Google art project

I have another piece to post and another one under way, but I'm not sure when I'll get them blogged. (Can that be a word? Let's say yes.) I'm very busy lately, but I miss writing and I hope to get back to it this summer. I have visions of blog posts about amazing exhibits I will see in New York and Philadelphia and Baltimore...But in the meantime, here's some amazing stuff I've seen online. Think of this as the art blogger's version of that new couch to 5K training app... this is the art I can see from my couch. Someday I will blog from Paris.

On Saturday one of my figure drawing buddies told me that google has been going to museums and photographing everything in sight in extremely high resolution. It's set up like google street view, he said, so you can take a virtual walk around the Hermitage without going to Moscow. It's an amazing concept, and it sounds even more incredible if you watch the guy who came up with the idea talk about it on the TED talks site. You can watch the talk online or just go straight to googleartproject.com. I've just started exploring the site and although it's not the virtual paradise I thought it would be, it is some kind of virtual paradise. The problem is that it's someone else's virtual paradise. It's an enormous undertaking, and there are a huge number of really weird curatorial choices being made as the google art project people try to decide what to focus on, so what you get is a very quirky selection of masterpieces from amazing museums.

The street view thing is also pretty funny. I'm starting to really love the unintentional effects of the enthusiasm for 360 degree views of spaces. When I was little I thought the real point of those driving games was to try to take an off road shortcut, and now that I'm older I feel the same way about 360 degree gallery views. I love that we can zoom in to the ceilings of galleries now. In the google art project's MOMA site there are some really odd effects when you try to get out of the rooms they've finished in to the ones they're not done with. In one of them you see a painting that's been blurred out next to a security guard whose head has been blurred out. It's kind of awesome, in a "this is so postmodern someone will surely make this an art project but actually it's only interesting for about three minutes" kind of way...

 

I've been looking at the Tate's site, though in the interest of efficiency I'm crabbily ignoring the whole walkthough aspect and just pulling down though the menu of available images. I'm finding some really amazing stuff. I'm loving the Tudor portraiture ( Who knew? Everyone but me?) and Ford Maddox Ford's Take Your Son, Sir kills me every time. I also love The Cholmondeley Ladies although there's really nothing intelligent to say about that piece that is as succinct and to the point as the elegant brevity of "WTF?!?!" If you don't feel that way just looking at the piece, read the viewing notes to the right of the image...

There's also a really great example of what the technology can do in the Chris Ofili piece called No Woman No Cry on the Tate's site. I like Chris Ofili, but this piece as always looked pretty idiotic to me. Of course I've only seen it in reproduction, and it turns out that a piece like this is just what you need google art project for. It looks like nothing until you zoom in really far, then try the option to view the paintings with the lights off. Not idiotic. Genius. Who knew? The Tate. Now who knows? The internet. Good going google.

Doubt, part 2

In the last post I mentioned that I made two pieces based on the same piece: they also have the same title: Doubt. This one is an etching that I made at Slugfest Printmaking Workshop with the help of my mom, Margie Simpson, and her lovely partner Tom Drucker.



Here's a detail:



I'm quite happy with this piece, and I'm excited to get to work on a new print. Jim Stroud at Center Street Studios has offered to work with me on another etching- I feel very lucky to have such a plethora of fantastic printmakers around me, especially because I have yet to meet a group of artists I like more.

It's my theory that printmakers are generally down to earth, funny and well socialized because they work in groups in the most insanely humbling medium on earth. It takes a sterling character to work in a process where your weeks worth of work can disappear because you lost track of time. Printmaking is good for the character. Painting, or drawing however- sitting in a room alone for long periods of time doing something that could but probably won't pay off really well...Perhaps we painters and draw-ers should be congratulated if we restrain our megalomania and paranoia for 90 minute stretches at a time...Or we should do printmaking on a regular basis, as a medicinal gesture akin to getting 15 minutes of sun exposure per day.

