Category — Art

Six years ago, a printmaker and a web developer teamed up to enable anyone with a story to capture it in a 32-page sketchbook, reports Liz Robbins in the New York Times (5/13/12). What Steven Peterman and Shane Zucker started then in Atlanta is today a collection of some “12,500 sketchbooks from more than 130 countries,” housed at the Brooklyn Art Library. An additional 7,502 sketchbooks “will join the permanent collection when they return from a 14-city tour, currently in Chicago and ending in Melbourne, Australia, in November.”

Anyone can participate: “For $25, any doodler, student, parent, graphic designer, architect … or would-be artist can fill a 32-page sketchbook and add it to the collection.” Located in a storefront, the Brooklyn Art Library “fits neatly on its block, an upscale artistic corridor with an architectural studio across the street from apartment lofts, an art gallery, a bar, a barbershop and a used-book store.” It’s also possible to sign up online — or simply peruse the many sketchbooks by applying for a library card, which entitles you to review two sketchbooks at a time.

“This is personal, this is someone, these are moments,” says Thanassis Petropoulos, a comic-book artist from Athens who recently checked out the collection. “It’s like you’re having coffee with your girlfriend and you’re going to do a sketch of her. When you’re done, this ends up here and someone from around the world can see moments from your life.” Thanassis hasn’t created a sketchbook himself yet, but is thinking about it. “We don’t have these kinds of things in Athens,” he says. “We don’t have a place to hang out with total strangers.” The library also sells “art supplies and vintage goods” as well as “dark chocolate bars, with custom wrappers that match the library cards, for $9.”

Maya Stein is bike riding and typewriting her way from Massachusetts to Milwaukee, reports Liz Leyden in the New York Times (5/12/12). Her inspiration is a typewriter her father kept “in the hallway between bedrooms for the family to use, an exercise in creativity that changed her life.” Her inclination is to ride her bicycle from her home in Amherst, Massachusetts to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, “where the design for the first mass-produced typewriter was developed in the 1860s. Along the way, she is delivering a manual typewriter to public spaces and inviting people to take a turn at the keys.”

As Maya explains: “I want to bring that communal hallway back … I want to make a space for collaboration and creativity, to invite people to contribute their voices to the larger story of the community we’re all in.” Her journey, which began on May 5th and coincides with her 40th birthday, is “to ride 40 miles a day, typewriter in tow, for 40 days until she reaches Milwaukee.” Her typewriter of choice is a turquoise Remington Ten Forty.

She funded her project with $16,000 raised on Kickstarter and it “is providing inspiration for her own writing, which she is doing daily at type-rider.com. “I saw a man mowing his lawn and I loved catching that moment,” says Maya. “All that I see in between my stops, that’s a treat. That’s my gift to myself.” Maya sets up in front of shops or cafes, her typewriter alongside a chalkboard that beckons, “Write Yourself Here.” She doesn’t try to sell anyone on taking a turn, but rather just waits to see what happens. Some folks prefer to talk to Maya instead, which is fine with her. “There are moments you cannot capture on paper,” she says.

A new natural-history museum in Utah makes “nature and humans all part of one ingeniously complex continuum,” reports Julie V. Iovine in The Wall Street Journal (5/9/12). For one thing, the $102.5 million Natural History Museum of Utah is not located downtown with other local museums; it is on the University of Utah campus and “straddles a popular hiking trail perched halfway up the slopes of the Wasatch Range, foothills to the Rockies at the edge of both the campus and the town.”

The museum’s facade, “clad in a burnished copper, mottled by streaks of zinc and tin” all but disappears “amid the reddish-brown rock against which it is set … you enter as through the faceted, sheer walls of a canyon, rendered in beige plaster and board-formed concrete. Instead of a procession of galleries with symmetrical predictability, the organizational logic is that of switchback paths traversing ramps, bridges and underpasses.” Todd Schliemann of Ennead Architects, designers of the new museum, says the approach was intended to help convey an overall message.

