Filter by Category : Tag : Date

Filter by Category : Tag : Date

Filter by Category : Tag : Date

Browsing Category

Art

Licentious Lines

One of the definition of licentious is disregarding accepted rules or conventions, especially in grammar or literary style. The artist I am introducing today extends that disregard to the conventions of portraiture with a distinct line-based approach.

Agnes Grochulska, a Polish painter who now lives in Richmond, Virginia, works with oils but also has a very strong background in charcoal and graphite drawing, and what appears to me, calligraphy.

Constructing portraits with lines is, of course, nothing new. Egon Schiele comes to mind, Mike Parr, Robert Marks closer to home; all configured faces in ingenious ways. Grochulska can be placed in that tradition in her depictions of sitters with calligraphic lines.

Her new work, though, adds some excitement with the addition of lines that do not delineate the portrait itself, but instead frame it.

Portrait with a blue outline #2

You might remember that I devoted a week of blogs on face perception and recognition in February 2017, wearing my psychologist hat at the time. I talked about how we perceive faces holistically, not by attending to individual features. It is the relationships between features that count – the spacing of the eyes relative to the length of the nose and so on – which allow us to construct a whole that leads to recognition. I also mentioned that expectation guides your attention and your ability to interpret or parse a scene.  Importantly, for visual inputs you can only see detail that is landing on your foveas; what lands on your foveas depends on where exactly you’re pointing your eyes; and movements of the eyes (pointing them first here and then there) turn out to be relatively slow. As a result, knowledge about where to look has an immense impact on what you’ll be able to see.

Portrait with Sea Glass Blue Outline

What Grochulska is doing is essentially grabbing our attention with added features – the contrasting and illuminating lines that divide rather than define the portrait – leading us to foveate on those and registering them as features, pulling us away from more holistic processing. We might swing back to the face, try to glimpse its emotional valence, or other associations it triggers, but the magnetism of the lines is strong, we will return to them. For me it resulted in a sense of scanning (although some of these paintings are rather small,) an action often associated with a more evaluative type of perception, looking someone over. It sure triggered my curiosity that I was able to be manipulated that way. It also served as a strong reminder that we should be wary of being caught by salient details, when really what is required is a look at the “whole” picture.

Red Specs

Add to that a more positive reaction: joy. The use of color, in its expressive, declarative form in those frames suggests abandon, a painter not holding back. No wonder people cite Oscar Wilde in connection with reviews of Grochulska’s work: “Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not the sitter”.

Here are additional examples of the Outline Series. I very much hope there will be a time when one can see these paintings in their original form, not just on screen.

Montages today of divided fields of perception:

Music today is by another artist from Poland, who also picked apart lines, and whose work was called bizarre but totally arresting – something one might apply to the paintings as well. Penderecki died this March.

0 Comments

Verso

If there is one positive thing I can think of that helps us through these weeks of anguish, it is the emotional and practical support provided by those close to us, our family, friends and community.

Human goodness, in all shapes and forms. I’ll try, then, to focus this week on humans, on portraits that speak to the strength of the sitter, or their relationship with the artist, the reaction they rouse in those portraying them, the way they provoke the creation of something more than just the semblance of a face.

Portraiture in painting was historically meant to depict those in power, or the rich who could pay the artist, focused primarily on some idealized representation conveying status. Eventually portraiture turned to depict all kinds of sitters, and went beyond likeness, introducing novel ways to convey a psychological truth rather than a more or less photorealist likeness of the face.

Today we have artists who do both, creating the likeness as well as going beyond it. The work that comes to my mind first in this regard is that of Cayce Zavaglia.

Originally trained as a painter she left the studio because of problems with the toxicity of oil paints and solvents involved. Instead she started to photograph her family and friends, and developed a form of (her terminology) renegade embroidery. She stitches the facial topography on pastel colored Belgian linen, creating a low relief resembling the brushstrokes of her former paintings, a tapestry of color blends from which a clear portrait emerges.

