You’d think that a science-fiction adventure featuring the “Star Wars” alums Natalie Portman and Oscar Isaac, as well as Portman’s “Thor” co-star Tessa Thompson, would have been a giant hit. But Paramount Pictures seemed baffled by how to market a sci-fi picture about ideas and creeping dread (rather then lasers and intergalactic dogfights), dumping it onto Netflix overseas and into theaters with a shrug in the United States. They fear what they don’t understand; the writer and director Alex Garland, adapting the novel by Jeff VanderMeer, crafts a thrilling yet thoughtful combination of head trip and hero’s journey that owes more to Tarkovsky than Lucas.
The feature directorial debut of the stand-up comic and sitcom star Jerrod Carmichael was one of many films all but disappeared by the pandemic; it premiered at the 2021, online-only edition of the Sundance Film Festival before quietly landing on Hulu more than a year later. But there’s much to recommend in “On the Count of Three,” the story of two longtime friends (played by Carmichael and Christopher Abbott) who vow to aid each other in ending their lives after a long day of cleaning up unfinished business. Its chief virtue is its leading actors — Abbott has been doing modest but devastating work on the indie scene for years, and Carmichael matches his co-star’s intensity and anguish — while Carmichael shows a sure hand for navigating the tonal shifts of Ari Katcher and Ryan Welch’s tricky screenplay.
The films of the director Gregg Araki have been so (rightly) celebrated in recent years for their wild stylistic choices and unapologetic queer themes that it’s tempting to overlook his more tempered, mainstream affairs. But this combination of sun-baked noir, coming-of-age drama and Sirkian melodrama remains one of his most fascinating concoctions. Shailene Woodley turns in one of her finest performances to date as young Kat, whose mother, Eve (Eva Green, vamping marvelously), disappears under mysterious circumstances. Kat tries to figure out what happened, but “White Bird” is less a detective story than an exploration of the tricky landscape of young adulthood, dramatized with a weary verisimilitude.
This tale of two teenage girl assassins (Alexis Bledel and Saoirse Ronan) from the writer and director Geoffrey Fletcher (the Oscar-winning screenwriter of “Precious”) suffers a bit from post-Tarantino preciousness. The M.V.P. here is James Gandolfini, who co-stars as their would-be target, and plays the character with the weary melancholy of a man who knows his days are numbered, and has accepted it. He plays it as dry comedy, with just a touch of doomed inevitability, and that’s the right choice; the genuine tenderness and trust in his scenes with Ronan are a nice plus. “Violet & Daisy” hit theaters just 12 days before Gandolfini’s untimely death, and it serves as a poignant reminder of the wide range of roles he had yet to play.
Kodi Smit-McPhee’s Oscar-nominated turn in “The Power of the Dog” was not the actor’s first go-round in the Wild West; six years earlier, he co-starred with Michael Fassbender in this eccentric and affecting oater from the writer and director John Maclean. Smit-McPhee plays Jay, a teenage Scottish immigrant traveling the West in search of his sweetheart from back home, with Fassbender as Silas, a frontiersman who takes the innocent and clueless Jay under his wing. MacLean creates a credibly dangerous world of threats both natural and seemingly supernatural (Ben Mendelsohn, stealing the show as a menacing bounty hunter).
The writer and director Andrew Bujalski (“Funny Ha Ha,” “Computer Chess”) creates what looks, on its shiny surface, like a sunny workplace comedy along the lines of “Working …” or the Chotchkie’s scenes in “Office Space.” But he’s up to something much slyer, a smart examination of class and gender politics in one of their most pointed playgrounds: a Hooters-style sports bar and grill, where customers leer at scantily clad waitresses while the manager, Lisa (Regina Hall), tries to keep temperatures cool (and maintain her own sanity). It’s a wise, winning comedy, with a particularly sparkling supporting turn by Haley Lu Richardson, a “White Lotus” favorite.
