYC things that we all take for granted that we’ve never done, even though we’ve lived here for years and years. I don’t even remember how many years it was before Jeff and I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge and that should be one of those requisite events that every New Yorker does when they get to the city…it’s free and the view is stunning.
Section of Maxfield Parrish's "Old King Cole"
So on my unwritten list of which things seemingly pop out of nowhere was having drinks at the King Cole Bar in the St. Regis Hotel. It wasn’t so much about having expensive cocktails in a dark-paneled, up scale location where supposedly the Bloody Mary was introduced to the US, but rather the famous Maxfield Parrish mural backing the entire length of the bar.
Maxfield Parrish is a favorite artist and illustrator of mine. I’ve collected replicas of his work and always try to have at least a post-card hanging in my cube or office. Years ago Jeff and I took the day and drove down to a retrospective of his at the Philadelphia Museum of Art which was amazing.
So Jeff was a trooper and met me on 55th and 5th last night for a quick after-work drink. The bar is as dark and dark-paneled as you could hope for which seemed to be the perfect setting for the mural which is 8ft tall and spans 30 feet across behind the bar. The beauty and hallmark of Parrish’s work was his use of a glazing technique rather than just outright painting. In this, the light seems to pass through the layers of glaze and then reflect back out, causing the painting to glow from an internal light. The darkness of the bar framed this effect beautifully. The colors Parrish used, also specific to him and his art, were perfect and warm and inviting.
I spent most of my glass of red wine staring at the mural realizing other than Parrish painting it, I didn’t know much about it so I googled it up when we got home. What I’m most disappointed about was learning the legend of the wry smile on King Cole’s face, thought to have been modeled after John Jacob Astor who originally commissioned the mural for his Knickerbocker hotel bar. As the tale goes, there was an unwritten competition among illustrators of the day to see who could sneak the act of flatulence into one of their public works. Supposedly Parrish won this contest with Old King Cole. Not only is the King smiling a secret smile but the reactions of his flanking knights give it away.
It’s not the DiVinci Code, but I’ll take it because its funny and seems to be appropriate for early-American illustration.
When I was reading up on the mural I also found this article in the NYTimes article about its restoration a few years ago that also relates the secret farting tale.
Anyone coming to NYC with some time to kill, it would be worthwhile to sneak into the King Cole bar and check out this work of art. I’m glad I finally did.
01.16.09
Moving forward
wash draft of a current sketch
It only took six weeks of “The Shining”-like isolation upstate to not only get me off my ass and start running and eating right again but actually getting over myself and picking up a pencil and watercolors again. I have a whole drawer of supplies that have been languishing and only being slightly molested at various times. I’d finger the paints and stroke the brushes and then “a-hmm” myself and slide the drawer shut again. What finally did it for me this time was the sheer volume of pictures I’ve been cutting out, downloading, and organizing. I can only tell myself “oh, I should paint that” so many times before it is time to shit or get off the pot.
These options are never the ones I’m aggressive towards.
And yet, for whatever reason, I’ve done it. I’ve worked on two pretty solid sketches and started putting on washes. Neither of which I think are anything other than just nice pieces of practice for me to learn the tools and try to understand how the medium works. Anything that is even remotely recognizable is nothing more than a happy accident.
True to my nature, I like neither of them. I like the idea of them and I like that I’ve actually shat as it were, but I see so much wrong and so much left to do which is typically discouraging for me. But I’m still moving forward with them and then I’ll move onto others and keep the dull roar of all that I have yet to learn to myself. And yet…I do like the idea of them. It makes me feel…attached.
05.27.08
There is nothing left for us here
I spent the weekend on my knees getting dirty. That can be taken anyway anyone sees fit and it would be true…or true enough, as it were.
Mark my words that come mid-August, it is best believed there will be some exhausted rantings about how fucking stupid it was to put out 20 Kirby cucumber plants, all for the love of pickles. I’ve warned Jeff already that him crying and whining about spending most of the weekends in August and part of September in the kitchen, over a hot stove sterilizing jars and boiling pickling brine will fall on very deaf ears. I just grow ‘em and do what I’m told. Seriously, mark it on your calendars.
The first summer naps of which I’m so fond was had on Sunday. Jeff’s mom spent the weekend with us and while we’d planned to do some shoping on Sunday and catch the new Indiana Jones flick, but by our 2pm departure, all three of us were cast in what probably looked like a fine funeral repose. All of us stretched out on the big new Pottery Barn couch/sectional thing we bought for the new screened in deck, snoozing away. I love the fact that I roused myself in the middle of it to find I’d stuffed my hand down Jeff’s pants right next to his mom. That’s how we roll with Charlotte. I would say this was a vast improvement over my normal routine where I’ve stuffed my hands so far into my armpits and clamped down with such force as to render both hands numb from a lack of circulation. At least in Jeff’s pants, I still had sensations…both in my hands and my pants.
So things grow. I put in a ton of periennials that I’d been meaning to do, trying to make the back flower bed off our porch into a butterfly and humming bird garden. Lots of cone flowers and black-eyed susans with a smattering of some different daisy varieties and a returning bed of bright red pom-pom’ed Mondara. I’m fearful that there is no good design in how I planted things but I think as long as they grow I’m content. I’m trying to slowly but surely kill my constant need for good design in everything because it renders me completely incapable of moving forward on any project.
I spent some time this weekend staring at the pig mural I painted on the side of our workshop. I’d link to the picture but it has once again escaped me to actually put the picture on some accessible media I could actually use. The closest I have is the pre-picture so imaginations will have to be used. I have visions and have actually researched on how to silk screen using a home-grown system. I think the mural would make a fine and spiffy t-shirt. Fine and Spiffy being my current direction in personal growth and flair.
Now I’m on that Tuesday-Feels-Like-Monday-After-A-Holiday schedule, riding the train back down to Philadelphia for work. All of which is still Fine and Spiffy with me, dirty or not.
05.16.08
Better Art
This is an amazing demonstration of how good art can be. It combines some of my favorite things about art: innovation, stop animation, and use of public spaces. I would have loved to watch this getting made.
05.15.08
The Fall
I was watching film trailers online as I like to do in my down time and came across a movie I’d heard nothing about. What caught my eye was the director, Tarsem, who’d directed “The Cell“, a movie I still can’t get out of my head and not because it had J.Lo in a rigid metal neck color lacquered red (but it does). It was so visually arresting and beautiful that I find myself still watching to this day though usually without the sound.
In his new film, The Fall, he apparently shot it over the course of years and all over the world and then couldn’t find any distributors though it was a favorite at film festivals. Now it finally found a home in the US and was released last week. I snuck out and saw it last week and loved it. It’s a simple story set in a California hospital in the early 20′s about a patient who spins a wild tale to a small Romanian girl also recovering at the hospital. It’s as visually stunning as “The Cell” and really showcases Tarsem’s visions. Plus it has Lee Pace from “Pushing Daisies”.