Line By Line

Great series of lessons on drawing by James MacMullan in the NY Times.

-James MacMullan

Christian Marclay's 24-hour video work: The Clock

So I just stumbled into the Paula Cooper Gallery on my way to the Gym at Chelsea Piers and I was transfixed by this strangely compelling film. I started watching at 4:20 pm and I soon realized that all of the clocks in the film said 4:20 pm. It took me a while to realize that time passed in the film just like real time!!! The film is composed of cut scenes drawn from the history of cinema and many recognizable actors and films are put in service of this clever conceit. I can rattle off a few that I can remember: Bette Davis, Humphey Bogart "Casablanca", Jack Nicholsen "About Schmidt"...
I plan to go back and see more as the show just opened and will close on February 19, 2011.

In The Clock, Marclay samples thousands of film excerpts indicating the passage of time. Spanning the range of timepieces, from clock towers to wristwatches and from buzzing alarm clocks to the occasional cuckoo, The Clock draws attention to time as a multifaceted protagonist of cinematic narrative. With virtuosic skill, the artist has excerpted each of these moments from their original contexts and edited them together to form a 24-hour montage, which unfolds in real time. While constructed from a dizzying variety of periods, contexts and film genres whose storylines seem to have shattered in a multitude of narrative shards, The Clock uncannily proceeds at a unified pace as if re-ordered by the latent narrative of time itself. Because it is synchronized with the local time of the exhibition space, the work conflates cinematic and actual time, revealing each passing minute as a repository of alternately suspenseful, tragic or romantic narrative possibilities.

MoMA is dead! Long live MoMA!

Here's my take on the NY Times article celebrating the re-birth from near death of MoMA.

Interesting take on how MoMA is settling in to the new space that seemed so unpromising when it first re-opened. I agree that Monet looked insignificant and that the Barnett Newman sculpture felt out of place; I also was delighted with the crowd pleasing foam cushions and felt that they added a humanizing element sorely lacking in the vast impersonal atrium.
I am too often repelled by the immense crowds that flock to MoMA and I find myself going less than I used to as it is more like Times Square and less like a haven for those who like to spend quiet moments with great works of art. For that, the Morgan and the Frick have always had a prime appeal.
Has \"Modern Art\" has become too popular? Perhaps the mission of MoMA has been fulfilled too well: crowds of tourists, toddlers and toadies swarm to every venue of the latest thing. So love/hate is the new MoMA and that push/pull is just another of the many NY City places that we all cling to and retreat from anew.
MoMA is dead! Long live MoMA!

What is to become of the Whitney Museum Building?

Great discussion on today's NY Times article about the fate of the Marcel Breuer building on 75th Street now that the Whitney has plans to vacate the site for new digs downtown.

The "uptown bunker for difficult art" is how I have referred to the Whitney for years; my wife calls it the "Whip-me Museum". It is both beloved and beleaguered and not unlike the Museum of Art and Design which has inherited the scorn of many from the Huntington Hartford building.
People joke about Target becoming the new owner but it will be worse: another Hermes / Lacoste / Ralph Lauren corporate showcase for sure will seize this museum and erase all the wonderful history of the love/hate relationship to the city that we all lave/hate.

Brushes on the iPad: Drawing in the 21st Century

Announcing a launch of a new blog about Drawing on the iPad using Brushes
Drawing 21
 http://drawing21.blogspot.com/


It's official: a major artist embraces the iPhone/iPad Brushes app to create a series of images for an exhibition!
David Hockney: Fresh Flowers at the The Fondation Pierre Bergé


Related Articles:

Canvas is just so 20th century

http://articles.cnn.com/2010-10-21/world/hockney.iphone_1_iphone-ipad-british-artist-david-hockney?_s=PM:WORLD

Gerhard Richter@The Drawing Center

Gerhard Richter
Lines which do not exist

"...approximately 50 graphite, watercolor, and ink on paper drawings made by Gerhard Richter (b. 1932, Dresden, Germany) over a period of five decades from 1966 to 2005."

September 11 – November 18, 2010
I was planning to go to the opening reception but something else came up. Gerhard Richter is always interesting. Here is a body of work that has never been shown before. Richter's huge retrospective at MoMA in 2002 apparently was not exhaustive, since drawings were not included in the 40 Years of Painting exhibit.
The New York Times reviewed the exhibit saying it was "superb".

A Daily Dose of Architecture

Here is an interesting blog about Architecture.

Sarah Morris: Pools

I've been asked to feature more women artists and so here is one of my favorite contemporary painters (who happens to be a woman). This is painting that is smart, insightful and thoroughly hip.

Personal Geometry @ Lori Bookstein Fine Art

Jan Müller
Untitled (Polyptych)
c. 1955
Oil on seven wood panels
46" x 40"

This is a show that is a must-see for me. I am always looking for a fresh perspective on geometric abstraction.
"Müller and Wilson, two painters whose work has been split between abstraction and representation, provide adept examples of paintings composed from the arrangement of humble squares, but which function foremost as matrices for the study of color relationships and personal moods." -from the press release for the exhibit


Personal Geometry
January 08, 2009 - February 07, 2009
Lori Bookstein Fine Art | 37 West 57th Street 3rd floor | New York NY 10019 | 212.750.0949 |

Women in Art

Here is a very engaging video that morphs through five hundred years of portraits of women in art. Enjoy!

Animatus Animation Links

Animatus Animation Links

Chromacolour | Pegbars | Canada

Chromacolour | Pegbars | Canada

Flash Frame-By-Frame Animation: Detailed Animation Part I

Flash Frame-By-Frame Animation: Detailed Animation Part I

3D Books

3D Books

Light Boxes for Sale: Cartoon Supplies

Disney Inks Stan Lee | Animation Magazine

Disney Inks Stan Lee | Animation Magazine

the TAB | Paperless 2D Animation Software for Web Designers and Broadcast | Download

the TAB | Paperless 2D Animation Software for Web Designers and Broadcast | Download

Music to See in NYC: Summerstage

Grat acts coming to NYC this summer: Joss Stoe. Cassandra Wilson and Television

Cubist Mashup #3

This image combines several components: a carafe, a wine bottle, a glass goblet and a projector contemporaneous with those seen by Picasso and Braque. The goal is to re-create a Cubist image that incorporates elements of the early Cinema apparatus (the projector) to prove the theis that Picasso and Braque embedded the machinery into there Cubist images.

Cubist Mashup #2

Starting with a photograph of a woman from the Victorian era, Photoshop was used to create a second image transformed by simple reflection; the was then overlaid onto an image of a tripod in an effort to replicate effects found in several images by Picasso.