Yesterday Beautiful Decay featured interesting work from a Swedish artist that I can't seem to dig up much information on. Leif Holmstrand’s creates crocheted and knitted sculptures and performance pieces that at their best combine simplicity and clear color with a darker underlying significance.
I'm in an inexplicably good mood this morning. These dancers of Matisse came to mind. While I have seen the work at MoMA, I never took especial notice of it. I'm not sure why my mind landed on this, but it is indeed a joyful work. And the colors!
If you're in need of a color surge to wake you up, may I recommend googling images of Matisse?
Top or Bottom?
Here was my thought while driving yesterday: there are two kinds of creative people. Those who visualize the ideal and then try to create something that resembles their ideal as completely as possible, and those who take bits and pieces of reality as starting blocks and see what they can create from that.
Top Down People....
Those who visualize the ideal might create a reasoned-out guideline to how the work should be organized. They know what they want, but not necessarily how to create it. Theirs is a world of symmetry and order with a rational mind at work behind it trying to approximate the perfection they imagined. They can be dissatisfied when their creation isn't perfect according to their pre-determined ideal.
Bottom Up People...
are realists, in a sense. They work from the bottom up, with pieces of reality whether it be an overheard sentence, the look in someone's eye, or an old car part. They imagine the potential of that thing in connection with this other thing. Their world is forever in pieces that they are trying to put together, which can be chaotic but also full of endless possibilities.
That's not to say people can't behave either way at different times, but I definitely lean toward the latter. What do you think? Does the top down/ bottom up distinction make sense to you? Are you a top or a bottom?
At least the name was familiar. Reading a survey on Caribbean art that I found at the public library, Wilfredo Lam came up at least half a dozen times before I even got to the section on Afro-Cubanism.The Jungle, above, is the most famous example of his work and displays the merging of European painting tradition in its Cubist perspective yet the masked figures amidst the sugarcane and bamboo also reflect the painter's inclusion of his African heritage and culture.
It should be noted that The Jungle was not intended to represent Afro-Cuban traditions literally--the masks are African-inspired rather than relating directly to his experience in Cuba. It is, in fact, a critique. His intention was to describe a spiritual state, most particularly that of an Afro-Cuban culture that had been reduced to absurdity by panning to tourist trade.
"I wanted with all my heart to paint the drama of my country, but by thoroughly expressing the negro spirit, the beauty of the plastic art of the blacks. In this way I could act as a Trojan horse that would spew forth hallucinating figures with the power to surprise, to disturb the dreams of the exploiters."- Wilfredo Lam
La Silla, 1943 Lam was born in Cuba to a Chinese father and a half Congolese, half Cuban mulatto mother. After studying in Cuba, he moved to Madrid and then Paris to continue his training. He became friends with Picasso and his circle and was influenced by them. He later traveled through the Caribbean with Andre Breton, another influential person in the Caribbean arts scene of the time.
When he returned to Havana in 1941, Lam became newly aware of Afro-Cuban traditions, which he felt were being lost and made picturesque for tourists. He wished to free Cuba from cultural subjugation and to rediscover its African heritage. Many great artists of the 20th century combined radical style with "primitive" arts. Lam did so by synthesizing the Surrealist and Cubist forms to express the iconography of Afro-Cubanism. Authenticity was perhaps more created than discovered in his work. A successful artist internationally who supported his ingenuous roots, he died in Paris in 1982. He remains widely influential in Cuba and throughout the Caribbean.
I am an Open Water Diver, at least according to PADI. That means I passed my written exams and did 4 dives. On the last one, I wasn't sure I was going to make it back to the surface. I figured I would have a heart attack after seeing a barracuda as long as I am.
Other island hazards:
You can only assume the mechanic of this grounded beer plane was also responsible for attaching these windshield wipers.
Or, rather, I step away from the e-learning Open Water Diver course on my computer and into the pool to practice. Then I have lunch, a nice boat ride, and I hop into a much deeper ocean and hope I don't sink. And that the sharks don't get me. Depending on the dive schedules, I should be a PADI- certified open water diver come Tuesday.
Nope, not the movie (which I am eager to see 3-D), but Beijing artist Cao Fei. She has some perceptive comments on how people behave in virtual realities like Second Life or her project, RMB City. The more time I spend online, the more I think of it as a virtual reality for myself. My blog is my virtual home. If that makes the picture in the sidebar my avatar, I must find a photo where my hands don't take up the whole picture.
Art:21 is a documentary series on contemporary visual artists, and this clip comes from season 5, fantasy episode. A part of PBS, the site allows you to watch their content online, but unfortunately season 5 isn't up yet.
"I do not distinguish between the construction of a book and that of a painting and I always proceed from the simple to the complex." -Henri Matisse, 1946
Le Cygne Livre d'artiste, or Artist's Book, were common at the turn of the 20th c. in France, and Henri Matisse produced more than a dozen illustrated books in his lifetime. Lucky folks in Atlanta will be able to see some of Matisse's most successful book illustrations on display at the Museum of Art at Oglethorpe University from January 17 until May 9. This exhibition looks lovely, and I enjoy the convergence of the simple lines of the lithographs and the poetry.
Matisse especially loved poetry, and he produced dozens of drawings and etchings to illustrate the work of French poets Stephane Mallarme and Pierre Ronsard that are on view. Initially he created a 30 lithograph portfolio in 1941, but seven years later Matisse had transformed it into a 128 page volume entitled Florilege des Amours de Ronsard. Matisse's drawings accompany the lyric poetry with flowers, nudes, dancers, and music.
I wasn't familiar with this part of Matisse's ouerve, and in looking for more information, found the artist had also illustrated James Joyce's Ulysses and Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal!, which leads me down another path of exploration...
Hippolyte's paintings and life are in many ways indicative of primitive Haitian art. They combine voodoo and Christian symbols, and are noted for creating an iconography for laos, or spirits, of the voodoo tradition. As a third generation priest, Hippolyte (1894-1948) worked in his community and eked out a living painting houses. Then DeWitt Peters, an American from the Centre d'Art in Porte au Prince, saw a pair of doors with intricate floral patterns that he had painted on a bar. He tracked Hippolyte down and asked him to come work in the city.
Papa Zaca
Hippolyte immediately accepted. He believed it was his destiny to become a painter, and he had been waiting for it to unfold. He moved to a cottage outside Port au Prince in 1945. His work was an immediate commercial success and made it big internationally when it was collected and shown by French surrealist Andre Breton. Hippolyte thus also represents the highly commercialized side of "naive" or primitive Haitian artists which has continued to this day. Hippolyte was highly prolific for the next 3 years, until he suddenly died. It is reported to have been a heart attack, although some think the division between his voodoo duties and his artistic ones overwhelmed him as he began painting more and more.
Saint Francis and Christ Child
Above is Hippolyte's painting of Saint Francis, and below is his depiction of Mistress Erzulie, the voodoo spirit of courtesy. In depicting both the Christian and voodoo persona, Hippolyte treats the subject in the same manner. The focus is on the strong central figure surrounded by a lush, brightly colored natural world. It's fascinating learning about his life and his art, especially how voodoo influenced his art, but there are few online resources. More information about his life and his works here.