The strange, twisted tale of the motel owner Gerald Foos (who claimed to have spied on his customers for decades) and the superstar journalist Gay Talese (who wrote about Foos in a controversial “New Yorker” article and book) is detailed by the directors Myles Kane and Josh Koury in this riveting documentary. Voyeurism aside, the most compelling passages are less about what Foos did than how Talese’s seemingly sturdy news judgment failed him so spectacularly. Ultimately, “Voyeur” is less a character study than a prescient examination of a faltering media landscape, where a story that’s too good to be true is too often told anyway.
Kenneth Powell and Thomas Edward Seymour’s first documentary on, per the secondary title, “Cult Films and the Decline of Physical Media” is a bit too ambitious for its slender 72-minute running time, attempting to follow too many strands and chase too many gimmicks. But the most direct material, on the logistics of the video business — from its golden age to this waning period — is invaluable, as Seymour seemed to realize when solo-directing the more successful follow-up, a straight-ahead history of exploitation films, their exhibition and the kind of oddities we’ve lost in this all-streaming, all-the-time era. The sequel is the better film, but both are informative and enlightening, with copious commentary from the people who make these movies, and those who love them.
As Shree wrote about Amma’s metamorphosis — a journey that culminates in a fateful trip to Pakistan, which she had fled after violence erupted during Partition in 1947 — she found herself composing an elegy to pluralistic, polyglot India, a place teeming with a diversity of languages, religions, cultures and dialects.
“The book kept bringing up the kinds of divisions that have crept in and the unities that are being lost,” Shree said. “That’s what we seem to be losing, now that there’s a kind of monopoly of certain languages and cultures.”
Shree didn’t expect the novel to resonate with an international audience. Several of her previous novels had been translated into English, but none were released outside of India, and she had no reason to believe “Tomb of Sand” would be any different.
Then, an unlikely series of breaks vaulted her to literary stardom. After the Hindi edition came out, the translator Arunava Sinha reached out to Shree and introduced her to Rockwell, who was looking for contemporary feminist fiction to translate. Rockwell did a sample translation, and the publisher, Titled Axis, a small, independent British press, acquired it and secured a grant for Rockwell to translate the full text.
The English version was published in Britain in 2021. The following year, it won the International Booker, which is given jointly to the author and translator. “Tomb of Sand” sold 30,000 copies in Britain, an impressive number for a work in translation from a relatively unknown author. In India, the English edition sold 50,000 copies, making it a resounding success for a work of literary fiction, and the Hindi version, titled “Ret Samadhi,” sold more than 35,000 copies. The novel became ubiquitous in train stations and airports across India; Shree’s name was a question on a popular game show hosted by the Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan. “Tomb of Sand” is now being translated into several other Indian languages, among them Tamil, Malayalam, Marathi and Assamese, according to Shree’s literary agent.
“It was considered a little bit out there,” Rockwell said. “Now everybody’s reading it.”
“Tomb of Sand” was a daunting text to translate, Rockwell said. The narrative is experimental, fragmented and dreamlike, full of language tricks and invented words. It’s laced with references to Sanskrit classics, Bollywood movies, song lyrics, prayers and chants, and contemporary Hindi and Urdu novelists. To capture the polyphonic flavor of the prose and Shree’s freewheeling sense of wordplay, Rockwell preserved fragments of the text from Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi and Sanskrit, leaving them untranslated.
In a way, it’s fitting that “Tomb of Sand,” a novel about the permeability of borders — between countries, religions, genders, languages, ages, life and death — is transcending linguistic barriers, despite the obstacles.
“Language is not just a vehicle to convey a message, it’s a complete entity in its own right,” Shree said. “It has a personality, it has a cadence, and sometimes it has no message.”
On Sunday, the Brooklyn-based artist will cheer for the Philadelphia Eagles from his reserved seat at the Super Bowl in Arizona’s State Farm Stadium, where local art handlers and a member of his studio team have installed a large stainless-steel sculpture of an athlete’s hand grasping for a football. The ten-foot-tall statue, titled Opportunity (reflection), has been in the works for nearly six months, ever since the National Football League asked Thomas for help celebrating the sport’s importance in American culture.
