Stealing the Mona Lisa

The Mona Lisa, Leonardo, c. 1503-1506, 30"x 21", Oil on Wood, the Louvre, Paris, France

On the night of August 21 1911, the Mona Lisa disappeared from the walls of the Louvre, apparently stolen by someone who had hidden in the museum overnight and hurried off with the painting the next morning, persuading a plumber to let them out.

The masterpiece did not reappear until December 1913, when a young man bedecked with a splendid moustache turned up at the office of an art dealer in Florence. He claimed to have brought the Mona Lisa to Florence from Paris in order to restore the painting to its rightful home in Italy. The apparent patriot also requested a 500,000 lire reward for his hard work (a not insignificant amount, although, as visitors to Italy pre-euro will vouch, the lire was always a currency which enjoyed confounding currency conversion with its delayed decimal place).

The dealer was understandably bemused, but intrigued, and an inspection of the painting at the young gentleman's hotel was arranged with the director of the Uffizi gallery. To the great surprise of the dealer and the director, it really was Da Vinci's masterpiece.

Soon the police were called, and the "patriot", Vincenzo Perugia was arrested. At his trial Perugia maintained it was an act of patriotism, not financial greed, that drove him to take the painting. The Italian public quickly adopted Perugia as a national hero and admirers dispatched hundreds of letters and gifts to his prison cell...

- "Mona Lisa's theft set the blueprint for art crime", excerpt of blog post by Hugo Gorst-Williams, www.guardian.co.uk

What other masterpieces have been stolen, recovered, or destroyed? What's missing now? How and why was it stolen? How was it recovered?

The web site, guardian.co.uk, offers a sub site for news about art thefts and thieves, artwork recovered, ongoing investigations and related information.

Link "Mona Lisa's theft set the blueprint for art crime", Full Text

Link Art and Design, Art Thefts at www.guardian.co.uk

Link The Theft of the Mona Lisa, Treasures of the World, PBS web site

Kathe Kollwitz - Artist

Self Portrait, Kathe Kollwitz, Color Stone Lithograph,

20.5 x 15 inches, approximately

"I would like to exert an influence in these times when human beings are so perplexed and in need of help." - Kathe Kollwitz, 1922

Käthe Kollwitz, July 8, 1867 – April 22, 1945, was a German painter, printmaker, and sculptor whose work offered an eloquent and often searing account of the human condition in the first half of the 20th century. Her empathy for the less fortunate, expressed most famously through the graphic means of drawing, etching, lithography, and woodcut, embraced the victims of poverty, hunger, and war. Initially her work was grounded in Naturalism, and later took on Expressionistic qualities...

...In 1933, after the establishment of the National-Socialist regime, the Nazi Party authorities forced her to resign her place on the faculty of the Akademie der Künste. Her work was removed from museums. Although she was banned from exhibiting, some of her work was used by the Nazis for propaganda... Wikipedia

Link Wikipedia, Full Text

Link Kathe Kollwitz, Google Image Search

The Annunciation

The Annunciation, oil and tempera on panel, 39 x 85, Leonarda da Vinci, circa 1472–1475, Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy

...And, behold, an angel of the Lord stood before her, saying: Fear not, Mary; for thou hast found grace before the Lord of all, and thou shalt conceive, according to His word. And she hearing, reasoned with herself, saying: Shall I conceive by the Lord, the living God? and shall I bring forth as every woman brings forth? And the angel of the Lord said: Not so, Mary; for the power of the Lord shall overshadow thee: wherefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of the Most High. And thou shalt call His name Jesus, for He shall save His people from their sins. And Mary said: Behold, the servant of the Lord before His face: let it be unto me according to thy word... The Gospel of James (circa 150 AD)

Like the Nativity, the complex meaning of the Annunciation is shaped by the past, cultures, the present, and context. Probing meaning in visual art, and the meaning of a specific art work, is very challenging. Observations and analysis are captured along the remarkable continuum of history. The quality of these observations depend entirely on the capabilities of the observer to seek out the mind of the artist.

Link The Annunciation, Leonardo da Vinci, Wikipedia

Link Iconography, Augusta State University

Link Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy

Neil Welliver - Landscape Painter

Birches, oil on canvas, Neil Welliver

Neil Welliver (July 22, 1929 - April 5, 2005) was an American-born modern artist, best known for his large-scale landscape paintings inspired by the deep woods near his home in Maine.

Welliver was born in Millville, Pennsylvania. He graduated from the Philadelphia College of Art (now part of the University of the Arts) and then received an MFA from Yale University. At Yale, he studied with the abstract artist Josef Albers. Welliver taught at Yale from 1956 to 1966, and in 1966 began teaching at, and eventually became chairman of, the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Fine Art, from which he retired in 1989.

