https://www.amazon.com/Famous-Artists-Course-Lessons-24/dp/B000BPIO5M
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Wednesday, February 28, 2018
Tuesday, February 27, 2018
Sunday, February 25, 2018
Art May Have Helped Shape Human Cognition and Language
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Art May Have Helped Shape Human Cognition and Language
// Archaeological Headlines - Archaeology Magazine
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS—According to a report in The Boston Globe, linguist Shigeru Miyagawa of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his colleagues think that cave art could offer clues to the evolution of language. Ancient paintings are often found in acoustic "hot spots" in caves, where the artists may have experienced echoes of the sounds they generated. Miyagawa suggests modern humans would have had to use a cognitive process to convert the acoustic signal into a mental representation, and then externalize it as a symbolic drawing. For example, the artists might have recreated the sounds of hoof beats, experienced the echo, and then drawn images of hoofed animals. He notes that cave art has been found all over the world, just like human language. For more, go to "he First Artists."
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Thursday, February 22, 2018
Tuesday, February 20, 2018
Classic Disney Animation Roughs
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Classic Disney Animation Roughs
// Deja View
Rough drawings from various Disney productions offered at recent a animation auctions.
I always find it interesting to see individual drawing styles by the animators.
Marc Davis drew Maleficent very clean, as did most everybody on Sleeping Beauty. Because of the specific style in the characters' design the animators didn't trust their clean up artists to interpret their roughs. That meant drawing as clean as you possibly could.
A powerful Woolie Reitherman rough from the rat sequence at the end of the film.Woolie's last animation before becoming a director.
One of Milt Kahl's lovely Wendy drawings. He did not enjoy the assignment, but as usual he did an amazing job interpreting Kathryn Beaumont's live action reference.
Woolie also animated action scenes with Captain Hook and Perter Pan.
John Musker believes that this sequence is John Lounsbery's work. Nope, it's Woolie.
Oh boy, Eric Larson felt so bad about his animation of the prince in Cinderella. He told me he'd like to do it over again.
This drawing is from a Marc Davis Scene. (Not sure about the hand holding the letter.) But overall Marc's animation of Cinderella is breathtaking.
Fred Moore animated the Three Little Wolves in the this 1936 short film. Just beautiful!!
A clean up study by Iwao Takamoto over Marc Davis' animation. Shapes and lines in perfect harmony.
Bill Tylta animated the sequence before and during the "washing up section." Gorgeous animation that needed top clean up artists to finish it off.
A Fred Moore rough animation drawing. So full of life, and such an intuitive feeling for the character.
We are standing on the shoulders of giants!!
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Animal Linocuts by Norbertine Bresslern-Roth
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Animal Linocuts by Norbertine Bresslern-Roth
// Gurney Journey
Norbertine Bresslern-Roth (1891-1978) was an Austrian printmaker who specialized in animal subjects.
Her preferred medium was the linoleum block print, which suited her strong sense of design.
She studied at the animal painting academy of Hans von Hayek, where students painted landscapes and animals on farms near Dachau.
She was inspired by a trip to Africa, and later by trips to the zoo. Most of her African compositions are based on her deep knowledge of animal anatomy, with poses that could never be taken directly from photography.
She often used the linoleum reduction process, where the same plate is used several times for progressively darker ink runs. With each color run, more and more of the block is cut away.
Even for a simple subject, this process requires careful planning, and since you destroy the plate, you can't go back and print more.
Her birds, fish, and insect subjects, show striking color combinations. Her art is well known to lino-cut artists, but not as well known as it should be to painters and other artists.
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Wikipedia (in German) Norbertine Bresslern-Roth
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Monday, February 19, 2018
Friday, February 16, 2018
Born to paint?
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Born to paint?
// Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect
More than a hundred billion people have ever lived. Perhaps 1,000 have been widely heralded as artistic geniuses who painted in oils.
And perhaps there were another thousand genius physicists and just one Nobel-Prize winning folksinger.
We sell ourselves short when we argue that there's something magical about creative work, something that can only happen if we're born to do it.
It's not that different from the thesis that there's something in the DNA of Spanish-speaking people that makes them good at soccer. I hope we can agree that people from countries that speak Spanish are more likely to be soccer stars because they grow up surrounded by soccer, with the expectation that they too can be good at it.
