5" x 7" watercolor
This is a study for a larger painting that I am working on. The original postcard is of a the church of Santa Maria della Consolazione in Todi, Italy. Todi is the the rolling hills of Umbria. The church sits like a little magical jewel nestled into the hillside.
Embroidery, animation and history, all in one: the animated Bayeux tapestry. Actually, it is just the final half with the battle of Hastings. Still, at the end of 4 minutes and 15 seconds you will be smarter and amused. If you go on and read some of the history pages, you can even discover the naked man and the sex scandal (sadly, the Victorians gave him some baggy shorts). Be sure to watch the text in the animation as it transforms from Middle to modern English.
Bayeux Tapestry at youtube
“The tapestry was commissioned by William the Conqueror’s half-brother, Bishop Odo of Bayeux, depicting the events surrounding the conquest. It details events leading up to the invasion and shows the key aspects of the conquest itself, not least the Battle of Hastings.
The tapestry is not a tapestry in the normal sense. It is actually an embroidery of at least eight coloured wools, worked into pieces of linen. It is divided into a series of connected panels, approximately half a metre wide and 70 metres long. It is probably incomplete.
It is thought likely to have been created by English embroiderers, probably in the then famous embroidery works of Winchester; though some French historians maintain it was made in Normandy. Even the name is disagreed over, depending on which country you are in: to the French it is La Tapisserie de la reine Mathilde, or Queen Matilda’s Tapestry (Matilda was the Conqueror’s wife).” bbc history
On Oct. 16, 2006, ArtReview magazine released its annual list of one hundred powerful people. Predictably, some people moved up; some moved down and a few were sent entirely into exile. The largest surprise of the list revealed a new twist in the role of the internet in art: Google has been placed on ArtReview magazine’s top 100 most influential [people] in the art world.
‘The most surprising inclusion on this list, at number 100, is the search engine Google. Mr Weich insisted it was not a joke. “Many of the curators we speak to have mentioned the potential of [the photo-sharing site] Flickr as a viable exhibition area – that in a few years from now they’ll be curating online to millions of viewers.
“And while we quickly concluded that Flickr has a way to go yet, it did make us realize how much we rely on Google for our art information. In a strange way, the number of hits an artist, curator or even a dealer gets can legitimize him in the same way it can anyone else.”‘ Guardian Unlimited (U.K.)
There is currently not much at the ArtReview web site, except for an offer to receive the upcoming ArtReview Digital free for 6 months. The current issues includes interviews with and commentary on the Top 100.
The Tate Museum’s 2005 Turner prizes have been awarded. London’s Guardian newspaper has written a short witty review of the awards, which includes a questioning of the relevance of conceptual art. Zoe Williams writes:
“There are three ways to transgress the boundaries of what’s arty. On the first tier you’ll find sex, dismemberment, scatological imagery and condoms; second tier, animal dung, pickled animals, indeed most things pertaining to animals, unless it’s a pretty painting of a live one; third tier, anything willfully mundane – a shed, a light going on and off, a box that isn’t an interesting shape and doesn’t contain anything, or a plinth designed to go on top of another plinth.”
By contrast, the Tate describes the conceptual piece’s significance:
“Simon Starling is fascinated by the processes involved in transforming one object or substance into another. He makes objects, installations, and pilgrimage-like journeys which draw out an array of ideas About nature, technology and economics. Starling describes his work as ‘the physical manifestation of a thought process’, revealing hidden histories and relationships….
Shedboatshed (Mobile Architecture No 2) 2005 has a similar circularity. Starling dismantled a shed and turned it into a boat; loaded with the remains of the shed, the boat was paddled down the Rhine to a museum in Basel, dismantled and re-made into a shed.”
We have come to a turning point in art and the Emperor’s New Clothes, when a major newspaper can question the relevance of conceptual art. Last year, in anticipation of the Turner prize awards, a survey of 500 art experts declared Duchamp’s urinal to be the most influential object of modern art. This urinal ranked above Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and Guernica and works by Matisse.
It has been nearly a century since Duchamp declared that readymades are art. Isn’t it time to move on to a new thought? Or as Daniel Henninger, of the Wall Street Journal, states more articulately:
“For the sake of argument, I am willing to agree that Duchamp’s urinal was the most influential artwork of the past century. If this is even close to being true, we may declare the modern art movement dead.
Why? For one reason: It is inappropriate to the age in which we live. It is time for both Modernism and Post-Modernism to go away. The 20th century is over. We don’t need it anymore. We don’t want it anymore.
What we need is an art, a culture, an aesthetic appropriate to the age in which we live–the 21st century, the Age of the Digital and the Age of September 11. Modern art isn’t it.”
I’ve been reading a lot of art theory lately, looking at issues of signs, symbols and metaphors. The underlying concept, as put forth by Rudolf Arnheim, states that fully representational images don’t allow us to add or explore our own relationship with the image. As an image becomes more abstract (more of a symbol), the viewer can impress their own experiences upon the image.
