Painting

Ed Ruscha and Jack Kerouac – Motorized Photographs Of Sunset Blvd. And Other L.A. Streets

Ed Ruscha has always been one of my favorite artists. When I was in Art School at the University of Kansas he had a heavy influence on the work I was producing at the time. Not so much his photography, but definitely his paintings and print works. The video above was Commissioned by The Getty Museum on the occasion of their 2019 Getty Medal to the painter, draftsman, photographer, and bookmaker, Ed Ruscha.

Produced by Matthew Miller the Getty Research Institute’s preservation and digitization of over a million images from Ed’s Streets of Los Angeles photo series. Miller then had Ruscha record a voice over for the piece using excerpts from Jack Kerouac’s “On The Road”.

I think this is a wonderful way to experience Ruscha’s photography of Los Angeles in a new way. If you are unfamiliar with Ruscha’s books I recommend checking them out. If you Google “Ed Ruscha Books”, you’ll be able to find them. Start with “26 Gas Stations”, or “Some Los Angeles Apartments”. They’ll give you a solid insight into where Ruscha’s head was in the early to mid-1960s.

The End Of The World Is Coming. Lets Study Some Art.

In a world where everything seems to be going to hell in a hand basket, and science is predicting the end of life in the next great mass extinction, it’s nice to know that there is art in the world. The world might be coming to an end at some point in the future, but you still have a chance to educate yourself about art thanks to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum loading 205 free art history books to the Internet Archive, all of which are available as PDF’s or ePub books. Yes now as you contemplate the end of the world and hone your apocalypse survival skills you can bone up on the finer things and learn about Max Ernst, The Italian Metamorphosis, French Art in the 1970’s, Joseph Cornell, Francis Bacon, Pop Art in the 60’s and so much more.

Yes now as you contemplate the end of the world and hone your apocalypse survival skills you can bone up on the finer things and learn about Max Ernst, The Italian Metamorphosis, French Art in the 1970’s, Joseph Cornell, Francis Bacon, Pop Art in the 60’s and so much more. Just be sure and pick up a solar powered charger for your phone or tablet so you can keep reading them after the power grid fails.

For the last 5 years, theGuggenheim has been digitizing its exhibition catalogs and art books, placing the results online. So if you want to study some art history this is the right place. The collection also includes catalogs of retrospective exhibitions on masters like Paul Klee, Robert Rauschenberg, and Mark Rothko. Or you can explore older art with Chinese art in the 20th century, craftsmen of ancient Peru, sculpture and works on paper or Masterpieces from the Guggenheim Collection: From Picasso to Pollock. What better way to spend your time when you aren’t trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic world.

Remember it is the arts and culture that separate us from the animals. Well that and opposable thumbs, larger brain capacity, the ability to create advanced tools, and a few other things.

Here Comes Summer. Lets Go Swimming.

It is the first day of summer in the Northern Hemisphere. Summer officially began at 6:34 p.m. EDT, and what better way to celebrate than by showing a series of paintings that capture one of summers official past times, swimming. The paintings below are from a series of swimming figures painted by Colombian illustrator and painter Pedro Covo. Covo was born in Cartagena de Indias – Colombia, graduated from Visual Arts in the Javeriana University of Bogota in 2011. The figurative paintings capture the figures as they are obscured by the splashes and movement of the water rendered in frenetic splatters of paint, bold strokes, and sinuous line that seems to melt into the deep blues, greens and gray’s of the water itself. There is a dream like quality to each of them that really appeals to me, an almost abstract quality that allows you to get lost in each painting. I’d love to see these in person, since your computer screen leaves out so many details.

Covo most recently exhibited at Río Laboratorio, and has has been shown internationally since 2013. We are in the midst of an early summer heatwave here inn the midwest and these make me want to take the day off and head to the pool.

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Money, Money, Money.

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Why is it that almost all foreign currency looks so much better than the American dollar? I’m not bashing the buck, but from a design perspective, to me foreign currency is simply more visually interesting than the American greenback. Case in point, the currency of the year awarded by The International Bank Note Society for the New Zealand for its $5 polymer note. The design features the face of New Zealand native mountain climber Sir Edmund Hillary, with a backdrop of Mount Cook and, a yellow-eyed penguin seemingly printed with what looks like metallic gold foil.

Now, with that said, I don’t think this is an award winning piece of design in the true sense. It is busy, and burdened with an abundance of imagery, and various patterns, but if you look at it in terms of a contemporary painting or print, it’s quite successful. I know that the reason for the patterns, color, overprints, and such are due to security issues and a need to foil counterfeiters, but this is something I might hang on a wall, and that is often the case for foreign currency with me. I’m not going to do that with American currency.

For more about the competition you can find it in this article at theguardian.com along with a video. And below are some additional curency examples.

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