Creative Tuesdays - Holiday Songs

Hello fine CT folks!

So... holiday songs it is, eh?
I must admit I am not a huge advocate of holiday songs, I have tended in life to favour Hitchens' opinion regarding the "tinny, maddening, repetitive ululations" that permeate the atmosphere this time of year though, like with most things, I have become more jolly and tolerant with age, even about that.



So saying, there are not a lot of holiday songs I can either conjure up in their entirety nor express anything about, though while I was looking at this riddle the absurd song 'Grandma got run over by a reindeer' came to mind. If I'm ever going to advocate for a holiday song, it would have to be one to so gleefully NOT take itself - or the season - seriously.



Meanwhile, I learned a few things about reindeers:

The reindeer is actually another name for the caribou, as it is known in the US. It is a species of deer native to Arctic and Subarctic regions. This includes both resident and migratory populations.


Reindeer have specialized noses featuring nasal turbinate bones that dramatically increase the surface area within the nostrils. Incoming cold air is warmed by the animal's body heat before entering the lungs, and water is condensed from the expired air and captured before the deer's breath is exhaled, used to moisten dry incoming air and possibly absorbed into the blood through the mucous membranes.

Reindeer hooves adapt to the season: in the summer, when the tundra is soft and wet, the footpads become sponge-like and provide extra traction. In the winter, the pads shrink and tighten, exposing the rim of the hoof, which cuts into the ice and crusted snow to keep it from slipping. This also enables them to dig down (an activity known as "cratering")^[19][20] through the snow to their favorite food, a lichen known as reindeer moss. The knees of many species of reindeer are adapted to produce a clicking sound as they walk.^{[21] This is why they are such successful winter animals!}
 

Balla, Giacomo Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash 1912 Oil on canvas 35 3/8 x 43 1/4 (89.9 x 109.9)

Balla, Giacomo
Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash
1912
Oil on canvas
35 3/8 x 43 1/4 (89.9 x 109.9)

As far as the piece itself, before I finally read the words of the song, I had decided on a narrative where Grandma was walking across the frozen tundra to hand Santa some cookies and milk in a glass. The reindeer, seeing Grandma approach, reacts in a fit of pique, attacks grandma, and causes the carnage of cookies & milk.




I grew inspired by contemplating the dizzying portrayals of motion of the Futurists in general, and Balla's 'Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash' (1912) in particular.

Marcel Duchamp. Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 1912. Oil on canvas. 57 7/8" x 35 1/8"

Thanks to new technological advances in photography and the cultural/moral landscape of the 'modern era' (abstract art, etc), a certain group of artists set about creating an accepted visual language of motion in art. Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase" is a good first example of that style - a painting which bended the minds of many incredulous and impressionable witnesses at the 1913 New York Armory show.


According to Tom Lubbock, upon discussing the above painting,  Balla's painting is particularly striking because:

Their legs have multiple positions, indicating brisk walking. They should be tripping along the pavement. Their bodies, on the other hand, have only one position in the picture, so their bodies are not advancing accordingly. If they're moving at all, it's much slower than the speed at which their feet would seem to be carrying them.

It's an awkward sense of movement that results. The lady's bunch of hard heels, scrumming under her skirts, promises a general trip-up. (An apparently unnecessary group of four kick out in front). The dog, meanwhile, gives the impression of frantic scampering. Its legs thrash beneath a body that makes no progress at all.

In my silly sketch I managed to also show the pathos of the attack, the fall, and the descent of the milk jug and glass, to its final conclusion. Yet the bodies are mostly stationary, albeit holding dynamic, awkward poses that portray a narrative of subjugation and domination - beast against (wo)man.



Hope all have had great holidays!

Creative Tuesday - Christmas in July

Creative Tuesdays - Christmas in July.

This is a very personally felt theme for me - I grew up in South America, and essentially, every Christmas for me felt like July! For me personally the contrast was heightened when I moved up here and found Christmas in winter, after all.  But I will never forget the bizarre retailing fiction so elaborately set up to hoodwink people into buying into a climatological condition they would NEVER, most likely, come to know - commodity fetish at its best. 


Shop sales and Christmas retail decorations - including fake pasted snowflakes, styrofoam snowy covers, green conifers and Arctic Santas - all showed up in the context of 90 degree heat and summer vacation! A typical Christmas celebration included opening up presents, then heading for the beach. 

This seemed an odd incongruity that the commodities market imposed on us south of the Equator dwellers - this fixation on winter weather in the height of summer - and all attendant imagery - and it's a form of cultural schizophrenia which has, if anything, gotten worse. But you know, when you're a kid, all you care about is loot so we didn't mind too much :D

So that's why I chose to draw what i drew - a memory of a typical storefront in a context of summer haze. As well am trying out a loose form quick sketching style - I have always admired those who can quickly (like newspaper or magazine cartoonists - draw something quick. So am trying it out.

On another note, I actually participated in a crafts/flea market fair titled 'Christmas in July' this past weekend!

