Animated drawing

okay, so it's probably weird that i still want to post on this blog, but oh well. i had to share this video with someone:

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

here's where i first read/heard about the video, and here's the artist's website.

Devotion to Thread

Thread/embroidery is a huge thing right now (at least, I'm really into it). I think I found out about this show, through design*sponge sometime last week. It's called Devotion to Thread and it features 15 artists who work with thread. Some deal with conventions of needlework (like Jenny Hart) and others embroider things I didn't think you could poke a needle through (like Diem Chau, who apparently embroiders...plates?). It doesn't open until May 17th, but the website has links to each artist's website.

Trees that draw

Elephants that paint, robots that draw, what's next? Trees that draw. Artist Tim Knowles attached pens to the branches of trees. The movements of the branches from the wind were recorded on paper. The result: drawings made by trees.

Chelsea Gallery Trip

Thank you all for coming. The trip was excellent. Our host at the end of the day was Lowell Pettit, Wesleyan class of '95. Look for him on YouTube and in the press- he'll be a person to watch for many years to come. He'd be a great choice as a Wesleyan guest lecturer, for anyone who is inclined to organize a symposium or lecture series!

A place to look at the full range of galleries: try Chelsea Art Galleries.com and be reminded of how many places we didn't see. This site has great a street-by street organization, as well as lists of shows that are about to close, open, and other ways of slicing and dicing the overwhelming number of exhibitions. Everything is linked to gallery websites.

Here are the main shows we viewed:

On 29th Street -
Sean Kelly Gallery
Los Carpentieros: installation of pool, beds, shelves, with watercolor drawings

On 26th Street -
Roebling Hall
Lane Twitchell: brighly colored lazer-cutout paintings
Bravin Lee Programs
Amparo Sard: paper pricked with a pin
James Cohan Gallery
Tabaimo: bathroom video, drawing installation
Rare Gallery
Jean-Pierre Roy: artist discussing his paintings, destroyed buildings
Claire Oliver Gallery
Jennifer Poon: figurative watercolors pinned to the wall on multiple sheets of paper

On 25th Street -
Tina Kim Gallery
Ghada Amer and Reza Farkhondeh: mixed media drawings with sewing, paint, etc, some erotic imagery
Betty Cuningham Gallery
John Lees: thickly layered painted landscapes and objects, some with text
PaceWildenstein
Thomas Nozkowski: small abstract paintings and works on paper, enormous gallery
ZieherSmith
Eddie Martinez: loose, brushy, cartoon-referencing abstractions

On 24th Street
Andrea Rosen
Katy Moran: small beige/grey/green/brown abstract paintings
Gagosian
Yayoi Kasuma, Steven Parrino, Anselm Reyle: group show, big gallery, Reyle is "car painting"

On 22nd Street -
PaceWildenstein
James Siena: large exhibition with wiggly lines and shapes, some faces
Max Protech
Byron Kim: abstractions of UN building and Robert Irwin Sculpture
Freidrich Petzel
Keith Edmier: We met with Jason Murison here and learned about Keith's re-made kitchen
Sikkema Jenkins
Marlene McCarty: giant pencil/ballpoint people, baptisms, gorillas
Matthew Marks
Jasper Johns: drawings

On 19th Street -
David Zwirner
Marcel Dzama: drawings, dioramas, video with live piano

Artists mentioned by Jennifer Wroblewski

I thought I'd link to images of some of the artists Jennifer Wroblewski mentioned as influences.

Jasper Johns we've mentioned on this page before, and DaVinci many of you will know. Other important ones:



Joseph Beuys (1921-1986,) a german artist important for his drawings, performances, politically reflective conceptual sculpture (among other things- a very rich and complex figure.) A great book is the 1993 Philadelphia Museum of Art Drawing catalogue.
See this good Biography from the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis.)




Cy Twombly (1928-present,) works for sale on Artnet give you a starting point- there is also a good one on display at the Yale Gallery. Considered a painter because he works frequently on canvas, his work is centered on drawing-markmaking. He has done drawings on other surfaces including chalkboards and paper.


