Josse Ford :: Art Journeys and Conversation ::

LA Weekly Art show opening, January 10, 2008

Last weekend I went to the LA weekly art show "Some Paintings" at Bergamot Station in Santa Monica. Featuring the work of over 70 living Los Angeles painters, curated by LA Weekly arts writer, Doug Harvey the exhibition was a huge success. Parking was a crazy experience for me. I'm used to zipping around Manhattan on the subway, not sitting in a long snaking traffic queue.

I didn't see a huge amount of art that resonated for me but there were some quite interesting landscapes by David Lloyd in the William Turner Gallery. The smooth lusciousness of the finish and the bright colors were gorgeous.

The event was packed with artists, their families and collectors. It was quite a feat in patience to see all the different exhibits.

Other pieces of art that i liked:

You can see the rest of the photos from the show here, in my photo albums.

As I left a performance piece was going on outside. The artists were jumping up and down on a car covered with a pile of rubbish, yelling and beating it with sticks. Perhaps a fitting tribute to the state of modern art today, just kidding :-)

Technorati Tags: art, art collectors

Trip to Berlin

I had a fabulous trip to Berlin earlier this year. I loved the city. It seemed everywhere you looked there was a photo opportunity just waiting to be taken. My favorite shopping area KaDaWe, the biggest department store in western Europe. It was filled with beautiful objects d'art. Lots of great museums and galleries.

Anyway you can check out the new photos in my albums or over all my Flickr account, here.

Technorati Tags: art

$50,000 in grants for artists

A new charity, United States Artists, will give $50,000 grants to 50 artists. - New York Times:
New Charity to Start Plan for $50,000 Artists’ Grants

A new charity, United States Artists, will announce today an ambitious plan to provide support to working artists, starting with a grant program that will be one of the most generous in existence.

Fifty artists working in a wide variety of disciplines and at various career stages will receive $50,000 each, no strings attached. The first recipients will be announced on Dec. 4.

However, to be eligible for a grant you will need to be nominated.

"Each year, nominations are made by an anonymous group of arts leaders, critics, scholars, and artists chosen by USA. Nominators do not know one another. There identities shall remain secret.

Nominators are asked to submit names of artists they believe show an extraordinary commitment to their craft. Artists at any stage of career development may be nominated. To be considered for fellowships, artists must be 21 years of age or older and U.S. citizens or legal residents in any U.S. state. Artists must have the following:

• Expert artistic skills
• Received artistic education or training (formal or informal)
• Attempted to derive income from those skills
• Been actively engaged in creating artwork and presenting it to the public."

For further information visit United States Artists.

Technorati Tags: art opportunities, artist grants, artists, emerging artists

New uses for the hipster pda

Mao gets things done,
originally uploaded by davekellam.

Anyone been using a hipster PDA to gather their creative ideas? Thought this was very cute!!

Technorati Tags: art, artists, hipster

Math Professor Wins a Coveted Religion Award - New York Times

Math Professor Wins a Coveted Religion Award - New York Times:

Continuing a recent trend in which the world's richest religion prize has gone to scientists, John D. Barrow, a British cosmologist whose work has explored the relationship between life and the laws of physics, was named the winner yesterday of the 2006 Templeton Prize for progress or research in spiritual matters.

Dr. Barrow will receive the $1.4 million prize during a ceremony at Buckingham Palace on May 3. The prize was created in 1972 by the philanthropist Sir John Marks Templeton, who specified that its monetary value always exceed that of the Nobel Prize. Five of the last six winners have been scientists. Asked about this, Dr. Barrow said, "Maybe they ask the most interesting questions."