The craft is amazing, the portraits appealing. But the truly interesting part of her work comes from the accidentally discovered interest of the backside of the embroidery, the verso, which reveals the messy bits and pieces of the cotton, silk and wool threads employed, dissolving the likeness but putting a more lively substance in its place. There are loose ends, potential for unraveling, but also a sense of mobility, flux, paths that can be chosen or abandoned.

.

Recently, she has returned to painting, using the discovery of those backside portraits as a template for larger works in acrylic. (The embroidered portraits are rather small and delicate.)

I am taken by the creativity, the craft, the openness to discovery and the flexibility to switch between media in Zavaglia’s work. What truly impresses me, though, is how the push to depict, the inner drive to make art is not deadened by obstacles. The demands of a body to be protected from toxins, the demands of raising children, curtailing time and space, led to an ingenious switch to portable work and embrace of people close to her as models rather than as a hindrance to her artistic practice. There is real ingenuity here about both the focus and the nature of the process.

Not surprisingly, when I look in the mirror I feel like I see my own verso, the marks of the upheaval of these weeks. It will right itself. I’ll be moving to San Francisco next week for some months to be there when my son comes out of hospital, wheelchair-bound for many weeks. I plan on continuing to blog, but it may be intermittent at the start.

Below is an interview with the artist:

“petrified and totally excited”

All photographs above of work by the artist. Montage below from my own work on altered portraiture, from some years back.

Music today are Beethoven variations on a Mozart theme – Men who feel the call of love – let’s make that into humans who feel the offer of love. Connection. All that matters.

2 Comments

Overcoming Aloneness

Even for people like me who like being alone, at times even crave aloneness, the recent lonely days smear solitude with fear at times.

What if we all end up alone? Truly alone, not just the state that we currently experience, in our respective living conditions, geographic locations, separated from family and friends? The kind of alone where you lost the one closest to your heart, or take your last breath being surrounded by strangers, if surrounded at all?

I find comfort, when these threatening thoughts crop up, in thinking of a German scientist, Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), who conquered an immense loss when his wife-to-be suddenly died, by throwing himself into work and art. In fact, he confronted the pain of aloneness with creating a whole worldview of systemic connectedness – ecology – and devoted himself to promote Darwin’s theory of evolution. The fate of the individual, the very fact of individuation, could be subsumed into ideas of connectedness and dominant needs within and for the preservation of the species. He and Darwin became close friends, and cooperated on numerous scientific explorations.

Haeckel’s scientific methods as a zoologist and professor of comparative anatomy as well as his philosophy where not uncontroversial – to this day creationist websites call him Darwin’s lap dog and the German menace – his Tree of Life was and is incendiary to religious folks clinging to biblical literalness of creation. The Nazis, long after his death, selectively picked some of his writings on the political and religious implications of Darwinism to justify their racial programs, perhaps one of the reasons that he has fallen into obscurity more so than Darwin.

Within the scientific community some of Haeckel’s biological assumptions are no longer accepted. Inferring from his work with radiolarians, tiny plankton that is found in the ocean, he believed that an individual’s biological development mirrors the evolutionary one of the entire species – ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Not so.

He is heralded, though, as a brilliant naturalist and discoverer of multiple new species.

Whatever you think of his science, or his beliefs, there is no controversy around the fact that he was an amazing artist.

In fact, it was his art that introduced him to Darwin in the first place when he sent him portfolios with his drawings of jelly fish and other maritime creatures. The drawings in Kunstformen der Natur – Art Forms in Nature – are breathtaking, you can judge for yourself, of course.

I can vividly imagine how the painstaking creation of these detailed drawings and watercolors of jelly fish and other creatures distracted him from his loss; the embrace of a theory that celebrates interconnectedness in nature must have helped to transmute his grief into a sense of belonging. We should all be so lucky to find appropriate distractions and beliefs ourselves.