While teaching at Yale, Welliver's style evolved from abstract color field painting to the realistic transcription of small-town scenes in watercolor. In the early 1960s he went to Maine, where he began painting figures outdoors, the large oil paintings often focusing on his sons canoing or female nudes bathing. In 1970 he moved permanently to Lincolnville, and by the mid 1970s the figure as subject had given way to the exclusive study of landscape... Wikipedia

Link Eulogy

Link Neil Welliver and the Healing Landscape, Edgar Allen Beem

Link Full Text, Wikipedia

Bates College Museum: The Thousand Words Project, Words and Brushstrokes

Light in Brook, Oil on Canvas, Neil Welliver, 1985

Bates College Museum, Lewiston, Maine

Tools of the Trade:

Words and Brushstrokes

Everyone has heard the old adage that “a painting is worth a thousand words.” What does this really mean, and how can it be useful to those interested in learning more about art? To answer this question, we must examine other questions. First, what is the job of a painting? Many would include the task of communication in their answer. How do we communicate in most situations? We all agree that most of the time, people communicate with words—whether spoken or written.

Why then, is a picture worth a thousand words? Words are in some ways symbolic--just like pictures can be. The word for a thing is not the thing itself. For instance “paintbrush” communicates the idea of a paintbrush, but is not the paintbrush itself. Similarly, a picture of a paintbrush might just be smears of paint creating an illusion of a paintbrush. But it is not a real tool that one can pick up and use. So pictures and words are very similar, in that they communicate ideas about the world around us.

How do artists use their brushes?...

- The Thousand Words Project, Bates College Museum web site

Link Full Text

Link Web Site

China: The Six Principles of Painting - Xie He, 550 CE(AD)

...The Six principles of Chinese painting were established by Xie He, a writer, art historian and critic in 6th century China. He is most famous for his "Six points to consider when judging a painting"... taken from the preface to his book "The Record of the Classification of Old Painters"... Keep in mind that this was written circa 550 CE(AD) and refers to "old" and "ancient" practices. The six elements that define a painting are:

1- "Spirit Resonance," or vitality, and seems to translate to the nervous energy transmitted from the artist into the work. The overall energy of a work of art. Xie He said that without Spirit Resonance, there was no need to look further.

2- "Bone Method," or the the way of using the brush. This refers not only to texture and brush stroke, but to the close link between handwriting and personality. In his day, the art of calligraphy was inseparable from painting.

3- "Correspondence to the Object," or the depicting of form, which would include shape and line.

4- "Suitability to Type," or the application of color, including layers, value and tone.

5- "Division and Planning," or placing and arrangement, corresponding to composition, space and depth.

6- "Transmission by Copying," or the copying of models, not only from life but also the works of antiquity... -Richard R. Wertz web site

Link Full Text

Link Wikipedia

Arthur Wesley Dow - Visual Artist/Educator on Composition

Arthur Wesley Dow (American, 1857-1922). August Moon, ca. 1905. Woodcut print. 5 5/16 x 7 1/4 in. (13.5 x 18.5 cm). Collection of Edgar Smith, New York / Photo: David Heald

...art lies in the fine choice. The artist does not teach us to see facts: he teaches us to feel harmonies. -"Talks on the Appreciation of Art", The Delinator (Jan 1915) - Wikiquote

Arthur Wesley Dow (April 6, 1857 - December 13, 1922) was an American painter, printmaker, photographer, and influential arts educator. Dow taught at major American arts training institutions for 30 years including Teachers College, Columbia University; the Art Students League of New York; Pratt Institute; and his own Ipswich Summer School of Art. His ideas were quite revolutionary for the period, he taught that rather than copying nature, art should be created by elements of the composition, like line, mass and color. His ideas were published in the 1899 book Composition: A Series of Exercises in Art Structure for the Use of Students and Teachers. He taught many of America's leading artists and craftspeople, including Georgia O'Keeffe, Charles J. Martin[citation needed], two of the Overbeck Sisters and the Byrdcliffe Colony. - Wikipedia

Link Composition: A Series of Exercises in Art Structure for the Use of Students and Teachers, Digitized Google Book

Link Quotes, Wikiquote

Link Wikipedia

Starry Night - Vincent Van Gogh

Starry Night(created after the painting), Reed Pen and Pencil, 18.5 x 25.5 inches, Vincent Van Gogh, 1889, Museum of Architecture (?), Moscow, Russia

Starry Night, Oil on Canvas, 29x36.25 inches, Vincent Van Gogh, 1889, MoMa

Letter from Vincent Van Gogh to his brother Theo Van Gogh (excerpt)

June 17 or 18, 1889

...At last I have a landscape with olive trees and also a new study of a starry sky. Though I have not seen either Gauguin's or Bernard's last canvases, I am pretty well convinced that these two studies I've spoken of are parallel in feeling.

