Art at the Gafney

Win art donated by 58 local artists to help raise funds for the Gafney Library in Sanbornville, New Hampshire. The opening reception is Wednesday July 11th from 4-7 pm. The raffle drawing and chocolate reception is Wednesday August 1st from 4-7 pm. Hope you can join us.

Malcolm Tarlofsky Photo-Collage Postcards

I have been hoarding these marvelous collectable Photo-Collage postcards by artist Malcolm Tarlofsky long enough. They are now available for sale in my collage gallery at Anita's Beads. Mail order available for folks who cannot travel to Wakefield, New Hampshire.

Felipe Jesus Consalvos: Material Culture

I've written about the fabulous collage work of Felipe Jesus Consalvos here before, four times in 2008, but not recently. I was reminded of his work by a two-page advertisement in this months Art in America. Material Culture is auctioning off three pieces by Consalvos: a collage titled "Young America," a decorated guitar, and the fabulous octagonal piece (front and back pictured above). Their inaugural auction, "New World Orders: Art Furnishings, Collectables, Decorative Arts" will be held in Philadelphia (home of the Fleisher-Ollman Gallery which represents the artist's estate) on May 5, 2012.

The jester says: "Do Not Storm the System." Indeed.  He's standing on the Ten of Clubs, and under that are the words: "Normal Academy." I love the background pattern. The title for this piece is "Medicinal Torpedoes Tabletop" and it is dated circa 1920/50.

The Artist's Mind

“There is at the back of every artist’s mind something like a pattern and a type of architecture. The original quality in any man of imagination is imagery. It is a thing like the landscape of his dreams; the sort of world he would like to make or in which he would like to wander, the strange flora and fauna, his own secret planet, the sort of thing he likes to think about. This general atmosphere, and pattern or a structure of growth, governs all his creations, however varied.” (G. K. Chesterton)

Julie Speed & Joseph Hammer

In the latest issue of ARTnews I noticed a review of Judy Speed's work at the Gerald Peters Gallery in New York. Her paintings and collages all speak to me. I was floored when I saw "Compass" (above). I have an attraction lately to square formats, particularly diagonal squares. (That black frame made me think of a collage I did called Boston.) Looking further, I discovered more of Speed's work, etchings, at Davis Gallery in Austin Texas. Some have strong red backgrounds that really knock you out.

And I couldn't help but notice the work of Joseph Hammer there as well. He makes such marvelous use of book parts and old type that I am left wondering why I am still sitting here at the keyboard when I could be downstairs working. I feel so inept today by comparison! Just look what he does:

He's got that four quadrant thing going on that reminds me so much of Roderick Slater.

Winter of the Mind: The Cornell-Nathan Connection

I've just started reading the marvelous book by Dore Ashton about collage/assemblage artist Joseph Cornell titled A Joseph Cornell Album (NY: Da Capo Press, 1974). It is a portrait of an authentic and original American eccentric with a poetic soul longing for the past, to paraphrase from the Foreward.

From it I have learned about a short novel written by Robert Nathan (1894-1985): Portrait of Jenny (1940). It was made into a film in 1949, and when the book was republished by Tachyon Publications in 1998, Ray Bradbury wrote: "Welcome back, Portrait of Jennie. It touched and frightened me when I was twenty-four. Now, once more, it touches and frightens."

Cornell greatly admired Nathan's supernatural novel and repeatedly referred friends to it. It is a book saturated with the experience of deja vu, writes Ashton. It is also explicitly an avowal of discomfort in the present.

"There is another kind of suffering for the artist which is worse than anything a winter, or poverty, can do; it is more like a winter of the mind, in which the life of his genius, the living sap of his work, seems frozen and motionless, caught--perhaps forever--in a season of death, and who knows if spring will ever come again to set it free?" (Robert Nathan)

Cornell shared Nathan's romanticism and longing for the safety of other times. The possibility of mystery in the universe is another common theme reflected in Cornell's work.

"One must sometimes believe what one cannot understand. That is the method of the scientist as well as the mystic; faced with a universe which must be endless and infinite, he accepts it, although he cannot really imagine it." (Robert Nathan)

Here are links to a number of interpretations, musical and otherwise, of Nathan's novel. I like to think Cornell would have enjoyed these:

Jennifer Jones: A Mozartian "Portrait of Jenny"

Portrait of Jenny Trailer

Portrait of Jenny {a tribute}

Jennie - Nobody knows

Keswick - A Portrait of Jenny

Nat King Cole - A Portrait of Jenny

George Benson - A Portrait of Jenny

Joe Lovano - Portrait of Jenny

How watching these clips makes me feel is best expressed by a German word I learned from reading Ashton: "sehnsucht" or, a longing for other times. This last link is off-topic, but it embodies the longing:

Charlie Parker - Autumn in New York

“I suppose most artists go through something of the sort; sooner or later it is no longer enough for them just to live —to paint, and have enough, or nearly enough, to eat. Sooner or later God asks His question: are you for me, or against me? And the artist must have some answer, or feel his heart break for what he cannot say.” (Robert Nathan)

Disordered Interior Geometries

The photography of Francesca Woodman (1958-1981) is on display at San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art. I remember including some black and white images of her work in a simultaneous slide show titled "Symbolist Photography" that I produced in the late 80's for a Photo Archives course I was taking at Simmons GSLIS. I have not given much thought to her work since, until reading this morning's post at Cafe Selavy.

Her work is as engaging as her life was tragic. Some belittle her art ( John Henshall for the New Statesman -- this one is saddening right down to the comments ) while others have contributed in a more positive way to a meaningful understanding of it. Peter Davison, poetry editor for the Atlantic, suggests: "Francesca Woodman's work presents femaleness without satire or an agenda," in his insightful article Girl, Seeming to Disappear.

The Long Exposure of Francesca Woodman by Elizabeth Gumport on the New York Review of Books blog (which makes mention of Woodman's use of Surrealist motifs) was another good find, as were the selections of 21 images posted on this blog and 13 more on this tumblr. But what finally convinced me to write about Francesca Woodman today was the discovery, via Gumport's article, of the photographer's altered book, published in 1980, titled "Some Disordered Interior Geometries."

I didn't find a copy of the book on Amazon, nor was one available through any of the other used book sellers that I frequent. However, I discovered Alison Dunhill's article "Dialogues with Diagrams: Francesca Woodman's Book, Some Disordered Interior Geometries" for Rebus, an online journal of art history and theory (Issue 2, Autumn 2008, .pdf file here). It is illustrated with several two-page spreads in addition to an image of the altered cover of the Italian geometry text, Esercizi Graduati di Geometria, which forms the base for Woodman's photos and annotations. According to Dunhill, this was one of five photographic books that Woodman created using a found object in this manner.

New Worlds of Surrealism

I saw the advertisement in Art News this month for the show titled Surrealism: New Worlds at the Weinstein Gallery in San Francisco. It is running December 10, 2011 to January 28, 2012. I'm particularly fond of this fantastic collage painting by Victor Brauner.

The roster of artists also includes: William Baziotes, Alexander Calder, Leonora Carrington, Salvador Dali, Oscar Dominguez, Enrico Donati, Marcel Duchamp, Jimmy Ernst, Max Ernst, Leonor Fini, David Hare, Marcel Jean, Gerome Kamrowski, Andre Mason, Roberto Matta, Joan Miro, Gordon Onslow Ford, Wolfgang Paalen, Hurt Seligmann, Stella Snead, and Yves Tanguy.

I also like this one by Gerome Kamrowski.

Skip Battaglia and Norman Juster

Having a YouTube kind of day! I just watched this great short film called Parataxis made by Skip Battaglia in 1980.

Am I the Story I tell myself? Consciousness begins with the first lie. My memory is redundant so that I might begin to exist. I could tell you but this would tell you nothing.

And I found my all-time favorite by Norman Juster, The Dot And The Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics. I've posted about the book before here. According to Wikipedia, Juster's story was inspired by the 1884 satirical novella Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin Abbott Abbott (writing pseudonymously as "A Square") who offered pointed observations on the social hierarchy of the Victorians.

Flatland inspired me as well. See this post for a collage example!

Larry Jordan & Joseph Cornell

I was very excited when I discovered the animation of Larry Jordan three years ago. Today I noticed a number of his pieces on YouTube including Gymnopedies (1965, with an enigmatic score by Eric Satie) and Hamfat Asar (1965).

And here's another great find, Carousel-Animal Opera filmed by Joseph Cornell in the 1930's and later completed by Larry Jordan in the 1970's.

And speaking of Joseph Cornell, here's a nice slide show of his work, including some altered books which I have never seen before. And here's his strange upside-down, reversed and negative image world of By Night With Torch and Spear with a marvelously haunting sound track!

Here's an interesting bit that I learned on the YouTube site. Made by splicing together stock footage that Cornell had found and collected, the film premiered at the first Surrealist exhibition in New York 1936. Salvador Dalí, present at its first screening, was outraged, claiming he had just had the same idea of applying collage to film. He remarked that Cornell should stick to making boxes and stop making films. Traumatized, Cornell rarely showed his films there after.

Larry Jordan was one of a number of young assistants that Cornell hired to help organize his collections. I wonder if the blue predominating in Gymnopedies is a nod to Cornell's Rose Hobart (1936) which was projected through a sheet of blue glass.