Doubt, part 1

I just finished a couple new pieces based on the same idea. I started a drawing, then went to Austin and made an an etching based on the idea I'd started, then I came home and finished the drawing. I really love the etching and will post images of that soon, but in the meantime here's the drawing. I've posted small images here but larger details are on the website.





It's a real mix of drawing and painting, as you can see in these details. I've taken to taking a paintbrush to the ink that's in my pens every now and then, as well as drawing on top of watercolors like I always do.






The text above says, "However comforting, faith is a far more lethal sword than" followed by a little arrow that points to the central word doubt. There's also a naked dad figure on the left edge of the drawing that you can probably see better in the big images on the website.



That text is right above this image.



I've painted lemmings before, but I realized as I was drawing these that I somehow picked up the idea that lemmings were pretty much the same as guinea pigs with tails. I looked them up this time, after I'd drawn them, and it turns out I'm pretty much right.



Whenever I use lemmings I think about the horrible story of lemmings and the turntable. I'm not sure everyone knows this story, but I never mean them as a simple symbol of mass suicide because of the story. If you don't know, here's the deal, copied from Wikipedia.

The myth of lemming "mass suicide" is long-standing and has been popularized by a number of factors...[among the most] influential was the 1958 Disney film White Wilderness, which won an Academy Award for Documentary Feature, in which staged footage was shown with lemmings jumping into certain death after faked scenes of mass migration. A Canadian Broadcasting Corporation documentary, Cruel Camera, found that the lemmings used for White Wilderness were flown from Hudson Bay to Calgary, Alberta, Canada, where they did not jump off the cliff, but were in fact launched off the cliff using a turntable.

Insane! Turns out that White Wilderness won an academy award, too!

I love stories of fake things that become myths. I like Arthur Evans and Knossos and the Snake Goddess at the Boston MFA and Robert Graves and the fact that people invented the cyclops because of mammoth skeletons.

But back to Doubt. Here's the last detail.



The text says, "I know so little but this."

Reminder and The Terrifying Minute...

You know the cartoon where Charlie Brown is fighting with the lawn chair? I've been stuck in that scene, only in slow motion, only with cameras. Just imagine a bunch of cameras, all slightly but irrevocably broken or with missing battery chargers or connectors or memory cards, slowly attacking me over the course of a couple weeks. Every time I try to photogrpah my work I am utterly, maddeningly set upon by technical problems. It's exactly like that cartoon.

Today, though, I finally managed to get some decent images of my new work.

The most recent piece is called Reminder, and you can see it on the website here. I'm using watercolors with my pens now, and I'm loving how it's working out. These are special archival watercolors that are based upon the colors that were used in ancient Japanese prints- they're very vivid and beautiful, and I can't wait to work with them some more.



Here are a few details:





It's a somewhat complicated piece, and it's better if you can read all the tiny text, which you can do by looking at the details on the website.

It's not nearly as complicated as this piece, though. This one is called



The Terrifying Minute, or How to Tell the Story.

You can see it on the website here, and it's based on several Victorian games that I saw in the Free Library of Philadelphia's wonderful rare books collection. Here's the whole piece:



The overlapping circles at the center of the piece are numbered, and if you follow the numbers around from the outside of the circles spiraling in towards the center you can see the progression of a life, with a character being born at 1 and going on from there to 24. It's not a progression that goes strictly by numerical age- the person I drew is quite a bit older than 24 at the end of the path through the circles.

There's also an overarching structure*: each circle represents a theme or idea that is countered by the circle opposite. There are love and hate circles, for instance. Each segment that falls in a particular circle responds to each theme- so where the hate circle, for instance, crosses the privilege circle, you get something that makes sense with those two ideas and that still follows the narrative of the life story that's being told. I've laid out the details on the website so that if anyone is interested they can get a reasonable sense of going around the circle here, but it's pretty hard to get on the web...

The whole piece is laid out as if it's a game that you can play.



These are the characters you can choose:





And there are choices to make:





* I almost wrote "metastructure". At what age does it become impossible to use words like metastructure with a straight face?