Monday, August 31, 2009

1. BLU


2. Zach Johnsen


3. Merijn Hos

4. Lapin

5. Silke Werzinger

6. Ronald Kurniawan

7. Kukula

8. Audrey Kawasaki

9. Yuko Shimizu

10. Mattias Adolfsson

11. Paul Heaston

12. Jesus Galiana

13. Tomer Hanuka

14.Matei Apostolescu

Do you know of any outstanding illustration art sites? Add them in the comments . . . .

Amazing turntable animation by Nicolas Crombez... Thanks Nicolas! Watch out though... This bad boy is 14 megs:)






Keywords: 3d three dimensional flying concept space ship model 8 eight prop propeller vehicle on fire in mid flight men jumping off with parachutes turntable animation animated flash loop by nicolas crombez dehollander.net lighting texturing compositing final

Here we have a free set of eight vector icons for logo design inspiration. You can use them for designing a twitter avatar, web icon, or maybe you might come up with an idea for creating an abstract pattern...

License: you can use this vector file for personal, commercial or non- profit use. If you post this vector file on your graphic site or blog, please make sure to include a link to www.vector-art.blogspot.com The zip contains Illustrator ai, eps, pdf and svg files.Download

Today I discovered a very fun day of the dead cat & dog by doing a google image search. Anyone that has spent any time at all searching mosaic art on the web has probably stumbled into the work of Martin Cheek before. I think he has quite a following in mosaic circles. Martin has a playful style and a wonderful sense of humor shines through in all of his work. Check out his day of the dead market lady, complete with happy octopus for sale. You can also learn more about him by following his Barbados Diary on his blog.

......................................................................

I love the day of the dead work on Martin's site and enjoyed featuring it today. It is getting a little cooler here in Texas and I know that fall is just around the corner. The day of the dead celebration is November 2nd and that will be here before you know it. I have been tossing around the idea of starting on a small skeleton bat as a donation to the Creative Arts Center's Halloween fundraiser. Mr Cheek's work has really inspired me this morning, and I now I can't wait to start on my bat. He will be a vampire bat and I will return to the use of heavy text in the background.

"Star Trek"


Something for the Trekkies! Sorry - TrekkERS right? A small collection of some logos from the Star Trek univers. More to come. Enjoy.
Authors unknown. Only for personal use.
1 AI : 200 KB

Download

"Yoga"


Silhouettes of some Yoga-Figures. Know nothing about this figures.
Author unknown. Only for personal use.
1 AI : 1,3 MB

Download


Yes! More Tattoos.
Authors unknown. Only for personal use. Hihi.
1 AI : 1,8 MB

Download

"Signs"


Well known signs as vectors. Enjoy.
1 AI : 1,2 MB

Download

Sunday, August 30, 2009


Jamie Nadalin, a reader of the Blog of Innocence, recently posted this comment:

"During the day, I'm ceaselessly striving. I'm striving for a picture in my mind. Every morning I wake up and try to attain this ideal.

You can imagine I'm regularly disappointed. But I brush off the disappointment--I've learned to."


Your blog is a pleasure to visit, I'm very glad to have stumbled upon it. I identify with the above quote very strongly. Not only am I regularly disappointed but also disheartened by not achieving that mysterious goal. Most often I do brush it off, but sometimes I can't help but feel like I've failed. What's worse is the goal or picture in mind is so vague, I can't rightly decide how it is I should improve myself or my approach.

I also want to ask you why you stopped smoking pot? You say your mind is important to you, how does pot affect your mind exactly? you see, I smoke on a regular basis, mostly because I think it's the only way to feel any real motivation, there are other reasons of course but that's the main one. Sometimes I want to quit though, I'm afraid it will turn me into some kind of a blob, a slug. Is that what you felt as well?

My response:


So you too have had this experience . . .

From time to time, I feel as though I've failed in achieving my mysterious goal. Especially when I consider my accomplishments from the point of view of my father; in other words, how he sees me.

My whole life I've been striving for my father's validation. On the one hand, I've done what I've wanted to do in life. I followed my dreams, my desires, my instincts. But on the other, I look back over my shoulder, always thinking of him, and anticipating his reaction.

