The New Yorker Cashes In On Scaramucci

AND A REAL ONE...

Artwork by my Dad, Ian Short

Artist's Notebook: Remembering National Lampoon

One of my favorite memories from childhood was peeking at my parent's National Lampoon Magazines.  I remember my dad laughing over "Mrs. Agnew's Diary," from which my own "Mrs. Gingrich's Diary" is flat out stolen.  I was thinking about NatLamp this weekend while hanging out with a fellow artist.

"Oh my god, I just had an awful awful thought," I said, laughing.

"What?" he said.

I put my hand to my heart.  "Oh no, you'll think less of me."

"Oh goody."  He said.

"Okay.  Do you recollect that National Lampoon cover, 'buy this magazine or we'll shoot this dog?' "

"I think so."

I continued.  "Okay, I admit this is just awful. What if it was The National Review and Katherine Jean Lopez was on the cover?"

He smiled.  "I love you."

"Yeah, but you can't call a woman a dog.  You just can't."

I kept thinking out loud..."plus, there's the whole gun thing.  You can't show a woman or any human, actually,  with a gun.  Not anymore."

He was, as usual, supportive.  "You'll play with Photoshop and think of something."

Art and Chaos Day at Blue Gal

It's high time once again that we take a break and look at some art.  I'm visiting my parents and at my dad's studio hangout, Artists Image Resource of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, they've done amazing work with...the cement floors.

These masks are silkscreened directly onto the cement floor of the workspace, and it is as cool as it looks.  

Art and Chaos Day at Blue Gal

I wonder after looking at the work of artist Lutz Bacher, why MY photoshops can't hang in well-appointed townhouses gracing the pages of Canadian House and Home Magazine?


Nevermind.

Lutz owes royalties to Anne Taintor, too.

A poem for today

The youngest is Matisse in old age:
When he lost his sight, he stopped painting, and cut paper
Over and over into bright collages.
Who knows what he could have made
With purple glue stick.

Middle child dreams in color
And though only six, knows negative space
Like her peers know princess couture.
Painting via mousepad, she stares at what she’s making
And I sigh that she’s happier at her work than at playing.

The oldest, a boy, needs another action figure.
He lies on the floor and makes Star Wars Seventeen.
Until I can get him just the right plastic figurine
A plastic spoon will stand in for a droid,
the beaters from my mixers will be ships.
The mommies of Spielberg (and yes, David Lynch), you know what I’m talking about.

Their father hated all the mess,
Which is why he now lives somewhere else.





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Art and Chaos Day at Blue Gal

Have you guys seen Drawger yet? I'm thinking The Photoshop Seven* should post their stuff there.

I especially like the work of Zina Saunders (this one is detail of a larger piece, used here by email permission from the artist). Of course, it's a painting, not a photoshop:



*I'm not going to name the Photoshop Seven here, they're just bloggers I can always count on to do great stuff, and stuff I can steal for the Open Thread. Why not guess who they are in comments? Maybe I've left one or two out.

Art and Chaos Day at Blue Gal

This is just too cool. If you're a process person like me you'll be enraptured. Found at GalleyCat.

This is why I blog every. single. day.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, Ira Glass. via 43 Folders:

Found Art. Twenty Cents. At the Thrift.

"he just had a bad crying spell. Allie and Nan were here. I don't why he cried."

I love finding stuff with a story attached. I would have paid 20 cents for the card even without the needles.

And yeah, there was once a world where you could buy knitting needles at JC Penney.

Art and Chaos - Found Art

My son finds a way to manage time. The quote in the upper right, from "Unknown", says, "Nothing makes a person more productive than the last minute."

An identifying theme

Picasso, Woman with a Mirror,
date not found on Google but I'd guess the 1950's

When three or more mouse clicks say the same thing in the same morning, that means way opens. Post about it.

Following one link to another I found this beautifully written memoir by "Alex," who can completely speak for himself:

My name is Alex. I guess an introduction is in order but I don't really know who I am. Actually Alex isn't really my legal name so even in my first words this starts to get a bit complicated.

I am a student, and if you ask any of my classmates who I am, you will probably hear that I am a 19-20 year old boy, well-read for my age, openly gay and that I am someone almost everybody likes but nobody knows. If you ask my mother, the picture may be somewhat different. I believe that she will tell you that I am a 27-year-old married mother of three.

Read the rest. Like all good writing it will tell you about the writer and you and humans and sorrow and joy and life and make you feel that you know more about all of that because you spent five minutes in front of a computer screen, just reading.

On the fiction front I loved the Wired essay by Lore Sjöberg, Resting in Pieces. Not sci-fi, not mere alternative history, it's more a musing on roads not taken from the standpoint of someone we would not care about, had it not been written just this way. I loved the moments I spent reading it.

And then I read a comment on another blog. I won't link though the blog deserves it aw hell it's Drifty, I'll link after all since the subsequent comments are grand and respond without troll-feeding. The commenter quoted below imho does not need encouragement. The commenter called us bloggers

"wounded birds, and the psychotically and physically maimed who need to pound it out at the keys, for some relief.

