Friday, May 15, 2009
Nikki's final piece
Hi Everyone,
Because of Nikki's flooded home, you all missed her final presentation.
Here are a few images of how her torn paper piece developed.
I wish you all a terrific summer. This has been a really great semester.
All the best
!
Because of Nikki's flooded home, you all missed her final presentation.
Here are a few images of how her torn paper piece developed.
I wish you all a terrific summer. This has been a really great semester.
All the best
!
Gone Bananas
As we've been talking about color and its relationship to time, we examined Stefan Sagmeister's installation of 7,200 bananas. I really enjoyed your reflections on this piece, especially Mary Ellen's astute comment that self-confidence does not always produce fine results. I wanted to post his statement about the piece that I found on another blog:
Because of the wonderful willingness of so many New York designers to write into our fogged up windows at Deitch (considering they all gave up 3 hours of their time I wanted to be there when they started) I spent quite a bit of time in the gallery and had a chance to observe many visitors. I had the impression that lots and lots of people were delighted by the banana wall, - during the 4 week run of the show hundreds and hundreds came through. Because so many visitors clearly enjoyed a banana with their eyes and with their nose, I was so surprised to learn you hated the smell. I myself absolutely loved it.
Why did I do this?
I wanted a formal device, that would allow the content of the sentence (“self-confidence produces fine results”) to appear and disappear, just like my own self-confidence comes and goes.
As a medium I chose bananas because their ripening process allows for this appearance/disappearence to happen, because they are an absolutely beautiful fruit, because they smell sweet and luscious as they turn brown, because they carry significant visual baggage (Andy Warhol’s banana cover for the Velvet Underground ever so slightly connected to our work for Lou Reed - who came by and loved the bananas by the way), because they fit neatly with our inflatable white monkeys, because glued to a wall bananas form a pattern reminiscent of a knitted sweater working tightly with our needle stitch typography.
Are these reasons good enough to “waste” almost $ 2000.00 dollars worth of bananas? I could have created the same size wall utilizing custom wallpaper, designed a vector graphic in illustrator, paid $ 8000.00 for printing it out and likely would have avoided upsetting anybody. I think it would have been weaker.
The bananas will come down on Sunday. If anybody from the blog wants to see them in real life, Saturday from 12:00 - 6:00 is the last chance. We’ll throw the brown bananas out. I donated double the cost of the bananas to the coalition for the homeless in New York.
— Stefan Sagmeister
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Time-lapse videos
Ello.
Whenever I think of time related shtuff, time-lapse videos always come to mind. I'm hoping the following videos that I will link to will give you guys some inspiration and maybe even more ideas about your final pieces. If you have a really fast internet connection, watch the videos in HD by clicking on the HD button. The images come out cleaner and the colors can be viewed better that way.
The first video <--- click link and watch in HD
Eirik Solheim, the creator of this project, took images from the same spot outside his house over a year (2005) and then condensed them into a 40-second video that showcases the changes in color as the seasons change over time.
The second video is another time lapse video that Solheim did after completing the experiment he did in 2007. He added audio that he recorded on the spot to the video and since it is stretched to over 2 minutes long, the color changes are more subtle. Another difference that can be noted with this video from the first one is that the camera is more focused on the foliage and by doing this, the changes in colors are more arresting since the the areas where a lot of color changing that we attribute to seasonal changes (leaves :D) are right in the face of the viewer.
You can read more about his experiment at his website: eirikso.com___________________________________________________________________
The next video showcases various natural occurrences that are just simply mesmerizing. From wet brown sand, slowly being covered by a blanket of the light blue sea, the blue sea giving way to orange sand as the tide descends to night skies changing from purple-orange, to black with some reds peeking out from the sides as heavenly bodies streak into the horizon, their colors also changing... Fungi that people just tread on and ignore are pulsating and alive, slowly creeping onto moss-covered rocks while the mushrooms explode into intricate patterns, and as you zoom out into the sky, the blue atmosphere of dawn in the mountains is being tapped by the orange of the sunrise sneaking into view.
I can go on and on, but yeah, just watch it. In HD or you're missing out on really cool colors. :D
The last video is of city scenes and shows how light is interacting with the glass windows of tall buildings and how street lamps reflecting into the water and blurred car lights create stunning imagery in the urban landscape.