It's not too late for you to be a genius. It comes at a price, but it's not based on your DNA.
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Valentine’s Day postcards by Winsor McCay
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Valentine's Day postcards by Winsor McCay
// Zontar of Venus
printed by Raphael Tuck & Sons/New York Herald Co, 1907
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Wednesday, February 14, 2018
A Single Book Disrupts the Foundation of a Brick Wall by Jorge Méndez Blake
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A Single Book Disrupts the Foundation of a Brick Wall by Jorge Méndez Blake
// Colossal
The Castle is a 2007 project by Mexican artist Jorge Méndez Blake that subtly examines the impact of a single outside force. For the installation, he constructed a 75 x 13 foot brick wall that balances on top of a single copy of Franz Kafka's The Castle. The mortarless wall bulges at the site of the inserted text, creating an arch that extends to the top of the precarious structure.
Although a larger metaphor could be applied to the installation no matter what piece of literature was chosen, Méndez Blake specifically selected The Castle to pay tribute to Kafka's lifestyle and work. The novelist was a deeply introverted figure who wrote privately throughout his life, and was only published posthumously by his friend Max Brod. This minimal, yet poignant presence is reflected in the brick work—Kafka's novel showcasing how a small idea can have a monumental presence.
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Monday, February 12, 2018
Sunday, February 11, 2018
Meural Canvas Gesture-Controlled Digital Art Frame Goes Version 2.0
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Meural Canvas Gesture-Controlled Digital Art Frame Goes Version 2.0
// Design MilkDesign Milk
The Meural Canvas earned a place as one of our past Tech Gift Guide picks, an early prognosticator of the digital art canvas category explosion that introduced an entire world of both static and animated artwork intended to replace or supplement traditional wall art. The first Meural stood out for its unique gesture-based controls, and it's now heading into its second iteration with several refinements and options.
Meural is offered in two versions: the 20 by 50.2 by 1.6 inches Winslow Canvas surrounded by a tasteful 1.5-inch natural walnut frame, or the slightly smaller framed Leonora Canvas available in either black or white. Both models use the same 27-inch 1080p LCD partnered with 8GB of memory (4GB for storing art, and 4GB for storing firmware and software updates). The only difference is the size and material of the exterior frame, with each capable of displaying a wide assortment of image and video files: JPG, GIF, PNG, BMP, and SVG. Looking beyond stills, users can even upload or manually install MP4 or MOV movie files. Note, the Canvas does set a 200MB limit per file and the display doesn't include speakers, but it does open a world of possibilities for displaying silent videos.
Like the first Meural Canvas, the newest model comes equipped with motion sensors giving users the ability to swipe up, down, left, or right to navigate settings and selections. This updated model's gesture efficiency has been notably improved in comparison to the sometimes sluggish first edition, especially while hung on the wall, but it's still preferable to access the Canvas using an iOS or Android connected device, which is still quicker for reviewing artwork collections or changing settings. However, we discovered guests demoing our loaner unit nearly always preferred using gesture controls versus the app, revealing sometimes faster isn't always as wondrous.
Gesture control is standard with both version of the Meural Canvas, but the optimized iOS app is still our preferred method of reviewing and selecting artwork to display.
Forgoing a 4K resolution upgrade, the Meural team instead focused on improving the Canvas's viewing angle and color accuracy, which in combination with the display's effective matte screen and an environmentally aware adaptive brightness system, gives artwork and photography a natural and pleasantly clear appearance from normal viewing distances. The result is a digital art frame emphasizing "art" rather than the "digital", and thankfully so when considering gracing the walls with artwork benefitting from a subtle and nuanced approach.
Wall space and the room itself may dictate a preference for either a vertical or horizontal orientation, and the Canvas serves this need automatically by reorienting its display and switch to artwork intended for vertical or horizontal modes. Wall mounting hardware is included and is extremely easy to install even for a single person; we do wish in the future Meural team would develop a simpler option for adjusting the display to rotate between orientation modes, which would undoubtedly please indecisive types.
A sample of horizontal and vertical art made available to Meural users culled from a curated library of tens of thousands of licensed artworks made available via my.meural (available with subscription).
Although the Meural Canvas works as a solitary option, it's best as a supplement mixed in with traditional wall art; integrated side by side with paintings, photography, or prints, the digital display offers a novel option to showcase curated collections of artwork of both a personal or professional nature, any which can be magically called up with a swipe of the hand – something no framed piece of traditional static art can yet do.