While doing reading on Arnheim, I came across this writing at Arteology that does a wonderful job of summarizing Moles’ writings about the importance of the discovery process in art. According to Abraham A. Moles (1966)…
“the greatest pleasure produced by perception is felt when consciousness is allowed to function at its maximal effect, that is, approximately at the rate of 100 bits a second. According to this, first of all, a work of art should contain a sufficient amount of superficial content or decoration immediately appealing to the senses. As a starting point to the interpretation can serve also the name of the work, if any. But to qualify as competent art, the work must be able to offer also a deeper content. Finding this deeper content will then produce the pleasant feeling of “eureka” once more, provided again that discovering it is not too easy. If it is very easy, or if there are no deeper layers to be discovered, the aesthetic pleasure remains brief and thus meager, and the work of art risks being classified as kitsch.
The perception of a profound work of art proceeds thus as several (or at least two) step-by-step phases. Each successive stage of comprehension should optimally be attainable so that the flow of new information remains always in the range of 100 bits per second, i.e. near the maximum of human abilities of perception. The deeper content can be a background structure, or anything else that arouses interest, for example an invitation to an emotional mood, or a message.
The most rewarding work of art is one in which the process described above can take place several times successively like in the figure on the right. Such a multi-faceted work of art can be looked at over and over again. In each new vista the observer finds something new; first perhaps a solution to a problem which remained unsolved in the previous phase of observation, and second, a novel surprise: another problem motivating him to a deeper still reflection. Each phase of observation leads to more profound comprehension and thus increases the aesthetic value of the work.”
image: “Church Street El,” by Charles Sheeler, 1920
It seems that the common, romantic notion of our ancestors sitting by the fire, quilting, may be entirely wrong. An article on Colonial quilters at womenfolk.com points out the silliness of this idea, just from the practical issues of the amount of other work to be done and the lack of lighting:
“Even the image of sewing by the fire is dubious. Not to say that no one ever quilted by the fire but it was far too dim for any fine stitching. In fact all artificial lighting of the time was quite meager. Add to that the short days and long nights in winter and it makes sense that women’s diaries and journals tell us that most of the quilting was done from May through November….”
By about 1840 the textile industry had grown to the point that fabric was readily available to most families. Only then did quilting become a common way for American women to express their creativity. Interestingly it was after quilting became a widespread activity that somehow the idea of quilting being common in colonial times became a romanticized myth. In truth, “‘Quilts of any kind were rare in New England in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and it is unlikely that New England women were making quilts in any number until at least the 1750s.’”
The page has a timeline of quilting history (left sidebar), which shows quilt type – mostly beginning in the 1750s. Notable are the dates:
1813 ~ 1840 Establishment of US Textile Mills
1845 ~ 1855E Early Sewing Machines
image: from the Smithsonian Collection: Appliqued and Embroidered quilt top signed by Frances Jolly; NC. Dated 1839.
1887 Scientific American considers the technology of the sewing machine. Here we are 125 years later and many of the inventions are still in common use today. But there is the matter of the intriguing ‘single thread’ machine. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to just jettison that bobbin?
“The number of special attachments that have been successfully adapted to plain sewing machines has multiplied so rapidly of late, that only one or two of the more notable can be spoken of on this occasion. Perhaps the most generally useful of these is the trimmer, an arrangement consisting of a vibrating knife, which trims off the superfluous edge of a seam as the machine stitches it…
The setting of the needle in a sewing machine was once quite a task. Ofttimes it had to be adjusted by chance, in other instances by certain guiding marks upon the needle bar. It is gratifying to know that all this has been done away with, and that the needle has only to be inserted into the bar, and fastened by turning a small screw. These are styled self-setting needles, and are usually so arranged that they cannot be adjusted wrongly as to the position of the eye.
The author never foresaw the arrival of an electric home sewing machine, nor for that matter, the revival of the hand crank machines:
“Domestic machines will probably always be driven by foot power, spring, electric, and water motors notwithstanding. But the age of treadles in the great manufacturing trades is a thing of the past. It was not necessary for Parliament to step in and protect the workers, as was frequently suggested by alarmists. The commercial interests of manufacturers themselves were at stake. Machines driven by power could do 25 per cent. more work than those moved by foot. “
quotes taken from “A recent lecture before the Society of Arts, London” (1887)
For the 75th anniversary of American Gothic, Harvard historian and social critic Steven Biel has written a book, American Gothic: A Life of America’s Most Famous Painting. The painting portrays the artist’s sister and his elderly dentist (photo taken in 1942).
Biel summarizes the significance of the image:
“During the Depression, it came to represent endurance in hard times through the quintessential American values of thrift, work, and faith. Later, in television, advertising, politics, and popular culture, American Gothic evolved into parody—all the while remaining a lodestar by which one might measure closeness to or distance from the American heartland.”
