MetaFilter posts tagged with visualart

"the whole rational creation formed a single dancing chorus"

Kattullus — Fri, 31 May 2013 08:34:32 -0800

The Dancing Saints is "a 3,000 square foot icon wrapping around the entire church rotunda, showing ninety larger-than life saints; four animals; stars, moons, suns and a twelve-foot dancing Christ." Among the icons are traditional saints like Francis of Assisi and Mary Magdalene, but most of them are non-traditional saints, like Florence Nightingale, John Coltrane and Lady Godiva's Horse. The Dancing Saints Icon is inside the St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco. You can watch a video tour of the church's architecture, read an interview with iconographer Mark Dukes, and a short essay on the Dancing Saints Icon by Richard Fabian.

The Thinker at the Gates of Hell

Kattullus — Tue, 07 May 2013 04:46:26 -0800

A twenty-five minute doctumentary about Auguste Rodin's monumental sculpture "The Gates of Hell," which exists in two radically different versions. From the first version spring many of Rodin's best known sculptures, including his most famous, "The Thinker," originally conceived as a portrait of Dante gazing at Hell from above. It was never cast in bronze during his lifetime and was somewhat notorious for never having been completed, but is now considered to be one of the greatest sculptures of the modern era.

Limonious in fine style

Dim Siawns — Sat, 04 May 2013 23:31:41 -0800

Wilfred Limonious was a visual artist who created many album covers, flyers etc. for dancehall artists. His best-known work is in a light -hearted style inspired by comic strips. In Fine Style collects several illustrations by Limonious along with related paraphernalia, and Interruptor maintains a more comprehensive archive of his cover artworks.

International Art English

The Whelk — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 12:33:26 -0800

"The internationalized art world relies on a unique language. Its purest articulation is found in the digital press release. This language has everything to do with English, but it is emphatically not English. It is largely an export of the Anglophone world and can thank the global dominance of English for its current reach. But what really matters for this language—what ultimately makes it a language—is the pointed distance from English that it has always cultivated. " - Triple Canopy magazine on why do artists' statments and press releases sound so utterly odd and confusing.

“I didn’t want to speak, but I wanted to be like, ‘Hey kids!’ Then I was

divabat — Sun, 20 Jan 2013 13:29:57 -0800

Visual artist Nick Cave (not of The Bad Seeds) worked together for months with students across various departments of the University of North Texas to present Heard, a visual and musical burst of vibrancy based on Cave's childhood experiences of colouring in horses and being told by his mother: "It doesn’t matter if it’s pink. If he wants it to be pink, it can be pink.". And not just pink, even.

"We cannot send 'The Dog' to the museum basement because it was on the apparently nonexisting second floor of the Quinta."

Kattullus — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 19:26:44 -0800

The Black Paintings is the title given to a series of works by Spanish artist Francisco Goya painted directly on the walls of his house from 1819-23. Their provenance has been doubted much like that of The Colossus, which has recently been attributed to Goya's assistant. Either way, the Black Paintings are masterpieces and have pride of place in the Museo del Prado in Madrid, which has put them all online in high resolution (you can save images to your computer in high resolution). [Goya previously]

Michael Asher (1943–2012)

wreckingball — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 10:38:10 -0800

"Michael devoted his work to exploring the limits of the galleries and schools and museums that give context and space for art, poking at all sorts of barriers and shibboleths with a humor that was sometimes sly, and sometimes hilarious. He removed walls and doors and windows from galleries and museum spaces, letting in daylight and air, letting out preconceptions." Pioneering conceptual artist Michael Asher dies at 69 Asher was a longtime faculty member at California Institute of the Arts. A former student, recalling one the artist's legendary critiques: "I pinned up approximately 4 or 5 wall pieces I was working on […] I was ready to discuss, in detail, my thought process behind each piece and the project as a whole. Michael walked in, I shook his hand, and I began pontificating on the meaning of my work. He stared at me, and after a moment of silence, I asked him what he thought. 'Today, we are only going to talk about the grommets[.]'" Roberta Smith at the New York Times reviews Asher's 2008 exhibition at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, for which he reinstalled the wooden and metal studs of every temporary wall built during the museum's ten years at the location. James Rondeau at Frieze discusses the exhibition and Asher's 40-year practice in greater depth.