I never feel recognized in my achievements by my father. Perhaps if I was leading a more conventional life, with a high-paying career, a family and such, he would recognize my success. As of now, I have done little to impress him. The last time I impressed my father was when I graduated from college.

It's a petty thing to need my father's approval, but this sort of thing dominates many people's lives. For some it's the mother's approval. For me, it's my father. I'm living the life my mother would have wanted for me. I run an arts and culture publication. I'm creative; a writer. My life is in accord with her dreams as an artist.

So, when you say "failure", I think of myself through my father's eyes. Of course, he would not say that I am a failure. Perhaps it's the reassurance that I'm not a failure which I need from him. I know I'm not. But certain things that are important to him--my ability to support myself, financial independence, etc.--demonstrate that I have fallen short in his eyes.

Sure, he's pleased with my literary and creative accomplishments, but they mean very little to him without a paycheck.

I love what you say here:
What's worse is the goal or picture in mind is so vague, I can't rightly decide how it is I should improve myself or my approach.
The mysterious goal we set for ourselves is meant to be vague. This is so that we can never actually attain it! So that we must continue striving, and achieving all sorts of things, but never anything that truly satisfies us.

The logic goes that if we were satisfied, then we would stop living. There would be no reason to continue doing anything in life.

We make the goal of our lives, our "destiny" per say--elusive. It must remain elusive for us, or we won't have a desire to keep going.

If your goal is to retire and move to Puerto Rico, like one of my uncles, then you attain it eventually and you move to Puerto Rico. This is not a mysterious goal. This is a concrete goal. And when you are there, you may do like my uncle did. He bought a house that overlooks the ocean and he sits on his roof and admires the view, or he drinks whiskey and watches the stock market ticker.

He has no elusive goal before him. He is done with life. Ask him, and he'll say there is nothing more.

You say, "I can't rightly decide how it is I should improve myself or my approach."

If you have a desire to live, you will improve yourself. We live in a culture of self-improvement and half the time this seems like the disease and not the cure. You are always improving your approach toward achieving your mysterious goal in that you are re-defining your goal and goals constantly.

As long as you are actively re-imagining your goals in life, you are coming closer to what you really want to do.

You ask me why I stopped smoking pot. This is a big question. First of all, I'm a recovering drug addict and I shouldn't have been smoking pot in the first place. I had what you call a relapse.

So when I was smoking pot recently, I was not leisurely smoking it. I was compulsively smoking it. I went out and bought a $150 glass bong. I took bong hits nightly.

And I didn't really enjoy the experience. You can read my essay "How many of us are self-medicating" to get an idea of the situation.

Yes, the mind is important to me. What I mean by this is I depend on my mind. I depend on my mind as a creative person, as a writer and intellectual.

I've done the experiment. Meaning, I've tested it out whether I'm more or less creative, more or less effective, while stoned.

Usually, while high, I have lots of interesting thoughts in my head. And I tend to end up on Twitter. Smitten by my own thoughts, I want to share them. I'll tweet something profound and wait for people to respond.

When I write high, however, only 1 in every 10 times does something articulate and meaningful get manifested. A lot of time it is just manic thought patterns and I don't have the wherewithal to compose a single coherent article, essay, or poem.

But I'm not going to lie, sometimes I tap into a profound stream of thoughts and I'm able to get them down on paper. For example, the Preface to the Blog of Innocence was written while I was stoned.

Every individual is different. You say you're more motivated while high. For me, I'm not more motivated, I'm more manic. And just because I'm manic, having racing thoughts, doesn't necessarily translate into motivation to produce a solid result.

I didn't worry that smoking would turn me into a lazy, unmotivated slob. My personality is Type A, so there's little fear of that. I do too much in life, which is why I gravitate toward drugs. I seem to need them to help me relax, to unwind, and to stop working.

So when I was smoking pot on a regular basis I would get all of my work done first. Pot was my reward at the end of the day.

But this didn't work out for me because I would stay up all night when I smoked. Smoking interfered with my cycle. I wouldn't wake up until the afternoon. And during the day, I noticed a bit of cloudiness.

