Drivin' jPad

Sweet Home Chicago...  drivin' with my cousins and sis. Can you tell we're hungry? We're just about to stop for some Gino's Chicago Style Pizza because Bry drives just so damn fast. For those of you out East, Chicago style is sauce on top, go figure. Despite being backwards, it was tasty.  Drawing took about 45 minutes along hi-ways just shy of O'Hare on Tuesday, September 27th, 2010.

Whence upon a Burchfield...

Din Rumination

Din-Din Contemplation

KiKi goes Abstract

Smokin'

Elena captures the culprits

KiKi's Fishnets

Dial-a-laugh

M&K Contemplate their Move

Knight-kicker

Last weekend I went into the city to peep the Burchfields at the Whitney and hobnob with my homies. Burchfield was outta sight. A ton of watercolors are hanging, most of which are giant, many of which... gi-normous. 

Wholeheartily recommend you make your way there for a delightful show which includes everything from B's Yahtzee doodles and wall paper designs to his despondent, subconscious symbolism and poetic reflections. He really must of got under my skin as I began drawing immediately afterward and continued pretty much straight through dinner, conversation and cocktails afterward. Others got the bug too and the sketch eventually made its way into other hands and around the room. Above were some highlights... 

MLB, eat your heart out!

Check it out... a Wailing Wren. It came to me this morning. I awoke with it, (perhaps slept-wake is more apt) with the image both in profile and from afront. The pen gave me the more frontal image, inspired by preDisney black and white animations and a confused audience last night. When describing my fantasy baseball team to a friend, she misheard Whalley as Waily and it conjured such a powerful idea, it was hard to shake. I'm gonna color it soon, smooth it out a bit more and maybe even put it to a ball cap. Sick, huh? P.S. I don't play fantasy sports. I don't. Really.

Heads Up

While looking for images of Joseph Albers I came across a most unsual portrait of him.


















After digging slightly deeper I unearthed a whole array of portraits or as Andrew Taggart calls them, Head Studies. They're a terrific grouping and still being added too since 2006. Drawing with photographs can be difficult. The mediums have differing speeds and familiarity. To combine the two and get the medium to read well is a difficult feat. Taggart pulls it off well, not just getting the mediums to work in concert but also doing a fine interpreatation of his subject.

Check out this one of the Dalai Lama. He's got the responsibilities of Tibet and weight of China on his mind...
















Here's a pondering Albert Camus always on the scent on an existensial idea and a sneaky James Dean...




































I've always thought of Hemmingway as kinda a thug:






















And the Surrealist, Joan Miro. What's the rope for? He's certainly up to no good...






















You can tell Taggart likes the Dutchess of Windsor!





















Stravinsky, Mark Twain, maybe not so much...




































George Bernard Shaw is a headache























Georgia O'keefe is sorta out on her own, perhaps the New Mexican dessert making her feel a little isolated?
























Walter Benjamin, ever the blockhead.
























but Gertrude Stein, a dapper lady!


















Grace Kelly still has some edge to her:



















And Krishnamurti has a mountain in his lap.





















Taggart, the painter of these photographs, is Canadian but he's living in Norway. You can peep more of Taggart's work here. There are some intriguing installations as well as a set digital books which you can page through.


Lets leave on a Margaret Thatcher note

Hold On To Your Horses

70 Million by Hold Your Horses ! from L'Ogre on Vimeo.

In so far as appropriation, it doesn't get much better than this music video for the song 70 Million. A big shout out to a Quinnipiac AR101 student for hitting me on to this stunner so absolutely terrific I needed to break my blogaitus.

Caldor... rant, rave & shout out

I'm grooving on this drawing. An early one, exploratory both of the thing being depicted and in the manner of depiction. This sheet speaks to me. Lines like silhouettes only dimensional, appearing flat but also going within the form and puncturing and punctuating the outline making monkeys with more banana than banal in their personality.

Alexander Calder, better known for his mobiles (which hang in the foyer of nearly every major American museum touting the salt of its Modernist collection), was also a pretty smart draftsman. I don't mean to diminish Calder's mobiles, which are often cool; distaste derives more from the unimaginative way they're most often hung today.

Take the National Gallery of Art's East Wing in Washington, DC as an example. The entryway feels like a omniplex movie theatre and its opens up into a shopping mall like atrium. The hallway is designed to move people and it does so efficiently but at expense of one beauty of a Puryear. Nobody sees it because the environment functions as passage. Predictably, what do we find in the atrium but some hulking piece of art, in this case, its the Calder. Usually our boy is little more reserved and his pieces are silent birds, shifting like slow motion sattelites, overhead and asking us to tilt our heads and take in some sky.

Calder's mobiles, like giraffes, are cool and I totally would be psyched to live near one. On the other hand these iron space pterodactyls seem ubiquitous and curators strangle their potential by consistently headlining their entryways with their presence.

Enough, lets go back, get out of the museums, pre-1940's... before moving to Connecticut when Calder was a hobnobbing Parisian in the business of making circus. This more grounded Calder saved his flights for the pen and paper and this is what I'd like you to gander at now.


If you like that one, check this boxy, gridded one out. Near totally abstract and reorienting the viewer outta their seat and up from the perspective on top of the room...


This last circus one came after moving back to the states. It was done from the memory of the earlier ones and I believe was made to entertain some friends and his daughter. Its a broader statement about the circus but in some ways not quite as quirkily original as the other two. Its still cool but a little too book cover ready or circus poster dependent.


Another part of Calder's ouvre which should not be overlooked is his jewelry. This stuff is awesome and it feels just as much as if it were a drawing in space as it does a body ornament.


Calder also was a conspiracy theorist and is reported to have spotted aliens in Aix...


If you hear me mispronouncing, let me hit you on to this Caldor
RIP, my beloved DariNor Plaza

PS... Shout out to Strega-Cusano, who'll be cooking for the town of Greenfield and all-comers tomarrow from four till six pm

Beyond the Draw

Its Friday & when better than to check in with Tellman...