ガイ・ララミー作： 広辞苑からできた龍安寺
Guy LARAMIE: Carving of the famous Zen rock garden Ryōanji in the pages of the Kōjien (Japanese dictionary)
There are more of Laramie’s book carvings at Visualnews and the artist’s own webpage.
A few weeks ago, I saw Werner Herzog’s new and unforgettable documentary The Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010) about the recently discovered Chauvet caves in southern France. These caves contain the world’s earliest known art, dating back 32,000 years, but as this trailer shows, the paintings are stunningly vivid, full of dramatic power, and dynamism. Watching the film, one cannot help but marvel at the expressive, creative power of the human soul. To be human is to create.
Venus, by Kate Macdowel
Venus, daylit side view , 9”x14”x9”, hand built porcelain, cone 6 glazes, acrylic gel, halogen light, wiring, 12/2006
Cy Twombly, Problem II & III (1966)
Museum of Modern Art, Frankfurt
One of my favorite artists, the idiosyncratic and always interesting Cy Twombly has passed away. His wild and scribble-like drawings and paintings, almost always executed on a grand scale, still somehow always manage to maintain something personable and intimate about them, something that draws the viewer into his playfully warm world. (The ability to create a warm and inviting work while just using scribbly, free, stridently non-representational—perhaps even anti-representational lines is itself quite a feat, rarely achieved by his abstract expressionist contemporaries.
This work, which I photographed just the other day at the Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt, reminds me of the kind of simple image a young, learning child might draw on the great blackboards at school as he is learning about the wondrous shapes that make up the world. The title, Problem, suggests exactly this sort of innocent query as some child (or childlike artist) attempts to solve a problem of shape, form, and line.
The New York Times ran this story about the death of Cy Twombly.
Cy Twombly, whose spare childlike scribbles and poetic engagement with antiquity left him stubbornly out of step with the movements of postwar American art even as he became one of the era’s most important painters, died in Rome Tuesday. He was 83.
The cause was not immediately known, although Mr. Twombly had suffered from cancer. His death was announced by the Gagosian Gallery, which represents his work.
Michael Stravato for The New York TimesCy Twombly in 2005.
In a career that slyly subverted Abstract Expressionism, toyed briefly with Minimalism, seemed barely to acknowledge Pop Art and anticipated some of the concerns of Conceptualism, Mr. Twombly was a divisive artist almost from the start. The curator Kirk Varnedoe, on the occasion of a 1994 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, wrote that his work was “influential among artists, discomfiting to many critics and truculently difficult not just for a broad public, but for sophisticated initiates of postwar art as well.” The critic Robert Hughes called him “the Third Man, a shadowy figure, beside that vivid duumvirate of his friends Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.”
Mr. Twombly’s decision to settle permanently in southern Italy in 1957 as the art world shifted decisively in the other direction, from Europe to New York, was only the most symbolic of his idiosyncrasies. He avoided publicity throughout his life and mostly ignored his critics, who questioned constantly whether his work deserved a place at the forefront of 20th-century abstraction, though he lived long enough to see it arrive there. It didn’t help that his paintings, because of their surface complexity and whirlwinds of tiny detail – scratches, erasures, drips, penciled fragments of Italian and classical verse amid scrawled phalluses and buttocks – lost much of their power in reproduction.
But Mr. Twombly, a tall, rangy Virginian who once practiced drawing in the dark to make his lines less purposeful, steadfastly followed his own program and looked to his own muses: often literary ones like Catullus, Rumi, Pound and Rilke. He seemed to welcome the privacy that came with unpopularity.
“I had my freedom and that was nice,” he said in a rare interview, with Nicholas Serota, the director of the Tate, before a 2008 survey of his career at the Tate Modern.
The critical low point probably came after a 1964 exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York that was widely panned. The artist and writer Donald Judd, who was hostile toward painting in general, was especially damning even so, calling the show a fiasco. “There are a few drips and splatters and an occasional pencil line,” he wrote in a review. “There isn’t anything to these paintings.”
But by the 1980s, with the rise of neo-Expressionism, a generation of younger artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat found inspiration in Mr. Twombly’s skittery bathroom-graffiti scrawl. Coupled with rising interest in European artists whose work shared unexpected ground with Mr. Twombly’s, like that of Joseph Beuys, the new-found attention brought him a kind of critical favor he had never enjoyed. And by the next decade he was highly sought after not only by European museums and collectors, who had discovered his work early on, but also by those back in his homeland who had not known what to make of him two decades before.
In 1989 the Philadelphia Museum of Art opened permanent rooms dedicated to his monumental 10-painting cycle, “Fifty Days at Iliam,” based on Alexander Pope’s translation of the “Iliad.” (Mr. Twombly said that he had purposely misspelled “Ilium,” a Latin name for Troy, with an “a,” to refer to Achilles.) That same year, Mr. Twombly’s work passed the million-dollar mark at auction. In 1995 the Menil Collection in Houston opened a new gallery dedicated to his work, designed by Renzo Piano after a plan by Mr. Twombly himself. Despite this growing acceptance, Mr. Varnedoe still felt it necessary to include an essay in the Modern’s newsletter at the time of the retrospective, titled “Your Kid Could Not Do This, and Other Reflections on Cy Twombly.”