Enjoy :D
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Violent color
Here's an article that I thought was a great example of writing about color; plus a link to some images from the exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
(c) 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. Reproduced with permission of copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.
Pierre Bonnard: The Late Interiors
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Through April 19
New York -- The French painter Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) combined the paint-handling of the Post-Impressionists with the high-keyed palette of the Nabis and the Fauves -- artists who concerned themselves with the poetic and expressive, rather than the naturalistic, functions of color. He atomized the world into a fever-pitch patchwork of color and light, creating paintings that are as mesmerizing as the most brilliant and beautiful sunsets. That beauty is in full force in "Pierre Bonnard: The Late Interiors," a fierce tour de force at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Yet beauty takes many forms. And to be captivating, a painter must do more than razzle-dazzle us with pretty colors. Bonnard understood that, although paintings may provide us with images of the external world, they can also explore states of mind. Therefore, he pushed everything to the extreme. Bonnard's flowering trees can suggest divine revelation, and his domestic interiors are reminiscent of sacred visitations. But, also, his bowls of fruit can gape like wide-open craniums; cherries can glisten like viscera; and windows can suggest crucifixions. Bonnard's dining tables often resemble game boards, operating arenas, insurmountable cliff faces or expanses of desolate tundra, and his sunset-colors can become fiery rains, enveloping his figures like molten flame.
Alberto Giacometti said that he could not get over "the violence of Bonnard," a quality he found lacking in Jackson Pollock when he compared the two. And, certainly, "violence" gets at the heart of Bonnard's paintings and drawings. Seductive, mystical and lovingly brutal could also describe the intensity of Bonnard's gorgeously clashing hues -- iridescent lemons, limes, crimsons and violets that shimmer like precious metals and gems; blacks and whites taken to the extremes of the spectrum; and deep purples and blues, no less than reds, oranges and yellows, that burn every color of fire.
If you think you have seen Bonnard before, as in the Museum of Modern Art's 1998 retrospective, think again. "The Late Interiors," unlike MoMA's show, is installed more-or-less chronologically; and, also unlike MoMA's show, it includes an astounding room of drawings, gouaches and watercolors made from life. Many of these were the sources for Bonnard's larger paintings.
Bonnard's works on paper -- delicately twinkling, at times tiny, still lifes, interiors, windows and figures -- have a nervous energy and a bejeweled light. Some of these are as beguiling as Islamic miniatures, and together they sing in chorus. Bonnard, referring back to the drawings, painted from memory and imagination on numerous canvases at a time. Polishing, weaving, igniting and stirring his forms into being, Bonnard created psychedelic stews in which color is paradoxically translucent and opaque; and in which solids, seemingly materializing and dissolving simultaneously, feel sculpted out of viscous light.
The Met's exhibition of some 80 works that date from 1923 to 1947 was organized by Dita Amory, acting associate curator-in-charge of the Robert Lehman Collection, where the show, unfortunately, is installed. Is it specifically "late" or primarily of "interiors"? Not really. But who cares? The show, despite its circular, basement location, is a knockout. Yes, it includes the artist's magnificent interiors, especially luxuriant window views and sprawling, vertiginous tablescapes, which are the focus of this exhibit (absent, however, are the miraculous bathtub paintings so prevalent in MoMA's retrospective); but there are also masterly flower paintings and still lifes, as well as a grouping of the artist's ethereal self-portraits.
And, besides, although Bonnard worked in traditional genres, he never adhered to typical motifs. His interiors, otherworldly narratives, are erotically charged dramas and dreams. They are exalted states -- beautifully ambiguous collisions of genre, domesticity and fantasy. In the large painting "Dining Room Overlooking the Garden (The Breakfast Room)" (1930-31), the serene window view encroaches on the interior, exposing the table, its food and dishes in frigid, naked light. Here, as elsewhere in Bonnard's arenas, the miraculous butts heads with the commonplace.
Typical of Bonnard's mysterious creations is "The White Tablecloth" (1925), in which a standing woman sets or clears a dining room table while another woman, seated, looks directly at the viewer. This scene is fraught with an intentional range of metaphors involving transformation, ambiguity and instability. The interaction among forms is ritualistic -- holy in nature -- yet the scene retains its peculiar sense of homey clutter and normality.
