Artists Living with Art

Artists Living with Art by Stacey Georgen and Amanda Benchley is one of those books you just enjoy having around.  (I am bummed about having to return they copy I’m reading to the library and may just have to spluge on one of my own.)  A picture book for adults, it presents photographs of art in artists’ homes alongside stories about their collections.

 

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Cover image, Artists Living with Art

 

Like the illustrated books I remember from my childhood with detailed interior scenes,  this is one you can pick up and browse and re-browse and continually discover something new.

 

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A two-page glimpse of photographer Cindy Sherman’s living room in Artists Living with Art.

 

Featured artists are: Tauba Auerbach, Francesco Clemente, Chuck Close, Will Cotton, John Currin/Rachel Feinstein, E.V. Day, Carroll Dunham/Laurie Simmons, Eric Fischl/April Gornick, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, Mary Heilmann, Rashid Johnson, Joan Jonas, Glenn Ligon, Helen Marden/Brice Marden, Marilyn Minter, Michele Oka Doner, Roxy Paine, Ellen Phelan/Joel Shapiro, Ugo Rondinone, Andres Serrano, Cindy Sherman, Pat Steir, Mickalene Thomas, Leo Villareal and Ursula Von Rydingsvard.

 

Photographed by Oberto Gili whose work has appeared in popular home design and fashion magazines like Architectural Digest and Vogue, each piece has the look and feel of an art-themed magazine spread.  Bound together the essays have a diversity and a creative field that is exciting to engage with.

 

 

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Tomato vines

I was going to review an art book for you today, Artists Living with Art by Stacey Goergen and Amanda Benchley, but the fall garden has me under its spell.  So here’s a picture of some waning tomato vines instead.  It’s super-windy right now and the sky has that weird, intense yellow-green color that we sometimes get before a storm.  It’s about to turn cold, I hear.  Are you ready for the change?  I am.  Almost.

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Tomatoes in the garden, October 2016

 

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September

September is the month my husband and I pull honey, extract it, bottle it, and bring it to market, so I always feel a little extra busy this time of year.  Beekeeping feeds my appetite for tidy/tangled botanical imagery.  In this case, it’s the impromptu grass brush he uses to brush straggler bees off combs that caught my eye.

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Honey in the comb, September 2016

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Paper by 53

Yay!  We have an iPad in the house and I am all over it, learning how to use Paper by 53, an app I’ve been dying to dig into since I learned about it at Tapestry in March.  Paper is a simple, intuitive drawing tool for the iPad used mainly by illustrators.  It has a ton of potential as a sketching tool for painters.  I would love to see more fine artists get into it.

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My first iPad drawing #madewithpaper

 

I’ve been using it for sketchnotes and to do casual sketching at home.  Here are a couple casual sketches I made of scenes from the The Knick, a TV series I like a lot.

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“This Surgery Proves How High We Can Soar,” iPad drawing #madewithpaper

 

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“This Is It, This Is All We Are,” iPad drawing #madewithpaper

 

Ready to try?  The app is simple enough for you to just download on your iPad or iPhone and start noodling around.  When you get stuck, check out this series of posts at mademistakes.  It is chock full of tips and will help un-stick you.  For more information geared toward data visualization and sketch notes, check out Catherine Madden’s website.  You may also find this free Skillshare video, How to Use Think Kit, helpful/interesting.

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Women of Abstract Expressionism in Denver

When the Denver Art Museum announced its Women of Abstract Expressionism exhibition last year it made a big splash.  ARTnews, Hyperallergic, and the New York Times published articles about it and created a nice bit of social media buzz.  (“It’s about time!” went the theme.)  Interestingly, I haven’t heard much about it since then, but did finally make it to the show which opened in June this past Saturday. It is interesting, both lovely and eyebrow raising.  Women of Abstract Expressionism presents a number of terrific paintings by women artists whose work deserves to be seen, but the show has an uneven quality that raises uncomfortable questions about art and sexism.  If you are a painter it is a must see.

 

This piece by Sonia Gechtoff is one of my favorites of the show.

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“Untitled #2” by Sonia Gechtoff, 1955, oil on canvas

Gechtoff is one of handful of “Bay Area artists”  featured in Women of Abstract Expressionism.

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Detail, “Untitled #2,” Sonia Gechtoff, 1955, oil on canvas

Another Bay Area painting, this one by Deborah Remington.

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“Exodus” by Deborah Remington, 1960, oil on canvas

The Bay Area paintings in general have an earthiness and material consciousness that make them exciting.  Their physical separation from the New York paintings in Women of Expressionism – the show unfolds across several spaces – creates cohesion and offers a counterpoint to better known works by Elaine de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner and Joan Mitchell.

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Detail, “Exodus,” Deborah Remington, 1960, oil on canvas

Joan Mitchell’s paintings, arguably the highlight of the show, looked wholly original, sensitively done and fresh to my eye.

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“Hudson River Day Line” by Joan Mitchell, 1955, oil on canvas

 

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“Cercando un Ago” by Joan Mitchell, 1957, oil on canvas.

But Elaine de Kooning’s paintings – at least the ones selected for this exhibition –  are so similar in gesture and palette to husband Willem de Kooning’s work . . .  well, it was hard not to judge them comparatively.

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“Bullfight” by Elaine De Kooning, 1959, oil on canvas

 

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Earthbound

Here it is, Earthbound, my contribution to the Boulder Barrel Project that I wrote about here: Boulder Barrel Project, and here: Color Notes.  Community projects like this always take more work than you think they will, but they are also a whole lot of fun.  For me, it was fun to work in acrylic, a medium I haven’t touched in years.  I also liked seeing the range of ideas people came up with, and, of course, supporting rainwater collection in my community.

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Earthbound, on display at Savory Spice Shop, 2041 Broadway, Boulder, Colorado starting today through mid-September, 2016.

 

See all the barrels and bid here.

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Oregano

Just because.

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A sentimental pic of a honeybee foraging on oregano in Boulder, Colorado, July 2016

 

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Oregano flowers and their tiny hairs are hard to see! I like how photographs can give a clearer picture of what’s happening with a plant at that smaller level.  The thing that most interests me here is being able to see how the oregano’s buds are arranged on each stem.  (That, and the tiny hairs. of course.)

 

 

in Source Imagery (botanical) / Uncategorized 0 comments