Or we could engage in truly downward comparison to make us feel better if we are really desperate: over dinner, the time of day where we try to cheer each other up by reporting useless factoids, I learned that marine biologists discovered, deep, deep at the floor of the ocean, a species of octopus that has to sit on her eggs (all 155 of them) for a gestation period of 4.5 years. Not eating during all this time, not moving once other than fending off ravenous crabs, the emaciated Mama dies when the little ones emerge. Now there is loneliness. To the bitter end.

Below is a 4 minute art film that uses Haeckel’s concepts and drawings to explain some of the things I mentioned. Nothing but wonder.

Music today fits the topic, I think. Anything and everything is captured in this concerto, from lonely distance, listlessness, determination to intense joy (Hindemith wrote it while still in the killing fields of WW I – art transmuting fear here as well.)

Photographs are of jelly fish at diverse aquariums, in Newport, OR, Vancouver BC and Charleston, SC.

0 Comments

Juxtapositions

I cannot think of another time of the year when the landscape around us is as intensely, profusely patterned as it is now. Billowing patches of wild flowers, carpets of fresh grasses and nettles, whole seas composed of lupines and chamomile, color and form and bees wherever you look. Blooming, buzzing confusion comes to mind, when you blink at it, but that is of course a quote by William James published in his 1890 Principles of Psychology and referring to babies’ perception. (And boy, did he get it wrong, as we now know 130 years later. Infant perception is fit from the get go.)

I know, I know, some will argue that the color carpets of autumn’s fallen leaves match the spring profusion, or that the geometric lines of wintery, stark, leaf-less branches are prime examples of pattern – please don’t. Just leave my May enthusiasm unchallenged! Uncurbed enthusiasm is what I need right now. Lest you want me to resume uncurbed wailing about politics and administrative utterances of human capital stock ready to work... No? Thought so.

I do not know some of the plants I photographed last week, identification welcome. But I thought it would be fun to juxtapose the billowing forms with art that is the opposite – exacting geometric lines, connected to nature as well, in some ways, or just connected to the world as photographed.

I am talking about the embroideries of Dutch-born, California-based Natalie Ciccoricco, who has a wonderful eye, a steady hand and in some of her work a deft sense of humor (as well as on her website where she goes by Mrs. Ciccoricco. At least I assume that is meant as a joke.)

Her most recent series of embroideries on recycled aper used found twigs and branches, encasing them in geometrically refined line patterns with a remarkable sense of balance. Here is a page where you can see the diversity within that body of works (Nesting).

I had first seen her images of circles – a series called color holes – embroidered on old photographs or landscapes, vintage postcards, images of SF houses etc., which struck me as creative in the radial pick-up of the color palettes.

They are also artful in the sense that they shift the spatial relationships while adding an eerie artificial element. Fabric artists are really seeing a renaissance, don’t they.

So, juxtaposing the straight with the diffuse, the carefully selected palette with the organically haphazard one, craft with nature – I think we have busied our eyes enough to allow ourselves to forgo reading the news. (Ha, got the hint at politics in twice!)

And music, what else could it be, will juxtapose the violin with the piano, in Beethoven’s Spring sonata (# 5, Frühlings-Sonate.)

0 Comments

Have you no Shame?

One of my favorite outbursts in my ongoing battle with the deer in my garden is: “Have you no shame?” Preferably yelling it loudly, as much as my grumpy lungs allow, or my consideration for my lovely neighbors who don’t need more of my screeching. Not that the deer react – they go on munching on my rose buds, my pink wild-geranium flowers, my columbines, their business – you name it.

Even in the wild, well, in the wilds of Tualatin, where they should be less accustomed to human/deer interaction they do not budge. Photographs from Monday’s walk are evidence that I could approach them to up to 2 meters with my small point&shoot camera. Then again, I did not yell, because I was happy to see them anywhere but in my stripped-down flowerbeds.