I wasn't lazy. I didn't stop working. I just began to feel as though my brain wasn't at its peak performance. That's all.

And my brain is important to me. In fact, my life depends on the performance of my brain. I'm a writer, a thinker and an intellectual. I want my mind in the best possible condition for writing these essays, and running my website and business Escape into Life.

These papercraft models of propeller driven airplanes are free samples from the Hairston Aviation website. On top is a 1:60 scale model of a Cessna 172 (download here). The lower model is a Pitts S-1S at 1:45 scale (download here). Besides these two free ones, there are dozens of other airplane model templates available for a few dollars a piece. All the models are the work of James J. Hairston, an aviation enthusiast who started building card model aircraft when he was a kid during World War II.

Saturday, August 29, 2009



1. Boooooom! My favorite art blog. Features photography, illustration, film, design, fine art. What makes this blog so good is Jeff Hamada's exquisite taste. He always finds the best art on the Web.



2. But Does it Float Easily one of the best visual blogs on the Web. Combines design and art, illustration and typography. Dubbed a visual conversation between two curators, Folkert and Atley. You can get lost in this blog for hours.



3. Design is Kinky Design blog from Australia that dates back to 1998. Incredible sense of style. Features photography, fine art, illustration, and design.



4. A Journey Round My Skull JRMS is a treasure trove of vintage illustration. "Unhealthy book fetishism from a reader, collector, and amateur historian of forgotten literature." Recent obsessions: illustration and graphic design.



5. CGUnit Dubbed "Daily Drugs for Artsy People," CGUnit definitely has an edge. You'll see at a lot of nude photography, but the work is top notch. Also some excellent fine art and illustration.

Friday, August 28, 2009


Marsilio Ficino's Book of Life arrived today.

The Book of Life was a surprise . . .

I'm exchanging journals with Kate from Wyoming. You remember the Moleskine Project I talked about in "The Unknown Aspect of Human Creativity" . . .

She included a translation of the underground classic from 1480.

I thought of Lin Yutang and The Importance of Living . . . . a book that is very important to me.

Ficino talks about the Muses, Mercury, Apollo, and Venus as if they were real people. The language is infused with metaphors the author seems to take literally.

The Book of Life is a book of advice, of counsel, on healthy living. Ficino sees himself as a physician of the soul. He writes, "I have done the healing medicine of souls for a long time now . . ."

Here is a curious passage:

How diligently one must take care of the brain, the heart, the stomach, and the spirit

Runners take care of their legs, athletes take care of their arms, musicians take care of their voices. Those who study and write ought to be at least that much concerned about their brains, and their hearts, their livers and their stomachs. They should even be more concerned, since these parts are more important, and more often used. A skilled craftsman takes great care of his instruments, a soldier his horse and weapons, a hunter his dogs and birds, a lyre-player his lyre, and so on.
Only the priests of the Muses, only the greatest hunters of good and truth, are so negligent and so unfortunate that they seem to neglect totally that instrument with which they are able to measure and comprehend the universe. The instrument is the spirit itself, which doctors define as some vapor of the blood, pure, subtle, warm, and clear. From the warmth of the heart, where it is produced from thinner blood, it flows to the brain, and there the spirit works hard for the functioning of the interior, rather than the exterior, senses. That is why the blood serves the spirit, the spirit serves the senses, and the senses, finally, serve reason.
On the surface, many of these claims sound absurd. Nobody living in the 21st century would agree with a sentence that begins with, "Only the priests of the Muses". And yet, this writing somehow still evokes the truth.

Complete falsehoods interwoven with truths.

The mind is important to me. I just realized this two weeks ago when I immediately stopped smoking pot.

Earlier this evening I was sitting in Border's, where I go every evening to read. As I said, the mind is important to me. Without it, I couldn't read the New York Times, which gives me so much pleasure. And I couldn't write these essays for the Blog of Innocence, which challenge me.

It would be harder every night to write a chapter of my novel. But instead I settle for a task which is hard but not too hard. My mind is able to concentrate better when I'm not frustrated by the task.