Hokusai's Great Wave

Kattullus — Sat, 22 Sep 2012 11:04:54 -0800

The Great Wave off Kanagawa is probably the most iconic Japanese artwork in history, often used to illustrate tsunamis, and scientists have attempted to analyze what kind of wave it depicts. The woodprint is part of the 36 Views of Mount Fuji series, which depicts the famous mountain from different spots in Japan. The artist who made the Great Wave, Katsushika Hokusai, created thousands of images, many of which can be viewed online, such as in the internet galleries of the Museum of Fine Art and Visipix (Visipix' Hokusai page). Besides woodprints, Hokusai produced sketchbooks he called manga, one of which, number twelve, can be flipped through on the Swedish Touch and Turn website.

The Breaking Bad Art Project

Egg Shen — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 15:18:38 -0800

The Breaking Bad Art Project is on exhibit at Gallery 1988 in Los Angeles through August 26. The acclaimed television drama has also inspired derivative works in other media.

Chéri Herouard and La Vie parisienne

Kattullus — Sat, 23 Jun 2012 19:45:05 -0800

Two Flickr sets of 295 illustrations and 103 illustrations each (plus three more illustrations), by French artist Chéri Herouard who is most famous for his work for "naughty French magazine" La Vie parisienne from 1907 to his death. You can find some high quality scans from La Vie parisienne and more information about the magazine at Darwination Scans. Quite a few of the images are not safe for work. [via Kate Beaton]

PBS Off Book

flex — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 14:50:16 -0800

The first episode of the second season of PBS Arts web-original series Off Book is Animated GIFs: The Birth of a Medium (mini-documentary, ~7 min). "OFF BOOK explores cutting edge arts and the artists that make it. Breaking the mold of the definition of art, OFF BOOK explores the avant-garde, the experimental and the underground artforms that are supported by online communities." press release: PBS announced... the premiere of “Off Book,” a new web series focused on experimental and non-traditional art forms on PBSArts.org ... This 13-part, bi-weekly series explores the ever-changing definition of art in the hands of the next generation of artists taking creative reigns and melding art with new media. OFF BOOK videos: all full episodes PBS Arts: Off Book home page PBS Arts: Off Book tumblr Season 1 episodes: Episode 1: Light Painting Episode 2: Typography Episode 3: Visual Culture Online Episode 4: Steampunk Episode 5: Hacking Art & Culture with F.A.T. Lab Episode 6: Street Art Episode 7: Etsy Episode 8: Video Games Episode 9: The Fashion of Artists Episode 10: Generative Art - Computers, Data, and Humanity Episode 11: Product Design Episode 12: Book Art Episode 13: The Evolution of Music Online

"these little songs, and many like them, were made for the comfort of my friends, in their sorrow, doubt and suffering"

Kattullus — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 18:17:10 -0800

An internet search, even in these days of abundant information, yields only that the pamphlets can be found in various library collections, and that they continued to be produced into the '70s. And that Edmund Wilson once sent one, "Mr. P. Squiggle's Reward," to Nabokov, calling it "one of the oddest of many odd things that are sent me by unknown people." He also got the title wrong, dubbing it "Mr. P. Squiggle's Revenge," which is probably significant. But that’s it: nothing about Volk or McCalib.