 

Much to know about deer, including the fact, among others, proclaimed by a science site: “The Chinese water deer is the only species that doesn’t shed its antlers, because it doesn’t have any.” Glad that could be added to the canon of irrelevant but funny bits in my brain.

Levantine Cave Painting Art, dated from the end of the Mesolithic Age and during the Neolithic Age at Valltorta-Gassulla Cultural Park in Spain near Valencia.

*

I’m actually more interested in talking about shame rather than deer today, since the absence of the former, whether among those cloven-hoofed ungulates or certain members of the political sphere, has significant consequences for our well-being. Thoughts about shame were triggered by a book review of a book by Ute Frevert, managing director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, and director of its Center for the History of Emotions.

Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553), Adam and Eve, (1526)

The Politics of Humiliation: A Modern History, now translated from the German by Adam Bresnahan, concerns the relationship between power and shame, shaming, or humiliation. Three areas of interest are used to explain the psychological mechanisms: shaming as punishment for individual transgression in the political, public sphere, humiliation online and in school, and foreign policy between countries. I look forward to reading about the history of how shaming developed across the centuries. “It is the story of the democratisation of the right to dignity and honor, which at different times were regarded as belonging only to the aristocracy and not to commoners, to adults and not to children, to men more than women, to a sovereign and not to a people. ” It is certainly interesting to think that not only the display rules of emotions differ between cultures, or genders, but that there were differences, across time, in who had a right to a particular feeling, or the power to induce it.

Attributed to JOHN FERNELEY JR. (British 1781-1860) The Stag Hunt

 

The ever looming memory of Nazi public shaming of women married to Jews, (or Norwegian public shaming of women in love with German soldiers) also raises questions about gendered approaches to shame: women often had their hair cut forcibly and in public, humiliation always directed at their bodies, in war (ancient and recent) often through the ultimate humiliation of rape.

Frida Kahlo The Wounded Deer (1946)

Found this stag on a hike on Mt. Hood near Paradise Meadow two years ago

As a cognitive psychologist I am of course most interested in how an emotion can be utilized to enact power or manipulate people, mechanisms spelled out in a 2018 interview with the author here. The distinction between shaming and humiliation is important. Shaming was always used as punishment for a norm-defying person to get them to repent and then back into the fold. Humiliation, on the other hand, has the goal to stigmatize the person and set them apart from the group. The state or political actors historically used these mechanisms, but nowadays on-line platforms have joined in, with body/fat-shaming just one example (which reminds me: I did NOT find Speaker Pelosi’s fat shaming of a certain monster appropriate, in fact it irritated me to no end. You can’t join the gutter.)

Here is the contradictory part: on the one hand we, as a society, value honor and respect (and rightfully decry its absence), but on the other hand we show increasing appetite for public humiliation, just look at all those reality shows. The psychological mechanisms seem to point to a gain in self esteem or sense of group membership when we berate and belittle others, openly and in front of everyone. If we are part of the group that is humiliating rather than humiliated, it gives us a sense of security and belonging, as well as power. And if we create specific out-groups through acts of humiliation we can utilize their status for our political purposes, directing and displacing anger at those victims. (Although seemingly, if we are paid enough, we are also willingly complying with a potential state of humiliation – just look at the lines of the casting show. Honor has a price, after all, as Frevert puts it.)

 

Franz Marc Crouching Deer (1911)

I think, well, I hope that knowing about the mechanisms of how humiliation works enables us to inoculate ourselves against related attempts to employ it as a tool, attempts surely to increase in the context of the election campaign. If humiliation thrives on having a public participate, it is up to us, the public, to refuse to be participants in the spectacle. We can turn away.

Now all I wish is for the deer to do the same.

Today you have a choice between Mozart’s The Hunt and Haydn’s (The Hunt) and Cesar Franck’s Accursed Hunter – maybe the latter felt some shame….

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

.

