From the cover of a 1922 ladies magazine – Image courtesy of The Graphics Fairy
Across the Bored has been rousted from hibernation, caught off-guard by the sudden arrival of 2 sunny days in a row. A larder in need of replenishing and a largish holiday weekend entailing some unexpected guests over the next 72 hours means intellectual pursuits will have to be put on the back-burner. Time to dig out the Easter baskets and pysanka….
Back to F is also for Friday next week.
It is doubtful if anyone in the last three decades has more prolifically caricatured the odd and interestingly recognizable events of everyday life than Roz Chast. David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, does not hesitate in calling the 58 year-old cartoonist “The magazine’s only certifiable genius” and the evidence is easily found in the watercolour-washed and inked panels that have graced its pages for the last 30 years.
we are all guiltyThe appeal in the shaky, quirky style lies in its urban icons – the message is not lost in any perfect graphic portrayal of the parts, we instantly recognize the whole whether it is a situation we have faced, something we may have seen or just random stuff and nonsense that flies out of left field. In a black and white framed snapshot of the absurd, multiple panels spread out over a few pages, a magazine cover, even a hooked rug or pysanka, most of Chast’s work is self-explanatory, readers either laugh or just don’t get it.
Chast has admitted that she is an anxious person, sometimes suffering from insomnia but rather than letting this have a crippling effect, it informs her cartoons and books with all those bits that we hate, have phobias of, secretly know and hide or have thought about while tossing restlessly around in bed at 3 AM. Like the best social commentary, she lays it out like a royal flush for all to see – these kinds of reflections on existence are far from pedestrian, Ms. Chast’s style creates a neutrality, a world where we are all a little off and most of the time just as strange as our neighbours.
pick one – or add your custom card to the collectionLife, whether it is domestic, family or work, provides sufficient material for Ms. Chast and more than enough to fill the pages of over a dozen books: one can lose many hours glued to the pages of the Theories of Everything: Selected Collected and Health-Inspected Cartoons, a compilation of the cartoons published in The New Yorker, Scientific American and the Harvard Business Review.
This cartoonist’s perspective is as genuine as the characters portrayed in her work – the typical glossy “author photo” on the dustcover would seem inappropriate and so a cartoon of a woman much like Roz herself smiles quizzically back at us.
We find ourselves in Roz Chast’s cartoons for we are her “everyman”.
Read more on:
Roz Chast
Roz Chast at the Julie Saul Gallery
Roz Chast appreciates Art
Depending on the occasion, anyone one with younger members in the household will know how difficult it can be just to speak to one another in the same language. Inane bits of conversation ranging from “how was your afternoon” to “please put your boots on the mat” can lead to fiery flare-ups, snorts of derision with rolling eyeball accompaniment or the best of the bunch, the snappy answer. From either party involved. It was one of those days and the best option was not to say anything at all because if we did it would have been, inevitably, much worse.
A moment’s solitude was in order and we happened to be in the vicinity of the local greenhouse which we hadn’t stepped foot into since our own monsters were small and in need of some winding down. In our own childhood, the place had seemed enormous with exotic plants hanging off raised beds and a banana tree with fruit dangling within a monkey’s reach tucked in a wing off the back. As recently as 20 years ago the glass house, as the Ghost liked to call it, had a heavy warmth filled with the sweet perfume of tropical flowers in the dead of winter and a koi pond whose occupants would swim up to the surface in the hopes of being fed. Today the door opened upon nannies with strollers seeking their own few minutes of peace while their under-fives bent over a rather sad display of non-descript between-season blooms. The air wasn’t as close and wet as we remember, the koi had been moved, their pond now filled with pennies and the dark water where they now hid from prying eyes didn’t invite closer inspection. The plants looked as though they had been donated by apartment dwellers with black thumbs – those that had once been green and fresh in some florist’s shop with all the promise of growth and sun and plenty of water had shrunk to shadows of their former glory, leaves a bit brown around the edges with blossoms trying vainly to shout colour into the wilderness of the hothouse. Evidently the man who used to take such care, who had a gift for nurturing his green charges was long gone and his apprentices had learned little, didn’t care or perhaps just didn’t know any better. Two nurseries once filled with odd-shaped plants from far corners of the world were closed – hopefully they are filled with seedlings and bright buds for the upcoming Easter exhibition. It took all of ten minutes to make the rounds and as much as we wanted, not even one photo opportunity presented itself – the iphone stayed sleeping in our pocket.