"The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford Paperbacks)" (John D. Barrow, Frank J. Tipler, John A. Wheeler)

Technorati Tags: culture

A Call To All Artists

Here's a call to action from Nietzsche:

"We, the new, the nameless, the hard-to-understand, we firstlings of a yet untried future - we require for a new end also a new means, namely, a new healthiness, stronger, sharper, tougher, bolder, and merrier than any healthiness hitherto. He whose soul longs to experience the whole range of hitherto recognized values and desirabilities, and to circumnavigate all the coasts of this ideal "Mediterranean Sea" who, from the adventures of his most personal experience, wants to know how it feels to be a conqueror and discoverer of the ideal - as likewise how it is with the artist, the saint, the legislator, the sage, the scholar, the devotee, the prophet, and the godly Nonconformist of the old style: __ requires one thing above all for that purpose, great healthiness - such healthiness as one not only possesses, but also constantly acquires and must acquire, because one continually sacrifices it again, and must sacrifice it! __ And now, after having being long on the way in this fashion, we Argonauts of the Ideal, who are more courageous perhaps than prudent, and often enough shipwrecked and brought to grief, nevertheless, as said above, healthier than people would like to admit, dangerously healthy, always healthy again, __ it would seem, as if in recompense for it all, that we still have an undiscovered country before us, the boundaries of which no one has yet seen, a beyond to all countries and corners of the ideal known hitherto, a world so over-rich in the beautiful, the strange, the questionable, the frightful, and the divine, that our curiosity as well as our thirst for the possession thereof, have got out of hand __ alas! that nothing will any longer satisfy us!
- Friedrich Nietzsche, Joyful Wisdom

Technorati Tags: art, spiritual art

Andrea Zittel at the Whitney

Recently I attended a panel at the Whitney curated by Andrea Zittel. Andrea and her friends who live at Joshua Tree talked about their influences and experiences on building community in the context of art. Here's what the Whitney had to say about the event:
"Well known for her research and design of domestic and external environments, Andrea Zittel creates experimental models for contemporary life, or what she calls "systems for living." Her current project, the desert studio and home A-Z West in Joshua Tree, California, explores all aspects of the everyday, from home furniture and house guests to food and clothing, as part of her investigation into the contours of human nature and human needs. One such A-Z project, Wagon Stations, comprises mobile living stations customized by individuals invited to join Zittel's desert community; several will be on view beginning February 9 at the Whitney Museum at Altria."

I've always liked Andrea Zittel. I first saw her work at the Whitney where she had a film on her daily routine as an artist at Joshua Tree. I appreciated it because the film had a great sense of humor. And then, of course, there's the desert. As Andrea herself has to say of the desert: "After living in the desert for six years, I have come to believe that most of us are drawn here because each of us is looking for some version of personal freedom." The A-Z wagons represent small, portable structures, customized by each artist, an ode to personal freedom. Traveling through the desert in my RV, painting, I can totally relate to the need for a space of one's own, even better if we can take it with us on our art journeys.

A Wagon in It's Native Environment

A Wagon Station from the installation at the Whitney, Altria

The panel itself meandered across a lot of different territories, from activist 60s art to camping out in a large tent in the middle of the Freize Art Fair, in London. What struck me, however, was just how much fun these artists were having being artists. They seemed to live in a world so far removed from our ordinary world of "getting ahead" and commercial considerations. How refreshing! This is what it must be like to live fully in the artist archetype, not an small pokey garret, starving but noble, but in a world of childlike wonder, innocence, creating magnificent worlds of your own choosing, without regard to whether of not anyone else gets it. I can't remember the last time I felt like that - probably the last time I was out in the desert.

Further thoughts from "The Artist's Mentor":
"In one of his letters from Tahiti, Gaugin had written that he felt he had to go back beyond the horses of the Parthenon, back to the rocking-horse of his childhood. It is easy to smile at this preoccupation of modern artists with the simple and the childlike, and yet it should not be hard to understand it. For artists feel that this directness and simplicity is the one thing that cannot be learnt. Every other trick of the trade can be acquired. Every effect becomes easy to imitate after it has been shown that it can be done. Many artists feel that the museums and exhibitions are full of works of such amazing facility and skill that nothing is gained by continuing along those lines; that they are in danger of losing their souls and becoming slick manufacturers of paintings or sculptures unless they become as little children.
-- E.H. Gombrich

"The Artist's Mentor : Inspiration from the World's Most Creative Minds" (Ian Jackman)

Technorati Tags: art, artists, culture, desert, journeys, women

The Mysterious Mona Lisa

Da Vinci's most well known and mysterious paintings is the "Mona Lisa." There has been much speculation down through history as to who's portrait it might be. We know that it was very important to Leonardo. He carried it with him everywhere. Why was he so attached?