1 Comments

Transformation

There are days when serendipity reigns. They are rare. They are welcome. And, as it so happens, one of them was yesterday. Early that morning I read an essay by a young acquaintance whose writing I have posted here repeatedly for its depth and perceptiveness. Mattathias Schwartz reported on the Trouble with Scale, offering devastating evidence why we need to change our approach to the rapid adoption of products across the world. Unchecked growth is not always good – an urgent example being the effect of internet proliferation on the genocide against the Rohingya in Myanmar. Among other outlets, including the NYT and the New Yorker, Matt writes for a relatively new nonprofit journalism organization, Rest of World, which so far has delivered nothing but interesting articles – I urge you to check them out if you are at all interested in international topics that won’t appear on our regular radar.

Mid-morning I received an email from a friend who sent me a link to a short film made by friends of her’s, Donata and Wim Wenders. The film is part of a project by public broadcasting in Berlin to create multiple shorts from various artists and intellectuals highlighting aspects of our current world-wide situation.

I am attaching my translation of the spoken/written word in the 2 minute clip so my US readers can appreciate the expressed yearning for change as well. Filmed in his apartment the short follows Wim Wenders editing his typewritten manuscript of reactions to the challenges facing us. You will spot immediately how it is connected to the essay recommended in the beginning of today’s musings.

Here is the film:

https://www.rbb-online.de/derrbbmachts/kurzfilm/videos/der-rbb-macht-kurzfim-veraenderung-wim-wenders.html

Here is the translation:

What would I wish for? Change.

How will our lives change “afterwards?”

Many people think about this right now and it is the most pressing question. What will happen after this brutal emergency brake that was applied to our world? 
What would I wish for? Change. 

Can we only imagine change when it seems necessary to us?

When and how are we humans willing to accept change?

Only through extreme situations like wars or global crises? The majority of us have never experienced those. Wars are always somewhere else and the second world war was too long ago….
And the climate catastrophe? 

It is only existentially experienced by those who will suffer its consequences, the children, the youth, the poorest of the poor, for most of us “there’s still time….”

But don’t we all experience NOW, ALL TOGETHER, for the first time, on the whole planet, something that threatens us all? 
And does that not force us to rediscover the COMMON GOOD, the way we are dependent on one another, responsible for each other?  

Our new experience of isolation, of being separated, left to fend for oneself, the huge longing for …. connection. How will all that change how we value community or society? 


———one sentence I didn’t get————-


Surely it has to be based on a new sense of togetherness, a rediscovery of equality, brotherhood or solidarity… ) (all concepts that have fallen out of favor) 

Do we have the strength to redirect out thinking in this direction?

Are we able to learn the lesson?

Will supermarket cashiers, medical personell and delivery truck drivers remain HEROES even “afterwards?”

Not, if all we want is to return to “business as usual.”

 “Growth” per se simply cannot remain the holy grail of politics.

Central to the new order has to be socially minded thinking concerning humanity and climate conscious action concerning the planet.


“Afterwards”, nothing will be more important than change. (Renewal? Transformation?)

*

You know Wenders likely from movies like Paris, Texas, or Wings of Desire, but I highly recommend that you check out a recent documentary, probably one of the best films they made, available on multiple outlets here, about Pope Francis. The visual skill of the film making is stellar, but it was the message that moved me, delivered without pathos, didacticism or condescension: to mend our ways is the only way we can and will survive the forces currently destroying the fabric of our world, quite literally. Religion can – perhaps – play a significant role, if religious representatives remain honorable.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-spiritual-nearness-of-wim-wenderss-pope-francis-a-man-of-his-word

Finally, at the end of the afternoon, I had made my way through multiple days of listening to Igor Levit playing Beethoven, alerted by a friend who pointed to his brilliance.

I found just the piece to end with today: a concert of the Waldstein Sonata he gave this April at Schloss Bellevue in Berlin, introduced by the German President, Walter Steinmeier, who pleaded with us to support the arts in these difficult times (what a difference a president makes…) The pianist reminded us, that it is a piece about togetherness empowering us all. I guess serendipity had lost patience with me, because the video of the performance refused to transfer to the blog. So here are the first and last movement from one of his CDs, I could not find a full version outside of Spotify….