The library attached to this small botanical garden is in much better condition – clean and quiet in the adult stacks, a little more boisterous and chaotic in the children’s section, it boasts a lovely sitting room with floral scrollwork hand-painted around the edge of a coffered ceiling. People come and spread out their books on the massive oak tables, study, look through thick art tomes or just breathe a sigh of relief in one of the comfortable, green leather reading chairs. That is exactly what we did.
sitting quietly seems to have helpedMore on visions of life as we know it by Roz Chast next week.
John Robert Cozens the18th century British painter of romantic watercolour landscapes often visited Italy finding the tranquil vistas, and that of Castel Gandolfo in particular, inspirational to his work. Although John Constable considered him “the greatest genius that ever touched landscape” his work was rejected by the Royal Academy, no doubt contributing to the nervous breakdown which eventually led to his hospitalization at the Bethlem Royal Hospital Asylum. In June 2010 Cozen’s Lake Albano (c.1777) sold at a Sotheby’s auction in London to David Thomson the Canadian media tycoon for £2.4 million, a record for any 18th-century British watercolour and quadruple its estimated price.
The above detail of Francis Towne‘s panorama (1781) is a lovely example of a watercolour-tinted drawing: soft tints of colour are layered over the dark ink wash with the details picked up in pen and ink to sharpen and highlight the details of the foreground. Unlike Cozens, who inspired William Turner and other English contemporaries, Towne’s more lithographic and antiquated style seems to have had little influence (apart from perhaps John Varley and John Sell Cotman) on the succeeding generation of romantic artists. His elegant loose drawing style and almost abstract wash designs nonetheless convey the serenity and warmth of the region of Lazio.
Self-taught landscape and portrait painter Joseph Wright of Derby is best known for his canvases capturing the spirit of the Industrial Revolution. Some twenty years after Cozens, he must also have felt the call of warmer climes and the less frantic pace of the countryside surrounding Castel Gandolfo. Although a frequent contributor to exhibitions at the Royal Academy, he declined becoming a full member due to a slight he believed had been directed at him by members.
Like many other French painters of the early 19th Century, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot journeyed to Italy in 1825 to refine his skills. He was extraordinarily productive completing over 200 drawings and 150 paintings during his three-year stay. Corot made two return visits to the country where he had been so prolific and each time returned to the same spot to capture once again the scenery of that had so entranced him as a novice.
The American painter George Inness spent almost eight years in Italy in the 1870s perfecting his picturesque and panoramic style. Influenced by the old Masters, Nicolas Poussin, and the Hudson River and Barbizon Schools, his paintings are meticulously composed, saturated with colour and include precise detail. The wide open skies and views from the hillsides surrounding Lake Albano seem to have nurtured his predilection for the theology of Emanuel Swedenborg for upon his return to America his work became infused with a more abstract, mystical component. Inness died in 1894 in Scotland where, according to his son, he was enjoying the setting sun when all of a sudden he threw his hands into the air with the exclamation “My God! oh, how beautiful!”, upon which he fell to the ground and passed away minutes later.
A multitude of artists, past and present, famous and unknown, have set up their easels and balanced sketchbooks on their knees to capture Lake Albano and Castel Gandolfo – though the details of the landscape may change with the passing of the years and man though managed encroaches, its beauty like the art it inspired remains timeless.
Read more on Landscape Art here…
Benedict, Pope Emeritus, awoke this morning to look out on Lake Albano one of the flock rather than the shepherd. Gone is the life in a style to which he had become accustomed, the weight of the world as it were lifted from his shoulders, the red shoes and the Ring of the Fisherman accessories no longer in his service to the Church. Castel Gandolfo will be his place of respite until an awkward return to the monastery Mater Ecclesiae in the Vatican when a successor is elected.
