Badass Feminist Robot Puts Pie Charts On Actual Pies

What, you ask, is better than a feminist robot? A feminist robot with a sweet tooth, obviously.

As part of Los Angeles County Museum of Art's seco...

Read more: Rube Goldberg, Art Meets Science, Annina Rüst, Pie Charts on Pie, Art Meets Tech, Feminist Artists, Annina Rüst Artist, Women in Tech, Female Artists, Lacma Art + Technology, Arts News

SOURCE: Art Meets Science on Huffington Post - Read entire story here.

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Independent Spaces Built the Scene

Colectivo Pornomiseria (Víctor Albarracín, Kevin Mancera, Edwin Sanchez, Francisco Toquica, and Cindy Triana), Limpieza Social (Un espectáculo de rehabilitación), 2006Ericka Florez discovers that Cali, Colombia, has emerged from the strife of the 1980s and ’90s with renewed artistic energy, thanks in part to enterprises like independent space lugar a dudas and collective Helena Producciones.


SOURCE: Guggenheim Blogs - Read entire story here.

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Big Read: A feast of art, food and architecture in Rodez – Irish Independent


Irish Independent

Big Read: A feast of art, food and architecture in Rodez
Irish Independent
What a wonderful Pythonesque start to my visit, I was looking forward to a feast of art, architecture and gastronomy, and I was not disappointed. Dinner that evening was in The Kiosque, a buzzing restaurant beside the Soulages Museum. We ate a very ...

and more »

SOURCE: Architecture - Google News - Read entire story here.

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Do This To Achieve Realistic Eyes in Your Portrait Paintings

Have you ever paid attention to how body language expresses an unspoken language? It’s fascinating how even minor movements can send a message of tension, flirtation, or annoyance. While some of this comes from subtle hand gestures or posture, much of it comes from the “windows to the soul”–the eyes. My sons learned this early on. As toddlers, they would make eye contact with me, testing the waters on occasion when they’d start getting rowdy in public. A simple raise of my brow reminded them that there was always a time-out corner nearby.

Portrait artist Luana Luconi Winner, featured in three new painting DVDs, knows the importance of capturing the uniqueness of one’s eyes, and how to do so with realism. “If all painters took a sculpting class, their progress in acquiring the three-dimensional knowledge of the head would be hastened,” she says. “When you divide the face into simple geometric forms, the many undulating surfaces and total topography become easier to handle, to recognize, to paint.” Learn more in this excerpt from Painting Classic Portraits: Great Faces Step by Step, and click here to post this how-to on Pinterest.

Happy painting,
Cherie

How to paint portraits

“The eyes are the single most important feature in a portrait,” says Winner. “Take time to resolve the eyes’ true character, and the subject of the portrait will be unquestionably recognized by family, friends, and colleagues.” Left to right: Ken Clark (detail; oil, 40×30); Haley Stoltz (detail; oil, 36×30); Dr. Marvin Soroos (detail; oil, 40×30) by Luana Luconi Winner

Mindset of a Sculptor by Luana Luconi Winner

Try this exercise in thinking like a sculptor. Consider your work in terms of planes. Imagine starting with a large mass and carving away everything that doesn’t relate to the shape of the head. Then carve the largest planes into this head-shape, indicating where the form sits in the shadow. The cavities of the eye sockets, nostrils, ears, and corners of the mouth should be deep enough to maintain the shadow and yet describe the most general of shapes. Next, chip away the smaller planes, indicating more subtle changes of planar direction. These planes create movements of form in the mid-values. The final touches help activate highlights. 

When you paint like a sculptor, you go from the general to the specific. You apply the paint as broadly as if you were a sculptor creating the shapes. First you mass in the shadows, allowing them to connect on the dark side of the form. Next you develop the mid-values, taking care with the direction and placement of your strokes as you turn them in and out of the form. Then you refine the details with touches that reinforce the direction of light and, finally, you drop in the highlights. 