I think when I die my ghost will stay here on earth, mainly to roam through Border's and wait for the cafe girls to fill up my coffee. The cafe girls will probably end up ignoring my ghost because they won't know it's me . . .

While I was reading Kate's journal in Border's, I had a palpable sense of her, like she was there beside me.

At the end of the first entry in the journal, I began to draw in the remaining space left on the page.

I drew for about an hour, completely engrossed in squiggly lines.

Doodling has a certain effect on me. I disappear into my doodles. I stop thinking. There is nothing . . .

During the day, I'm ceaselessly striving. I'm striving for a picture in my mind. Every morning I wake up and try to attain this ideal.

You can imagine I'm regularly disappointed. But I brush off the disappointment--I've learned to.

A number of days go by when I'm possessed by a flurry of intoxication over my perceived accomplishments. I feel as though I am really getting there, I'm nearing that perfect thing I want so bad.

It's a dream, a rush, a hallucination. I feel the pulse of achieving whatever it was in my head, whatever seemed so beautiful I had to chase after it.

There are moments when I am thrilled to be me. There are moments when I am giddy over nothing. Because everything feels so right.
The instrument is the spirit itself, which doctors define as some vapor of the blood, pure, subtle, warm, and clear. From the warmth of the heart, where it is produced from thinner blood, it flows to the brain, and there the spirit works hard for the functioning of the interior, rather than the exterior, senses. That is why the blood serves the spirit, the spirit serves the senses, and the senses, finally, serve reason.
I don't even know what it means to be spiritual anymore. I used to meditate. But then I changed my habits, I acquired bad ones again, such as smoking and drinking.

Every day I am caught up in the picture in my mind. There is a larger picture, a landscape, like the city of Oz. But there are pieces too, fragments of the dream, and I try to grab these. I try to snatch them out of the air . . .

Melancholy . . .
Melancholy, that is, black bile, is something double: some of it is called natural by doctors, but another part touches on burning. This natural type is nothing other than a part of the blood getting thicker and dryer. The burning type is divided, however, into four kinds: for it is produced by combustion of either natural melancholy, pure blood, bile, or phlegm.
Nonsense, isn't it? Or maybe, the most sense. It kind of sounds like when a psychiatrist explains a mental disorder by calling it a chemical imbalance in the brain.

What doctor can explain sadness or joy? We are a living cocktail of emotion all hours of the day.

Maybe the only doctor who can explain us is Ficino and his Book of Life . . .

I wouldn't take every word literally. Unless you know that words are metaphors to begin with; that nothing can be taken literally. We say, "dog". But what is a dog?

Those are my thoughts tonight. They are jumbled, irrelevant. I'm making a post on the Blog of Innocence every day. This is part of the picture in my mind.

Image Credits:

http://www.mgscarsbrook.com/profile

Some old images and a Flash loop of the Solar Sailer from the 1982 TRON film as well as some bootleg images from the upcoming TRON LEGACY movie set to debut in 2010. Check the trailer.













Keywords: solar sailer concept ships from tron and tron legacy film cinematic movies disney pixar animated flash loop stills frames


Another small collection of vectorized comic bubbles. Think I've uploaded some before?!?
Whatever...enjoy.
Author unknown.
1 AI : 1,3 MB

Download


All you need is football? Here's some stuff for you.
Author unknown. Only for personal use.
1 AI : 2,4 MB

Download

"Boxing"


Some stuff I've found about boxing. Enjoy.
Authors unknown. Only for personal use.
1 AI : 2,5 MB

Download

Thursday, August 27, 2009

I tried to publish a response to the comments, but Blogger said it was too long. Here is my response:

Thank you for making this discussion possible!

@Kate: You know I never thought of the graffiti comparison . . . and I do identify with graffiti art; in fact, I'm reading a book on it right now. But Marden's work does not remind me of street sketches or graffiti art.

To me, creative graffiti has more heat, more intensity, more attitude and character.

I'm glad you told me how you receive the work--as "loopy and strangely restful". Excellent description.

And certainly I can acknowledge this experience. Thank you for opening up my mind.

@Anita: Thank you for sharing this. Formlessness indeed can be beautiful. As in water.

@Joey: Your response was pitch-perfect to my ears. Thank you. I agree.