Epitomes was a series of pamphlets published by Elwin Volk and Dennis McCalib. Few traces of Volk's life are to be found, but he seems to have been a lawyer, and wrote at least a couple of pamphlets about law, which he self-published in Pasadena. McCalib is equally elusive. A man by that name contributed to an issue of One: The Homosexual Viewpoint in 1964. A Dennis McCalib also used the pseudonym Lord Fuzzy. The aforementioned "Mr. P. Squiggle's Reward" got a curt, two half-sentence dismissal in Poetry Magazine, otherwise these pamphlets seem not to have troubled the literary world. Someone donated their manuscripts to UCLA where they rest undigitized in fourteen boxes. But Library of Congress has scanned a total of twenty-six pages in high resolution.

"a monument to the decline of monuments"

Kattullus — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 16:20:24 -0800

After the highly publicized Bruce Lee monument was erected in Mostar, a city and municipality in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2005, a series of similar ventures were initiated in rural Serbia. Some sociologists describe the glorification of nonpolitical celebrity figures as the result of an identity crisis caused by the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, a period when a once functioning multi-ethnic unity collapsed.

— Turbo Sculpture is an essay by Aleksandra Domanović about sculptures of pop culture heroes, e.g. Bruce Lee, Rocky Balboa and Bob Marley, which have been placed or proposed in the nation-states that once comprised Yugoslavia. You can also watch a photo-illustrated reading of the essay voiced by a dead-pan British man. [via We Find Wildness]

Giorgio Morandi

Trurl — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 19:13:31 -0800

Aspirants to the role of painter-as-poet are many. Giorgio Morandi was the real thing. Morandi has never been a popular artist and never will be. He engages the world one solitary viewer at a time. The experience of his work is unsharable even, in a way, with oneself, like a word remembered but not remembered, on the tip of the tongue.

The paintings of Don Van Vliet

Trurl — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 20:29:24 -0800

Don Van Vliet is self-taught. He neither expects allowances for the amateur’s lack of dexterity nor permits any technical deficiency on his own part to limit his scope. Nobody's understanding or forbearance sets limits to what he does - any more than does the fear of going wrong. The lacerations, transgressions, and awkward moments that he introduces are unpredictable, as is their duration; when he takes the figures that confront him and tugs them out of shape, he simultaneously tugs himself out of shape - and out of his own limitations. - Roberto Ohrt

Scottish artist Robert Montgomery and his billboards and neon signs

Kattullus — Fri, 20 May 2011 06:27:01 -0800

"Robert Montgomery works in a poetic and melancholic post-situationist tradition. He makes billboard pieces, recycled sunlight pieces and drawings." This one's my favorite but I like others too. Here are a few more examples: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.

Simon Tookome, artist and whipper

Kattullus — Sat, 02 Apr 2011 00:17:28 -0800

"I'm proud of being recognized as an artist, but I really want to be known as someone with a special talent for the whip." Simon Tookoome, who passed away last year, was justly celebrated as an artist in his lifetime. You can view 39 of his pieces in The Canadian Art Database (including my favorite of his, the sculpture Shaman Wolf). But whipping was closer to his heart, and in his prime may have been the world's greatest whipper. Sadly, I could find no video of him from before 2000 on the internet, but here he is at 72. You can read a description of him at his peak in this condescending Time article about the 1972 Arctic Winter Games. And you can watch a few more Simon Tookoome videos here.

Found Functions

jokeefe — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 15:49:25 -0800

Found Functions. An elegant demonstration of beauty in mathematics (and landscape). Nikki Graziano is a math and photography student at Rochester Institute of Technology; some of her photographs were recently featured in Wired. Graziano "overlays graphs and their corresponding equations onto her carefully composed photos. ... Graziano doesn’t go out looking for a specific function but lets one find her instead. Once she’s got an image she likes, Graziano whips up the numbers and tweaks the function until the graph it describes aligns perfectly with the photograph."

Art by Alasdair Gray

Kattullus — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 09:37:19 -0800

Alasdair Gray is best known as a novelist but his illustrations of his own books have long fascinated and delighted. Here you can see hundreds of artworks by Alasdair Gray, including some book illustrations, from 1950 through 2009. Here are a few of his works that I like: unfinished Scottish Society of Playwrights poster, Nina Watching the Simpsons, Erics Watching Television, Ice Age and Babylonian Science, theatre poster for A Clockwork Orange and the Scots Hippo series. Also on the website there are a lot of articles about and by Alasdair Gray reposted from various publications. And finally, here's a podcast of a talk Alasdair Gray gave called The First Pictures I Enjoyed.