Look Into the Eyes
In my book 
Painting Classic Portraits: Great Faces Step by Step, I explain how to apply sculptural principles to the painting of each facial feature, but you can get the general idea from this painting demonstration of an eye:

Drawing eyes

1. Establish the blueprint: With a relatively dry brush, draw a trapezoid into which you can build the eye socket. Use burnt sienna and ivory black to make a color similar to burnt umber. The color at this dry-sketch stage establishes the footprint where you’ll build the flat planes. Inside the socket, paint a circle for the eyeball. In the center of this circle, draw two concentric circles that look like the bull’s-eye of a target. 

How to draw eyes

2. Add darks: Place a small arrow as a reminder of the direction of light (you can paint over the arrow later). Create a thin, dark mixture of burnt sienna and ivory black to drybrush inside the eye socket and on the shadow side of the eyeball. 

Drawing faces

3. Place mid-values: Fill the pupil with ivory black. Place a thin mixture of cobalt blue with a touch of ivory black in the iris, the colored part of the eye indicated by the middle circle. To simplify laying in the upper and lower lids, continue to use geometric shapes. Mix yellow ochre and alizarin crimson into the dark mixture described in step 2 and add a little white. Place a triangle of this mid-value skin-tone mixture on the shadow side of the eye on the upper and lower lids. Lighten the mixture with white and place two triangles on the upper and lower lids on the light side. 

Portrait painting

4. Blend skin and add eyebrows: Add yellow ochre, alizarin crimson, a touch of ivory black, and white to the mid-value mixture on the palette to create a realistic skin tone for the more lighted areas. Then add new planes to areas around the eye, including the forehead, cheekbone, and eye socket.

Add the eyebrow with ivory black, burnt sienna, and yellow ochre. Use brisk strokes up and outward to “grow” the eyebrows.

Blend and soften areas into one another so that the transitions between the shadow, mid-value, and light areas connect. Add warmth to the inner and outer corners of the eye with alizarin crimson and cadmium red at the tear duct (where the eyelids meet on the left).

Soften the depth of the darkest shadows by lightly feathering your brush over those areas with mid-value skin color. Make certain there’s a change in value to represent the shadow that the thickness of the eyelid casts on the eyeball.

Drawing eyes

5. Add highlights and appearance of moisture: Add highlights to the brow bone, the upper lid, the lower lid, and the cheekbone to further indicate the direction from which the light falls on the face. The only place in the demonstration where you may use pure white is a catchlight placed at the two o’clock position between the iris and the pupil. This catchlight is actually a reflection on the cornea, the clear coating over the iris and pupil. In this demonstration, the light hits the cornea (indicated by the catchlight), travels through the cornea in a straight path, and then lands at the seven o’clock position of the “eye circle.” The light then floods the surface of the iris in that area and lightens local color.

The indication of moisture in the eye will bring it to life, so add a touch of white to represent moisture on the lower lid where it meets the iris. In this demonstration, the direction of the light also creates a reduced-value highlight on the tear duct.

Soften the transitions, feather out edges and assess your progress. Reduce the depth of shadow in the socket to make this eye look less tired. Adjust highlights in small increments, blending along the brow bone and rounding out this bone from the shadow depths. Do the same for the zygomatic bone (the high cheekbone under the eye) blending outward and upward.

Easy on the Eyes

Learn the construction of the eye and its depth of placement in the eye socket, and you’ll achieve lively, moist-looking eyes with minimal trouble. Keep in mind that each step is simplified when you think in terms of planes and geometric shapes. ~L.L.W.

Preview Winner’s newest painting DVDs:
• How to Paint Pastel Portraits the Easy Way
• How to Paint Oil Portraits the Easy Way
• How to Paint Watercolor Portraits the Easy Way 
    

SOURCE: Artist's Network - Read entire story here.

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Sean O’Hagan: “If you don’t annoy some people some of the time, you’re not doing your job properly!”