When you have looked at these two studies for some time, and that of the ivy as well, it will perhaps give you some idea, better than words could, of the things that Gauguin and Bernard and I sometimes used to talk about, and which we've thought about a good deal; it is not a return to the romantic or to religious ideas, no. Nevertheless, by going the way of Delacroix, more than is apparent, by colour and a more spontaneous drawing than delusive precision, one could express the purer nature of a countryside compared with the suburbs and cabarets of Paris... - source: Vincent van Gogh. Letter to Theo van Gogh. Written 17 or 18 June 1889 in Saint-Rémy. Translated by Mrs. Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, edited by Robert Harrison, number 595.

When he wrote this letter, Vincent Van Gogh was 36 years old. He died July 29, 1890.

Link Full Text

Link Starry Night, Museum of Modern Art, NYC

Slaughterhouse | The New Republic - Jed Perl

Self Portrait, Oil/Canvas, Francis Bacon, 1971

Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Is there such a thing as a wrongheaded tradition? I believe there is. And the most enduring one is surely the tradition of the artist as a romantic outlaw, which in the last half-century has been pretty much owned by Francis Bacon. His canvases, modernist melodramas with just the right crowd-friendly dash of old-fashioned grandiloquence, are the subject of a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Bacon, who died in 1992 at the age of eighty-two, may well be the greatest exemplar of a wrongheaded tradition that we have ever seen. He had a knack for adapting all the wrong elements from all the right artists... - excerpt

Link Full Text, Slaughterhouse, Jed Perl, The New Republic, June 17, 2009

Charlie Rose talks with Jed Perl, Art Critic - Video

A conversation with Jed Perl, art critic for "The New Republic" about his book "New Art City: Manhattan at Mid-Century". - Charlie Rose web site

Link Charlie Rose web site

Link Articles by Jed Perl

Link The New Republic

Who Gets to Call it Art? - Ben Street

Letter from London: Who Gets to Call it Art?

Art 21 Blog
December 7, 2009

What does contemporary art look like? What a ridiculous question! It doesn’t look like anything, does it? No one in their right minds would want to begin to map out a common style across the thousands of different approaches littering the white floors and gray walls of contemporary art galleries all over the world. There have been attempts to bracket artists together, notably by Jerry Saltz in a lovely unprintable phrase that’s apparently still in style (judging by this year’s Venice Biennale), but they only ever glance at comprehensiveness. Talent contests like the Turner Prize begin to look like meaningless conflations of the Oscars, the Pulitzer, and the Nobel... - Art 21 Blog

Link Full Text, Letter from London: Who Gets to Call it Art?, Ben Street

Link Art 21 Blog

Sculptor - Ron Meunck

Mask II, Ron Meunck

...(Ron) Meunck's sculptures faithfully reproduce the minute detail of the human body, but play with scale to produce disconcertingly jarring visual images. His five metre high sculpture Boy 1999 was a feature in the Millennium Dome and later exhibited in the Venice Biennale.

In 1999 Mueck was appointed as Associate Artist at the National Gallery, London. During this two year post he created the works Mother and Child, Pregnant Woman, Man in a Boat and Swaddled Baby. - Wikipedia

Link Ron Meunck, Wikipedia

Link Working Process

Drawing Technique - Trois Crayons

Trois Crayons Example. Young Girl, Watteau

Trois Crayons refers to a drawing technique using three colors of chalk: red (sanguine), black, and white. The paper used may be a mid-tone such as grey, blue, or tan. Among numerous others, the French painter Antoine Watteau drew studies of figures and drapery using trois crayons. - Wikipedia

The technique may be used to organize the light relative to form, to create emphasis, rhythmic dialog, and balance.

Link Wikipedia

Special Exhibit: Watteau to Degas, French Drawings at the Frick Collection, NYC

Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684–1721),Woman Lying on a Sofa, c . 1717–18, red, black, and white chalk, 21.7 x 31.1 cm, Fondation Custodia, Paris

Watteau to Degas: French Drawings from the Frits Lugt Collection

October 6, 2009, through January 10, 2010

Curators at The Frick Collection were invited to select for the exhibition and its accompanying catalogue Lugt's finest eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French drawings, and the sixty-four works featured in the exhibition illuminate both Lugt's taste and that of his successors. Included are drawings and watercolors by well-known masters of the French School such as Watteau, Boucher, Fragonard, David, Ingres, and Degas, as well as by important figures who are less familiar to the general public. This is the first time that a group of French master drawings from the Fondation Custodia has traveled to New York. - Frick Collection web site