The large tablecloth feels low to the floor, like a picnic blanket. It rotates and buckles in space, as if it refuses to stay put; and it glows yellow-white amid a room of dark, blood-red fire. As in many of Bonnard's interiors, the table appears to force the figures out of the picture. The standing woman, leaning on the table, is ballast and supplicant. She burns a red-hot orange, as if made of embers. And she dips her hand into the tablecloth, making offerings (gathering crumbs?), as if the table were some magical, snowy substance. Behind the seated woman, who looks as if she were carved of stone, is a long, peacock-feather-colored sideboard. The sideboard, standing vertically, seemingly rises out of her shoulders like angel's or butterfly's wings. Is this room heaven or hell; an Annunciation, a last supper, a sacrifice or just another family gathering? Bonnard won't say for certain.
In his wonderland, everything is exactly what it is -- fruit, window, woman, dog -- yet nothing is only what it appears to be. Working from his imagination and memory, Bonnard allowed transformations to triumph over fixed destinations. He allowed his bowls to become boats; his adults to transform into children or apparitions; his tables to become landscapes; his walls and fireplaces to become sunsets and windows -- and every window to open into another world.
Bonnard's paintings flit from one exalted state to another. Yet they never stray too far from the simplicity, comfortable chaos and familiarity of domesticity. Bonnard weaves memory into memory; fantasy into fantasy. He layers intensity upon intensity. Sometimes his paintings are like looking directly into the sun; other times they are like walking into a hothouse, a furnace or the rabbit hole of Bonnard's vivid imagination. Then again, as crazy as they are, Bonnard's interiors are just like coming home.
---
Mr. Esplund writes about art for the Journal.
Credit: By Lance Esplund
(c) 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. Reproduced with permission of copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.
Pierre Bonnard: The Late Interiors
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Through April 19
New York -- The French painter Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) combined the paint-handling of the Post-Impressionists with the high-keyed palette of the Nabis and the Fauves -- artists who concerned themselves with the poetic and expressive, rather than the naturalistic, functions of color. He atomized the world into a fever-pitch patchwork of color and light, creating paintings that are as mesmerizing as the most brilliant and beautiful sunsets. That beauty is in full force in "Pierre Bonnard: The Late Interiors," a fierce tour de force at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Yet beauty takes many forms. And to be captivating, a painter must do more than razzle-dazzle us with pretty colors. Bonnard understood that, although paintings may provide us with images of the external world, they can also explore states of mind. Therefore, he pushed everything to the extreme. Bonnard's flowering trees can suggest divine revelation, and his domestic interiors are reminiscent of sacred visitations. But, also, his bowls of fruit can gape like wide-open craniums; cherries can glisten like viscera; and windows can suggest crucifixions. Bonnard's dining tables often resemble game boards, operating arenas, insurmountable cliff faces or expanses of desolate tundra, and his sunset-colors can become fiery rains, enveloping his figures like molten flame.
Alberto Giacometti said that he could not get over "the violence of Bonnard," a quality he found lacking in Jackson Pollock when he compared the two. And, certainly, "violence" gets at the heart of Bonnard's paintings and drawings. Seductive, mystical and lovingly brutal could also describe the intensity of Bonnard's gorgeously clashing hues -- iridescent lemons, limes, crimsons and violets that shimmer like precious metals and gems; blacks and whites taken to the extremes of the spectrum; and deep purples and blues, no less than reds, oranges and yellows, that burn every color of fire.
If you think you have seen Bonnard before, as in the Museum of Modern Art's 1998 retrospective, think again. "The Late Interiors," unlike MoMA's show, is installed more-or-less chronologically; and, also unlike MoMA's show, it includes an astounding room of drawings, gouaches and watercolors made from life. Many of these were the sources for Bonnard's larger paintings.
Bonnard's works on paper -- delicately twinkling, at times tiny, still lifes, interiors, windows and figures -- have a nervous energy and a bejeweled light. Some of these are as beguiling as Islamic miniatures, and together they sing in chorus. Bonnard, referring back to the drawings, painted from memory and imagination on numerous canvases at a time. Polishing, weaving, igniting and stirring his forms into being, Bonnard created psychedelic stews in which color is paradoxically translucent and opaque; and in which solids, seemingly materializing and dissolving simultaneously, feel sculpted out of viscous light.