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“There is a metaphor here,” Thomas told ARTnews in a recent interview, explaining how the sculpture’s reflective surface resembled the Vince Lombardi Trophy given to the winning Super Bowl team. “That trophy symbolizes the highest peak of success in the league.”
Only a few weeks earlier, the artist was receiving a different kind of top honor. On an unseasonably mild January afternoon in Boston, Thomas presided over the unveiling of The Embrace, his monument to the civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife Coretta Scott King. That day was five years in the making — time spent navigating a labyrinthian public approval process and hundreds of questions about how to transport the 37,000-pound bronze statue — likely the largest in the United States — from a foundry in Walla Walla, Washington to the Boston Common.
Elected officials including Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, as well several of Kings’ relatives, were at the ceremony, as were many of the historians and activists who have urged Boston to include more representations of Black historical figures among the many white men featured in its tourist attractions and monuments about the city’s colonial past. A nonprofit called the Boston Foundation helped provide resources and $10.5 million in funds so that the statue could stand in the park’s 1965 Freedom Plaza, which honors 64 local civil rights leaders from the 1950s to the 1970s.
“We are learning how to have critical discourse in the public and how that works is not for the weak-stomached.”
Hank Willis Thomas, On The Response To The Embrace
The new MLK monument, according to Thomas, is about love. He wanted to push the boundaries of the figurative style usually associated with public art. With his collaborators at the architecture firm MASS Design Group, Thomas worked from a photograph of the couple hugging shortly after King won the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize. The resulting sculpture — a 20-foot tall statue made of 609 pieces of welded bronze — focused on that loving gesture and omitted the civil rights icons’ faces. In Thomas’ vision, visitors could walk under the monumental work’s arched arms and experience King and Coretta Scott’s famed embrace, a living memorial honoring King’s vision of a more loving and just society.
“The invitation of our work is for the viewer to walk inside and feel like they are in the heart of that embrace between King and his wife,” Thomas said.
But images of the sculpture shared on social media illustrated a different kind of love. Mayor Wu was still speaking at the dedication ceremony when the sculpture was transformed into a meme on TikTok and Twitter, with users describing it irreverently as “a masturbatory metal homage” and a “horny Rorshach test.” Many users coalesced around the idea that the statue depicted sexual acts from every angle, and conspiracy theorists alleged that Thomas had intentionally disgraced two of the most beloved figures in American history.
None of that was true, but the rumors spread so quickly that some attendees of the opening celebrations were still at the monument site when they started receiving text messages from friends asking: Did the Martin Luther King Jr. monument really look like an enormous phallus?
“The internet is going to internet,” Yng-Ru Chen, a Boston gallerist who attended the opening told ARTnews. She disagreed with the online reactions to the memorial and said that experiencing the sculpture in person made it difficult to see what others did. “I very much enjoyed the monument when I was standing in front of it.”
How such a prolific artist like Hank Willis Thomas could see one of his greatest achievements sullied was a question that has stumped the art world. Few artists are as engaged with the public, and virtually none have the same level of expertise when it comes to navigating questions of representation and memorialization.
Between 2015 and 2020, Thomas served on the New York City Public Design Commission, which oversees the municipal collection of permanent monuments and votes to approve new ones. His appointment coincided with a tumultuous period in the agency’s history, when the de Blasio administration greenlit nearly a dozen monuments that it ultimately never built. Some activists blamed the Public Design Commission for not doing enough to increase the city’s miniscule number of statues honoring women and people of color.
At the time, Thomas was not afraid to weigh into such controversial topics. “There are what, five or six [male] statues that I think could easily be replaced by individual statues of each of these women,” he said during a 2019 hearing about increasing gender diversity in the city’s statues. That comment was picked apart by the New York Post in an article claiming that he was putting the city’s monument men in peril. But colleagues described Thomas as taking that role very seriously.
“Commissioners make a choice to serve and contribute to the City of New York and with that, bring in their expertise and experience,” Mary Valverde, a commissioner who served alongside the artist, told ARTnews. “I can say that as a colleague Hank has been pleasant and I have only known him to be open and generous in nature.”
During the same period that Thomas served as a commissioner, he expanded his public art practice.