Link Watteau to Degas Exhibition web site

Four Things I've Learned About Designers by Warren Berger

For the last two years, I’ve been doing to designers what they usually do unto others. Which is to say, I’ve been observing and studying them, asking a lot of questions and trying to discern patterns. Here are a few things I’ve learned along the way. - Warren Berger, Dec. 1, 2009, AIGA web site

AIGA, the professional association for design, stimulates thinking about design, demonstrates the value of design and empowers the success of designers at each stage of their careers. AIGA’s mission is to advance designing as a professional craft, strategic tool and vital cultural force. Founded in 1914, AIGA remains the oldest and largest professional membership organization for design, and is a nonprofit, 501(c)(3) educational institution..

Link Full Article, Four Things I've Learned About Designers, Warren Berger

Link AIGA web site

The Sacred Made Real: Spanish Painting and Sculpture 1600 - 1700

The Sacred Made Real, Exhibition Catalog Cover

The National Gallery, London

‘The Sacred Made Real’ presents a landmark reappraisal of religious art from the Spanish Golden Age with works created to shock the senses and stir the soul.

Paintings, including masterpieces by Diego Velázquez and Francisco de Zurbarán, are displayed for the very first time alongside Spain’s remarkable polychrome wooden sculptures.

Inspiring devotion

The religious artists of 17th-century Spain pursued a quest for realism with uncompromising zeal and genius, creating works to inspire devotion among believers.

By displaying works side by side, this exhibition explores the intense dialogue between the arts of sculpture and painting, revealing that they were intricately linked and Interdependent.‘The Sacred Made Real’ presents a landmark reappraisal of religious art from the Spanish Golden Age with works created to shock the senses and stir the soul.

Paintings, including masterpieces by Diego Velázquez and Francisco de Zurbarán, are displayed for the very first time alongside Spain’s remarkable polychrome wooden sculptures. - National Gallery (London) Web Site

Oct 21 - Jan 24, 2010

Link The Sacred Made Real Web Site, National Gallery, London

John Wonnacott - Painter

Red Tablecloth Two, Oyster Eaters, John Wonnacott, 1996-99

"What I’m really trying to do is to bridge this gap between my own world of feelings, thoughts and ideas and that world out there. When it works, when one reaches the point of balance between them, it’s a wonderful thing." - excerpt, Ray Atkins in conversation with John Wonnacott

John Wonnacott was born in London in 1940. He trained at the Slade School from 1958-63 before moving to Southend in Essex where he still lives and paints in a studio overlooking the Thames Estuary. - John Wonnacott Online Gallery

His paintings and drawings are known for their panoramic and unexpected pictorial space which is a dynamic of working from direct observation.

Link Interview, Ray Atkins in conversation with John Wonnacott

Link John Wonnacott Online Gallery

Link Slade School of Art

Back to the Land - a visual essay by Maira Kalman

Maira Kalman, NY Times

Maira Kalman is an illustrator, author and designer whose last column for Op-Extra (NY Times), "The Principles of Uncertainty," ran from May of 2006 to April of 2007 and has been published as a book. She has written and illustrated 12 children's books, and her artwork is featured in a recent edition of Strunk and White's "Elements of Style." She recently created a panel story for The Rosenbach Museum and Library's 21st-Century Abe Web project. Her work is shown at the Julie Saul Gallery in Manhattan. Ms. Kalman lives in New York City and teaches graduate courses in design at the School of Visual Arts. "And the Pursuit of Happiness," about American democracy, will appear on the last Friday of each month. - NY Times

Link Full Illustrated Article, Back to the Land, NY Times, Maira Kalman

Calm Things - an essay about still life by Shawna Lemay

Ginger Jar with Fruit, Paul Cezanne

Calm Things

...We live in the world as little as possible. When the phone rings in this quiet house, there is genuine shock. We answer, incredulous, stuttering and stumbling over too few words. I wonder what most people talk about at mealtimes. For us, the subject is usually still life. Rob says what area of his painting he’s been working on. He works from a photo that I’ve seen beforehand, and still there is news. The grapes were much darker than he thought they would be before mixing the paint. Adjustments have to be made continually from photo to canvas. A shadow has to be deepened, a band of light refined. The calligraphy of stems needs to be rewritten...

...In a book on the painter Balthus, Claude Roy notes that in Japan, during the Meiji era, the term seibutso was formed. This translates as “calm things” and is the term used by the Japanese when talking about what we most commonly call “still life.” Roy says that “the peaceful contemplation of calm things, has its roots deep in the Japanese past, in politeness with regard to those objects that man has fashioned, generated, humanized.”...

