Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Monday, February 16, 2009
Group shots... patterns of emergence
Fishermen try to catch fish during the Argungu fishing festival in Nigeria on March 15, 2008. Over 30,000 fishermen from different parts of Nigeria and neighbouring West Africa took part in the final of the yearly Argungu fishing festival in Kebbi, northwestern Nigeria. (Pius Utomi Ekpei/AFP/Getty Images)
People drop lines in holes on a frozen river at an event to fish trout in Hwacheon, South Korea, about 20 km (12 miles) south of the demilitarised zone separating two Koreas, northeast of Seoul January 13, 2008. More than 1,000,000 people attend at the annual ice festival which lasts for three weeks in January. (REUTERS/Lee Jae-Won )
Thousands of sportsmen and women are seen on their way from Maloja to S-Chanf near St Moritz in south eastern Switzerland on March 9, 2008 as they participate in the annual Engadin skiing marathon. (AP Photo/Keystone/Alessandro Della Bella)
Friday, February 13, 2009
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Mark Rothko 1903-1970
"I’m not an abstractionist. I’m not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on."
"It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academicism. There is no such thing as good painting about nothing."
"Silence is so accurate."
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Photo of the day...
Photo taken from someone’s back porch in Adelaide. Cute little koala looking for some relief from the heat. The lady that lived there filled up a basin of water and he jumped in.
Unbelievably adorable. ache
Quotes....
He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.
Aristotle, Politics
In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous.
Aristotle, Parts of Animals
What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies.
Aristotle, from Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers
Monday, February 9, 2009
Theo Jansen: The art of creating creatures...
Artist Theo Jansen demonstrates the amazingly lifelike kinetic sculptures he builds from plastic tubes and lemonade bottles. His creatures are designed to move -- and even survive -- on their own.
Saturday, February 7, 2009
More Calder....
Alexander Calder, Goldfish Bowl, 1929, wire, private collection.
Red Lily Pads, 1956. Painted sheet metal, metal rods, and wire, 42 x 201 x 109 inches. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. 65.1737. © 2007 Calder Foundation, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Friday, February 6, 2009
Art stuff...
Whitney 1993 Biennial
Charles Ray's "Family Romance" (1992-1993) uniform size naked, hand-holding nuclear family sculpture on display at Whitney Museum's 1993 Biennial exhibition.
Location: New York, NY, US
Date taken: March 1993
Photographer: Ted Thai
Ray's primary thematic concerns center around containment, integration, isolation, and self-sufficiency. A leader in Conceptual Realism, Ray's best work offers a metaphor for the gap between the literal and the symbolic (or the known and the unknown).
His art is compelling in its representation of consciousness as uncertain and fugitive, something toward which we continually grasp. His work seems to capture the strategic orientation and inescapable reflexiveness of the resurgent Realist figuration we've seen in this post-Postmodern era. It often involves odd discrepancies in resolution, a visual mismatch among parts, or a discomfiting slip between the model and the finished product. Other works make powerful use of shifts in scale, destabilizing our customary relationships to the objects they represent.
Both "Ink Box" (1986) and "Self-Portrait" (1990) display the mordant humor that occasionally surfaces in Ray's work. The former is an example of the perceptually oriented thought-puzzles to which Ray devoted his attention in the late 1980s. The three-foot cube is beautifully finished in gleaming black, and at first glance it is an instance of Minimalist formal power. Yet something is slightly off -- the work emits an aura of agitation that undermines the authority of the object. Closer examination reveals that the sculpture is actually an open box filled just past the brim with ink held from spilling by its own surface tension. The artist himself described the work as "neurotic" in its almost animate and threatening presence. The latter work presents itself as a department store mannequin, until one notices that it has imperfect features. The face is a genericized version of Ray's own, and the dummy models what has come to be the artist's trademark "Everygeek" ensemble: jeans, button-front shirt, windbreaker, and comfortable shoes. The pieces serve to define the generally indeterminate line between abstraction and figuration. Such flexibility illustrates how, at his best, Ray works between these supposedly polar-opposite methods, defamiliarizing the vernacular and making the commonplace strange.
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
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