In the first of a new series of interviews with members of the international photography community - writers, curators, collectors, gallerists, picture editors and so on - Federica Chiocchetti of the forthcoming Photocaptionist speaks to The Guardian’s photography critic of 10 years Sean O’Hagan. They discuss conceptions of ‘good’ writing on photography, how he discovers new talent, and which British photographers he feels have been underemphasised by UK photographic institutions.


Federica Chiocchetti: Could you tell us a little bit about your background prior to your post as photography critic at The Guardian?

Sean O’Hagan: I studied English at university and worked as a music writer for several years. Then, I worked for The Guardian as a freelance writer and as a features writer for The Observer on art and culture. I still really love doing interviews. For me, it’s the best way to shed light on someone’s way of thinking creatively.

Photography was always there in the background as a fascination of mine and several interviews I did for The Observer Review section with the likes of Robert Frank, William Eggleston, Stephen Shore, and Anders Petersen prompted me to start writing about it more. That was about 10 years ago, when there seemed to be an absence of writing on photography in the ‘serious’ papers. It was usually left to the art critic or whoever else was available to review a big exhibition or book. It was not taken seriously as an art form – still isn’t, but to a lesser degree – compared to, say, theatre or film or dance. So, I was very much on a mission to help put that right. It just grew from there and I was offered a regular online forum by The Guardian a few years ago, which became On Photography.

FC: What is your conception of ‘good’ writing on photography? Is there anyone in particular that has inspired you? And what advice would you give to an emerging writer on photography?

SH: Writing that is clear and clear-headed even if it is tackling difficult or elusive or obtuse subject matter. I have a certain responsibility because I work for a newspaper with a huge readership. Many of my readers are regulars but many more may come to a column or a feature out of curiosity and with only a passing interest in the subject. I’d like them to come back. I’m not writing for an art magazine where one can assume that the reader has a certain familiarity with the subject or with the history of conceptualism or whatever. I can’t use dense, theoretical language to deconstruct works by Jeff Wall or Gursky, nor would I want to.

My formative inspirations were non-fiction writers like Joan Didion, in particular her first two collections of essays, The White Album and Slouching Towards Bethlehem. I like Truman Capote’s essays as well, much more than his fiction. And Gay Talese’s classic collection, Frank Sinatra Has A Cold, which has just been published as a Penguin Classics. On the more contemporary front, I’d recommend John Jeremiah Sullivan’s collection, Pulphead: Notes from the Other Side of America, which is a very personal take on music, politics and culture. As far as photography writing goes, it always amazes me how many great photographers are also great writers - Diane Arbus, Robert Adams, Danny Lyon. And Eggleston’s short illuminating afterword from The Democratic Forest still resounds. We ALL need to be more at war with the obvious right now!

FC: How do you discover new talent?

SH: Increasingly, it discovers me. Strange, but true. It’s the power of the internet again. People know where to find you!

I try to stay alert to what people I trust are enthusing about. I read photography mags, blogs, websites – at least the more interesting ones. There is an awful lot of new work out there and I have to be ultra-selective just because of space and the requirements of the job so I see all these other outlets as a kind of filter. And, of course, people send me stuff - books, pdfs, ongoing projects. It’s kind of relentless and so is the demand for an instant response. I worry about that a bit as I tend towards the reflective. I think we should all slow down... and breath. Let things settle. The quick response is journalistic, of course, but it is not necessarily critical. And opinions are not enough. That’s where we live right now, though. I wish there was a slow journalism movement. I really do.

FC: Do you read/appreciate photography theory?

SH: It depends. Good writing is good writing, whatever. But, when I read bad theoretical writing – dense theoretical jargonese – the old punk in me agrees with Nan Goldin, who said recently: “Fucking postmodern and gender theory. I mean, who gives a shit? People made all that crap up to get jobs in universities.” I think it kills the work for people who are not from that academic background. That kind of writing is exclusive by its nature. It often makes things less clear.