- excerpt, Shawna Lemay, Cezanne's Carrot Literary Journal, Winter Solstice, 2007, Volume 3, Issue 1

Link Calm Things, Full Text by Shawna Lemay

Link Cezanne's Carrot, A Literary Journal

Euan Uglow - Painter

Ali, 1995-97, Oil on Canvas, 32 7/8" x 30 3/4", Euan Uglow

+ Giacometti always wanted to look into the eyes of the models, but I don't want the scrutiny of the model on me whilst I'm working, so you will very rarely find the eyes are looking at me.

+ I'm painting an idea not an ideal. Basically I'm trying to paint a structured painting full of controlled, and therefore potent, emotion.

+ I don't do wristy paintings because I want the brain to intervene between the observation and the mark.

+ I'm interested in color belonging to something, where it takes on a completely new kind of vibrancy, rather than being what you would call straight abstract paintings.. And anyway it is so much more exciting trying to find out about the three dimensions of color and sticking it down on a two dimensional surface.

Link Euan Uglow, Wikipedia

Link Euan Uglow, Google Image Search

Frank Auerbach - Working After The Masters

Link Part 2, Rembrandt

Link Part 3, Titian

Link Part 4, Constable, Etc.

In this 4 part series, Frank Auerbach talks about his use of the National Gallery of Art (UK), as a life long resource for his development as an artist.

Frank Auerbach (born 29 April 1931) is a German-born British painter. His work typically portrays either one of a small group of mainly female models, or scenes around London, especially Camden Town. - Wikipedia

Ben Aronson - Painter

Woman in a Sun Hat, Ben Aronson, 2007

...In working from familiar surroundings, as I often do, I find that in order to raise a work from the commonplace to the extraordinary – from a simple descriptive record to a work of art, the main objective is not merely physical likeness, but rather to aim for the most concentrated form of a powerful visual experience. Perfect spelling alone does not make great poetry, just as the realistic rendering of numerous visual facts will not alone amount to high art. One can consider masters as different in style as Vermeer and DeKooning and still agree that all great painting is derived through some process of interaction with, or distillation from the visible world...

Link Ben Aronson Website

Tim Burton at MoMA, Nov 22 - April 26, 2010

Behind the Scenes with Tim Burton

Taking inspiration from popular culture, Tim Burton (American, b. 1958) has reinvented Hollywood genre filmmaking as an expression of personal vision, garnering for himself an international audience of fans and influencing a generation of young artists working in film, video, and graphics. This exhibition explores the full range of his creative work, tracing the current of his visual imagination from early childhood drawings through his mature work in film. - MoMA

Link Tim Burton, MoMA

Link Tim Burton, Wikipedia

FATE - Foundations in Art: Theory and Education

Foundations is a coordinated set of courses for students who

are seeking degrees in an art or design discipline. These courses
focus on basic conceptual, craft, critical-thinking, research, and
working discipline...

Foundations in Art: Theory and Education (FATE) is a
national association of college-level art educators that is
specially focused on issues related to first year programs. As
part of our mission, we support excellence in foundation
teaching and learning in the structures that support first-year art
and design... - FATE website

Link FATE Guidelines

Link FATE website

Antonio Lopez Garcia - Painter

The beauty of López García's work begins with an appreciation of his craft. Paintings such as The Sideboard (1965–66), or the atmospheric views of Madrid from the 1970s show an acute perception and understanding of the beauty of the objects he portrays.

Though López García is devoted to the mundane—he depicts humble people, buildings, plants, and cluttered interiors—his portrayal of these subjects is compelling and beautiful. Starkly lit studies of his studio, bathroom, and the red brick wall in his backyard underscore an interest in prosaic subject matter. His deftness brings attention to these simple forms, encouraging the viewer to re-examine the presence of ordinary objects...

...The pictures are sometimes worked on for more than twenty years, some of them remaining unfinished.

As the artist explains, "the pictorial nucleus begins to grow and you work until the whole surface has an expressive intensity equivalent to what you have before you, converted into a pictorial reality." - Wikipedia

Link Full Text, Wikipedia

Ann Gale - Painter

Shannon, Ann Gale, Oil/Masonite, 14x11

Ann Gale (born 1966) is an American figurative painter based in Seattle, Washington. She is known for her portrait paintings, which consist of an accumulation of small color patches expressing the changing light and the shifting position of her models over time. Some of her main influences include Lucian Freud, Alberto Giacometti, and Antonio Garcia López.[1]

Gale works from live models and her process is lengthy. Once she begins to paint, she works for three-hour sessions[2], and takes from four months to two years to complete a painting[3]. Her pieces possess a strong psychological component due to the amount of time she spends with her models... - Wikipedia

Link Ann Gale, Full Text, Wikipedia

Link Ann Gale, Christopher Jagers' Blog

Jo Weiss - Painter

Embolden, Jo Weiss, 2000

Jo Weiss is a contemporary figurative painter living and working in Washington, DC. Through the act of painting, she expresses a deep pictorial intelligence and visual poetry. Her work possesses a strong emotional and personal presence and a gravity earned from years of dedication to the art and practice of painting.