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Friday, February 9, 2018
Thursday, February 8, 2018
James Brunt Organizes Leaves and Rocks Into Elaborate Cairns and Mandalas
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James Brunt Organizes Leaves and Rocks Into Elaborate Cairns and Mandalas
// Colossal
James Brunt creates elaborate ephemeral artworks using the natural materials he finds in forests, parks, and beaches near his home in Yorkshire, England. This form of land art, popularized and often associated with fellow Brit Andy Goldsworthy, involves detailed patterns, textures, and shapes formed using multiples of one kind of material. Brunt collects twigs, rocks, and leaves and arranges them in mandala-like spirals and concentric circles. He photographs his finished work to document it before nature once again takes hold of his materials. The artist frequently shares updates via Twitter and Facebook where he sometimes invites the public to join him as he works. Brunt also offers prints of his photographed artworks on his website.
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Wednesday, February 7, 2018
Tuesday, February 6, 2018
I Am Loved: Nikki Giovanni’s Poems for Kids, Selected and Illustrated by Beloved 94-Year-Old Artist Ashley Bryan
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I Am Loved: Nikki Giovanni's Poems for Kids, Selected and Illustrated by Beloved 94-Year-Old Artist Ashley Bryan
// Brain Pickings
A vibrant ode to the inherent poetry of existence.
It is often said that we are born scientists — naturally curious, tickled rather than daunted by the unknown, unafraid to experiment and to stumble in learning the world. Broadening the common ground between science and poetry is the awareness that we are equally born poets — children rejoice in the sandbox of language, where word and image are castled into wild possibilities of meaning, their minds sculpted by the magic of metaphor.
In the tradition of Edna St. Vincent Millay's illustrated poems for young people, Maya Angelou's courageous children's verses illustrated by Basquiat, and T.S. Eliot's classic cat poems illustrated by Edward Gorey, now comes I Am Loved (public library) — a lovely set of poems by Nikki Giovanni (b. June 7, 1943), one of the great poets of our time, illustrated by the prolific ninety-four-year-old artist, storyteller, and humanitarian Ashley Bryan (b. July 13, 1923).
Animated by his lifelong ardor for poetry, Bryan selected a dozen of Giovanni's poems to bring to life in his unmistakable style — artwork vibrant and irrepressibly alive, radiating the native poetry of existence. Here he is reciting the Langston Hughes poem that ignited and continues to stoke his love of poetry:
A SONG FOR BLACKBIRD
by Nikki Giovanni(for Carolyn Rodgers, October 4, 2010)
We look for words:
intelligent intense
chocolate warm
ambitious cautiousto describe a person
We design monuments:
the Pyramids the Taj Mahal
the Lincoln Memorial the Empire State Building
the Wrigley Building Coffinsto say someone was loved
We sing a sad blue
Song
We sing a river — no — bridge
Song
We sing a Song of a Blackbird
To SayYou will be missed.
BECAUSE
by Nikki GiovanniI wrote a poem
for you because
you are
my little boyI wrote a poem
for you because
you are
my darling daughterand in this poem
I sang a song
that says
as time goes on
I am you
and you are me
and that's how life
goes on
KIDNAP POEM
by Nikki Giovanniever been kidnapped
by a poet
if i were a poet
i'd kidnap you
put you in my phrases and meter
you to jones beach
or maybe coney island
or maybe just to my house
lyric you in lilacs
dash you in the rain
blend into the beach
to complement my see
play the lyre for you
ode you with my love song
anything to win you
wrap you in red Black green
show you off to mama
yeah if i were a poet i'd kid
nap you
NO HEAVEN
by Nikki GiovanniHow can there be
No heaven
When rain falls
gently on the grass
When sunshine scampers
across my toesWhen corn bakes
into bread
When wheat melts
into cakeWhen shadows
cool
And owls
call
And little finches
eat upside
downHow can there be
No HeavenWhen tears comfort
When dreams caress
When you smile
at me
Complement the immeasurably wonderful I Am Loved with this illustrated collection of classic love poems, then revisit Nikki Giovanni on love, her poems celebrating libraries and librarians, and her fantastic forgotten conversation with James Baldwin.
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