That said, I am familiar with theoretical writing. I did an English degree at a time when post-structuralism and semiotics were like time bombs exploding in the academy. I still return to Barthes and Foucault from time to time. I love Barthes when he is at his most personal and Camera Lucida is a very personal meditation on photography and memory and mourning.

I worry about the teaching of photography in colleges and the emphasis on theory. You see degree shows and MA shows where students present half-digested theory and really dull photographs. I think the ascendency of the curator is a cause for concern as well. They sometimes seem more important than the artists, which is something Brian Eno predicted when I saw him gave a lecture at the beginning of the nineties. I like this essay by Paul Graham, which touches on some concerns of mine. I don’t think it helps to exclude people – or images – from the ongoing debate about the meaning of photography. Theory can be a way of entering and decoding a work but, too often, it seems to me like an end in itself. It’s still valid to walk out into the world with a camera and simply take photographs, though there is, of course, nothing simple about doing that well. I often detect a kind of implicit disdain for that approach from curators and academics.

FC: What is the harshest criticism that you received in your career as a photography critic for The Guardian?


SH: Where to begin? You have to become thick-skinned pretty quickly if you venture online. There was a post recently suggesting that a ‘proper’ art critic should have reviewed Lorna Simpson’s show at BALTIC - “she deserves to be reviewed in a context and by a reviewer commensurate with her status!” - which I took personally for about five minutes until I realised the next post had demolished the inherent snobbery of that remark pretty succinctly. I received a fair amount of flak as well as support for my views on The Deutsche Börse Photography Prize a few years ago, when I suggested it was biased towards art photography at the expense of other genres, but that comes with the turf. I guess if you don’t annoy some of the people some of the time, you’re not doing your job properly.

FC: Which British photographers do you feel have been underemphasised by UK photographic institutions?


SH: Oh dear, where to begin? Chris Killip had a major retrospective in Essen, not that long ago, but has not had one here. That is mystifying to me. In fact that whole generation of great British documentarists get short shrift from British institutions. I can only put that down to curatorial bias. If not, what else explains it? I think people in the photography community were relieved when Tony Ray-Jones was finally given a show last year (at Media Space.) Likewise Tom Wood at The Photographers’ Gallery. I know Paul Graham had a big show at The Whitechapel a few years back, but why not at the Tate or the Hayward? It just seems odd at this stage of the game.

FC: What trends do you find interesting at present?

SH: Found photography continues to fascinate people in and out of the photography community – Thomas Sauvin’s Beijing Silvermine project looks like the last word but probably isn’t. I get sent a lot of diaristic work, which is probably the biggest trend. Says a lot about where we live. A lot of it seems solipsistic and has none of the heft of, say, Nan Goldin’s work.

I’ll be glad to see the back of (too) big prints, which everyone seemed to be doing for a moment there, whether the work required it or not. And, please, no more Google Street View projects! I think photographers do tend to get apocalyptic about the post-digital deluge – Instagram etc. – and the sheer numbers can be scary, but most people don’t even see that stuff. For me it’s just another moment in the continuum. I read somewhere that, in the sixties, over half of all households in America had a Polaroid or Instamatic camera, but I don’t think Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand were running around in a panic thinking, “It’s all over for us – everyone’s taking photographs!”

What it does to looking or processing images is another thing, though. We’re all living though a huge social experiment that it is hard to gauge the real meaning of. I’m a bit more concerned with what texting, tweeting and the rest is doing to literacy. Kids’ brains are definitely being rewired. Where will it lead? Who knows?

FC: Do you think that prizes and awards are a good thing?

SH: Yes and no. It’s good to be acknowledged, but there are too many prizes now. And they can tend to be a lottery of sorts. I looked at this year’s Deutsche Börse shortlist and thought, What?! Where’s Viviane Sassen, for example? But, that’s the nature of prizes: it’s four people’s opinions usually – and two of them are curators. I tend to take them with a pinch of salt - unless I’m up for one!

FC: Could you tell us a photobook and an exhibition from the past that blew your mind?