The small coastline town southeast of Rome, which Benedict is no doubt familiar with, has a history long associated with not only the papacy but the European artistic community as well. Painters, many considered Old Masters, from the French, British and Italian schools found a source of inspiration in the area’s rolling hills and classic vistas. It provided all the elements that more northern climes could not – a softness of light from mediterranean skies that kissed the ground with warmth, dusty variegated greens that knew little of seasons with snow and the requisite peasants with their animal charges seemingly dropped by the muses into an idyllic setting waiting to be immortalized on canvas. The Castel Gandolfo is often small and blurred in the distance, an architectural feature that is the only hint at man’s imprint on the face of nature.
It is has been for centuries a place of sanctuary, a bastion of solitude in a world torn by war and strife – may it bring to Benedict, as it did to generations of artists and writers, divine inspiration.
More on Castel Gandolfo in art next week.
The original enfant terrible and darling of couture royalty, Puerto Rican born Antonio Lopez was a graduate of FIT in New York and parlayed a talent for dazzling illustration into a lucrative career and heady lifestyle. Incorporating the current trends in art into his depiction of fashion in the late 60s, he was not averse to mixing media within the same piece sometimes using a combination of pencil, pen and ink, charcoal and watercolour to achieve the desired emphasis on detail. His life in Paris in the 70s was the gateway to the beautiful people and served as inspiration for much of his work – credited with having discovered Jerry Hall, Grace Jones and Tina Chow, when he wasn’t drawing he was a more than willing participant in the riotous extravagance that was the dawn of the disco era. 
It is twenty-five years since Lopez passed away from complications related to Kaposi’s Sarcoma during the height of the AIDS epidemic and fitting that both a retrospective exhibition, “Antonio’s World”, at Suzanne Geiss Company in Soho and a book by Rizzoli, “Antonio: Fashion, Art, Sex, & Disco”, are presenting his work to the generation that had forgotten of his existence and those who never knew of his incredible legacy to the art of illustration in the fashion world.
For more on this illustrator visit:
In another lifetime every living breathing minute was devoted to fashion, art and the pursuit of activities that were somehow design related – it was the 1980s and everyone we knew, or at least the ones we admitted into the sphere filled with such rarified air one walked at least a foot above the ground, was oh-so-cool and doing something big, bold, shocking and usually public. It was the beginning of the glorification of brands, of celebrities becoming the poster children for trends and the public developing an unsatiable appetite for the latest thing that has brought our credit-dependent economy to where it flails about bloated and helpless today.
We’ve had some discussions recently with the Ghost and Miss Z about how much of what they see, hear, wear and take for granted comes out of the 80s – not to say that this was the most fabulous era, for many of us there are great chunks of it missing from our memories, but it was one in which extremely creative people thrived and produced and influenced others without the bonus of readily available internet. Sometimes it is hard to imagine that we ever got so much done…
Print media was huge and we spent more than our fair share on glossy publications from Europe and the States to feed our cravings. Loaded with enough inspiration for a hundred lifetimes, these magazines also made us fall in love with those who were capturing the essence of the era. Antonio Lopez, a prolific artist with an unfortunately brief but meteoric career, was one such object of adulation: he changed the way the world saw art, design and clothing as inextricably intertwined and some say, singlehandedly revived the art of fashion illustration.
More on the work of Antonio Lopez next week.
Everyone knows that bad habits are hard to break but those that may masquerade as good ones are sometimes even more difficult. What once upon a time seemed like frivolity, a dalliance, a minor amusement, can become addiction, obsession, a time-sucking void upon whose edge we teeter precariously while all else falls away into the blackness of eternity.
So with that in mind, in an effort to fit as much creative productivity into 24 hours while still managing to get some sleep, attend to the quotidian demands of real life and retain some semblance of sanity without losing too many bits, Across the Bored resolves to:
BUT
We also find ourselves having to:
So not bad in all, nothing all of us can’t live with and hopefully just as entertaining…
Find as many visual declarations as there are days in the New Year at the Weekly Photo Challenge: Resolved.
