We all know grief now. We grieve the people we loved, but also the people we were before this pandemic began. If you’re old enough, you add it to the grief you’ve accrued over the years: for the children we were, the hopes we had, the people we longed to be. But if you’re lucky, the art that you need still finds you. It reminds you of who you are when you’ve forgotten, and gives you the power to imagine a life beyond this one. It lets you believe that what you’ve been robbed of will be found, that your home will come alive.
Tag: art
-
Dan Sinker: The Magic of Pee-wee Herman in a Dark Year
-
Hokusai’s Sudden Gust
The New York Times has posted a lovely analysis of my favorite woodblock print by Hokusai, “Ejiri in Suruga Province” (circa 1830, from his “Thirty-Six Views of Mt. Fuji” series), in which a sudden blast of wind is the invisible subject of the piece. Nature and landscape and social class and quotidian humor, all meeting together in a pivotal moment of art history where Dutch imports influenced the Edo-era artists whose own innovative works quickly influenced the French.
-
What Keeps Al Jaffee, the Genius Behind Mad Magazine’s Fold-Ins, Going After 52 Years
If it ever gets too bleak, just remember that Al Jaffee is still making the world a better place through his incredible (and bitingly funny) illustrations for Mad at age 96 (!!!).
I was making fun of the fold-outs you’d see in Playboy or National Geographic or Life Magazine. They had these big, fancy, full-color fold-outs. Well, at Mad we didn’t have that kind of budget. So I thought, wouldn’t it be funny to do the exact opposite? We’d do a cheap black-and-white fold in.
I love that the Fold-In started as another subversive bit of meta-humor about how “cheap” Mad magazine is.
On a side note, Columbia University acquired Jaffee’s paper archives a couple of years ago — I’d be amazing to look through that trove of 50+ years of sketches.
-
Charles Addams Mother Goose
Maria Popova posts a wonderful selection of cartoons from Charles Addam’s lesser-known book of Mother Goose rhymes from 1967. Such good stuff, and fun to imagine the crossovers between the classic grim nursery rhymes and his own macabre sense of humor, juxtaposed with his mid-century New York City skylines and deadpan-faced characters.
-
The color gray in full bloom – OUPblog
“In A Descriptive Handbook of Modern Water Colours, by J. Scott Taylor…. London: Winsor and Newton, 1887, neutral tint is described as ‘A compound shadow colour of a cool neutral character. It is not very permanent, as the gray is apt to become grey by exposure’. Has anyone besides this author ever made a distinction of meaning between gray and grey? I do not know how the distinction is to be converted in speaking unless the words are differently pronounced” (1897).
Glad to know that the gray / grey split in English has been confusing people for well over 115 years. What’s going on in pigment company Winsor & Newton’s world where gray turns into grey eventually? An interesting read about the etymology of the mysterious color and it’s uncertain linguistic origins.
-
Al Jaffee on Showing Your Work
I kept creating them, hoping I’d hit pay dirt. But I never showed them to anybody, so it was an exercise in stupidity. At least they’ll look good at Columbia. From a New York Times article on cartoonist Al Jaffee (of Mad Magazine fame, where among other things he continues to paint the back-cover Fold-In, a feature he’s been creating since 1964!). At age 92, he’s giving his archive of work to Columbia University’s rare book and manuscript library, including boxes of comic strips that he was tinkering with in the 1950s and 1960, unseen by the rest of the world.
-
Sixteen Colors Draw – ANSI Editor
Create and edit ANSI and ASCII art in your browser!
If ansi.drastic.net isn’t doing it for you, here’s another in-browser ANSI art generator, with source available on Github. Go make some BBS graffiti!
-
John Cage on the Beauty of the Moon
I don’t agree. I think that we can still at unexpected moments be surprised by the beauty of the moon though now we can travel to it. John Cage, in response to critics claiming an urgency for the scholarly, analytical study of “difficult to understand” twentieth Century art, quoted from this acceptance speech in which he talks about Finnegans Wake and his own works influenced by that book.
-
Kyle Mcdonald on Getting a Little Lost
I’ve learned you have to be careful when you get lost in an idea. As an artist, you have to get a little lost. Otherwise you won’t discover anything interesting. But you have to avoid getting so lost that you’re unable to walk away and keep exploring. Media artist Kyle McDonald writes about the aftermath of his People Staring at Computers Apple Store project that drew attention last summer after he was investigated by the Secret Service.
-
Rives Bfk Acronym Explained
As an art person I’ve enjoyed a good amount of time around lithography and other drawing media, and now I’m engaged to a children’s book illustrator who largely works in watercolor, so I’ve spent a fair amount of time at art supply shops buying paper. One thing has bugged me for years about our fine rag paper purchases, though: what’s up with the “BFK” in “Rives Arches BFK”? I’ve asked professors, professional printers, other artists, and even the Internet, with no great leads, but I finally coaxed the answer out of Google today. From The Albumen & Salted Paper Book: The history and practice of photographic printing, 1840-1895:
It is no wonder that only two paper mills in the world managed to consistently produce a paper of the necessary quality, and these two mills were able to maintain their monopoly from the 1860’s until approximately World War I. They were the above-mentioned Blanchet Frères et Klébler Co. in Rives, France (hence their product was known as the “Rives” paper) and Steinbach and Company, located in Malmedy, Belgium (at that time part of Germany). Steinbach paper was known outside Germany as “Saxe” paper.
The product that established their paper monopoly (duopoly?) — the exploding new field of photography! More to the point, 3D stereography, the Victorian postcard origin of a Tumblr meme:
In the late 1850’s and especially after 1860, two new factors in photographic technology and practice generated a great demand for albumen paper. The first of these was the stereograph; its ability to transport the viewer to distant scenes with the illusion of three-dimensional reality depended largely on the smooth surface and fine detail of albumen paper. Stereo views were extremely popular, and created a corresponding demand for albumen paper. Nearly all stereo views before 1890 were made on albumen paper.
This 3D thing will catch on one of these days…