SH: The past is a big country. How about the very recent past? The Robert Adams retrospective at Jeu de Paume in Paris recently was just so impressive - a life in a body of work. I spent ages in there. He’s a living master. At the other extreme, someone who is relatively new. I walked into Tereza Zelenkova’s small show, The Absence of Myth, at Legion TV, a small gallery in Hackney last year and was blown away by the work and the way it was laid out - texts and multiple black and white prints in large frames. She’s a young photographer, but there is something very thoughtful as well as day dreamily melancholic about her approach to the gothic and uncanny. She’s fascinated by Georges Bataille and manages to get something of his aura into the words and pictures. She has her own way of seeing things. That’s what I’ m looking out for.

In terms of historical shows, Eggleston’s Ancient and Modern at The Barbican in 1992 was a game-changer for me. It presented a new way of seeing: the ordinary made luminous, the world as we know it, but slightly skewed.

And photo books...Off the top of my head: Love on the Left Bank by Ed van der Elsken was perhaps the first photobook that made me see the potential of photography to create a staged, semi-fictional, but somehow utterly real, visual narrative. It still amazes me that it was first published in 1957. So far ahead of the game. I also remember coming across Ray’s A Laugh by Richard Billingham in a bookshop in the mid-nineties and being really confused and excited by it. It had a similar impact on me as a great punk or hip-hop record would once have had – that feeling that you were encountering something new and so viscerally powerful that you were not quite sure what to do with it.

I had a similar reaction to Lieko Shiga’s Rasen Kaigan. What’s going on in these pages!? Still not sure, but it’s pretty powerful. And, recently, this photobook arrived though my letterbox and it’s pretty damn exciting, too: Shanxi by Zhang Xaio, published by Little Big Man.
SOURCE: 1000 Words Photography Magazine Blog - Read entire story here.

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SCT’s – Disney on Broadway’ featuring young performers

Salem Community Theatre is staging the second annual alumni cabaret benefit, "Disney on Broadway," at 7 p.m. Aug. 15 and 16. It will feature an eight-member cast of young performers who began and grew their interest in the theatrical arts at SCT and the surrounding area.

SOURCE: Musical Theater News - Read entire story here.

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Is there a competition in the arts?

Barcelona beach barRecently I faced an important question – how about competition in the arts and among artists? Let’s try to “decompose” this question.

What is competition? Competition in business is when the same buyer has an equal choice how to spend money. In case of everyday goods and services, it means that we as consumers can choose to buy baguette from one bakery or the other, a milk made by one producer or other, to buy a wine from one winery or other.

Moving up the hierarchy of needs (from basic food to luxury items), the question is more – should I spend money on opera tickets or dinner in a fancy restaurant? Should I spend long holidays in neighbouring countries or shorter somewhere in a longer distance? Or maybe I could stay home and indulge in something special that I haven’t experienced yet. Or moving even higher – should I buy a yacht or another house?

If in the lower level of pyramid competition is among likelihood products – one bread or another, but still bread, then moving up to the top, competition is more about emotions, experience, adventure, values.

Since art is at the very top of the pyramid, actually the highest form of luxury, it means that artists compete in the field of values and emotions and not directly artist vs artist. One artist painting classical still life is not directly competing with another artist painting abstracts. Rather the classic artist competes with antiques and expensive original classic furniture. If styles and values of the two artists are similar, their brands are equally positioned and they sell in the same price group, then yes, they might be competing with each other. Or if two artists are listed in the top 500 list of best-selling artists, then they have become an investment option. In this case the content and values are not so important for the buyer. They see an art piece as an alternative to other investment possibilities.

So, there is a competition, just the question – whom are you competing with – other artists or totally different product groups?

SOURCE: Business blog for artists - Read entire story here.