And I can't close without mentioning this superb example of bizarre collage animation dating from 1959: Stan Vanderbeek's Science Friction! There's a bit with a television in there that must have inspired Joanna Priestley.

Parliament Presents Salvador Dali

Here's a 1958 Mike Wallace interview with Surrealist Salvador Dali from YouTube. The dialog is interesting enough but the introduction featuring Wallace pushing Parliament cigarettes (they're Hi-Fi!) is really amazing! I discovered it via Brain Pickings.

Constructivism and the Visual Verities

I've just begun reading George Rickey's book Constructivism: Origins and Evolution (Revised Editon; NY: George Braziller, 1995) which I purchased some time ago at the Museum of Fine Arts bookstore in Boston. I wasn't into collage yet but look at those dots on the cover! Even back then they held an attraction for me.

The term "Constructivism" was invented c.1914 by Russian artist Vladimir Tatlin to define objects built rather than cast or carved, or any design in two or three dimensions reminiscent of Euclid: flat and rectilinear or made with straight edge or compass.

The constructivists (1913-1922) include some of my favorite Russian artists: Tatlin, Malevich, Rodchenko, El Lissitzky, Naum Gabo, Antoine Pevsner and (briefly) Wassily Kandinsky.

In the preface to the revised edition, the author presents this list of visual verities ". . . waiting like the keys of a piano for a human touch:"

Time

Space

Color

Light

Texture

Contrast

Passage

Impact

Echo

Void

Shape

Acute

Obtuse

Convex

Concave

Sound

Silence

Alex Steinweiss Album Cover Art

I just discovered a wonderful graphic designer named Alex Steinweiss who was responsible for the invention of album cover art in the late 1930's. Here's a bit of history from the Alex Steinweiss site:

Before Alex Steinweiss invented the album cover in 1938, at the age of 23, all albums came in plain brown wrappers. Steinweiss's idea to create a package that had something visual on the outside to lure the consumer was a huge success. That simple idea revolutionized the record business and spawned an entire new field of illustration--album cover art--that is now inseparable from the product it announces. Steinweiss's covers are still regarded as icons of the genre. He designed them as miniature posters, with eye-catching graphics, distinctive and vivid colors, and creative, original typography. He was an accomplished illustrator, and he incorporated original artwork into most of his pieces. The Steinweiss style went hand in hand with the golden age of jazz, classical, and popular music.

Follow this link to the Steinweiss covers page which has over 70 examples including the one with a cool collage treasure dot shown above. My first LP was "Rubber Soul" by The Beatles. I miss that large 12x12 format. Today's CD's are too small to do their artwork justice, but I guess that's progress for you.

Taschen has published what looks to be a great book on Steinweiss. There is also a biography, For the Record: The Life and Work of Alex Steinweiss on Amazon.

Surrealist Kay Sage

I'm reading Judith D. Suther's biography of the painter Kay Sage titled A House of Her Own: Kay Sage, Solitary Surrealist (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997.) The author describes how the "surrealist espousal of dream states, the non-rational, and the individual's access to the unconscious held the key to authentic creativity."

There's a nice slide show on YouTube showcasing Sage's work. I find her painting titled "Tomorrow is Never" of the shrouded skyscrapers enclosed by scaffolding (at 1:30) to be very disturbing. Makes me think of a last-ditch and now abandoned effort to escape the killing effects of a chemtrail laden atmosphere.

I guess I never realized how may artists are represented on YouTube. Other women surrealists I found there include: my all-time favorite Remedios Varo, Dorothea Tanning, Ilene Meyer (who is new to me and needs to be explored further), and Leonora Carrington.

Meg Hitchcock's Visual Mantras

Meg Hitchcock's reassembled text collages serve to illustrate how obsessive a devoted book altering artist can be. I just discovered her work while following up on ACA Galleries' advertisement for their upcoming show Fragments: Modern and Contemporary Collage (April 30 through June 11).

On her Art Blog, Meg reveals a bit about her method: "Briefly, my creative work goes like this: I cut up sacred texts letter by letter, disemboweling the word of God, and then reconfigure them letter by letter to create another sacred text." Visit her website to see her lovely paintings (in three series: Gates, Totems and Knots) and more collage work.

There is also a clip on YouTube featuring the artist talking about her installation in process, re-writing the Koran as the Book of Revelation. She is a wizard with that x-acto knife! I found the viewer comments, which discuss the distinction between art and religion, to be interesting as well.

And, in postscript, I want to mention that Tony Fitzpatrick, my favorite collage artist from Chicago, will also be showing work in ACA's Fragments show.

