Archive for May, 2008
Congresscritters: Free Orphan Works
The folks over at the Electronic Frontier Foundation have put together a tidy rundown of the current state of Orphan Works copyright legislation. From the post:
Orphan works are those whose owner cannot be located. Others who would like to use and share these works may hesitate to do so out of fear that they could later be found liable for copyright infringement because they didn’t get permission. …The Orphan Works legislation would help resolve those fears and, in the process, encourage the display and re-use of these “lost” works.
Read copyfighter Larry Lessig’s op-ed piece on the Orphan Works Act here.
Read Ars Technica’s take on the Orphan Works situation here.
Eldred.cc is a site dedicated to continuing the effort toward Orphan Works reform.
Related:
More on the intellectual property debate from the EFF.
My mother just got me a copy of the book Permissions: A Survival Guide. When I’ve read and digested it I’ll post thoughts here.
Faye: Now Showing for Paseo Fest
Faye (Runs Hot And Cold), acrylic on canvas, 2008.
Faye is one of the paintings in my current solo show Idiolect, now showing at AKA Gallery in Oklahoma City’s Paseo District. This weekend is the annual Paseo Arts Festival. The hours are as follows:
Saturday 05.24 10 am to 9 pm
Sunday 05.25 10 am to 9 pm
Monday 05.26 10 am to 6 pm
Hope to see you there!
Faye, detail view
Faye, another detail view.
Our Lady Of Useful Things
This is Our Lady of Useful Things. She is composed of objects that were useful at some time, but whose purpose has been fulfilled, leaving them discarded shells. She has been with me for about a year and a half. She needs a new home.
Our Lady measures 57″ long, 18″ wide, and stands 26″ from the floor. The legs are detachable. I do not have room for her where I’m going.
If you’d like to take this table home with you, it’s yours to do with as you please. Add to it, take things off. Put plants on it, or mail. Take the legs off and stand it inside the guest room closet to startle visiting relatives. No questions asked.
Our Lady of Useful Things is available for the low bargain price of Come And Get Her. Drop me a note to make arrangements.
Masami Teraoka at Samuel Freeman Gallery
Over at Right Some Good this week there’s an announcement of a current show by Masami Teraoka. The show is at Samuel Freeman Gallery in Santa Monica, and it closes May 24. So if you’re in the area run on over.
Venus and Pope’s Workout by Masami Teraoka.
Masami Teraoka has long been one of my favorite painters. His watercolors from the 1980s about the AIDS crisis are an evocative mix of beauty and terror, sensual forms startled into abrupt mortality. (Dear Lord Baby Jesus, if I work really really hard, can I be this good a painter someday?) His new series, The Cloisters’ Confession, draws upon the traditions of early Renaissance painting from Europe, particularly the altarpiece form. (I’m seeing both northern and southern elements here, even a play on Botticelli’s Birth of Venus.) There are even some oil-on-canvas miniatures — quite a departure from his earlier large-scale watercolors. Is it too cliched to characterize this as East Meets West? Possibly. At any rate, let’s not pigeonhole.
In recent years Teraoka has been painting flesh with a curiously post-mortem pallor. The corpse-like appearance of these figures, treated with rolling Florentine sensuality, plus a generous dose of taboo sexuality, sends us straight to Bosch and back again.
Teraoka points out a similarity between European early renaissance and ukiyo-e painting: the tendency to flatten physical space into a series of stacked planes. The paintings in Cloisters’ Confession recall Flemish horror vacui. The resulting scenes are not what you would call realistic — in other words, not what you would see with your own eyes out in meatspace. Instead it’s a melding of learned visual information (what the eye sees, further processed by memory) and graphic language used for narrative purposes. This concoction elevates the image’s importance beyond the need to represent a scene realistically. Taraoka is using pictures to tell us something.
Geisha in Bath, from the AIDS Series, by Masami Teraoka
(A side note — I see in several of the altarpiece paintings that Teraoka has placed Venus figures and geisha side-by-side. A few years ago I enetertained the notion of combining the features of a Botticelli beauty with the feminine ideals presented by Kitagawa Utamaro. I wondered what would happen when two disparate paradigms of feminine beauty were put together. Teraoka’s works remind me that I should dig out those images and post them.)
Right Some Good is where Kirsten Anderson (of Roq La Rue gallery in Seattle) has been blogging about some of her favorite contemporary and historical artists. In the post about Teraoka’s show, she mentions an essay in the works about the return of the grotesque in contemporary art. I’m looking forward to that.
Not What I Meant
Not What I Meant, acrylic on wood panel, 2008. Click image to enlarge.
A few years back I came into a whole pile of these 8 x 22 inch wood panels. I think they were raw cabinet doors that hadn’t been shaped and finished. Usually I paint on them vertically, so this is the first time I’ve used one in its wide format. Just in time for Illustration Friday: Wide.
Not What I Meant, detail view.
This panel was actually a so-so painting several years back. (In fact, it was one of a series of paintings I did that turned out so poorly that I realized I needed to go back to school and learn to paint. Hence: graduate school.) To start the painting you see here, I sanded the previous painting’s surface, then added the red and blue. I scratched the fish shapes away with an exacto knife (and many many blades). It’s so satisfying to transform a failure into a success.
Book Design Envy: Nom Nom Nom
Cover for A General Theory of Love, designed by John Gall
Have a look at this charming video interview with book designer John Gall. He talks about his idiosyncratic design aesthetic and willingness to make bold moves.
Gall mentions the dichotomy of quiet time balanced by bursts of creative energy. I find I spend a lot of my creative time just looking, considering, trying out ideas. After a certain point I reach a watershed and the image just pours out.
Gall is also right that deadlines are powerful motivators. Here’s another interview with John Gall at Step Inside Design.
Great design awes me. I’ve never considered myself an Idea Man, but I believe that is what a designer does. They hold up a clever mirror to culture. When I see a piece of good design, a well-made form that complements the content it’s wrapped around, I think “Of course! Why didn’t I look at it that way before?”
Elia Woods and Whitney Forsyth at IAO
A show of mixed-meda works by Oklahoma fiber artists Elia Woods and Whitney Fosyth is currently showing at IAO Gallery at 811 N Broadway in Oklahoma City.
Walking Home, mixed media work by Elia Woods.
Elia is a versatile artist and thinker, whose work spans many media and disciplines. She employs an evocative mix of alternative photographic processeses and fabric to describe the complicated relationship between people and the natural world. Plus, she’s a lovely person, to boot.
“What we eat has profound implications for our own health and the health of the planet. With this body of work, I invite the viewer to consider the nature and quality of our food, where it comes from, and our relationship to it.”
Elia also cultivates a community garden at 31st and Shartel.
This show’s reception is this Friday 05.16.2008 from 6 to 9 pm.
Hey, Pal: Custom Vans for Canvas 2008
Hey, Pal. Custom painted Vans, 2008.
These custom painted Vans will be in the Canvas 2008 show, which opens 06.06.2008 in downtown Oklahoma City. Visit the Canvas site for more details.
Hey Pal, detail view, acrylic on canvas shoes, 2008.
In Soviet Russia, Vans customize you!
Here is my Canvas entry from last year:
Vans on Vans, ink and mixed media on canvas shoes, 2007.
Left shoe view.
Left shoe detail.
Vans on Vans was done by collaging Kleenex Viva towels on the blank shoes using Golden extra heavy matte gel, then drawing with Sakura Pigma Micron pens (I prefer sizes 01 and 02). The hands are tinted with acrylic wash. This piece is an homage to my old Vans Sk8 Hi-Tops. (Vans on Vans sold last year and won’t be in the upcoming show.)