Monday, July 28, 2008
Art, books, chocolates and men
Beatrice Wood was born on March 3, 1893 and died 105 years later, in 1998. She lives on to those of us who know about her because of her brilliant art but perhaps even more importanlty because of her playful and exhuberant joy in living. When asked the secret of her live and longevity, her answer was “art, books, chocolates and young men.”

Today is the 111th birthday of Marcel Duchamp, he of Nude Descending a Staircase (on left) and that wild and crazy art style now as cubism.

When I saw that it is his anniversary today, I was reminded of Beatrice Wood who was one of his closest friends and is one of the people I most admire. It is one of my huge regrets that I never met her but I hope to emulate her sense of wonder and joy at everything.

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Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Alexander Calder
Happy 110th to Alexander Calder. What a wonderful addition he was to the world.

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Friday, July 4, 2008
Paintings from France
In one of those fortuitous click-throughs that happens when browsing blogs, I came upon Postcard from Provence. This amazing site is Julian Merrow-Smith's daily painting diary. He paints pottery, natural objects, found treasures, landscapes, etc. near his home in the South of France. His work is really lovely, a style you don't see much any more. His paintings are for sale by auction on the site (clever idea!).

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Saturday, June 7, 2008
Colorful abstraction
Amy Stillman has an exhibit on at the Hirschhorn Museum in Washington DC (details here). Her work is an interesting intellectual exercise as well as visually appealing. (h/t Color Addict)

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Sunday, December 23, 2007
Math
This is a considerable tangent since politics and the olidays are the main topics right now, but Bertrand Russell's quote of the day at Google caught my eye and so I decided to add it here and invite thoughts from any CRRs about it:
Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty - a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture.

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Tuesday, September 4, 2007
O and P are for op
Yes, I'm probably cheating a bit. The exercise wasn't meant to be oh-so-clever nor to rush through it, but I'm determined to get through the alphabet by the end of today or tomorrow, and why not think in a different box. Anyway, "op" originated in the sixties and seventies and meant the optical illusional art that people like Andy Warhol and Viktor Vasarely did. Derived from Bauhaus thinking, it emphasized simplicity and unusual / unexpected / clever ways to present and see things. MoMa officially kicked it off with The Responsive Eye in the mid-sixties. There is an element of trompe l'oeil to it, but that's only part of it. Warhol's famous soupcan paintings were early warning shots of what would become op art, and there were the folded canvases where you saw one painting when you stood on one side and another when you stood center-on and yet another from the other side. There were many other variations on many themes and much use of color playing against color, shape against shape. Even fashion designer Mary Quant got in on the act with her sharp-edged geometric designs. Very clever and probably computer-assisted nowadays, but brilliant at the time.

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Tuesday, August 16, 2005
HongNian Zhang
Stunning paintings here by a contemporary American oil painter and lithographer. Thanks for the site to the Fletcher Gallery and for the tip to Reflections in D Minor.

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