Balint Zsako

More art with things floating on white backgrounds! Today it's the brilliant and bizarre drawings of Balint Zsako that are inspiring and exciting me. 

Jenny Kendler

Lately I haven't been able to draw anything that isn't basically an object or person or group of objects and people floating in a background. (I mean, okay, so I've drawn some other things -- like, objects and people inside fleshed out interiors or landscapes and other physical spaces, besides the white of the page. But they sucked.) I'm trying to not frame this as a problem, just a fact: right now, the only good drawings I am making are of things that are floating in space. 

One of the explanations/excuses I come up with when I'm thinking of it as a problem is that sometimes I get stuck thinking verbally. Ideally, I'd only be creating images that can only be expressed as images, and not words. The issue comes that when I try to think about them, words get in the way. So even if I have a particular image of a particular bird, as soon as I think "I'm drawing a picture of a bird," it might as well be a white piece of paper with the word "BIRD" floating in the middle. By the time I get to drawing it, I'm just replacing the word "bird" with an image of a bird, instead of creating an entire image on the entire plane. (In fact! The "bird" tag on my art blog reveals many drawings demonstrating this exact scenario.)

But maybe this isn't a bad thing. This is why I'm enjoying Jenny Kendler's work so much right now! Amazing line work and images, and my favorites all involve objects and people and animals that are just floating. And it works and it's fantastic and powerful. 

She actually does a lot of different types of work, and it's all gorgeous. There's more on my tumblr Jenny Kendler tag. This might also explain part of what attracts me so much to the work of Anu Tuominen, Ed Young, and even some of these photographs of book art. 

my neighbor totoro animated gifs, part two

(part one is here)

Some of you may be wondering, was another post about My Neighbor Totoro aniamted gifs really necessary? The answer is yes. Yes it is. In fact, as I continue to find awesome gifs, I will continue to post them here. "But," you say. "You even did another post that included four four's Ponyo animated gifs." Do I look like I think that makes this AMAZING CATBUS ANIMATION ANY LESS AWESOME? It is an animated gif. Of a catbus. It will run forever.

The first gif of Totoro with Mei is via glasspoppy on tumblr; Catbus gif is via and-b on tumblr; the Studio Ghibli intro gif is via podam on tumblr, though when I was trying to find credit I found that it was also on the lovegifs tumblr; the second gif of Totoro with Mei and the one of Satsuki gathering twigs are both from the lovegifs tumblr as well. 

Laura Battle

I just finished a fun web design project, making a website for Laura Battle, who I had as a painting and drawing professor at Bard. She's an amazing professor and artist and person, it was really delightful to get to work with her on this site. 

The gallery is built using zenphoto, which is currently my favorite script for a gallery CMS. Just simple and beautiful and straightforward to customize. (I also really like gallery and plogger). 

Going Forth by Night, 117" x 22", ink, 2009

Seventh Hour, 18x103", ink, 2009

 Crossing, 22x30", graphite on grey paper, 2007

Time piece, 22x30", graphite on grey paper, 2007 

 Love Letter, etching, 24x36", edition of 20, 2009-10 

green rice! rice cooked with an abundance of green things: spinach, parsley, chiles, leeks, and dill

This is another recipe I modified from one by Deborah Madison -- actually from two by Deborah Madison, both of which are called "green rice." One's in The Savory Way, the other from Vegetarian Suppers from Deborah Madison's Kitchen. And they're really, really different! And neither is vegan, and each is not vegan in different ways. So here's my version.

GREEN RICE 

Ingredients: 

2 or 3 handfuls of spinach leaves, finely chopped

1 bunch chopped parsley

3 poblano chiles

3 medium leeks, white parts plus paler greens, chopped

1 tbsp finely chopped dill, or a 1 tsp ground dill

1 tbsp olive oil

salt to taste

1 1/2 cups rice

3 cups water

2 tbsp lemon juice or to taste
2 or 3 scallions, sliced, for garnish (optional) 

black pepper to taste

Char the chiles over a flame, then drop them into a plastic bag to steam for 15 minutes. Pull out the seeds and chop into 1/2-inch pieces.

Wash and cut everything else as suggested. Heat the olive oil in a heavy saucepan; add the spinach, parsley, chiles, leeks, and herbs, and salt to taste and cook over medium heat for a few minutes, stirring frequently. Add the rice and cook for several more minutes, until the grains of rice begin to turn clear and golden. Add the water, bring it to a boil, turn the heat to low, cover the pan, and cook until the water has been absorbed, about 20 minutes. Add the lemon juice if using and stir it into the rice with a fork. Add pepper to taste and scallions if using. 

trip to museums in houston

I got this picture from a google search that wound up here, the rest are from the respective museum websites

I recently went down to Houston to see the museums there before I leave Texas. The Menil Collection (above and below) was my favorite. The collection, the layout, the architecture, even the location, were  all considered and related. I love museums that feel relaxed, and the spacious, light-filled building did just that. 

