Palace Scholastica

{I spent the day at Hampton Court Palace, and while it seemed a bit like a fairy tale, it was actually for my art history class.}

The changing skies spun me into something of restlessness. A mess of dramatic clouds and blinding blue fought above walls of old and stories of forever. Stone and shadow build the history of a nation. It's easy to forget that the people who lived here had beating hearts, tangled hair, and lively steps like ours.

History sits heavy in framed faces. We must learn to bear the weight for a while.

I'm so very lucky and endlessly grateful.

Splash

I was glancing at Black Book Magazine's website and stumbled upon these photos by Art Director Alex Sum. I quite like them. 

My Little Sister and Her Screen Prints

My beautiful little sister has this unbelievable, instinctual sense for print and textile work. She's been working on some screen printing that I am totally and completely obsessed with: a few parts Andy Worhol with a dash of Rorschach ink blot. I love love love.

Strange Plastic Day

I stumbled upon these pictures in the Art section of the New York Times' photo galleries. They're creepy and cold and fantastic. Apparently one of the largest mannequin manufacturers, Lifestyle Forms and Display, is in Brooklyn -- a whole factory of people spending their days creating fake bodies from wood, plastic and wax. What a strange strange world this is, ours.

Edgar Degas "Horses" c. 1882

I adore this. I have a print of it in my room.

Transitory Art and Fashion in Motion: The Physical Emotion of Rodin and Balmain

Auguste Rodin, perhaps the most prolific modern French sculptor, was a master of emotional form. He had an unmatched ability  to convey anguish, sensuality, and the tire of existence with chipped and scathed stone and cast metals. Rodin understood the weight of our bones, the tension of our muscles, and the movement of our bodies to be the most powerful expression of our love and our pain. 

Taking influence from painters before him, Rodin used texture and figure, replacing the Impressionists' color and shadow, to sculpt the transitory nature of ourselves. Man Walking is a momentary study of motion and gravity; of the shifting of weight; of the progression of ourselves as our bodies inhabitant.

It is without hesitation that we can look at fashion as exploring the transitory nature of ourselves and our bodes as well. (Which isn't to automatically conclude that fashion designers and Rodin have similar intent, vision, or understanding.) 

The Fall 2009 Balmain collection has given to us an undeniable contrast of structure and fluidity. Much like the texture and form of Man Walking, the heavy, rigid shoulder and ever-moving silhouette below the waist seen on the Balmain runways at fashion week imply the transitional, unresting nature of our bodies as we move through time and space. In both, it's difficult, if not impossible, to separate the passage of the physical and the evolution of the emotional. 

Rodin and Balmain force us to consider -- where does muscle tension end and stress begin? Is there a difference between feeling down and feeling the pull of gravity? How can we distinguish the weight of ourselves from the weight of our emotions? And perhaps most importantly, does it matter?

The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit

In their lifetime, these four little girls saw more of the world than any other little girls could have possibly hoped. American princesses collecting shell tiaras from their Rhode Island vacation home, the daughters of Edward Darley Boit lived lives of uninhibited wealth and travel. The blue and white vases, standing tall in their portrait, traveled with the family -- packed and unpacked like familiar faces in crowded rooms of people speaking languages foreign to the girls' well cleaned ears.  

If you visit the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, you'll find John Singer Sargent's portrait of family and youth humbly hung, but powerfully flanked by the actual vases standing like old friends in Sargent's painting. Gallery whispers tell us that when the MFA acquired the vases, they tipped them about for a good cleaning, spilling out a few long-lost toys the younger girls had tossed into the vases' open mouths. 

It's a beautiful intersection of history and family and art -- leaving us to wonder where one begins and the other ends. And if at the end of it all, when hung on the quiet wall of a museum, the boundaries we've drawn between the intersections of our segmented lives mean anything at all. 

Marni: The Modern Day Diary of Princess Margarita Theresa of Spain?

Perhaps it is because I was studying into the wee hours of the morning for my Art History exam during Fashion Week, or perhaps it is because my brain tends to organize fashion and art in the same pile of creative cultural records in my head, but I cannot help but notice the uncanny, yet delightful, similarities between the Fall 2009 Marni collection, and the elaborate wardrobe of Princess Margarita Theresa of Spain. 