The Met's exhibition of some 80 works that date from 1923 to 1947 was organized by Dita Amory, acting associate curator-in-charge of the Robert Lehman Collection, where the show, unfortunately, is installed. Is it specifically "late" or primarily of "interiors"? Not really. But who cares? The show, despite its circular, basement location, is a knockout. Yes, it includes the artist's magnificent interiors, especially luxuriant window views and sprawling, vertiginous tablescapes, which are the focus of this exhibit (absent, however, are the miraculous bathtub paintings so prevalent in MoMA's retrospective); but there are also masterly flower paintings and still lifes, as well as a grouping of the artist's ethereal self-portraits.
And, besides, although Bonnard worked in traditional genres, he never adhered to typical motifs. His interiors, otherworldly narratives, are erotically charged dramas and dreams. They are exalted states -- beautifully ambiguous collisions of genre, domesticity and fantasy. In the large painting "Dining Room Overlooking the Garden (The Breakfast Room)" (1930-31), the serene window view encroaches on the interior, exposing the table, its food and dishes in frigid, naked light. Here, as elsewhere in Bonnard's arenas, the miraculous butts heads with the commonplace.
Typical of Bonnard's mysterious creations is "The White Tablecloth" (1925), in which a standing woman sets or clears a dining room table while another woman, seated, looks directly at the viewer. This scene is fraught with an intentional range of metaphors involving transformation, ambiguity and instability. The interaction among forms is ritualistic -- holy in nature -- yet the scene retains its peculiar sense of homey clutter and normality.
The large tablecloth feels low to the floor, like a picnic blanket. It rotates and buckles in space, as if it refuses to stay put; and it glows yellow-white amid a room of dark, blood-red fire. As in many of Bonnard's interiors, the table appears to force the figures out of the picture. The standing woman, leaning on the table, is ballast and supplicant. She burns a red-hot orange, as if made of embers. And she dips her hand into the tablecloth, making offerings (gathering crumbs?), as if the table were some magical, snowy substance. Behind the seated woman, who looks as if she were carved of stone, is a long, peacock-feather-colored sideboard. The sideboard, standing vertically, seemingly rises out of her shoulders like angel's or butterfly's wings. Is this room heaven or hell; an Annunciation, a last supper, a sacrifice or just another family gathering? Bonnard won't say for certain.
In his wonderland, everything is exactly what it is -- fruit, window, woman, dog -- yet nothing is only what it appears to be. Working from his imagination and memory, Bonnard allowed transformations to triumph over fixed destinations. He allowed his bowls to become boats; his adults to transform into children or apparitions; his tables to become landscapes; his walls and fireplaces to become sunsets and windows -- and every window to open into another world.
Bonnard's paintings flit from one exalted state to another. Yet they never stray too far from the simplicity, comfortable chaos and familiarity of domesticity. Bonnard weaves memory into memory; fantasy into fantasy. He layers intensity upon intensity. Sometimes his paintings are like looking directly into the sun; other times they are like walking into a hothouse, a furnace or the rabbit hole of Bonnard's vivid imagination. Then again, as crazy as they are, Bonnard's interiors are just like coming home.
---
Mr. Esplund writes about art for the Journal.
Credit: By Lance Esplund
Monday, April 6, 2009
Steven Alexander
Steven Alexander is an artist in Scranton PA - who does amazing things with color. His paintings usually consist of two contrapuntal bands of color. His palettes are varied. I find them to be lush, tempting to touch. Three examples from an exhibition in Houston are shown on the left. Many more of his paintings are on his website. Enjoy they are wonderful.
http://stevenalexanderstudio.blogspot.com/
Friday, March 27, 2009
Silence
Just as artists and thinkers have made strong connections between color and sound, many have also contemplated the connection between color and silence. As we've been doing silence experiments in class, we've also been playing with how to interpret silence visually. Thus far, the results have been varied and inspiring.
Other artists to look at on this theme include Agnes Martin, Mark Rothko, Vija Celmins, Diane Szczepaniak, Wolfgang Laib, James Turrell and Mary Temple. Rothko, Szczepaniak, and Laib create intensely vivid works, rich in color with a very silent presence. Martin works with very subtle palettes (which makes them somewhat challenging to grasp via a computer monitor) and Celmins's represenational achromatic drawings capture a breathtaking stillness.
It is also interesting to look at artists like Marina Abramovic and Kimsooja who have worked with silence in a performative way. Kimsooja's video A Laundry Woman documents her standing at the banks of the Yamuna river as flotsam from funeral pyres drift by. It is a complex and exquisite contemplation of our mortality.
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