But a portion of the whole
Doomsday hour, like Y2K and the recurrent fiery comet, has passed leaving us all enormously thankful that we can celebrate the dawn of a new cosmic age. For those who had put off their holiday shopping until after the Big Event, it just proves once more that procrastination is perhaps not the best solution to a persistent problem. With that out of the way, we can all go back to living our lives and getting on with the tasks at hand – perhaps some time in the future we may even visit the lands that gave rise to this latest apocalyptic rumour – Latin and Central America.
Well worth a trip for its sheer magnitude is the tripartite 250 square metre mural, Presencia de América Latina, painted in acrylics on rough stucco by Mexican artist Jorge González Camarena after an earthquake damaged part of the University of Concepción, Chile. The artist’s vision was, in his words, one of “genetic and cultural unity, and of course, the target of our continent ” – visually loaded with a mulitplicity of ideograms and symbology, the history of Latin America can be viewed chronologically from right to left. As an example of Muralism, this distinct art form not only presented familiar subjects in a new light but also provided for political expression stemming from Camarena’s (and other muralists) indigenous roots.
The verses of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda that run along the top of the gigantic work are not exclusive – how can we, as temporary occupants of this small earth, not look around ourselves no matter where we are and not think the same…
Discover more at:
Jorge González Camarena
Pablo Neruda
Mexican Muralism
No Doomsday this
Now it is Christmas again – Carl Larsson, 1907
Works by Swedish painter Carl Larsson are informed by a very visible love of family – in the soft shades and warm light of often idyllic scenes of home, the artist provides us respite, he offers us in watercolour the relationship between beauty and all that is morally good. The domestic scenes, especially those of Christmas, remain fresh and appealing for they represent what most of us strive for – a few peaceful moments in the company of loved ones where the cares of the world have fallen away.
For many December is bittersweet, a time for reflection upon the past but also for forging traditions – those small customs for the benefit of the young, they who do not yet realize the importance of their heritage and who will, hopefully, keep it alive once we are gone. One wonders whether Larsson was familiar with Ring Out, Wild Bells by Alfred Lord Tennyson. The poem has been recited at the annual New Year’s Eve Celebration at Skansen in Stockholm every year since 1897. Its themes are clear and precise, as relevant today as they were when it was first published in 1850.
Read more about these subjects:
Carl Larsson
Arts and Crafts Movement
Alfred Lord Tennyson
Gareth Davies-Jones reading Ring Out
Slices of heaven – vanilla never looked so good…
Fridays are usually when Across the Bored highlights art and artists but today is somewhat different in that Travel. Garden. Eat. has graciously presented us with the Liebster Award! Around the Cake by Wayne Thiebaud – one of the penultimate painters of common objects – is a sweet offering to express my gratitude to Kat and all those who read, comment, follow and inspire me with something new on a daily basis.
Someone once said that we form an opinion about the person from their actions – from what we see of them. Certainly true and often limiting in realworld situations, the multiverse of blogging gives total strangers an idea of who we want to be, who we think we are – from the words and images we present. By following the Rules for the Liebster Award (see farther below) we throw another wrench into the gears…
11 things very few people know about me:
11 answers to 11 Kat questions:
Now here is the really good stuff:
The Rules for the Liebster Award are as follows:
Due-diligence has unfortunately shown that a few of the blogs up for our nomination already had their Liebster awards while others clearly had over 200 followers eliminating them from this particular award; confirmation of follower numbers was unavailable for many, so being new at all this, we offer hearty congratulations to these 11 Liebster nominees:
So all my lovely lucky nominees, Across the Bored would love to see your answers to these 11 Across the Bored questions:
Have fun!
Back to the usual by next Friday…
Unseasonably warm, it was more of a grey day than most but the weather warns that this will be the last of it for awhile. Light rain still falls and with each drop we wonder why it feels more like March than it should in the short weeks leading up to the winter holiday – where is the first snow, the one that makes us run to the window and just stop, in silence, to look out. City or country, it is always magical.
