lillian schwartz

wave

http://lillian.com/

lillian schwartz exhibited her digital art at moma in nyc in 1968.

she continues to create digital art and has also used her knowledge of colors and pixels to restore old italian masters.

it's all quite a story.

freischwimmer

http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/event/2004/C7D1.en

artscope

the meaning of the nonsense of the meaning

the happy elephant

. . . now lives with us . . .

WATARU SUGIYAMA

fun w sky lights

proust's favorite painter

a young proust filled out a questionnaire noting meissonier as his favorite painter and i say hmph, who's that?

turns out jean-louis-ernest meissonier might be most well known for his war scenes paintings (do people do that anymore? do we have "great art" showing the bombings of vietnam? does a painter get inspired by the burning down of a village?) but i digress...his works are on display in museums around the world, http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/meissonier_jean-louis-ernest.html.

i don't know that the following is representative of his work but i love the colors and i love the fabric so here it is:

london rocks

art in austin

Maqbool Fida Husain

amoda

hmph . . . just learned about the austin museum of digital art, need to check out some of their happenings, could be fun.

in fact, this reminds me that i need to do the whole east austin art studio tour thing,

eastaustinstudiotour.com.

work so interferes with important things.
why can't the leaves pick up themselves,
why can't oprah let me have her cook a couple nights a week,
why can't the dogs learn to give themselves a bath, and
why don't things stop breaking down
so that i can be free to do nothing but explore the world?

scary monday here again

tim burton



 

antoine helbert

people do get up to interesting things  . . .

http://www.antoine-helbert.com/58893-idsessd89a5fddeec16be5e9f85ba3abb99445

play time

http://www.jacksonpollock.org/

women artists

why are there so few women artists represented in mainstream museums? (not a rhetorical question nor a particularly original one . . .)

i learned that the whitney museum did a retrospective of georgia o'keefe in 1970 (http://www.okeeffemuseum.org/american-modernism.html) and lots of museums have a mary cassatt or two (http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/cassatt) & helen frankenthaler's paintings get hung in museums (http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/frankenthaler_helen.html) as do those of joan mitchell http://www.artchive.com/artchive/M/mitchell.html  . . . and frida kahlo has been popularized in recent years (http://www.fridakahlo.com/) and no other women painters really come to mind.

curious.

so introducing a few women artists that are new to me...

Pamela Masik (Canadian, contemporary): http://missingwomen.blogspot.com/2011/01/ubc-museum-cancels-offensive-painting.html

Fanny Fleury (French, 1848-1920): http://beardedroman.com/?tag=women-artists

Dorothea Rockburne (another Canadian, contemporary):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothea_Rockburne

Lynda Benglis (American, contemporary): http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/arts/design/13benglis.html?ref=arts

austin city hall

though i've worked down the street from city hall for years, only recently did i venture inside and wow, what a building it is. limestone on the outside (516 tons worth) and designed to capture the spirit of the hill country, ultra-cool on the inside with something like 66,000 square feet of copper lining the ceilings. things are done at slants and angles to minimize right angles and the theme throughout is transparency in government so lots of windows and glass walls. architect was antoine predock, http://www.predock.com/.

on fridays from spring through fall, live music plays during lunchtime and the stairway doubles as seating across from the built-in outdoor stage. inside yearround is "the people's gallery" -- a selection of 100 pieces of art from central texas artists on display throughout the building and members of the public are welcome to wander through offices discovering each piece. this collection rotates each january so worth repeat visits. lots of other nice finishes touches, just very nicely done.

and if that is not enough, this building is a role model of sustainability and won a gold rating for leadership in energy and environmental design.

please note previous blog and know that it has a distinctive "cantilevered" point that extends almost 50 feet from the building over second street -- meant to be ? an armadillo tail? a point north? a stinger? i'm not sure i understand or appreciate this feature of the building quite yet, but one day perhaps it will inspire me.

austinites should be very proud.

design at the turn of the century

here's what was going on w/design in ad1 in thailand...

and in Peru at the same time . . .

courtesy of 30,000 years of art

how cool is google?

museums of the world brought to your computer monitor courtesy of google, http://www.googleartproject.com/

how cool is that?

tattoo origins?

according to 30,000 years of art, the picture below is a pot fragment from the solomon islands. the design motif would later be used on tattoos in the region, which "makes sense from a design perspective ... cermaics, textiles and tattoos each allow surface decoration that then articluates a three-dimensional form."



fragment of lapita pottery, c 1000 BC

 and if this leaves you wondering where the solomon islands might be found, well, join the crowd...think east of papua new guinea or, for those with a higher level knowledge of geography, think oceania

Modern vs not-so-modern architecture

Vincent Scully on the difference.....

Baroque architecture is controlling and controlled.  Using the Spanish Steps in Rome as an example of Baroque (as opposed to modern) architecture, he says, of the spaces created by Baroque fixtures, "all movement is around fixed points.  It is a union of the opposites of order and freedom.  The order is absolutely firm, but against it an illusion of freedom is played....it is in fact the space that governs the design."  For architecture to be modern, per Scully, the fixtures, not the space, predominate.

"The space between the natural and the manmade forms is essentially a void between opposing solids...the human beings who occupy it ... are exposed to the two separate and hostile realities of human life, what nature is and what men want to do."

Deep

Baroque architectural space?    "symmetry, hierarchy, climax and emotional release"

Modern? "a complicated spatial wandering"

Even more deep.

Vincent Scully, Modern Architecture (NY: George Braziller, 1974).