Here is the link to the Bellevue concert, maybe if you copy it directly into youTube, it might work – worth looking at his hands. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lC8DBTfJI90

Photographs today are in honor of Wim Wender’s devotion to Francis of Assisi, Patron Saint of the birds, and my own devotion to owls. All of these photos – with the exception of the horned owl I found in New Mexico last year – are from the last weeks, when a barred owl made an appearance in my garden while we were sitting on our deck, and in the forest nearby during multiple hikes. Talk about serendipity….

1 Comments

Become happier in just 5 minutes

That’s what the top of the website said when I searched for images of Jon Foreman’s land art. The suggested psychological benefit of signing up for a daily newsletter or some such seemed as surreal as the idea that anyone might buy into such a claim. But then again, we know that of all the claims people buy into these days, a link between advertisement and happiness probably is among the least outrageous….

2019 works with stone and leaves, John Foreman

In any case, here is the history: I get several minutes of pleasure on my daily walks in the neighborhood when finding little art projects that are left behind to cheer us all up. They spurred me to look at other artists who put something in the landscape on a greater scale, with snazzier means, often closer to design than art, but so be it. I vaguely remembered having seen something about Foreman and sand-rakings, but then found the site that had me roll my eyes for five seconds rather than experiencing happiness. Eventually there was a successful search result for this video showing the artist raking his neighborhood in Wales. Using sand and stones – available to all of us to some degree – maybe we could come up with something a little bit more unconstrained, or witty? My neighbors are certainly on up there.

Found at Marshall Park

Land painting on a larger scale is something you can currently find in Switzerland. The site surely beckons, although the landscape painting is probably long grown out or washed over when travel becomes available once again, 100 years from now. Think of a canvas 3000 square meters wide to be filled with imagery of hope, employing tromp l’oeil at its best. The 3-D manipulation is remarkable!

Aerial Views of Switzerland Capture Saype’s Massive Artwork Painted on the Alpine Terrain
Found at Marikara Park

Saype, born in 1989, has been visible on the art scene since about 2013, increasingly known for his large grass paintings that use biodegradable paints that he produces himself. They get absorbed into the landscape once the grass grows over it. Last year he won a Forbes 30/under/30 award, that declared the 30 personalities under 30 who are the most influential in the contemporary Art & Culture world.

Painted stones are left in nests of moss all over the park by the short set

I, of course, like his work with political impetus the best, although he is very careful to position himself as a humanist, rather than an affiliate with any political movement. Here is a beautiful clip about his work in honor of the SOS Mediterranee, an organization that saves refugees from drowning. The artist is not exactly witty, as I had hoped. He is, however, very good at what he does, and he also likes clothes that carry his brand name. Hm.

Carved doors appear again (we had a neighborhood tension over those of us who loved them (the many of them) and those who removed them daily when they appeared….)

Saype’s most recent project is called Beyond Walls – “it shows interlaced hands, reaching out, shaking and united in a common effort beyond all walls separating humans and enclosing them in mental or geographical spaces. Thus, the walls erected in mentalities become fictive partitions, wiped out by artistic imagination. It merely opens a breach in the real walls, the ones built by humanity within and against itself. ” Here are the sites that already have been painted, Andorra, Berlin and Paris among them.

It’s big, it’s pretty literal, it’s a notch too obvious. But it is clearly done with good intentions.

​Back to my neighborhood artists, then, who are also reaching out, lending a hand, giving all indications that they understand mutual aid and solidarity, and for whom small scale is just enough.

Flower and leaf still life at the edge of the path

Now that makes me happy.

Music today from a Swiss composer, Arthur Honegger, who provides us with a sufficiently chipper entry into this new week and something fresh assuming that you as much as I are not too familiar with this composer…

1 Comments

Fluchtgedanken

Since we are all over the map this week anyhow, I might as well think out loud about one of my current preoccupations in the art department.