Brian Dettmer's Book Art

Brian Dettmer is known as "the Book Surgeon" for his technique of carving up old volumes to create beautiful sculptural art. Taking collage to the next level, he neither adds nor rearranges, only removes using scissors and surgical tools transforming dictionaries, old medical textbooks, and out-of-date encyclopedias into mind-boggling dioramas.

My Modern Met features fifteen illustrations of Dettmer's bibliotransformations as well as an exclusive interview with seven more photos. Visit the website of Brian Dettmer to view additional work dating from 2005 to 2010. Recent press includes an article on The New Yorker's "Book Bench" titled Postmodern Deconstruction. A solo show is scheduled for May 19, 2011 – June 11, 2011 at Kinz + Tillou in New York City.

Barbara Kruger Does Barbasol

I just started reading a fabulous book: Barbara Kruger (NY: Rizzoli, 2010). Even if you are not familiar with the name you probably would recognize her signature artwork: black and white photos with bold captions on red backgrounds.

The book is 312 pages and so far I have been skimming and skipping. Imagine my surprise to see that Kruger appropriated one of my favorite Barbasol advertisement images (original ad pictured above; blogged earlier here) from a 1950's Life magazine! I learned from her Wikipedia entry that the typeface she uses is Futura Bold and she studied art and design with Diane Arbus at Parson's School of Design. The entry pointed me to a clever Graphic Standards Manual. And a nice selection of her work can be seen here.

Collage as Gesamtkunstwerk

I'm still reading my way through "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" which is a chapter from Dialectic of Enlightenment ( Adorno & Horkheimer, 1944). There I came across a marvelous German word: gesamtkunstwerk.

Translated as" total work of art," the idea of gesamtkunstwerk implies ideal work of art, universal artwork, synthesis of the arts, comprehensive artwork, all-embracing art form, or total artwork. The term was first used in 1827 by the German writer and philosopher K. F. E. Trahndorff. As a "supernaturalist," Trahndorff opposed theological rationalism and embraced the indeducible, supernatural and mystical nature of religious revelation. German opera composer Richard Wagner used the term in his 1849 essays "Art and Revolution" and "The Artwork of the Future", where he speaks of unifying all works of art via the theater.

I see collage as a synthesis of both the visual arts (painting, photography, graphic design, etc.) and of the ephemeral bits of life, memories and dreams; a curio cabinet of the soul.

And, in keeping with the German theme, check out Alexander Korzer-Robinson's amazing collages constructed with the German encyclopaedia Brockhaus Konversationslexikon.

Blotted Cross How-To and More Warhol

I was able to achieve the "blotted line" effect using Photoshop. My original sketch was in red Sharpie marker on a yellow lined tablet. (Does this depend on the color red to achieve the effect? I need to check that aspect out. . .)

Starting with a .jpg file I went to Image, then Mode and selected Grayscale.

And then, again under Mode, I converted the image to Bitmap (Input Resolution 72 pixels/inch; Output Resolution 1200 pixels/inch; Method use 50% threshold). The result is a .psd file which I resized to 600 pixels wide and then saved as a .gif.

Then, using the brush tool set to white, I cleaned up the background, preserving the cross design. (Note to self: straighten up the image in the first step while it is still in .jpg format because you can't do it once the image is in Bitmap!).

I need to experiment further to see what happens with different Resolution and Threshold settings.

Recently I've been noticing other blog posts related to Andy Warhol. My friend Jim at Dull Tool Dim Bulb links a coloring book published by Pittsburgh's H. J. Heinz Company to Warhol's Heinz Tomato Ketchup drawing.

And Mike over at Unremitting Failure published a great self-portrait in the style of Warhol's Marilyn Monroe portraits.

Andy Warhol and That Beautiful Blotted Line!

It's the end of June already. To a certain extent I feel like I'm clawing my way through limbo. I don't have any finished collages to show for it but there are new possibilities on the horizon. I've been watching an amazing documentary from Netflix: Andy Warhol from the American Masters Series. Aside from learning about the politics behind trends in art, I have finally become aware of the importance of Andy Warhol's work.

Funny thing how growing up with it I just took the work for granted and never even saw it, really, let alone realized its implications. All that marvelous repetition! Can you imagine what he would have done had he access to Photoshop?

So now I am in love with that beautiful "blotted line." I even found instruction on how it is done. The possibilities for collage are astounding to me. And I keep watching the documentary over and over (should I admit, obsessively--Andy would have liked that) because every time I do I pick up on something new.

The blog called Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast has an interview in which children's illustrator Edwin Fotheringham elaborates on his use of the blotted line and it's digital translation via Photoshop using a "Wacom Cintiq" which Fotheringham describes as "essentially a flat panel monitor that acts as a pressure sensitive tablet, with stylus input."