How and How Not to...

I recently finished a new piece that's called How and How Not to Draw a Morning Glory.



It's a game, but it's also a map.




In the circles with the numbers (north, south, east and west) there are alternate moods. Each mood has arrows in it that show ways that the mood can lead you to work or not to work.



The arrows point to text that says either "Do Draw a Morning Glory" or "Do Not Draw a Morning Glory."



Each mood also has an associated place. "Contemplate Mortality," above, is the ocean. (The fish at the top of the circle is telling you so.)







In between the mood images, at NE, NW and SE and SW, there are variations and combinations of the basic moods. For instance, if you're in between "Contemplate Mortality" and "Get Pissed Off", you get this:



(You'll notice that death is eating a Dorito.)

Between "Get Pissed Off" and "Imagine Omniscience" gets you working.



Between "Imagine Omniscience" and "Fall in Love" is this, which could just have easily been something like, "My clothes/homemaking/numbers/jobs are my art".



And between falling in love and contemplating mortality is this circle, which says ""Dance with Ghosts."



I've started a new piece and am also working on some small drawings that are a little bit different for me- I'll post them later. In the meantime, if you want to see this piece larger, it's on the website here.

The WeeGee Board

This New York Times feature on WeeGee's Naked City is really fabulous.

What I saw in New York

Last week was amazing- I saw so much good art I'm set for life, and if someone would just give me a winning lottery ticket I'd move to New York in about half a second. (I love you Philly, but...dang.)



There was an amazing print show at the Brooklyn Museum called Utagawa: Masters of the Japanese Print, 1770–1900. It was one of the best print shows I've seen ever. The Brooklyn Museum doesn't have the prints I liked online, but they do have some amazing Hiroshige images online for free here: One Hundred Views of Edo.

We all pretended to be zombies in the yellow light of Olafur Eliasson's Take Your Time exhibition at MOMA. We didn't see the whole exhibition, but the hallway with the yellow light was our favorite part of his stuff we did see. The yellow lights did something strange: they sucked the color out of everything that wasn't yellow or blue. Every color besides blue looked like a shade of yellow. Blue looked like a creepy purple. Which made people like my mom, who is a blue-eyed blonde, look like a perfect zombie. Her clothes, hair and skin were various shades of sickly yellow and her eyes were a blazingly surreal purple. Super cool.

We all really loved the Glossolalia: Languages of Drawing exhibition. Man, was that good. Martin Ramirez, Henry Darger, Tom of Finland, Raymond Pettibon...a whole bunch of amazing work was in that show. The following images are from the MOMA website; if you click the link above you can see many more great images from the exhibit.



Jockum Nordström. (Swedish, born 1963). Playtime for Dung-Hills. (2000). Pencil on paper, 17 3/4 x 24 3/8" (45.1 x 61.9 cm). Gift of the Friends of Contemporary Drawing. © 2008 Jockum Nordström



Jim Nutt. (American, born 1938). A Certain Distance Between Them. (1975). Ballpoint pen and pencil on paper, 10 x 13" (25.4 x 33 cm). The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection Gift. © 2008 Jim Nutt



Raymond Pettibon. (American, born 1957). No Title (Don't complicate...). 1987. Ink and gouache on paper, 24 x 18" (60.9 x 45.7 cm). Gift of the Friends of Contemporary Drawing. © 2008 Raymond Pettibon



Scottie Wilson. (Scottish, 1889-1972). Fantastic Flowers. n.d. Ink and crayon on paper, 14 1/8 x 10" (35.9 x 25.4 cm). Purchase

We also visited Cannonball Press. The guys there make a whole bunch of different kinds of work, but some of their best stuff is these huge prints that are done collaboratively.



(click for larger image. So worth it.)

When we visited Cannonball Press the lovely printers showed us a bunch of their geniusy work and gave us prints!


Hold Please, by Mike Houston

The print they gave me is by Mike Houston. It, um, expresses ire about interoffice memos and includes a little bitter squirrely man saying "F.U." So of course I love it, and plan to hang it in my office at work.

There's also a great print show in Philly, though, too, although unfortunately there's not much about it on the net. It's called Curious and Commonplace: European Popular Prints of the 1800s, and it includes this fantastic image, which is really the least of it- everything in the show is incredible, I swear. But you'll have to trust me, because the Philly Museum website will only let me link to this dinky little image. But if you click it you can see it bigger!



We saw lots more art, but I'm just hitting the highlights because I'm so behind on this blog. I finished a new piece yesterday and hope to post it tomorrow, but in any case if you're near Philly or New York, run run run and see these shows! And go buy some prints from Cannonball Press. They're great, funny, smart and and cheap. What's not to love?



Miss Fortune by Martin Mazorra.(Click for ordering info.)

Fraktur

I'm almost done with a new piece, but I'm spending the next week or so looking at art in New York with my mom, Margie Simpson, and Tom Drucker, who are fabulous artists as well as fabulous relations of mine, so that new piece is going to have to sit on the drawing board for a little while. (That's not just an expression. I actually do have a drawing board.)

I've been looking at Pennsylvania Dutch drawings online. Their drawings are called "fraktur", or "fractur" and they're usually done to commemorate an event: a wedding, funeral, or birth. They're basically the most beautiful birth, marriage and death certificates ever. I'm putting some images of them online here, most of which I borrowed from frakturweb, an incredibly comprehensive site which includes extensive information about fractur and citations for each image.


This is by some guy who is known as the "Flat Parrot Artist."




















There is also some really fascinating information online about a religious group that made lots of of fraktur called the Schwenkfelders. I love that word. It almost makes me want to get religion.

The new piece I'm doing is based on some early American board games I saw in an exhibition called Beyond This Time and Place, Children's Books in England at the Rare Book Collection at the Philadelphia Free Library. It's a great exhibition and was recently reviewed on artblog, as was my show at Gallery Joe.

I've seen lots of great stuff lately, much of which was done by people I know and like. Rob Matthews, Rubens Ghenov and Chris Davison have geniusy work up at Jenny Jaskey Gallery right now, and my pal Mauro Zamora won the Pew, which is great. My friend Eva Wylie has had a few beautiful exhibitions lately, most recently one at Vox Populi Gallery. I didn't get over there, but artblog reviewed it and I love how great it looks online.



The piece was called "Roaring Tulips." Too cool.

There is tons of good stuff happening in Philly right now. The ICA has Trenton Doyle Hancock, the Philly Museum has William Kentridge and there are a thousand more exhibits around town I haven't seen yet. The Wexler Gallery has a pretty interesting exhibition with some nice Damien Hirst prints in it, but I think the show was stolen by Joe Boruchow, a friend of the curator's who is in his first group show.

In addition to looking at lots of good art lately, my head is still spinning from seeing Lynda Barry talk, which was incredible. She's so smart it's scary, and she wraps her brilliance in humility and humor that make her words go down like the most nutritious cupcake ever. I'm reading her new book, What It Is, and loving it, but I can't wait for the podcast of the talk to come out so I can make everyone I know listen to it. My students are doomed.