In the only written statement that Mr. Twombly ever made about his work, a short essay in an Italian art journal in 1957, he tried to make clear that his intentions were not subversive but elementally human. Each line he made, he said, was “the actual experience” of making the line, adding: “It does not illustrate. It is the sensation of its own realization.” Years later he described this more plainly. “It’s more like I’m having an experience than making a picture.” The process stood in stark contrast to the detached, effete image that often clung to Mr. Twombly. After completing a work, in a kind of ecstatic state, it was as if the painting existed and he barely did anymore: “I usually have to go to bed for a couple of days.”
Donna Collins
Puffy Bear Panda with Friends
Donna Collins, one of Kalamazoo’s most interesting and consistently fun independent artists, has a wonderful new blog, full of her strange and quirky pieces of art. An article about her in the Seattle Times said the following.
Her materials are a mixed bag of delights: glitter and brown wrapping paper, tempera paints and sewing notions. Her bright, exuberant 3-D pieces are framed in vintage windows; their funky wit and brilliant palette is truly irresistible.
Yet her art has rigor; its humor and its upbeat brilliance are double-edged. This has been recognized by her growing cult of collectors, which include the actresses Susan Sarandon and Roseanne, as well as their fellow L.A. resident Courtney Love.
The Kalamazoo Gazette has said this about her after a show here in Kalamazoo.
It’s refreshing to see that even though Collins has begun to sell more work and get some recognition for the sweet, free-wheeling, funny pieces that she has done up until now, she shows no inclination to stay safely within the confines of what has proven saleable.
Instead, she has followed her natural instincts and turned her attentions toward the mysteries of love, inspiration, and spirituality, delivering work that opens up new territory while retaining the unabashedly goofy wit, imagination and completely uncontrived sincerity that made her earlier works so appealing.
I have two pieces of her art at my house: a gigantic pink cat done in sparkly glitter, and a window dressing in which she has created an elaborate scene with mice and cats sitting down to drink tea. (The mice are created in the same way as the photo above.) Even after looking at them for years, they still give me a kick every time I see them.
“Vandal” Artists Add Satirical Painting of Fukushima to Public Art in Tokyo
Everyone who passes through Shibuya Station, one of Tokyo’s busiest and most important train stations, is familiar with the famous mural by Okamoto Tarō, The Myth of Tomorrow, which hangs in one of the public hallways connecting the many train lines that converge there. This important painting, probably one of the most famous pieces of public art in Tokyo, depicts a human being at the moment of a nuclear blast and expresses strong doubts about the myth of progress and man’s relationship to science, particular nuclear energy.
Late on April 30, a group of six men and women “vandal” artists who call themselves Chim↑Pom installed without permission a new satirical panel in the lower right corner of Okamoto’s painting, showing the meltdown at the Fukushima reactors. This public display seems to tap into the the nation’s angst and disappointment surrounding the fact that the myth of safe nuclear energy, which led to the creation of the Fukushima reactors a few decades ago, had in fact resulted in the biggest nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.
The panel was done in a style that closely approximated Okamoto’s style, and it fit extremely well into the overall design of Okamoto’s painting. The addition of the panel did not cause any damage, but it was quickly taken down by the police, and according to an article on the Yomiuri Shibun’s online website, it is possible that the six artists will be charged with a misdemeanor crime.
This incident caught the attention of the Japanese blogosphere and Twitter world. Here are some photographs of the panel taken from a Japanese blog post about the now infamous panel. 
AFP published this article about the incident.
Japan police end nuclear art stunt
(AFP) – May 1, 2011TOKYO — An anonymous painter in Japan at the weekend added an image of the stricken Fukushima atomic plant to a public mural about the horrors of a nuclear explosion by the late abstract master Taro Okamoto.
The clandestine add-on image — painted in a style mimicking that of Okamoto’s “Myth of Tomorrow” on display at a busy Tokyo train station — created a stir on Twitter before police took it down Sunday evening.
The small wooden panel — which shows black smoke billowing from reactor buildings resembling those at Fukushima — was attached to the wall without causing damage to the original 30-metre (100-foot) long wall painting.
Okamoto, who was born 100 years ago and died in 1996, is one of Japan’s best-known modern artists. Strongly influenced by Pablo Picasso, he is known for his abstract paintings and sculptures, including his “Tower of the Sun” erected for the Osaka Expo in 1970.
“Myth of Tomorrow”, created in Mexico in 1968-69, went missing for years but was rediscovered in 2003, returned to Japan and finally installed at a pedestrian overpass at the capital’s busy Shibuya railway station in 2008.
The non-profit organisation that is the guardian of the painting was quoted as saying by local media: “It is an outrageous prank and we are troubled.”
An official with the group said “it is problematic to create a link when many people are suffering” between the horror of an atomic bomb explosion and the crisis at the tsunami-hit nuclear plant, the Tokyo Shimbun reported.
Japan’s massive earthquake and tsunami on March 11 destroyed the cooling systems of the Fukushima plant, causing explosions and fires. The plant has since leaked radioactive substances into the air, ground and sea.
Here are some more photographs showing the now infamous panel beginning to fall from the wall.