Link Jo Weiss, Website

Chuck Close and the Painting Process

Excerpt from the public program Painting Process/Process Painting, featuring artists Chuck Close and Carroll Dunham.

Held in conjunction with the exhibition, What Is Painting? Contemporary Art from the Collection.

For more information about the exhibition, please visit http://www.moma.org/exhibitions.php?i... For a full audio recording of the presentation as well as the conversation with Chuck Close, Carroll Dunham, and curator Anne Umland, please visit http://www.moma.org/audio or the ThinkModern podcast in iTunes.

© 2007 The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Category: Film & Animation

Link Google, Chuck Close Images

Ginny Grayson and Perceptual Drawing

"Looking Down on the Self," Ginny Grayson

The Veils of Perception

Although I have worked with a variety of methods and mediums, from works on paper to video/performance, it is the activity of drawing itself that is the most compelling for me and is the central basis from which my practice unfolds.

Drawing has long been thought of as the process most suited to giving form to ideas and expressing the internal workings of the imagination and the body, due to its immediacy of touch. This tactile seismographic directness is what attracts me to it as a primary source of communication.

At its essence my work endeavours to relate to the viewer from a personal level the ‘actuality’ of experience itself. It is ‘how’ the work is imaged and made that is most significant to its reading. Perceptual/observational drawing is especially engaging for me – encompassing memory, time, emotion and a high level of concentration. it absorbs, frustrates, excites, terrifies, exhausts and humbles. I often feel blind when drawing from 'life', the more I look the more I see. The more beyond comprehension it all seems to become. At this point I relate to Lucien Freuds remark that -"The harder you concentrate the more things that are really in your head start coming out". A level of completion in a drawing is difficult for me to attain, there always seems to be more that can be explored, learnt and discovered. But it is a conundrum I am becoming more comfortable with as the physicality and tension that manifests in the work through this response, through the process of drawing, re-drawing layering and erasure, is essential to what I am seeking to communicate in it’s direct link to the visceral and the ambiguous effect temporal transience has on our state of being.

Ginny Grayson 2008

Link Ginny Grayson's Website

Stanley Lewis - Painter

Front Room w Horizontal Table, Ballpoint Pen, 2003, Stanley Lewis

C. Stanley Lewis, or Stanley Lewis is an artist and art teacher. He was a member of the Bowery Gallery in New York City and is still a member of Oxbow Gallery in Northampton, Massachusetts. Now he is represented by Lohin Geduld Gallery in New York, NY. His work has been shown recently at Salander O'Reilly Galleries in New York City

An Emeritis professor from American University, he also taught at the Kansas City Art Institute from 1969 to 1986, and currently teaches part-time at the New York Studio School.

There was a (recent) major retrospective of Lewis' work at the American University Museum in the Katzen Arts Center in Washington, D.C.. He was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in the spring of 2005. He is a graduate of Wesleyan University and Yale School of Art. - source, Wikipedia

Link Virtual Gallery, Paintings and Drawings

Link Midwest Paint Group

The Threadneedle Prize for Painting and Sculpture

Self Portrait by Sheila Wallis, Threadneedle Prize Winner, 2009

(UK.) Artists are invited to submit representational and figurative work that retains a strong reference to the real world...Work must be based on observation, rather than concept or abstraction. All themes are admissible; traditional as well as innovative interpretations are both welcome...

Two major prizes are available: The Threadneedle Prize (£25,000) and the new Federation of British Artists Emerging Artist Prize (£5,000). Each of the six runners-up for The Threadneedle Prize receive £1,000.

The competition is open to all artists - established and emerging talent - aged 18 and over, living or working in the UK. Approximately 60 works, selected from a national open submission, will be exhibited at the Mall Galleries, London in September 2009.

To view 2009 submissions and prize winners, click on the link below.