In 2016, Thomas, along with fellow artists Eric Gottesman, Michelle Woo, and Wyatt Gallery, founded Super PAC For Freedoms to serve as an artistic platform for civic engagement. The “collective,” as Thomas has characterized it, has commissioned artists to create billboards during political elections and has staged awareness campaigns tackling issues like the Iranian government’s treatment of women. According to Thomas, the collective has about 30 members, many of whom work on the artist’s personal projects. “We don’t really draw lines with the studio,” he said.
During his tenure on the Public Design Commission, Thomas also marshaled his own permanent monument onto the city streets. Near the Brooklyn Bridge, he erected Unity, a 22-foot bronze arm with an index finger pointing skyward. The work was commissioned by another city agency called the Percent for Art program, though it still needed approval from the Public Design Commission. (Thomas recused himself from those deliberations.) When the statue was unveiled in 2019, a New York Times critic described it as “a traditional and fairly conservative work.”
Thomas still remembers the detractors who claimed his piece was extremist. At the time, a handful of preservation activists and Republican politicians claimed that Unity was a symbol of ISIS, the terrorist group. A city spokesman eventually came to the artist’s defense. “This accusation is completely absurd — is every sports fan who holds up a foam finger an ISIS sympathizer?” Ryan Max, an employee with the Cultural Affairs Department had said. “The gesture depicted by this sculpture is a universal sign of uplift and aspiration.”
The experience with Unity prepared Thomas, he said, for “disparate and unexpected responses” to his public art works, adding that his proposal for The Embrace was the most representational option from the five finalists, which included abstractions by Yinka Shonibare, Barbara Chase-Riboud, and other famous artists. Chosen from over one hundred artist proposals, the finalists’ designs were shared with the public in 2018, receiving over 1,000 comments, before Thomas’ Embrace was finally selected in 2019 by the Boston Art Commission, which oversees public art in the city.
Thousands of Black Lives Matter protesters holding signs walk past Unity, which towers over the streets of New York at 22 1/2 feet tall. The big bronze arm sits right at the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge and points towards the sky on June 19, 2020.
Ira L. Black/Corbis via Getty Images
Though other people have characterized the debate around The Embrace as a controversy, Thomas sees it as a public conversation. “We are learning how to have critical discourse in the public and how that works is not for the weak-stomached,” he said. “Lots of people heard about the monument before the online feedback, but ten times more people heard about it after. Kim Kardashian on her trip to Harvard Business School even felt the need to drive by and post about it.”
As he mentioned Kardashian, he received an update on Instagram — the artist Nina Chanel Abney was posting positively about The Embrace on her social media account.
“It’s important that I talk about how my practice is a conversation with the viewer,” Thomas continued. “To whatever degree there is adversity, it is also an opportunity for me to engage. How could I be upset or disappointed when a work about communal love is so well-embraced?”
Thomas said he was “fascinated” to see how responses to The Embrace became shaped by a particular photographic angle once it was fed into social media and that he was “surprised” that there was far more focus in web publications on that response than King’s legacy.
“It was surprising, like a reality check,” Thomas said, explaining that he made a series of maquettes so that his team, funders, and public officials could scrutinize the design. Nobody, he said, had ever raised an issue as far he knew with how the memorial looked from different angles.
“You forget that the media is a business, and they say sex sells,” Thomas said. “So it’s like, oh right, how naïve of me to think we can talk about social justice and not have it overshadowed with juvenile conversations.”
Not everyone has agreed that the controversy was all spectacle. There are some relatives of the Kings who were displeased with the monument. Seneca Scott, a cousin of Coretta Scott King, tweeted “I still can’t get over how they tried to play my fam,” adding in an essay that he found the sculpture “rather insulting.” Later, in the week, when speaking to The Guardian, he revised his original statement. “When I wrote that, I was in the anger part of grief. Now I’ve accepted the grief,” he said, adding that the fact that the statue was privately funded had made him “not nearly as upset.”
