Boucher

I don't believe I have blogged about this before.  I picked up this bit about Boucher from my Aesthetics prof many years ago.  Boucher tended to like having little jokes going on in his paintings. 

This is his Diana Leaving her bath.  Now to really understand this painting you have to be up on your mythology.  In particularly the myth of Actaeon.  Actaeon was a pretty good guy, people liked him.  He had just finished hunting for the day and had parted with his friends.  He is on his way home when he bursts into a clearing and sees the goddess Artemis fully naked at her bath.  Artemis is a virgin goddess and can not have that, so she kicks water at him and turns him into a deer.  His own dogs tear him to pieces and eat him. 

Now as I am sure you know Diana is Artemis's Roman name.  The primary viewers of this painting would have been male.  You have to pay attention to the composition of this painting and what it points to.  If you follow the blue fabric down along Diana and her kicking foot you get kicked to the dog sphincter.  If you follow the top of the hill the goddess is leaning against it again points you to dog sphincter.  So beware males you may turn into steaming dog poo after viewing this painting!

Orlan and biology based art

I first heard of Orlan a few years ago, when I read an article in Le Monde about how she was suing Lady Gaga for plagiarism.  I came across her again in Arthur Miller's Colliding Worlds, a book about where science and art meet.  She is a French artist.  She has worked quite extensively, but what she is most known for are plastic surgeries she underwent in order to achieve the male artist's ideal of female beauty.  The result of these surgeries is that she will have: the chine of Botticelli's Venus, the nose of Jean-Leon Gerome's Psyche, the lips of Boucher's Europa, the eyes of Diana from a 16th century French painting, and the forehead of the Mona Lisa.

Now these surgeries have been filmed and broadcast to the world.  She was awake for the surgeries, although on some pretty good pain killers.  Probably the most interesting though is the Harlequin Coat, which is a prototype for a tech living skin coat.  Some of the skin is from her own skin cells, and some from people of other races, and completely different species of animals, which are combined for the project.  I believe that she did this project at Symbiotica in Australia.   

This is a link to Symbiotica's blurb about Orlan.

http://www.stillliving.symbiotica.uwa.edu.au/pages/artists/orlan.htm


This is an interview with Orlan.  Maybe I should add a warning that they do show a bit of a surgery in this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQ1Ph-Pprj4

Jackson Pollock

Now years ago when I was working on my archaeology degree I recall during field school this one nasty guy telling me that it was easy to make it in art, all you have to do is dribble paint like Jackson Pollock.  No.  Jackson Pollock's work is not easy to produce, and is actually quite easily identified because his work contains fractal patterns.  Fractal patterns are the patterns found in nature, it is the patterns tree branches grow in, and the pattern the waves leave in the sand as they recede.  Normal adult humans cannot draw or paint fractally our hands just don't move that way.  The thought is that Pollock was a severe alcoholic, his medical records actually show that he drank himself to the point of damaging his ability to balance.  Now small children when they are learning to walk move their hands in fractal patterns in order to balance, as do tight rope walkers.  The thought is that when Pollock leaned out over his paintings to work it threw his damaged balance off even more, so his hands would move fractally.  Now that is not to say Pollock was just an alcoholic with a paint brush.  He had a lot of years studying painting under his belt, including under Thomas Hart Benton. 

Chuck Close

I was originally just going to write about Jackson Pollock today, but then I started thinking more generally about artists with disabilities and I thought about Chuck Close.  Chuck Close is best known for his photorealistic paintings.  I don't think that most people know though that he actually has prosopagnosia, or in other words he is face blind.  Meaning that he cannot recognize people by their facial features.  I heard an interview with him awhile back on WPR, where he said the prosopagnosia was why he took on portraits.  From what I understand that is also why he has to use his system of gridding that he uses to break the photos down into more manageable parts.  I didn't know that Chuck Close suffered from this condition before that interview, and it makes his paintings way more remarkable.

Cuneiform

I think I actually did this one in my undergraduate degree.  The text, the triangular stuff going on above the figure is Akkadian cuneiform.  I am not kidding you, at one point in my life my goal was to be an epigrapher, so I was studying things like Hebrew and Akkadian (in more lay terms Babylonian).  Unfortunately I have forgotten most of it, so I don't remember what this says.  Cuneiform is actually incredibly difficult.  It was the first known writing system so granted there were some kinks that needed to get worked out, but part of it to was that only the scribes were literate and people had to pay them to send or interpret their letters.  The scribes didn't want it to be easy because then they would be out of work.  Basically the way cuneiform works is that there are three types of sign: logogram, determinative, and the phonetic signs.  Logograms represent a full word, determinatives refer to what the word in question was made of (i.e. the word for boat always has the determinative for wood with it), the phonemes are like they sound they are a syllable.  Now the difficulty comes in that one sign often has three different syllable sounds associated with is as well as a logogram or determinative meaning with it. 

I had forgotten about this one.  I did it while at the Vitamin Studio.  Primarily it was a thing of I had an odd shaped piece of copper that looked like a sea monster to me.  The leash if I remember correctly was mainly a formalist addition, although maybe content wise it speaks towards personal responsibility.

Blub Blub

I did this one back in graduate school, but I did not have a camera to photograph it.   Blub Blub pretty much sums up how I felt in graduate school.

Light

I cannot recall if I posted this before.

Arabian Nights Cover

Maybe I should not post this, but this was intended to be the wrap around cover to my Arabian Nights book.  It is an engraving.  Always a concern is people stealing my images or whatever, but I thought maybe it should be seen even if I never get around to the book.

This is a fairly old print, I think like 2007-2008.

Proof of an old old block, originally done for Prints for Peace although I never sent it out.

This is a proof off of an old old block.

First Silverpoint

More on this can be found at the Want Something Drawn? Yo I'll draw it blog.  Although not a whole lot more, not particularly wordy tonight.