Sunday Sketches - another Fiverr piece

Once again, almost too late to participate in this week's Sunday Sketches hosted by Sophia, I submit another Fiverr gig, from my "I'll charcoal draw anything you want!"

Interestingly enough, 75% of my orders have involved portraits or self portraits (in this case). THis presents a peculiar set of difficulties not the case when drawing random objects, etc.

This difficulty can be summed up with an interesting factoid attributed to a famed plastic surgeon - apparently, the only difference between a 'beautiful' person and one of average looks can amount to only a few millimetres' difference. The ration between a woman's eyelids and the space between her nose and upper lip, for instance, must be identical. If the distance is even a millimetre off, this woman is no longer beautiful - and this minute distance must be fixed.

Leaving aside the ghoulish idiosyncracies of the commodity-fetish glamour world, the paraphrasing above illustrates PRECISELY why rendering a faithful likeness can be so difficult. If a millimetre separates a belle from a turnip, this same millimetre is what separates one person's face from another's!!!

I had this grave problem with this guy's picture because, at one pt and regardless of what I did, he kept looking like a certain famous person whom I won't mention so as to not sway others' experience. Finally I felt OK enough to submit it.

Shea Hembrey: How I became 100 artists

Possibly I have found a new Favorite Artist.

Speaking to a -- from large-scale outdoor installations to tiny paintings drawn with a single-haired brush.
desire to make art that MATTERS.

Months in Europe viewing major art installations led Hembrey to witness lack of satisfaction in what was out there, and increasingly found that what he was longing for was:

1) more work that was appealing to a broad public, more accessible

2) more exquisite craftsmanship and technique

He invented 100 artists "to create a biennalle I need artists from all around the world" he explains - so he did. He figured out their passions, their identities, their styles in life, and begun making work. He created all of these disparate, lively, lovely things within a 2-year period - hence, the Biennalle concept.

He would curate this fictional event with mainly two sets of criteria:

1) "MeeMaw's Test" - to be able to explain the concept or the piece to his Arkansas country grandmother, and have her understand and appreciate it within 5 minutes or less.

2) "3 H's" - head ( interesting intellectual ideas/concepts), heart (passion/soul), and hand (excellently crafted)

In a tongue-in-cheek display which seems to poke fun at the fact that such artists are hard to find, Hembrey opts to invent the 100 artists by himself. Here are a few samples of these fictional artists. Hembrey shows his great energy, versatile creativity, and imagination in conceptualizing, and then committing to creating identity and artwork. I have outlined a few present in the TED talks presentation Hembrey made:


Kay Overstreet is interested in ephimerality and transcience - "weather I made" - making weather in the body scale - breathed back and forth on the lawn all night to leave the mark of her breath

Gus Winemiller - a large project, "Arts for the People". As a subsection of that there's a project called Artists in Residence he spends a week at a time with a family, showing up with a toothbrush and pajamas at their doorstop - he spends that week talking to the family and asks "what is great art to you?" living with them, producing art based solely on things found in the house. Whatever he makes somehow references nesting and space and personal property.

Joaquin Perez Vega - he believes art is everywhere waiting to happen - he just has to help it happen. He gets wild birds to make his art for him. He places materials to allow the birds to make nests from it. Sample here is "mixed tape love songs nest"

Mika Avernathy and Bud Holland - they are interested in creating culture. They more into and area and try to establish a new tradition in a small geographic area. "We need a positive tradition that goes with death" was the decision when passing through Eastern Tennessee. So they created a "DIG JIG". For a birthday or milestone anniversary, you dance in a graveyard, over the space you will be buried. After you dance, everyone toasts you and tells you how great you are. "It' a funeral you get to be present for!"

The Silver Dobermans, a collective. Their motto is to spread pragmatism, one person at at time. They're very interested in how over-coddled we've become. They've put a warning sign on every single barb on this fence. "Horse Sense Fence"

Estelle Willoughsby - she heals with color, and is one of the most prolific artists, even though she's already 90 years old.

I adore his creativity, and the way in which he seems to address a point I've raised earlier here, in my work with/for/through Marshall Arts.

New York art critic Jerry Saltz, who weighs in on the bleak state of both contemporary art and artists’ creativity. “It’s work stuck in a cul-de-sac of esthetic regress, where everyone is deconstructing the same elements.” What is wrong with the art world? Are the sorts of artists who merit a show at the Venice Biennial, or other important international art houses or shows, really a representative selection of the best that creatives worldwide have to offer?

I challenged Saltz to provide an answer to that query as well as to the question

Is there not something you can DO in your influencial position as a member of the New York artworld? Have you no ideas about how to rescue art from the sterilized death even you admit to?

I even emailed him. Hell, it only takes a minute - plus I don't have a lot more going on in this bucolic petri dish I inhabit, truth be told -

- and then i received the email. No, not from Saltz (as if), but from a friendly Atlanta listserve, showing me Hembrey's work and the way he, unlike Saltz, unlike all who deplore the stupid state of contemporary art, did something.