Caravaggio and Rembrandt, two great tastes that go well together

Kattullus — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 11:34:08 -0800

The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam invites you to compare Caravaggio and Rembrandt. For an overview of Rembrandt's work here are Rembrandt van Rijn: Life and Work and A Web Catalogue of Rembrandt Paintings. For Caravaggio there's caravaggio.com which makes use of the Italian website Tutta l'opera del Caravaggio.

Iconodule website

Kattullus — Sun, 10 May 2009 22:47:22 -0800

The Temple Gallery in London has more than 200 items of Eastern Orthodox religious art, principally icons, on its website, both from the current exhibit as well as older pieces. Icons have been a part of Orthodox Christianity for centuries and they are loaded with meaning. The theology is elaborated upon in this essay on the history, principles and function of icons by iconographer Dr. George Kordis. One of the subjects of the essay is the Byzantine iconoclasm, a central event of which was the Seventh Ecumenical Council, depicted here in an icon. Here are some other icons I like: The Forty Martyrs of Sebasteia, St. Alypius the Stylite, Synaxis of the Archangels, Dormition of the Virgin and Presentation of Christ in the Temple. [Click on any image for a larger view]

Trimpin: Musical Sculptor

Kattullus — Mon, 04 May 2009 13:32:29 -0800

Seattle-based German artist Trimpin makes sculptural musical instruments. He was profiled in a mini-documentary by Washington public TV station KBTC a couple of years ago. Here are videos of some other works of art he's created, Fire Organ, Liquid Percussion, Cello, Sensors and Record Players, Contraption at Seattle-Tacoma Airport, MIDI-controlled Player Piano and Sheng High. Kyle Gann wrote an essay by that placed Trimpin in the tradition of John Cage, Harry Partch and other avant-garde American musical inventors. The audio of a nearly hour and a half long 1990 interview with Trimpin by Charles Amirkhanian can be downloaded from the Internet Archive. Another, more light-hearted interview in connection to his show at this year's SXSW, where a documentary about him premiered (trailer).

Wriston Art Center Galleries Digital Collection

Kattullus — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 21:12:43 -0800

The Wriston Art Center Galleries Digital Collection at Lawrence University has over 1500 images of various artworks, focusing especially on prints & printmaking and ancient coins. All can be viewed in extremely high resolution (click "export image" above the artwork). Here are a few I particularly like: Beginning of Winter (Japanese woodcut), Rising Sun (Paul Klee painting), From Distant Lands (watercolor), Three Kings (Jacques Villon engraving), Untitled I (netting) and Noble Lady and Prince (Japanese woodcut).

French Drawings

Kattullus — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 21:39:53 -0800

The Essence of Line is a collection of over 900 drawings by French artists "from Ingres to Degas" by the Baltimore Museum of Art. I'd link to some highlights but the site did such a stellar job of it that I'll just direct you there. They also have some sketchbooks. Note that some of the drawings have short essays about them. As a related link, here is the famous Demonographia, with drawings of demons by Louis Breton and descriptions by Collin de Plancy.

Artists' Books Online

Kattullus — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 05:33:43 -0800

Artists' Books Online is a collection by the University of Virginia of artists' books. Artists' books are works of art that take the form of books and are often both text and visual art. Either way, they're awful interesting to look at. Here are some artbooks to get you started: How to Humiliate Your Peeping Tom by Susan Baker, The Word Made Flesh by Johanna Drucker, Life in a Book by Francois Deschamps, A.A.A.R.P. by Clifton Kirkpatrick Meador, opuntia is just another name for a prickly pear by Todd Walker and Black Dog White Bark by Erica Van Horn