Link The Threadneedle Prize for Painting and Sculpture

Vermeer's Naughty Milkmaid - Alexandra Peers, The Daily Beast

The Milkmaid, Vermeer, c. 1658-61

The Dutch master’s most famous painting is on display in the U.S. for the first time since World War II. Alexandra Peers on the portrait’s erotic secrets.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in big need of a fall blockbuster, is rewriting art history to be just a bit more salacious. Walter Liedtke, the curator of its Vermeer’s Masterpiece: The Milkmaid exhibition, says the painting, long interpreted as a salute to the working classes, is actually a kind of discreet 17th-century paean to voyeurism, desire and sex. One highlight of the controversial new spin: The milkmaid’s famous open milk jug, according to the Met, is representative of “a portion of the female anatomy.”

Liedtke, the Met’s curator of European paintings, grants that his view is far from the mainstream. The famous circa-1660 painting is usually misread, he says, “as a Madonna of the cow pastures.” Because latter painters such as Jean-Francois Millet glorified the dignity of laborers, we typically see Vermeer’s milkmaid through those noble eyes, he explains...

Link The Daily Beast,Vermeer's Naughty Milkmaid, Alexandra Peers

Link Metropolitan Museum of Art, Vermeer Special Exhibition, Sept. 10 - Nov. 29, 2009

Gorky, Modern Painter - " From Mimic to Master of Invention"

Water of the Flowery Mill, A.Gorky, Oil, 1944

PHILADELPHIA — Two stories are well known about the Armenian-American artist Arshile Gorky. One is that he came to a terrible end, a suicide in his mid-40s, after a hammering series of catastrophes. The other is that he took a very long time — around 20 years, until he was in his late 30s — to become the artist who painted some of the most magnetic and heart-rending pictures of the 20th century.

Before that he was many other artists. He was Cézanne, Picasso, Léger, Miró, André Masson and Roberto Matta, more or less in that order, as he assiduously and almost selflessly emulated a succession of existing personal styles to teach himself how to be a painter.

This unusually long learning curve in his relatively short life can give a chronological survey of his art, like the magisterial “Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, an unbalanced shape. Gorky’s protracted apprenticeship was followed by distinctive wonders: the rustling and throbbing landscape in “Water of the Flowery Mill”; the penumbral, narcotized mood piece called “Soft Night”; the meat-colored “Agony,” which suggests a slab of burned flesh and dates from 1947, the year before Gorky died...- source, NY Times, article by Holland Carter

Link Full Text, NY Times, Holland Carter

Link Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective, Philadelphia Museum of Art

Link Google Images

“Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective” runs through Jan. 10 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street. It then travels to the Tate Modern in London and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

Richard Diebenkorn (Modern Painter): Shifting Form - Paul Ruiz

Seated Nude, Charcoal, Richard Diebenkorn, 1966

"What drives some artists to output work with almost rapid abandon, and others who feel driven to continually re-state, re-work or edit their work?"

This is something that I often contend with in the studio, wondering how to strike some balance between bursts of activity and the need to reflect, critically adjust and reshape the output.

So I turned to the work of Richard Diebenkorn (1922-1993).

Had I paid more attention during art history lectures, perhaps I would not have overlooked the significance and strength of this American painter’s work. Yet the scope of his work is broad so I’ll consider a few works on paper here.

In considering Diebenkorn’s drawings I felt a strong affinity with his method; they strike a strong chord with me as I struggle to balance creative impulse with the rigour of critical revision. As those who have drawn from life will know, forceful and convincing studies of the human form are rarely as simple as the medium (charcoal in this instance) might suggest – as in the following work (above).

You can see and almost feel the vigour of Diebenkorn’s thoughts and hand as they interrogate and study human form. The marks which seem to randomly cut across the surface are sensuous without being sentimental – their primary focus is on the overall sweep, weight, presence and gesture of the human subject – a way of responding to both the subtle and bold rhythms inherent in the body...Paul Ruiz, 2009

Link Full Text, Art Catalyst Blog by Paul Ruiz, Painter

Link Richard Diebenkorn, Wikipedia

You Are What You Eat - Photos by Mark Menjivar

Owner of Defunct Amusement Park | Alpine, TX | 1-Person
Household | Former WW II Prisoner of War. | 2007

You Are What You Eat

"For three years I traveled around the country examining the issue of hunger. The more time I spent speaking and listening to individual stories, the more I began to think about the foods we consume and the effects they have on us as individuals and communities. An intense curiosity and questions about stewardship led me to begin to make these unconventional portraits.

A refrigerator is both a private and a shared space. One person likened the question, "May I photograph the interior of your fridge?" to asking someone to pose nude for the camera. Each fridge is photographed "as is." Nothing added, nothing taken away." - Mark Menjivar, Center for Photography Website

Link Mark Menjivar, Center for Photography

Images copyright, Mark Menjivar

Wee Planets - Alexandre Duret-Lutz

Green Eiffel by Alexandre Duret-Lutz

Wee Planets is a collection of original panoramas created by Alexandre Duret-Lutz. His pictures are 360 x 180 degree panoramic pictures projected to look like small planets using a projection called stereographic projection.