Hauntingly beautiful, the mystery of her smile has provoked much discussion. What is she smiling about? Leonardo used a special techique called sfumato - the blurred outline and soft edges, with indistinct corners of the eyes and corners of the mouth.

Who was she? An unrequited love affair? One suggestion that I agree with, is that she was a self-portrait. I believe that Leonardo Da Vinci was painting his Soul. Michael J. Gelb in his book How to Think Like Leonardo Da Vinci has found evidence for this from Dr Lillian Schwartz of Bell Laboratories and author of The Computer Artist's Handbook.

"Applying sophistocated computer modeling with precision measurements of scale and alignment, Schwartz compared the Mona Lisa with the only extant self-portrait of the artist, drawn in red chalk in 1518. As she describes it, 'Juxtaposing the images was all that was needed to fuse them: the relative locations of the nose, mouth, chin and eyes and forehead i none precisely matched the other. Merely flipping up the corner of the mouth would produce the mysterious smile ..."

And then, of course, there is "The Da Vinci Code" which has been unleashing a torrent of interest and controversy, especially within the Vatican. But this is the story of another post..

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"How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci: Seven Steps to Genius Every Day" (Michael J. Gelb)

Technorati Tags: art, spiritual art

The American Sublime - a review of Robert Smithson's "Spiral Jetty" by Arthur Danto

There is an excellent review of Robert Smithson by Arthur Danto in an essay entitled The American Sublime over at "The Nation" (link thanks to Amy at the ARTery). Danto has this to say:

"One of the most famous works of art in America, Robert Smithson's Spiral
Jetty transcends the "earth art" genre to which critics have consigned
it, and has become an emblem of the American sublime."

"An autodidact, widely read in science fiction, amateur geology and
crystallography, Smithson was a singularly original thinker who brought
to bear in his art and writing as many of his intellectual pursuits as
he could. His master concept was entropy--a statistical measure of
energy disorder or randomness--which gripped him much as the concept of
blind will gripped Arthur Schopenhauer, as the ultimate reality against
which form and order crumple and collapse. He connected the coolness of
contemporary sculpture with the inevitable cooling down of physical
systems. Thus, he suggested, the most important new works in American
sculpture "bring to mind the Ice Age rather than the Golden Age"--an
allusion that suddenly vests his abstract ice crystals with a certain
prophetic meaning."

In the essay Dante sites Robert Smithson as more of an influence for today's young artist than Picasso: "anti-institutional, in touch with the environment, hospitable to myth and ritual, alive to the poetry of the wilderness, ambitious in his desire to touch the public through a vision of monumentality that throws the world of the shopping mall and the parking lot into a moral perspective."

Robert Smithson's work can be seen at the Whitney Museum of American Art until October 23.

Technorati Tags: art, artists, nature, nyc art, spiritual art

Another poem - "Voluntary Servitude" by Mark Wunderlich

Amy had a poem that really struck me here. I did some research on the poet, Mark Wunderllch and found another poem of his that I liked.

VOLUNTARY SERVITUDE

In a valley in Wisconsin there is a graveyard where the graves are flooded by spring.

You say, Don’t wreck me, and I say I won’t, but how can I know that?

To see a man in shackles, how you feel about that, depends on whether the servitude is voluntary

The bodies are intact in their gloves, soaked in a bath of ice. Hair a net around them.

Music does not console me. Words in books rise up and scatter.

A friend told me of a snake that came into her room one night.

The house was in Pennsylvania. She lived there alone.

In the dark she could hear it—dry, slipping onto boards like a stocking rolled from a leg.

It retreated when she turned on a light. There was a dark hole at the floor.

Residents disagree about the cemetery.

Some think to say the bodies are intact is wrong.

To suggest that there is anything abnormal is unfit thinking.

I have a new story to tell you.

In it, there is a girl. It’s a story a friend once told me.

Some forms of servitude are voluntary. Some shackles too—

Some you can remove. But this story—

you start in the middle, in the thick and marrow of it.

I think you’ll like it. Let me tell it to you.

Lying side by side. In the dark.

Technorati Tags: culture, writing