In another lifetime and at about this same time of year, it was a tradition to look for a Christmas tree in the bush before the snow became too deep, mark it and then return with a sharp axe once the house was ready to receive it. On one such mission accomplished, the walk back was a quiet one when the scene above unfolded before us. There was no choice but to just stop – and watch as the light along the horizon slowly changed and the clouds rolled through blue, mauve and apricot. The moment marked a lifelong predilection for big sky landscapes, a quality of light and softness that makes one sigh or draw breath and hold it in as if to capture a part of this beauty for ourselves.
On New Year’s Eve decades later, a hushed midnight stroll down the main street of a small town found us awestruck once again. There in the window of a gallery was our very private memory, every detail captured as if the artist had been there with us. Morning couldn’t come soon enough.
This is what art is all about – having it grab your heart and wring from it something so deep that there are no words.
Here are a few 21st century landscape painters whose work speaks for itself:
The first snows are almost upon us. The light is changing, becoming more muted, much like the sky filtering through in this late 19th century watercolour. There is nothing like a good mystery to keep indoor life interesting and the search for information about the artist who captured the very breath of winter in these few sure brushstrokes proved riveting.
We have become accustomed to being able to find what we want with a tap on the keyboard – names, biographies, archives – and when all else fails we resort to Wikipedia, but sometimes the trail has been cold for so long that little remains. Such is the case with Japanese Pre-War painter Ginnosuke Yokouchi (1870 -1942) whose slate, apart from images of some recent reprints and works in a private collection, seems to have been wiped clean.
Oddly, the scene (above) of the little group on their way through the snow to the local temple made one think of Pissarro – it is as if the two painters were inspired by the same soft light, the crispness of the winter air and the serenity of daily village life unfolding around them, even though they were worlds and years apart.
Road to Versailles at Louveciennes – Camille Pissarro, 1869
Was Yokouchi a part of the group of Japanese painters during the Taishō period so greatly influenced by European Impressionist works? Perhaps, but for lack of a backstory, we may never know…
More to look at:
Impressionism
Ginnosuke Yokouchi at the Hanga Gallery
Japanese Watercolours
Camille Pissarro
A favourite amongst many masterworks
Across the Bored had the privilege of visiting the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts to see the French Impressionist collection currently on tour courtesy of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Consisting of four relatively small spaces whose walls were hung with the cream of the Impressionist crop, this exhibition was filled to capacity at the time of our visit. Nonetheless, the works on display are truly jaw-dropping.
Now, here comes the but – we were acting as field-trip chaperone for a group of grade 9 students from a friend’s art class…
Although well-behaved, polite, reasonably responsive (for 14 year-olds) and happy to have the afternoon off, only about 10% of them had any idea of what they were about to see. This wasn’t for lack of preparation on their teacher’s part but rather that they just didn’t care… Luckily, we had a lovely tour guide who not only knew fascinating details about the paintings presented but also had the magical gift of keeping the group relatively engaged for what could have been a very long hour otherwise. The only time she cringed was when one student kept repeating “Is it real?”
The temptation to blurt out “NO, it’s a digital reproduction – it’s a knock-off made in CHINA and you can get one in the gift shop” was great.
Afterwards, as they all sat on the stairs of the museum foyer, we made the mistake of asking them if they had liked their visit. Blank faces. Really? Well, what type of art did they like? “Music art”, “Dance art”… what? Do you mean like Warhol, Richard Hamilton or Banksy? Blank faces.
Here is what they did like…
OK, so it’s cute…
Didn’t get a chance to look at the date on this installation but it sure has echoes of Brazilian design team, Fernando and Humberto Campana’s 2002 Banquete chair…
Where is the snake?
Oh well, looks like we will be going back to the Museum. Solo this time.
More to look at:
Impressionism
Impressionist Masterpieces from the Clark Collection
Giovanni Boldini
Claude Monet
Edgar Degas
Statement Furniture: Fernando & Humberto Campana – RETROSPECT
ACROSS THE BORED 