The initial blowback, however, forced advocates into damage control. Even Boston’s mayor, Michelle Wu, had to defend the monument to her own colleagues. “I went to the U.S. Conference of Mayors, I think the next week, and I told everyone off,” she said in a recent interview. “I said it was our monument. We are proud of it. We love it.”
Making Public Art Means Accepting That ‘You Can’t Please Everyone’
The Embrace statue by artist Hank Willis Thomas is seen in Boston surrounded by onlookers.
Photo by George Amman/Courtesy of Hank Willis Thomas
Other artists who’ve experienced their own public art controversies are sympathetic to Thomas.
“Criticizing specific angles of the sculpture out of its context is like judging an entire painting based solely on specific details,” artist Lava Thomas, who is not related to Hank, told ARTnews. “It’s a limited perspective.
In 2019, Lava Thomas learned that San Francisco had scrapped her winning proposal for a Maya Angelou monument because an elected official did not like the nonfigurative elements of her design, which included a nine-foot-tall bronze book with Angelou’s portrait on one side and her words on the other. It would take the artist another year of fighting through bureaucracy and organizing support until public officials reinstated her version, though it has yet to be completed.
When asked how to prepare for the public art process, she recommended that artists “develop a tough skin and accept that you can’t please everyone.”
Hank Willis Thomas seems to have developed that thick skin. He has been attending an classes at Harvard Business School in a classroom not far from where his 2015 artwork “Ernest and Ruth” once sat on the campus quad (That edition of the work has since been moved to Duke Ellington School of the Arts in Washington, D.C.). And, while he commutes between Boston and his homebase of New York, he is already planning a series of other public artworks — at least six in the near future — in cities like Seattle, Chicago, Miami, Austin, and San Antonio
It would stand to reason, then, that traveling to the Super Bowl and seeing Opportunity (reflection) surrounded by the 60,000 sports fans walking toward the game must be something of a relief for Thomas. The sculpture is based on his previous work, Opportunity, which belongs to a private collection and has a chameleon-like finish that changes color as the viewer passes it. Like many of his public artworks, the new monument will be placed outside, temporarily placed on the lawn outside the State Farm Stadium. it will then be on view for one year in front of the Arizona State University Art Museum.
“Hank’s powerful sculpture showcased during Super Bowl week beautifully represents the passion, strength, and hope at the heart of our game,” Peter O’Reilly, a spokesman for the NFL, said in a statement. “We hope the sculpture inspires the thousands of individuals who experience it throughout the week and well beyond.”
Thomas remains close to the spotlight, but this weekend he will not be the subject of scrutiny; for the moment. He can leave that burden to the coaches and players on the field.
“I just feel honored to be a part of all of it,” Thomas said.
Opening today at Tate Modern: The World Goes Pop, an exhibition presenting less known – or, in many cases, virtually unknown – artworks linked to the Pop Art movement. While formally inspired by the pop aesthetics, the artists exhibited (most of them Eastern European, Asian, Latin American and/or Mid-Eastern) used the easily recognisable visual language in a more critical context. See our photos on Flickr.
SOURCE: Happy Famous Artists » Blog - Read entire story here.
It always gives me a kick of inspiration to see that a superb art piece way out of my league began as a rough sketch that's closer to my level. Emokih's realistic hand drawn portraits are not doodly at all, but I can’t resist sharing the WIP photos she posts. It's so intriguing to see a portion of meticulously perfected detail surrounded by the very basics of a sketch. One little corner that she labored intensively on, while the rest is left in its bare bones. I can't help finding it more interesting than the completed pieces sometimes.
Nearing the fourth anniversary of Mike Kelley’s death, REDCAT presented a theatrical screening of six of his video works, curated by Steve Anker and Bérénice Reynaud as part of the Jack H. Skirball Series. The selection of works in Mike Kelley: Single Channel Videos included a one-act melodrama based on a black-and-white yearbook photograph, a hammy and melancholic Superman reciting Sylvia Plath, an invocation of power through juvenile imagination, and collaborations with Paul McCarthy and BDSM dyad Sheree Rose and Bob Flanagan.