As those of you familiar with my montage work know, I often appropriate partial images from other artists into my art. I am not alone in that venture: artists more famous or talented than I have long pursued all forms of appropriation, sometimes even direct copying. A more detailed discussion in the art world can be found here.

Air France (Fluchtgedanken, 2020)

My rule has always been that I only use snippets that I photographed myself, and that the ultimate outcome – the montage – produces significant change to the parts appropriated, and provides a completely new creative context.

That said, I find myself in a novel situation with the series I am presenting to you today. It uses not just one partial painting by a single painter, but incorporates multiple works by that painter. The series is one way of my dealing with the emotions and thoughts generated by the current situation, less so about the social isolation and more about the way we as a society are distributing risk, often unfairly, and in some recent whispered discussion within the framework of accepting eugenic principles. Took us what, only 75 years to get around to it again? What are expandable lives? The old? The diseased? The incarcerated? The poor?

The Tunnel (Fluchtgedanken, 2020)
Virus Whispers (Fluchtgedanken, 2020)

All the painted portraits I manipulated in the new series Fluchtgedanken – Thoughts of Escape are from an interesting guy, George Tooker; I found an old art magazine in a pile in my basement that my husband for some incomprehensible reason saved from his grandfather. It had a spread of Tooker paintings printed on grainy cheap paper, painted in the 1950s and 60s, that I photographed. Tooker was openly gay, first living in Manhattan, then somewhere rural up North, totally engaged in civil rights movement, including the march on Selma, and preoccupied with the fate of the working class. Had quite a bit of success with egg tempera paintings in the Social Realism style in the 1960s. I had honestly never before heard of the guy or seen his work.

At the Soup Kitchen (Fluchtgedanken, 2020)
Grand Central Station (Fluchtgedanken, 2020)
Plexiglass (Fluchtgedanken, 2020)

The people in the paintings all had such a gripping zombie look, such empty eyes, that they seemed the perfect representations for those being pushed or having no choice but to attend the Covid-19 frontlines. The essential workers, the nurses, the unemployed, the hungry, the people in lock – down, the ones hiding from racism – all there! Well, with a bit of imagination they fit into the roles – and with even more imagination I linked them to themes of escape, hinting at modes of getting away.

Filing for Unemployment (Fluchtgedanken, 2020)
Waiting for the Bus (Fluchtgedanken, 2020)

I embedded them in montages that include a lot of linear abstractions to counterbalance the figurative work and used my older, existing work that focussed on means of transportation, planes, ships, bikes, trains etc. connecting them to the figures in our constrained environment. I figured Tooker would not be offended by my recycling of some of his portraits given the shared politics and impetus to force people to think about the realities of our world through art. Then again, who knows. He’s dead. I couldn’t ask.

The Harbor (Fluchtgedanken, 2020)
Quarantine (Fluchtgedanken, 2020)

Would very much appreciate feedback on what you see here today – if and how it speaks to you, ore more basically whether the points come across….

At the Airport (Fluchtgedanken 2020)

and for May Day, tomorrow, I’ll honor the striking workers (and recommend this from The Intercept for your perusal about the labor relations at major US companies under current dangerous conditions.)

The Strikers (Fluchtgedanken, 2020)

Music is a mix of the traditional kind sung during May 1 demonstrations in the class struggle and the kind Tooker would have heard while he painted…one of my favorite albums of all time, I used to scream in sync with it…

5 Comments

Quotidien Observations

I know I am repeating myself but where would I be without my friends who are sending me all this cool stuff? Today’s offering came from Germany although it is originally a Spanish video creation (Quarantine with Art,)by some fashion organization, attached all the way at the end. I have added english translations to the images. Hey, no mention of the virus, just a description of our daily lives, for future historians…..