NPR’s Melissa Gray offers this audio commentary of American Gothic Gray explores the composition of the work: “The three-pronged pitchfork is one obvious example, but look more closely and you’ll see echoes of the design on the face of the man, the bib of his overalls, and the lines on his shirt. In fact, the straightforward Gothic style extends to the directness of the painting itself… In addition to its architectural connotations, “Gothic” can also mean crude or underdeveloped. It’s an implication Wood was likely aware of when he titled the painting, though it’s unlikely that this was his sole observation about the pair.”
Continue reading
How should art be taught? Ellen Lupton (educator, designer and curator of contemporary design at Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum) makes some shocking proposals in her AIGA article, The Re-Skilling of the American Art Student. Her recommendation is that students be taught a set of skills:
“The idea of skill has come to seem woefully outdated in an art world that emphasizes conceptual innovation, and making the right statement at the right time, with the right media. Gone are the days when life drawing was the backbone of any artists’ skill set. The term “skill” carries not only an academic connotation, but a working-class one. The skilled worker is one who knows something about a particular process (which puts him or her a step above the unskilled worker), but is not part of the professional class. Plumbers, auto mechanics and short-order cooks are skilled workers.
I’m arguing for the re-skilling of the American art student across the disciplines of fine and applied art….”
Have we all gone too far in copyright insanity? Bouncing around the blogging community is a discussion about street art with a copyright symbol that has appeared in Brooklyn. At the right edge of the image photo (left) you can catch a glimpse of the drawing that is being copyrighted.
Stay Free is of the opinion that the copyright is part of the art experience. Hard to say, but it does make me reflect that the sense of profitable ownership in art may have gone a bit too far.
UPDATE: May 16,2005
A response from the folks at Stay Free: I think you’ve got our take at Stay Free!’s backwards, Serena.
At the time that I wrote the post I thought the idea of copyrighting chalk street art was laughable and invited him to come after me for posting a photo on the Stay Free blog. On reflection, I think the copyright is INTENDED to make the work stand out so that people talk about it and reproduce it.
-Charles
http://blog.stayfreemagazine.org
If you ever suspect that the rarefied world of fine art seems more like a street corner shell game than a pursuit for truth, wisdom and beauty, then the (U.K.) Telegraph has an article for you. ‘It’s not like selling socks’ provides background on the upcoming Art Task episode of BBC2 series The Apprentice. The Art Task requires the candidates to sell an entire gallery of contemporary art in a single evening. A short clip from the article:
“The era from the Renaissance through to the mid-19th century was one of patronage. But then the capitalist intermediary, the dealer, took over. And as early as 1871 the prestigious periodical the Art Journal was lamenting their part: ‘The influence of the dealer is one of the chief characteristics of modern art… to him has been owing… the immense increase in the prices of pictures.’
…But dealers are anxious to explain that this is a game properly played by experts unmotivated by the fast buck. Wigram prides himself on having a ‘good eye’ and being able to pick a winner; marketing instincts, he says, are irrelevant. His words chime with those of David Risley, a dealer now with his own flourishing gallery after making his first sale out of a bookshop, off the Charing Cross Road: ‘I never think about what’s going to sell, I just think about what I like.’ Leslie Waddington, who has been running blue-chip galleries in Cork Street for four decades, warns of ‘the great danger that people start seeing with their ears instead of their eyes.’ Only Maureen Paley, the founding of whose gallery Interim Art in 1984 spearheaded the London art world’s shift to the East End, is happy to think of herself as an entrepreneur. She describes art dealing as ‘a life’s work’, in which she is ultimately ‘promoting a cultural position’.”
New York Public Library has opened its digital gallery to the public. So far, about 275,000 items are online, “digitized from primary sources and printed rarities in the collections of The New York Public Library, including illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints and photographs, illustrated books, printed ephemera, and more.”
A New York Times review complains of the old fashioned organization of the collection: “The digital gallery is modeled on an old-fashioned card catalog, with all the attendant creaks. Doing a search is like going into a library and opening file drawers.” Yet this is also a great charm of the collection: the sense of exploration and discovery.
Browsing can occur through the archive’s front page collections list, or by subject, or name/title.
Some collections that will be of interest to fiber artists are:
Ornament and Pattern: Pre-Victorian to Art Deco (including several books – 256 pages – by Seguy)
The Floating World: Japanese Color Woodcuts by Kitagawa Utamaro (56 color plates)
Turn of the Century Posters
Anyone up for creating a work exploring the inhumanity of slavery and the dreams of freedom and a better life? There is the log of a slave ship and The gospel of slavery: a primer of freedom..
On a lighter note and reminiscent of Wayne Thiebaud‘s paintings, there is the book of Ladies’ dress shoes of the nineteenth century or The history of the feminine costume of the world, from the year 5318 B.C. to our century.
Note that images prior to 1922 are not subject to copyright fees. The library has a thoroughly considered pricing schedule for all other images.
Lots of inspiration. Drop by for a visit!