A little over a year ago, MOCA curator Bennett Simpson arranged the Los Angeles iteration of Kelley’s posthumous retrospective, Mike Kelley, at the Geffen Contemporary. First organized by the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and curated by Ann Goldstein, the exhibition included a number of Kelley’s major installations. There, his video works were part and parcel of a larger whole, submerged into hilarious, exploded altars to the American ritual. In its entirety, the exhibition was loud, stimulating, and messy—and rightly so. Like Frankenstein’s monster, Mike Kelley was a chaotic assemblage whose sensitive eloquence gained psychic strength from the dissolution of the singular, rather than a distillation toward the sublime. There is no way to neatly separate and isolate light and sound within the box of a building that is the Geffen, and there is no reason to pursue that kind of purity with Kelley’s artworks, which are so much about the uncanny—how near-familiar images and objects can push their fingers into our psyche, beyond the clean boundaries of conscious control.
Nonetheless, at REDCAT’s presentation on December 14, 2015, curator Bérénice Reynaud framed the screening as arising out of Kelley’s MOCA retrospective, her idea being that the video works necessitated a theatrical screening so that they could be experienced in a facility specifically built for viewing films. As promised, REDCAT provided a space that enhanced the innate qualities of the medium, which in effect changed the experience of the six presented video works in varying ways. In the organized darkness of the theater, I could see the moving image projected in front of me, but I couldn’t see my hands. The sweet boozy scent of my neighbors became all the more palpable. The theatrical seating and its positioning of bodies created a sort of nonconfrontational, gentle sense of community—one unified by a common focus and consolidated by sharing a point of reception and reaction in space and time.
In this way, I enjoyed the strange intimacy of knowing the range of laughter that Kelley’s 100 Reasons (1991) elicited from my tipsy, unseen companions. My happy, drunken neighbors were brought to a new height of hilarity each time Kelley’s voice read aloud another one of the hundred names for a spanking paddle, while Mistress Rose swung her paddle, slapping Bob Flanagan’s ass and swelling his flesh into a plum hue. By the time Kelley read “board of education,” I was tearing from laughter, too.
The histrionic dialogue and melodramatic framing of Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #1 (Domestic Scene) (2000) brought out a similar set of communal responses. Laughter bubbled up throughout the exaggerated overtures of the simplified, dramatized dynamics of two figures whose relationship is marred by oppositional forces—desire and guilt, empathy and torture, acceptance and repression, among others—in the nearly thirty-minute act. Laughter stopped in a caesura of seriousness when the two actors looked toward death—an open oven with a tiny dancing ghost of Sylvia Plath inside—until the dialogue broke through the veil of austerity with a sharp return and reminder of the overplayed power dynamic of sexual dominance and submission. After a descent into a romanticized narrative of suicide, the submissive character is reminded that even though he may be Sylvia Plath’s in death, his ass is still his partner’s in life; at that moment, laughter burst out in the theater.
Likewise, in Bridge Visitor (Legend–Trip) (2004), the juvenile incantations of power in projections of the satanic touched upon childlike ideations of the occult. The resurgence of faith in the unknown exploded when the audience realized the orb of bubbling liquid in the video was a skillfully shot point-of-view take of the speaking figure pissing into a toilet, prompting the theater to burst out laughing once again.
With the freedom to move at one’s own pace, walking through an exhibition is a much more isolated experience than sitting in a theater. Though the body’s individual relationship to the chaos and scale of objects was heightened in other presentations of Mike Kelley’s work, REDCAT’s theatrical screening of his video work opened up another kind of productive confusion in being a part of a collective audience, and in unraveling reactions in real time.
We are enslaved to systems that don't have our best interests at heart, in order to fulfill a basic human need: communication. We need to seriously consider creating alternatives to the internet, which would allow our communities to have ownership over how we talk and share information.
What would a pattern look like if it was inspired by the hustle and bustle of city life? It might look something like Isorinths, a series of isometric patterns designed by artist Damola Rufai.
Like Piet Mondrian’s “Broadway Boogie Woogie,” which brings together the city grid of Manhattan with the music he loved to dance to, Rufai captures the maze-like nature of Lagos, Nigeria with the vibrant and colorful spirit of the city in these intricate patterns.