Karen Kilimnick (1957-present,) A link to her first survey at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia in 2007. A very prominent contemporary artist, draws on popular imagery and nostalgic romanticism, among other things.



Marlene McCarty (1957-present)
Her gallery, Sikkema Jenkins, is located in Chelsea, NYC.
This blog has a great set of images. Giant pen drawings, larger than life sized figures, semi-nudes.

Troy Brauntuch

Troy Brauntuch makes eerie, ethereal conte drawings on cotton. They are reminiscent of old photographs in their fuzziness and intimacy and kind of give me nightmares about lives I may have once lived or may be living in another lighter dimension.





At Friedrich Petzel

Applicants for Drawing Position

Here are the web pages for the artists who are applying to teach at Wesleyan. These four have been selected from an enormous group.  It will be interesting to see them all speak.  Remember: lectures begin in Zilkha 106 at 4:15, followed by thesis crits and then crits in the drawing studio.

Tuesday, March 25: Jennifer Wroblewski

Tuesday, April 1: Tamie Beldue

Thursday, April 3: Julia Randall

Tuesday, April 8: Juan Perdiguero

 

demetrie tyler

So sometimes I get lost on the internet (like, I just follow links and half an hour later end up thinking "how did I get here?!"). Anyway, as a result of a recent session of that, I found this guy, demetrie tyler. He's an ITP graduate (Tisch's Interactive Telecommunications Program) and he currently has a piece in the MoMA show Design and the Elastic Mind. It's called Hypothetical Drawings About the End of the World.

From his page about the piece:

"This software looks for conversational language on the web based on a search query and generates large-format social landscapes using a set of programmatic drawing assets."

I think that means he wrote a program that makes a drawing, and based on the videos on his homepage I think a machine makes the drawing (check that out here).

I also found this video of a talk he gave on the drawings.

dead dog art

A Costa Rican artist caught a starving dog off the streets and tied it up in his gallery where it died of starvation after a few days. Not surprisingly, animal groups are outraged and many people are asking if it is art.

Link to the story here:

http://www.popgive.com/2008/03/since-when-starving-dog-to-death-is.htm

there are a lot of comments but it's interesting and sometimes scary to skim through them.

Dirty Car Drawings

I randomly came across this on the internet, and I think it's pretty cool. This guy Scott Wade makes drawings in the dust on the rear window of his car. I don't think the drawings are particularly good, but I think the range of value he achieves just by brushing dust off his car is pretty amazing. It's also interesting to look at the deterioration of the drawings over time as the dust gets washed off by rain.

Robert Longo- Incredible Charcoal

"Men in Cities" artist Emma copied. All of these on this website are more recent works, all charcoal and graphite. Read the sizes below the images.  Metro Pictures gallery is in Chelsea, NYC.

William Kentridge- Drawing Videos

This video, illegally copied by bringing a camera into the Venice Biennale, or so it seems, is now on YouTube. Does that make it illegal for us to share? There are many Kentridge videos online- check Deterioration and others that appear alongside- link up anything particularly good.

Also see this article about him in Animation World Magazine. Described as "Arguably South Africa's most famous artist."

Lucian Freud Etchings

A beautiful website from the MOMA show. As is quoted on the site, Freud says "Etching's not drawing exactly, but it's a sort of drawing." You can zoom in a great deal on the images, which is very satisfying. Freud is a very prominent British painter and printmaker.

Tara Donovan

In response to Chris Jordan/Running the Numbers, here is an artist who uses some of the same source material but transforms it entirely into something incredibly beautiful with more complex associations. Here is her gallery page at Ace, and a link for a show at the Hammer Museum in L.A.  The content of the work is entirely different, but worth comparing to Jordan's images.

Whitney Biennial

A quick preview of the new Whitney Biennial from the New York Times. Just a reminder of something everyone should see in New York if you get a chance, though not specifically related to drawing. A touchstone for contemporary artists- love it or hate it, it's all discussed and absorbed.