You know, I'm not an art student. I never was. I studied literature and literary criticism. Literary critics do the exact same thing.

Coming from a younger generation, I would like to see a language, and a particular manner of discussing art, literature, and culture, that is not limited to a select few. I do not like the idea that only certain people can hold the meaning of an object in culture.

I understand the difference between critical judgment and non-critical judgment. I believe intelligence and the ability to articulate one's thoughts and feelings is all that is necessary to distinguish the two. To make a critical judgment, to discuss a cultural topic, one should not have to rely on the guarded terminology, references, and phrases of elite or specialized discourses. We all have our frames of reference, we all have our contexts of understanding art, literature, and culture. Why is one context privileged over another?

But I think democratic language is possible, at least within a given culture. Why should we let language be further fragmented into tiny sub discourses, and sub sub discourses. After a certain point, only two people can understand each other, and then not even that!

Art critics, literary critics, historians, scholars, are cocooned within their own vocabularies; I would like to democratize language. So everyone can talk about art, culture, and literature.

@Peter: My pleasure . . .

@Villa: I thank you for this story. I would not like to admit it but the more I looked at Marden, the more I opened up to the possibility of feeling slightly differently toward these works. But I do not want to exaggerate this; it was no great shift from my initial impression. I simply became more sympathetic to the works.

You describe something that happens a lot in life. Such as when you first meet someone who you can't stand; the next thing you know they're your best friend.

I'm open to a change of heart on anything. This happens in life, and to refuse to acknowledge change, is to be a fundamentalist. We change our ideas, our views, and our feelings constantly change. I embrace contradiction as Whitman once said.

@Jamie: Like with Editorial Joe, your response was pitch-perfect to my ears. Maybe it's a generational thing. I don't know. But I hear you!

@Mark: You're an outstanding writer. You understand art on many levels. But I'm going to have to disagree with you about the question of difficulty.

Yes, ballet is difficult, writing novels is difficult. I'm not arguing about whether what Marden does is difficult or not. Having watched the Charlie Rose interview, I'm aware of the complicated process behind Marden's paintings.

But that's like saying because a novel is a thousand pages long, and caused the author great strain to produce, then the novel itself is great.

Some of the book reviews I read in the New York Times fall into this trap. . . A critic will imply in one way or another the plot was weak or the characters were undeveloped, but because the work is "ambitious", the novel should be considered worthy of our attention.

My primary question is do Marden's works justify his fame, the MoMA exhibit, the world tour, and so on?

Could we be putting the spotlight on better artists and better art?

And if I stood in front of a Marden, would I change my heart and mind? I doubt it, I really doubt that the real thing before me would change my heart on his work. But I'm willing to yield to this argument.

I looked at scores of his works last night. I asked my heart, "Do you feel this?"

My heart said, "No, I do not feel that."

One more thing Mark, I love Pollock. I've seen the movie. I've read about Pollock and I've seen his work.

Pollock's work moves me. I am in awe of it. Marden, on the other hand, is a faint echo of Pollock, not even that. As someone remarked on Twitter, a parody of Pollock.

Anything can be done well or poorly, effectively or ineffectively. Anything can be interesting or not interesting.

Abstract expressionism or photo realism or country music. The school does not dictate the quality and (yes, here's that word again) the originality, or the challenging, daring aspects of the artwork.

But you cannot compare Pollock to Marden! I will not let you make that comparison. Two totally separate levels of creativity and mind.

Marden, in my view, does not have a unique voice.

As Jamie said, "I'm astounded that this man has spent so many years doing such unimpressive work."

@Kayin: Art critics have little power in the art world. I'm reading a book right now called, "The $12 Million Stuffed Shark"; and the power is in the hands of major museums like the MoMA, branded dealers, and branded auction houses.

When the MoMA decided to put Marden in the museum it wasn't as transparent as that. His art sales will be affected by this--there is a lot of marketing and stone cold business behind art museums, exhibitions, dealers, and collectors.

What this means is we stand to lose great art in place of branded art, art by institutional decree, art that is not really good but serves as coin in the art market.

It's complicated and ugly.