Our visual record of Princess Margarita is almost entirely through Spanish Baroque artist Diego Velazquez's work. In the mid-1620s, Spain's King Philip IV named Velazquez the official court painter. Princess Margarita, Philip's favorite daughter, quickly became the focus of Velazquez's efforts. When she was born, the Princess was promised to her cousin, a member of the Austrian royal family. In a grand romantic gesture of arranged marriage, King Philip arranged for Margarita's portrait to be painted as gifts for her young Austrian fiancé.

The Baroque period in Spain was a time of drama and ornate details -- the fabrics heavy, the colors rich. The Spanish Empire was almost unbelievably powerful. Pockets were deep and elaborate clothing was becoming increasingly more accessible. Dresses made of metallic thread, heavy tapestry-like cloth, and jeweled details were the prize of royal closets. 

It is without question that pieces from the Marni collection are strikingly similar to some of Velazquez's most famous portraits of Princess Margarita Theresa. I'm not yet sure what the similarity means, if anything at all, but I do know that there's something antique, something lavish, and something opulent about it all. 

Infanta Margarita Theresa in a pink dress, Velaquez. 1654.

Marni Fall 2009

Queen Margarita on horseback, Velazquez. 1634-35.

Marni Fall 2009

Oren Lavie "Her Morning Elegance"

I know I know I know I've been posting lots of videos as of late, but this one is really all together too good to omit in the name of post diversity. Stop motion has always fascinated me, but this music video has taken it to a new place - a captivating conversation between dimension. Surfaces become negative space, horizontal teases our brains into vertical. Like the floating of a great love among the clouds, this is the kind of video that you wish someone would make about you.

Oren Lavie "Her Morning Elegance"

If you fall as madly in love with this as I have, you will without a moment's hesitation love Michel Gondry. (If you've seen The Science of Sleep or Eternal Sunshine, you might know Michel better than you think.) 

LED Sheep Art (Yes, you read that correctly)

I almost can't believe that this is real. But I'm so happy that it is. 

Art Appropriation: Book Autopsies

I've been thinking more about where our understanding of Art is headed. As mass media integrates rapidly with fine arts, we are forced to allow the skewing of what's left of the dividing lines between what we've been raised to categorize. Recently, society has stumbled upon some major projects that have guided our conscious melding of textbook silos and artistic paradigms: The Post Secret project has spanned the gap of private and public art; Shepard Fairey's propaganda-influenced shopping bags for Neiman Marcus have taken a new look at the role Art plays in our human consumerism. Art, in its traditional sense, has begun to appropriate areas of our lives that are traditionally held separately from what we've come to understand as Art. 

Brian Dettmer's "Book Autopsies" have moved this idea from a contextual sense, into a quite literal artistic appropriation of a non-arty medium - books, in the most tactile, three dimensional sense of the form. Carved like a block of marble to reveal an institutional knowledge organized in an entirely new schema of intellectual understanding, Dettmer's "Book Autopsies" are like nothing I've ever seen before - an allegory for our new sense of cross-pollinated understanding of the world around us. 

A Feat of Graphic Design Prowess

Tonight, my PRSSA Agency client, Mike Lombardo, and I decided to make a poster for his upcoming show at TT the Bear's in Cambridge. Earlier today, his bassist Ellen made a funny little semi-serious poster in MS Paint. 

Mike and I don't joke. Our craft is refined, our talent revered. We create wholly serious, exquisitely beautiful art with ideas that are entirely our own. Like this:

I have two conclusions: 1. I should have gone into graphic design, and 2. You should go to Mike's show. 

Some Thoughts on the Societal Function of Art

During the Medieval period in Europe, art served almost exclusively as a functional force in something other than art -- most frequently religious ritual. With the coming of the Renaissance, societal interaction with art moved from functional appreciation to aesthetic and intellectual appreciation. 

So we must ask ourselves..

With the ever increasing role of graphic design in new media, where does this relatively new kind of art sit on the scale of function and aesthetics? How can we define digital art's role in our society? Where do we draw the line between form and function?

I need to explore this more. Stay tuned.