Thursday, February 7, 2008

that green wall (Sickert)

Some poetry snippets...

First....just the first stanza of an A.R. Ammons poem, the rest of it is good too but goes into the whole musician as genius thing.

He Held Radical Light

He held radical light
as music in his skull: music
turned, as
over ridges immanences of evening light
rise, turned
back over the furrows of his brain
into the dark, shuddered,
shot out again
in long swaying swirls of sound

and.....

from Nicole Brossard's 'The Temptation' (it's the last line here that kills me)

i succumbed to the clear vision
of vegetation and events
of early morning, in the privileges of light
because the authentic body spine of fire
has shown its tongue as it
was then tangible and tango
very vivid for the eyes/of the inside

Arnaud Loumeau



Yes, it's on graph paper.

Wednesday, February 6, 2008

suzanne opton


katie, here's that photographer i was telling you about.

goya


el greco


lovis corinth


three pennies of thought



This is what I've been thinking about, drawing about?, 'n reflecting on as of late... [think the Maslow model is a little flawed, but its a nice place to start]. If everyone had their most basic needs met, we'd all have a chance to thrive/survive.

the physiological needs can definitely control your thoughts 'n behaviors, and can cause you to feel sick, pain, and discomfort (at the very least!)-- if you are hungry, thirsty, unloved; then you're chemically unbalanced, all of your energy is focused on remedying these deficiencies, and all these other needs remain unfulfilled. Don't know how exactly I'm handling this in my drawings, (don't think I am effectively yet) think maybe it just helps me cope more than anything else, feel terrible for not *doing* more. helping more.



Regarding these unfulfilled needs, The Threepenny Opera, really hammers this home...(finally got a chance to see it performed last year in Asheville.) It certainly affects me reading it, but in full-on theatrical display, the final song "Do Not Prosecute Too Much Transgression" left me bleary-eyed. jeez, of course you can't judge the acts of others if they don't even have their most basic of needs met...even MacHeath (Mack the Knife)!

Anne Harris

Giacometti

Tuesday, February 5, 2008

the diving bell and the butterfly

The new Schnabel movie...saw it in VT....A movie about a man who has a stroke and becomes completely paralyzed though fully conscious. He has to communicate by blinking.....it is based on a book that he dictated completely in blinks after his accident.

http://www.thedivingbellandthebutterfly-themovie.com/

boundaries

Taken from Dr Zhivago:

"It was Sunday in the middle of July. On holidays you could stay in Bed a little longer. Laura lay on her back, her hands clasped behind her head....Laura felt the size and position in the bed with two points of her body - the salient of her left shoulder and the big toe of her right foot. Everthing else was more or less herself, her soul or inner being, harmoniously fitted into her contours and impatiently strained to the future."

From Rilke's Duino Elegies:

"And the night, oh the night when the wind
full of outer space gnaws at our faces; that wished for,
gentle, deceptive one waiting painfully for the lonely
heart - she'd stay on for anyone. Is she easier on lovers?
But they use each other to hide their fate.
You still don't understand? Throw the emptiness in
your arms out into that space we breathe; maybe birds
will feel the air thinning as they fly deeper into themselves."

taken from: Empathy and Sympathy as Tactile Encounter by Edith Wyschogrod

Touch and the Other
Ordinary language attests this account of the tactile body and provides
a link between touch, empathy, and sympathy. When we say,
colloquially, ‘‘X is touchy,’’ we mean that X is hypersensitive, vulnerable
to injury. When ‘‘I am touched by Y’s kindness,’’ I mean that Y
has compelled me to let down my guard, has drawn close so that I
cannot remain indifferent to him. To remain untouched by another is
to refuse to engage in a feeling-act that brings to light the other’s
plight, to refuse to empathize with the other. The active deployment
of tactility is expressed in such colloquialisms as ‘‘I feel for you,’’ by
which we mean my body substitutes for yours, I take on your pain.
In empathy I do not merge with the others but retrace the lines of
the other’s affect. Thus Martin Buber writes:
Empathy means to glide with one’s own feeling into the dynamic
structure of an object, a pillar or a crystal or the branch
of a tree or even of an animal or a man and as it were to trace it
from within, understanding the formation and motoriality of the
object with the perception of one’s own muscles. Thus it means
the exclusion of one’s own concreteness, the extinguishing of
the actual situation of life, the absorption in pure aestheticism
of the reality in which one participates.

Tim Noble and Sue Webster trash art

I think these are the artists whom Andy was talking about in Drawing Marathon. Besides the work being amazing in its technical proficiency, it also makes me reconsider the "outside" influences on and in one's work.





Ron Mueck's sculpture

Hang on and watch this entire video. You will see something unexpected if you watch carefully.

new life

A previously unknown sub-species of bird (named Nepal Rufous-vented Prinia) in the southern grasslands of Nepal.

ai


Pleo hatches from an egg, and becomes its own personality according to the environment it grows up in.

Monday, February 4, 2008

SuperBowl Ads

Yesterday's game was great, but the ads were pretty boring overall...the best ones were from FedEx and Pepsi...go to myspace.com/superbowlads...

www.dirknyc.com

first google image for appropriation

tuymans again


himmler

luc tuymans

william gedney


this photo made me cry.

joan linder

Sunday, February 3, 2008

for Jules...


ahh--found one!
"Felix in Exile,"--W. Kentridge
really amazing...


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vF5cngcXqSs