@Chip: I have nothing against Abstract Expressionism. If art makes me feel, then it doesn't matter what school or tradition it's from. Rothko, like my comments about Pollock, is in another league. Rothko and Pollock came up with the stuff that Marden only seems to be creating poor, distant imitations of.

And originality, while I agree is a difficult argument to make, is still an element that must be reckoned with. All works have sources. All works derive from something that came before; but not all works are derivative.

Thank you so much guys for sharing with me your thoughts. My intentions are not to dominate the conversation with my views. I write these articles to engage others, to find out what other people think, and then through a conversation I like to come to a place where we can share our ideas.

Lethe

"Isabella" (See all Proofs)
These fun little Chihuahuas are an excellent example of the quality of artwork I am able to create when I have a really good photograph to start with. Isabella's photo was a tad challenging because it was all black and white. Since she is a black pup it worked out pretty well I think. I played around with backgrounds a bit this time. In addition to creating a couple of new background options I also dusted off some old grounds and played around with color, giving them new life. My last pup at the bottom, was influenced by Jeff Soto's color palette and his amazing ability to use "pink" in a non-passive unromantic way. Pink is a versatile hue and it does not have to be used in an overly girlie fashion unless of course that is what you are shooting for.

In the "Partners in Crime" episode of the newest Doctor Who television series, there appear hundreds of cuddly little alien creatures called "Adipose". The oddest thing about the Adipose is that they are composed entirely of human body fat. This makes sense considering "adipose" is the medical term for fat tissue. The fatty papercraft pictured above is the creation of Sponzar of the Hunkydorky blog. You can grab a template for a papercraft Adipose of your own here.

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Brice Marden: Study for Muses, Hydra, 1997

I envision a moment--perhaps two hundred years from now--
when people, not institutions, get to decide what hangs on museum walls.

Brice Marden was floating around the Internet earlier today. I found a New Yorker article on Reddit Art, which I tweeted. And then a friend, in response, sent me the Charlie Rose interview with Brice Marden.

Who is Brice Marden?

He is an abstract expressionist painter who gained worldwide attention in 2006 because of the Brice Marden Retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art (New York).

The show traveled to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in early 2007, and then to Berlin's Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart . . .

The MoMA called the exhibition "an unprecedented gathering of [Marden's] work, with more than fifty paintings and an equal number of drawings, organized chronologically, drawn from all phases of the artist's career." (Wikipedia)

Brice Marden: Bear Print, 1997-98/2000

Sometimes I use Twitter to get a sampling of public opinion on a prominent artist or intellectual figure. Last week it was the Lacanian-Marxist political philosopher, Slavoj Žižek. This week it is Brice Marden.

I'm interested in what people think. I tweeted the New Yorker article to see what people think of Marden's work, and the merits of the article itself.

We already know what the Museum of Modern Art thinks of Brice Marden.

If for some reason the show does not make that clear to us, we can always read the 330 page hardcover book (published by the Museum of Modern Art) about Marden's importance to the art world, "Plane Image: A Brice Marden Retrospective."

At the time of this publication and retrospective, Charlie Rose also thought Brice Marden was important. So he interviewed him.

And surely, forty years of painting must mean something!

A detail from "The Propitious Garden of Plane Image, Third Version," 2000-2006

So what did people say on Twitter when I asked if they liked Brice Marden's paintings?

@TDeregowski
love it, saw a big show at the whitechapel.

@LT78 brice bardon = snooze. sorry. (This comment was erased, probably b/c the author realized she spelled his name wrong)

@twicklicious Brice Marden, excellent marketeer, not so much "artist" though.. (personal opinion)

@ownnothing I've never liked Brice Marden's work. Flat, lifeless, doodles, color studies. Are these paintings for the ages?

Now let's look at what the New Yorker had to say in 2006:
Marden’s current retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art confirms him, at the age of sixty-eight, as the most profound abstract painter of the past four decades.

The surface eludes them. Sombre color seems at once to engulf you, with a sort of oceanic tenderness, and infinitely to recede. This effect distills that of the furry-edged, drifting masses of ineffable color with which Rothko aimed, he said, to evoke a mood of “the single human figure, alone in a moment of utter immobility.”