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"Any photographer who says he’s not a voyeur is either…


© Miroslav Tichy


© Miroslav Tichy


© Miroslav Tichy


© Miroslav Tichy


© Miroslav Tichy


© Miroslav Tichy


© Miroslav Tichy

"Any photographer who says he’s not a voyeur is either stupid or a liar."—Helmut Newton

The artist Miroslav Tichý, who passed away in May 2011, was born in 1926 in what is now the Czech Republic. Although trained as a painter at The Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, Tichy’s life took an altogether different direction after the Communist takeover in 1948. Tichy had a problem with authority and rather than acquiesce to the new demands of the State, chose a marginal lifestyle in his hometown of Kyjov.

With handmade cameras fashioned from bits and pieces of old cardboard tubes, cigarette boxes, plexiglas and other ephemera, Tichy would wander around his hometown taking surreptitious photos of individuals, generally young women, at the local pool, markets, or walking around town. Most of his subjects weren’t (in many cases) aware that his cameras were actually real, choosing to believe instead that the unkempt eccentric standing in front of them was harmless. He allowed himself three rolls of film a day. These recorded images would then be brought to his home where he processed, developed and printed them for himself.

Through the strange alchemy of his vision and the eroticized intensity of his photographs, Tichy’s work garnered attention late in life. He was internationally “discovered” in 2004 during the Seville Biennial. Since then he has gone on to have solo shows at such premier venues as the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris and his first American show at the International Center of Photography. Today, his work is widely collected, exhibited and for sale by dealers like myself.

Although his photography and artistry break all the rules in terms of focusing, exposure, poor printing, and careless handling, none of this mattered to Tichy who once told an interviewer, “A mistake. That’s what makes the poetry.” —Lane Nevares

SOURCE: Art Photo Collector - Read entire story here.

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Variation By Subject

Emma Twice, 2009, oil on canvas, 48"x48" by Daniel Maidman.
Emma Twice, 2009, oil on canvas, 48 x 48.
All works by Daniel Maidman.

Over my past posts, we've been discussing shocks to the system as a way of avoiding growing complacent and thoughtless in your art. I shared two of my own tricks—varying my mark-making, and varying my media. But there is another, broader trick I use: varying my subject.

I'm not going to lie to you. My favorite thing in the world is painting nudes. But just because I like doing it doesn't mean it's good for me to do it all the time. Over the past couple of years, I've been working on expanding my oil painting subject matter. Each topic I tackle has forced me to see freshly—to study my subject with new eyes, to evaluate my media with new goals, to refine my vision to make something worthwhile from my new subject.

I have been working on a series of paintings of heavy industrial parts. I decided to restrict my palette to white, blue, gray, and black paint, and to work silver leaf into my compositions.

I've also been working with photographs of pond water taken through a microscope to make paintings of the microscopic life that surrounds us. I took a crack at cityscapes, and I've also been messing around with paintings of animals and flowers.

Industrial Object #1, 2011, silver leaf and oil on canvas, 36 x 36. Microbiota #1, 2011, oil on canvas, 24 x 30. Jade Street, 2011, oil on canvas, 30 x 24.
Industrial Object #1, 2011,
silver leaf and oil on canvas,
36 x 36.
Microbiota #1,
2011, oil on canvas,
24 x 30.
Jade Street,
2011, oil on canvas,
30 x 24.

I learned two things from these explorations:

1. I was worried
that if I painted different subjects, my oil paintings wouldn't look like
"me"—like my work. But I think that no matter where I look, my own
personality influences how I see. No matter how diverse the subjects,
when I look at my paintings, they look like my paintings. That's pleasing to know, isn't it?

2. Once again, shocking my system brought new insights and a fresh approach to my "ordinary" work—figurative nudes.

Blue Leah #2, 2011, oil on canvas, 24 x 36.
Blue Leah #2, 2011, oil on canvas, 24 x 36.

Life is long and the world is full of interesting things. Trying something new is a risk—it could always turn out to be a waste of time—but I think it's better to see it as an investment. You can bank on what you already know you can do, or you can sink your artistic "savings" of talent and skill into new ventures. The minute you "get good," I encourage you to start considering something you're not good at yet, and work on that.

--Daniel


SOURCE: Artist Daily - Read entire story here.

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