Rufai also drew upon personal experiences to design the series, using stylistic influences from African wax print patterns, pastel colors of South Beach, and even a popular puzzle game called Monument Valley!
How have the fields of medicine and art intersected over the past few centuries? We visited the Guggenheim’s neighboring institution, the New York Academy of Medicine, and looked for answers in their extensive collection of rare books.
SOURCE: Guggenheim Blogs - Read entire story here.
Congratulations to our January Artist of the Month, Susan Brandsema! Susan was a finalist in The Artist’s Magazine‘s Annual Art Competition! Her painting Almost Home is below. Read more about how the artist how nature, photography and family all inspire her equally!
My artistic journey began when I was four-years-old, in a home filled with framed illustrations by my grandfather, Joseph Franke. One morning, upon discovering one of my mom’s paintings, I decided to “help paint” even though I barely reached the easel. With the touch of my fingers in the fresh piles of oil paint, I “painted”, while imagining myself as an artist, marking the beginning of a lifetime passion to create.
Flashes of lightning and the sound of distant thunder, combined with torrential rain pummeling the windshield, inspired Almost Home. The electric sky was luminous and created the misty reflections on the bridge, the roadway and the windshield, which were so interesting to paint.
Most of my work begins with late afternoon plein air sketches and color studies. Nature provides an ever-changing source of inspiration, with pristine untouched woods, snowy mountains, city streets or quiet streams. When working in my studio, I keep a window open and I love to listen to instrumental music. I also enjoy the company, conversation and creativity of friends and family who occasionally paint with me.
My plein air and studio palettes are arranged the same way, starting with titanium white, then adding both cool and warm yellows (cadmium lemon and cadmium yellow deep), reds (alizarin crimson and cadmium red), greens (viridian and sap green) and blues (cobalt blue dark and ultramarine).
A small plein air painting or study can be finished in just one day. Sometimes, if the light and weather conditions are similar, I will continue a plein air painting for several days at the same location. According to the size and detail of the painting, I will then take it into my studio and continue to work, letting each layer dry before adding to the next.
The difficulty faced with Almost Home was that it was primarily painted from my photograph. After painting the bridge perspective, the roadway and the vehicles, the challenge was painting the raindrops on the windshield. This was accomplished by spraying droplets of water onto a pane of glass and painting the drops from this observation, into the dry painting.
My future plans are to continue painting and drawing every day—in the studio and plein air—and to seek the inspiration provided by nature that brings energizing and endless possibilities for a new canvas.
Painting in nature inspires me to observe the amazing minute-by-minute changes in light, weather conditions, seasons and temperature. My goal with each painting is to choose a focal point, then use color and paint strokes that convey the light, charm and emotions unique to just one moment in time.
I am thankful that my husband, family and friends are supportive of my art career. Many of my plein air studies and paintings are painted at the 80-acre home and property of one of my relatives, and I am grateful that they welcome me to spend days at a time painting there.
As we close out 2015 and set out to make 2016 another amazing year, I wanted to quickly thank our community of friends, fans, readers and artists that make Doodlers Anonymous such a thriving community of inspiration, creativity and art.
Now on to the good stuff. This past year we highlighted hundreds of artists, projects and artworks (you can revisit the complete archive here). As a short recap, I'm featuring a few of the more popular and memorable ones below (click their titles to read further about each).
Ellie Harrison may have a tough time in Glasgow over the next year, where she'll stay as part of an art project that has offended some Glaswegians. But she's standing by her project, called The Glasgow Effect, as is the public body that funded it.
Harrison got a £15,000 (about $22,000) grant from Creative Scotland, a public agency that supports art and filmmaking ventures with funds from the government and the national lottery. The organization gave out about £31 million (around $45,500,000) in 2015 to visual and performing arts in 2014–15.
The project is titled for an expression that refers to low life expectancy and high rates of disease among Glaswegians compared to the rest of Europe, a phenomenon that epidemiologists have been unable to explain.