His grays and grayed greens and blues recall the ungraspable nuances of Velázquez and, at times, the simmering ardors of Caspar David Friedrich. (Am I dropping too many names? There’s no helping it. Marden, an artist bred in museums, communes rather directly with all past painters whose temperaments correspond to his own.)

Regardless of the merit of these aesthetic judgments, never has a writer been so accurately self-conscious of his own journalism.

The Peter Schjeldahl article in the New Yorker drips with what the anonymous commenter (from my recent essay Art, Taste, Money) detested as art-speak, intellectual art babble, hyperbole, and so on . . .

We can almost picture the anonymous commenter, after reading the New Yorker, lifting up Peter Schjeldal by his shirt collar and shouting, "Just tell me what you think of the goddamn painting!"

The interview with Charlie Rose is also revealing.

Marden: There is a real responsibility of being an artist. I mean you’re not just doing this stuff to make pretty things for people to hang on their wall.

You know, there is some meaning to it. You are living in the culture and you are reflecting on the culture.

I mean they’re going to know more about this stuff in three hundred—I mean, this stuff is made to last . . . You look at Venetian painting and you have some idea about what’s going on—you don’t have to read about all the battles--

CR: Art is the permanence of a civilization.

Marden: Yeah, well, it’s a reflection of a culture.

Brice Marden: Cold Mountain 6 (Bridge), 1989-91

Terence Clarke, a blog critic, finds the trumpeting of Marden's work absurd. As for the meaning that everyone seems to be talking about, he writes:
In the case of Marden's work, Stella's dictum (what you see is what you see) is an accurate assessment. You theorize about its deeper meanings at the risk of describing the emperor's new clothes. There is little here of the great intentions that I've read about in descriptions, by many critics, of Marden's art. They may think such intentions are there. Maybe even Marden thinks they are. But they aren't.
Clarke also has something to say about feeling.
Metaphor is what makes good art so riveting. It opens the soul to variegated depths, to an acknowledgment of emotions. To conflict. To soul-saving resolution. It stirs the heart's blood, surely one of the classic purposes of all art.
And of these particular elements--emotions, conflict--he finds a definite dearth in Marden.

Brice Marden: For Pearl, 1970

In another segment of the Charlie Rose interview:

Marden: I think there’s a lot of painters around doing it (abstract expressionism) . . .

CR: There’s a line that goes through Pollock and you and . . .

Marden: Yeah, but I don’t know who they are. I mean, I sort of know some of them. I mean, it’s still going but . . . it seems to me the big thing going on now is like non-abstract expressionism—

CR: It is?

Marden: Well, it has much more to do with the kind of literary, storytelling . . . as I said, it’s more literary, it tells little stories. Not little stories, but there’s a narrative, there’s a lot of narrative stuff going on . . .

CR: Does it influence you?

Marden: Ehhhh, maybe, I don’t know . . . I mean these things, these long paintings are sort of a narrative, but no, I don’t want to tell stories in my paintings. If I tell the story, I’d rather it be a symphony rather than like a book.

CR: With movements . . .

Marden: So you respond to it viscerally, rather than intellectually . . . You can look at it, you’re figuring it out, but at the same time, if you’re beginning to have some sort of jump in your stomach, then I think you’re sort of getting it.

I did in fact have a "jump in my stomach" tonight, but it was not looking at Marden's oeuvre, nor any individual painting.

The "jump" came from all of the voices around me, responding to Marden's work. All of the voices that contributed to this meaning of Brice Marden.

I'm interested in what people have to say. Not institutions. Not the MoMA. Not the New Yorker.

Meaning takes care of itself. The artist need not worry about meaning. If the art has integrity, originality, and yes, beauty, it will provoke meaning.

sundragon83 at deviantart.









Keywords: alex figini concept vehicle spaceship environment digital pen tablet speed paintings deviant art account aka sundragon83

"Diego" (see all proofs)

These two pups were a lot of fun. The original photos were very high in quality and shot by pet photographer Jill Beninato. We are starting to get very busy here at Art Paw, so stay tuned for more artwork this week.