Does ANYONE who blogs not have some great personal psycho/sexual/gender adversity to overcome that I don't have to hear about?

Is there NO one out there, that's just normal?

Why sure there is, commenter, and you can find them by doing a google blog search for "kittens," "my cute baby nephew," or "cookie recipe."

One can write well about those things, but really: hold up any novel or memoir or political tract worth reading and there on the title page is a word "by" followed by the name of a wounded bird. And there in the pages is, we hope and pray, a bit of great personal psycho/sexual/gender adversity.

See, you can be an artist, hell you can be the blogosphere's Pablo Picasso. Or you can be a commenter who is looking for "normal" where staring at you through your screen is something so much better. Your choice.

I've posted this song before but it just seems so, well, apropos:

Art and chaos day at Blue Gal

All rights reserved on this post don't use anything here please thanks.

I promised some artwork by my parents. These are webcam photos of stuff I have in my house so they're not museum quality reprints but you'll get the idea.



I love this drawing my dad did...a self portrait spinning on a barstool. He made this as a study for his 2D students to show them that movement can be indicated on a flat piece of paper.

I remember my mom explaining to me about Whistler's Mother, which is actually called "Composition in Black and White: A Portrait of the Artist's Mother". My mother showed me the art teacher trick that if you cover up anything on the wall behind Whistler's Mother the painting totally changes. The same is true of my dad's drawing. There are two curved lines emanating from the hat on the upper right corner of this drawing. If you cover them, the drawing becomes much flatter and less dimensional.

What I love most about this drawing apart from its Escher-like precision is that it has multiple thumbtack holes in the corners where Dad has put it up and taken in down from one semester to the next. It's not just a drawing, it's a teaching tool.

Here's my mother's painting of the same subject:



Mom's work is decidedly different. She owes a lot to Picasso, of course, but her paintings are much more wickedly funny and personal too. Family portraits always include her cats and this one actually has a cut out photograph of the dog Janet, now deceased, tucked in the three dimensional pockets that emerge from the bottom of the painting. No comment on the fact that my dad's halo is made out of a casserole with french fried onion rings.

Here's a portrait she did of me when my hair was short. It's hard to see in this photo but the black thing over my shoulder is a young cat.



The roses that surround me and dangle from my ears are collage, cut and glued from some wrapping paper or something. Mom is amazing at using found objects. One must never get too attached to a work in progress. A face you like this morning may be turpentined away by the time you get home from school.

Speaking of Picasso there's a video of him doing just that, working on something and the interviewer is watching and Picasso looks at the painting and decides he doesn't like it and he takes a rag and wipes off the face. The interviewer is horrified. I mean, the Spanish guy just destroyed a Picasso! Except the Spanish guy IS Picasso and the painting, you see, is not a Picasso because Picasso didn't like it or think it was finished. Artist's choice.

I want to show you what my dad is working on currently but his website isn't quite ready yet. Here's a sneak peek though and this image and others will be available as blank notecards, probably primarily in art museum gift shops but also by mail. All rights reserved on this post don't use anything here please thanks.

Art and chaos day at Blue Gal

Every so often we need to take a break and look at some art.

So I'm bopping around the web for half an hour looking for something to show you and through the South African website ArtThrob I find a place called

VVork.

I always try for Art and Chaos days to find a place where the viewer can spend some time but I gotta warn you. VVork is visually amazing (that seems to be the point, and it's a good one for online contemporary art) and the site is apparently updated daily. You could easily be there for an hour or more.

Some of the stuff is overtly political. There's a piece on the Lebanon war where civilians begin their stories using a physical object they had during their war experience. David Barbarino's piece (above) shows London Daily Standard headlines for the fateful month of March, 2003. There's also the lovely images of some guy filming his own circumcision. (No link, find it your own self and tell your boss you went on a circumcision scavenger hunt instead of working.)

I love the guy who posted his curriculum vitae on the side of a building, though.
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Art and chaos day at Blue Gal

Above is detail from Joan Linder's "Bra, Italy; Panties, Cambodia; Shoes, Brazil," online at the Judi Rotenberg Gallery (Boston).

If you want to read a three-thousand word essay about this piece (which shows the large undergarment, small outline of the country-of-origin, and a larger citibank logo), with similar musings about the nature of personal clothing, commerce, privacy, ownership, sexuality, national boundaries, and art...

...you've come to the wrong place. Let's not spoil it, shall we?

Some of the art in this gallery makes up in fine execution what it lacks in subtlety of statement. (Oops, I'm about to ruin it for everybody. Sorry.) I offer as a fine for-instance, Dave Cole's Trophy Wives, and Money Dress, a Vera Wang gown knit out of strips of dollar bills. Timely that Lizzy Gardner's Gold Card Dress from the 1994 Oscars said the same thing with less tearage.

Hey, it's Sunday afternoon. Galleries like this one, whether virtual or real, are for walking around and getting lost. Enjoy.