No body-contact

 «La creació d’Adam» de Michelangelo Buonarotti (1511)

or kisses, 

 «Los amantes» de René Magritte (1928) 

6 feet distance

 «Annunciazione de Cestello» Sandro Botticelli (1489–1490) 

Cosmetologists are closed

 «Autorretrato (1974)» Frida Kahlo 

Balcony conversations

 «Mujeres en la ventana» Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1655–1660)

City Center

 «Piazza d’Italia» de Giorgio de Chirico (1913) 

Long morning hours

 «After Breakfast» Elin Danielson-Gambogi (1890)

Week 1

«Retrato de Helena Kay» Winslow Homer (c 1872) 

Week 2

“Mujer leyendo en un sofá” William Worchester Churchill (1920) 

Week 3

 «Joven decadente (después del baile)»Ramón Casas (1899) 

Coughing into your elbow

 «La Caída de Faeton» Jan Carel van Eyck (1636-1638) 

The way we’ll all look this summer

” Pareja” Fernando Botero (1932) 

When you HAVE to go outside

 Detalle de obra, perro (?)  

Shopping for 2 weeks

«Cristo en la casa de Maria y Martha» Vincenzo Campi (c 1580) 

Video Conferencing

“Retratos” Amedeo Modigliani (1915-1920) 

And when everything is over

 “ El abrazo del Demiurgo” Luis Key (2019) 

the reunion!

 “ Bal du Moulin de la Galette” August Renoir (1876).

Here is the video.

Music today matches the beauty of the paintings, from Spain in honor of the video’s creator.

3 Comments

Fields

There they were in the fields, this Monday. Hundreds and hundreds of them. So much for social distancing….

Usually at this time of year Canada Geese would gather for the migration back North. Many of them now stay here, having found both food sources and breeding grounds that suit them. They are really amazing in what they pull off, once in flight. They can fly up to 1000 km a day, which means they could fly around the world in 48 days, if they’d wish to. But they wish to stay.

Looking at them reminded me of Inuit art that has depicted them for ages.

Traditional stencil,

Lukta Qiatsuk, Canada Geese Nesting Ground, 1959

modern stone cut and stencil,

Killiktte Killiktee, Canada Geese, 2016

Litographs,

Kananginak Pootoogook, Canada Geese Mating, 1976

Carvings,

Johnnysa Mathewsie Canada Goose, 2018

Acrylic and ink on paper,

Benjamin Chee Chee Goose in Flight 1977

And these artworks, in turn, reminded me of a small, riveting exhibit at the Portland Art Museum that I had a chance to explore earlier this year before everything shut down. Akunnittinni: A Kinngait Family Portrait exhibited the works of three Inuk women, grandmother, mother and daughter, Pitseolak Ashoona, Napachie Pootoogook, and Annie Pootoogook respectively. Their work was intimate, direct, jarring. They described the world as seen and experienced by them, providing autobiographical narratives as much as a glimpse of historical and cultural episodes that taught me much about Inuit culture and the resilience of women in a violent world, violence to which the youngest artist succumbed in 2016, and which was born by the older ones, during a time where husbands would rent out their wives by the hour to traveling sailors.

Trading Women for Supplies by Napachie Pootoogook, Ink,(1997/98). 

It was fascinating to see three generations describe their lives, and display an astute summary of the mundane, the quotidian, the cultural influences of later years on the first nation lives. PAM’s Center for Contemporary Native Art picked a winner (the exhibition was curated by Andrea R. Hanley (Navajo.) I will be eager to go back to the smaller galleries, once the museum is open again, and let me be surprised at what I find.

Oh, to be a bird, and just leave it all behind, hide in that big gaggle in the safety of numbers, wander through the fields with less of a sense of past or future and just living in the moment of grazing. There is some continuity for them as well, though – they mate for life! And geese, believe it or not, often live for up to 24 years.

And here is Mother Goose….

And here is a bonus Ravel – really a much more interesting piece, and we can just pretend we walk along some fields in Spain….

3 Comments
© 2026