Many Brits have taken to the project's Facebook page to criticize it. One poll, from January 4, found nearly 7,000 voters calling it “pretentious shite and a waste of money." (Nearly 700 voted for the response “How the fuck do I buy tickets to watch someone stay in Glasgow for a year?")
“You have given me so much material to digest," the artist said in a Facebook post to her not-so-loving public, "that it will take the whole year to do so. I hope to follow-up by meeting many of you face-to-face, when all the fuss has died down."
Creative Scotland has put out a statement defending Harrison, calling her "a recognised artist with an MA with Distinction from the Glasgow School of Art."
"Ellie's project is based on the premise that if society wishes to achieve global change, then individuals have to be more active within their communities at a local level," it goes on.
"In restricting herself to staying within the city boundaries she is keen to explore what impact this will have her on her life and on her work as an artist with national and international commitments."
Harrison's intent is partly to cultivate her connections to local arts and community organizations and to reduce her carbon footprint. But the project is about more than that, the artist pointed out in the post, saying that it also intends to “highlight the absurd mechanisms at play within Higher Education," adding that that was actually the "initial impetus for the project.
Harrison isn't actually cashing the check, she points out. The funds will go to Duncan of Jordanstone Art College in Dundee, where she is a lecturer, to cover the costs of hiring a replacement while she is on leave.
"I have been careful to stipulate that the money be used solely to cover my teaching responsibilities and that a post be advertised externally, in order to: a) create a job opportunity for a talented artist in Scotland b) provide the best possible experience for my students in my absence," she said.
“The fact that this University," she said, "like most others in the UK, now requires its Lecturing staff to be fundraisers and is willing to pay them to be absent from teaching as a result, should be the focus of this debate."
She has published the full text of the application that helped her obtain the grant on the project's Tumblr page.
She ended her Facebook statement on something of a cheeky note, pointing out that even the harsh criticisms of the project have helped her to earn the public funds.
“At least now, thanks to you all, I have ticked Creative Scotland's ‘Public Engagement' box and fulfilled the University's 'Impact' agenda and so can get on with the real work."
Another disappointing season for the Philadelphia Eagles has left ;the franchise down a coach ;and its fan base incensed, willing and wanting to hurl the worst possible insults at the organization and its players. ;
For one fan, that insult came in its laziest form: emasculation. The fan wrote on Facebook ;that the Eagles “played like they were wearing tutus!!!” -- suggesting that those who don tutus are weak and ineffectual, fundamentally lesser than those who, say, suit up in pads and helmets every week.
Of course, that claim is entirely incorrect. Year after year, these dancers work endless hours, train until they can barely stand, in order to perfect the pas de bourrées and sautés requisite for a given performance.
Seriously, has this man not seen "Black Swan"?
Last week, the Pennsylvania Ballet decided to say as much when ;it responded to the Eagles fan, shutting down the derisive remark so entirely that the post has subsequently garnered over ;30,000 Facebook likes. ;
Here is the ballet's response in its entirety: ;
With all due respect to the Eagles, let's take a minute to look at what our tutu wearing women have done this month:
By tomorrow afternoon, the ballerinas that wear tutus at Pennsylvania Ballet will have performed The Nutcracker 27 times in 21 days. Some of those women have performed the Snow scene and the Waltz of the Flowers without an understudy or second cast. No 'second string' to come in and spell them when they needed a break. When they have been sick they have come to the theater, put on make up and costume, smiled and performed. When they have felt an injury in the middle of a show there have been no injury timeouts. They have kept smiling, finished their job, bowed, left the stage, and then dealt with what hurts. Some of these tutu wearers have been tossed into a new position with only a moments notice. That's like a cornerback being told at halftime that they're going to play wide receiver for the second half, but they need to make sure that no one can tell they've never played wide receiver before. They have done all of this with such artistry and grace that audience after audience has clapped and cheered (no Boo Birds at the Academy) and the Philadelphia Inquirer has said this production looks "better than ever."
The Pennsylvania Ballet has once again proved that there is no room for sexism at the barre or on the gridiron. Looks like the Eagles lost this one by way of their fan, too. ;
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SOURCE: Arts News on The Huffington Post - Read entire story here.