Link Wee Planets

Link FAQ

Kerry Skarbakka - Constructed Visions, Perpetual Falling

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Kerry Skarbakka is a visual artist working in photography and video. He received his B.A. in Studio Art with an emphasis in Sculpture in 1994 from the University of Washington School of Art. In 2003 he completed his MFA in Photography from Columbia College in Chicago.

Artist's Statement (partial) - "Philosopher Martin Heideggar described human existence as a process of perpetual falling, and it is the responsibility of each individual to catch ourselves from our own uncertainty. This unsettling prognosis of life informs my present body of work..." - source, Kerry Skarbakka Website

Link Kerry Skarbakka Website

Model Poses Nude for Life Drawing Class on Daytime TV

Australia, July 9, 2009

Paul Revoir, Mail Online

"Lunchtime TV is well known as the preserve of news bulletins, women's talk shows, Australian soap re-runs and cosy family dramas."

"So you can imagine the surprise when mothers sitting down with their children flicked over to Channel 4 yesterday and were greeted by a fully naked woman..."

"...The programme saw the camera lingering on the model's naked form as the artist talked through the process of drawing her. But the show which was filmed at Mr Hume's studio has sparked a backlash from viewers..."

Link Daily Mail/Mail Online, Article by Paul Revoir, Full Text and Comments

Smarthistory - an Online Destination for Art and Art History

Why We Made Smarthistory

We are dissatisfied with the large expensive art history textbook. We find that they are difficult for many students, contain too many images, and just are not particularly engaging. In addition, we find the web resources developed by publishers to be woefully uncreative. We had developed quite a bit of content for our online Western art history courses and we had also created many podcasts, and a few screencasts for our Smarthistory blog. So, it finally occurred to us, why not use the personal voice that we use when we teach online, along with the multimedia we had already created for our blog and for our courses, to create a more engaging "web-book" that could be used in conjunction with art history survey courses. We also realized that this content would be useful to museum visitors and other informal learners. We are committed to joining the growing number of teachers who make their content freely available on the web.

Smarthistory was founded by Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker as a blog in 2005. Since then, many people have contributed their content and skills to the project. - source, Smarthistory Website

Link Smarthistory Website

Winner of the Webby Award, Education Category, 2009

Spencer Tunick - Photography and the Nude

Title: Düsseldorf 4 (Museum Kunst Palast) 2006, Medium: c-print mounted between plexi, Size, h: 30 x w: 37.5 in / h: 76.2 x w: 95.25 cm, Edition/Set of 6, Copyright © Spencer Tunick

Spencer Tunick (born January 1, 1967) is an American artist. He is best known for his installations that feature large numbers of nude people posed in artistic formations. These installations are often situated in urban locations throughout the world, although he has also has done some "Beyond The City" woodland and beach installations and still does individuals and small groups occasionally. Tunick is the subject of three HBO documentaries, Naked States[1], Naked World[2], and Positively Naked[3]. His models are volunteers who receive a limited edition photo as a reward. - Wikipedia

Link Wikipedia

Link Artist's Website

Design Observer - Current Ideas and Conversations About Design Thinking

Design, Culture, Change. The Design Observer Website is a comprehensive, rich web environment with stimulating information about design and culture delivered in multiple formats under the headings: Observatory, Change Observer, Places, Observer Media.

Design Observer was founded in October 2003 by Michael Bierut, William Drenttel, Jessica Helfand and Rick Poynor with design and technology by Ruby Studio.

Copyright ©2003-2009 Observer Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Link Design Observer Website

What is Design Thinking Anyway?

"Most companies today rely on analytical thinking, which merely refines current knowledge, producing small improvements to the status quo. To innovate, organizations need to employ the characteristics of great design: a deep understanding of the user, creative resolution of tensions, collaborative prototyping and continuous modification of ideas and solutions. This is design-thinking." - Roger Martin, The Design Observer Group Website, 2009

" 'What is Design Thinking' is an excerpt from Roger Martin's new book The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage (Harvard Business Press, 2009)."

Permalink Article

Link The Design Observer Website

TED - Ideas Worth Spreading

;Al Gore at TED2006; Jane Goodall at TED2003;

"TED is a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader. Along with the annual TED Conference in Long Beach, California, and the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford UK, TED includes the award-winning TEDTalks video site, the Open Translation Program, the new TEDx community program, this year's TEDIndia Conference and the annual TED Prize." - source, TED website

Link TED