The whole collection was amazing and beautifully curated, but my favorite was the surrealism collection. Pictured above left is Witnesses to a Surrealist Vision, a "room of wonders." From their site: the room "displays the types of exotic curiosities that captivated and inspired these artists. The 200 objects on view range from ceremonial costumes and masks to bird specimens, surgical tools, astronomical instruments, and fetish figures." This room has everything from a necklace made out of colorful, iridescent dead birds, to a dildo made out of a rock, to a bizarre leather costume covered in nails. 

Pictured above right is my favorite piece in the contemporary collection, Robert Gober's Untitled, made of beeswax and human hair. It's just sitting on a white podium, doing its thing. 

I also enjoyed the Cy Twombly gallery, a part of the Menil collection in another building. My favorite was the text-like, chalkboard-like room of paintings above left. 

I'm glad I visited the Rothko Chapel too, though it wasn't exactly a museum, or part of a museum experience. I wish I'd gone there in a mindset to meditate, or had a chapel just like it in my neighborhood to go to and meditate whenever I wanted, because it's perfect for that. For looking at the 9 paintings there, it was simply from a different world than the museums I'd been visiting, so it was almost hard to register them as paintings. I think I appreciated them as paintings, and I definitely loved them as means for creating a spiritual/meditative space.  

I also visited the Byzantine Fresco Chapel, which is very small but worth it if only to see a modern reconstruction of a 13th century Byzantine dome and apse built inside of a concrete room. Stopped by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, as well, and was not impressed, especially after the gorgeous Menil collection.

We're already planning another weekend Texas art expedition. I just learned about this amazing-sounding exhibit of children's book illustration at the National Center for Children's Illustrated Literature in Abilene, TX. There are originals by Trina Schart Hyman and Jerry Pinkney! I'm so excited to make a ton of pasta salad, load up the car with snacks and my ipod with audiobooks, and see it. 

gorgeous book of frida kahlo fakes (Finding Frida Kahlo)

Today I happened on a copy of this beautiful book, Finding Frida Kahlo, which purports to be a collection of ephemera belonging to Frida including trunks, suitcases, recipes, letters, and journals, as well as some exquisite stuffed hummingbirds, some pistols, and a Mexican flag. The photographs are like curio-box alternate-reality versions of Kahlo's paintings or diary. I didn't look at it long, since it was expensive and I wasn't really out shopping for books. When I got home I looked it up, originally hoping that there just happened to be a used copy for sale somewhere online for under $10, and/or to rifle the google books preview for images. Turns out the items are fakes. 

Even just seeing the slideshow on the NY Times article about it, the differences in style and handwriting are pretty apparent. Once it's pointed out that basically every object in the book is signed with her name or initials, that these signatures don't look much like how she signed her work, and that she actually didn't even sign things that often (let alone constantly) it seems obvious, especially considering the author said she didn't want to go through getting the items professionally verified since "that could take years" and she was eager to publish quickly. (Not to mention that the foremost Kahlo scholars all agree that they're fakes.)  

A bit from this Andrew Purcell article about it that I think is hilarious:

“The content is being manufactured, working backwards from known biographical details,” she [New York dealer Mary-Anne Martin] says. “The entry about ‘being bisexual’ is not even spelled correctly. Also, in the 1940s, bisexual meant hermaphrodite. We don’t think the term existed when these diaries were supposedly written. They’re full of funny mistakes like that.”

I wish I could've found more images on the web. There were these strange anatomical sketches, plus a weird book of anatomy that had been drawn over, and some pages of just text that were beautiful just as handwriting and images. I was looking at the book completely uncritically at the time, so I was just vaguely interested and surprised in all of the drawings of genitalia, and wondered how they fit into the little I know about Kahlo's life. But in retrospect, a lot of the images had a very contemporary look to them. 

The author and collectors maintain that this collection would be interesting even if the objects didn't belong to Frida Kahlo. And they would! They're gorgeous, and the photographs are really lush and well-styled. It's just obviously wrong to put Frida's name on them to sell museum tickets and books. I for one would probably buy the book anyway -- if I had $50 to spend on a coffee table book, which I do not. (And if I did, rather than support this silly fraud, I would save half my money and buy Sibella Court's Etcetera instead, a book of beautifully styled ephemera that doesn't claim to be anything else!) Hell, they could've even put Frida's name on it without claiming that she produced all of these things. I mean, I'm interested in these items visually, and I'm also interested in the story of them being fakes. I want a book about that! Where did these beautiful objects come from? Are antique dealers in Mexico selling anything that looks over 40 years old to Americans by claiming that it once belonged to Frida Kahlo? What if a couple of them are authentic? Which people honestly think these are real, or just want to believe that they are, and which people are just cynically copying early photos of Frida Kahlo holding some severed limbs? Did some of them actually belong to her, like how Andre Breton and other surrealists collected Oceanic art, taxidermy animals, and just weird stuff they thought was cool? What kinds of narratives are being created about Frida by these objects and by the people who try to pass them off as real? Now that would be an interesting book. 

Other links: article from the Art Newspaper; article from Art Fag City.