For example, a room featuring a display of “a model of Lake Bonneville, which filled the Great Basin during the Pleistocene era some 15,000 years ago” opens up to an “adjacent terrace to view the actual lake in the distance.” The main lobby, known as the Canyon, features “an enormous panoramic window that, with breathtaking sweep, delivers natural history live: a view of the entire Salt Lake Valley and snow-capped Oquirrh Mountains … The laudable intention was to provide a public place where people can range widely and even see a little something for free before buying a ticket.” (images)

The best golf courses, says Bill Coore, are “like a really good essay or poem,” reports John Paul Newport in the Wall Street Journal (4/7/12). “If you get all the nuances the first time through, well then, it wasn’t very good,” he explains. Bill, along with business partner Ben Crenshaw, are “minimalist” golf-course designers. This means that they only work on terrain that lends itself to the game and “move as little dirt as possible in crafting the finished product.” They have designed “many of the most highly regarded US courses built in the last 20 years, such as Sand Hills, which Golfweek rates “No. 1 on its list of modern American courses.”

Eschewing “the kind of intensively manicured, cookie-cutter courses that most people are familiar with,” Bill and Ben instead look for land that is “naturally gifted for golf.” Because they believe that “building golf courses is more art than science,” they also reject the use of computer-aided design in crafting courses. “We’re like the lumbering dinosaurs just prior to extinction, but somehow we get away with it,” says Bill. When scoping out a new course, they begin by looking for “the easiest, most natural ways to move around the land, often guided by the paths that deer and other native animals have created.”

Their main tools are aerial photos, topographical maps, Sharpie pens to mark “interesting spots,” a 12-inch ruler and a 1980s-era range-finder to help determine distances. “It’s a very nebulous process,” says Bill. “Do I see contours that suggest interesting golf shots? Do a few natural locations for greens, or even entire holes, pop out at me?” He and his team, using machetes, chain saws and small earthmovers, shape the terrain “by the seat of their pants,” essentially. “The human capability for imagination is vast, but it’s nowhere near as vast as nature’s in terms of variety, randomness and surprise,” says Bill, who is currently developing the Steamsong golf course in Central Florida. A typical project takes about two years to complete, with the architectural fees running “a million dollars or more.”

Where dog-art is concerned, New York City is a pretty impressive kennel, reports Randy Kennedy in the New York Times (2/10/12). In and around town, "there is Balto, the bronze Siberian husky who has stood at attention in Central Park since 1925, commemorating the sled dog who helped deliver medicine to save Nome, Alaska, from a diphtheria epidemic." The Metropolitan Museum of Art has "dogs around practically every corner."

Jennifer Russell, the Met’s associate director of exhibitions, is especially fond of Howling Canine, "a fifth-to-sixth century Mexican ceramic of what could be a mutt or maybe a coyote in full-body howl, practically rising up on its tail." She thinks the dog "represents how we all feel at the end of a very long week. And if we were dogs, we would howl." Other notable Met dogs include Boy With a Greyhound and A Woman with a Dog (and no, it’s not the way it sounds).

In March, the Morgan Museum & Library will celebrate dogs and other animals in a special exhibit that includes "a 19th century illustration by John Waxman of "Odysseus’ faithful hound, Argos, who waited 20 years in Ithaca for his master’s return, recognizing him even through his master’s disguise and summoning just enough energy to greet him a final time before dying." Curator Clara Drummond comments: "It’s hard to think of a story more central to our deep relationship with our animals. It’s as moving as the war itself, and as powerful as Greek tragedy."

Christophe Laudamiel is exploring "the last frontier" of perfume — "as a fine art form," reports Alexandra Alter in the Wall Street Journal (1/26/12). Christophe is well-known for his work designing "high-end fragrances for Ralph Lauren, Estee Lauder and Tom Ford" and has a reputation as "one of the world’s most innovative practitioners." His credits also include designing scents inspired by a 1985 Patrick Suskind novel-turned-movie (trailer) "which included the stench of gutters in 18th century Paris."

Christophe was also involved in a "scent opera … pairing an original musical score with a sequence of more than 20 scents delivered through an odor-releasing device." (link) His latest venture "tests the commercial possibilities of scent art" via "seven scent sculptures on display" at Dillon Gallery in New York City. Among them is a scent called "Fear," in which "sniffers will encounter the sweet, musty, cold smell of a damp cave." Christophe achieved this through "metallic notes found in geranium and musty elements found in rhubarb and roots."

On the lighter side is "The Banana and the Monkey," which pairs the smell of "sweet, ripe banana … with a hairy, sweaty, feral monkey odor." Christophe used amyl acetate for the banana and civet, "which smells vaguely fecal," among other elements. The sculptures are experienced in tents set up around the gallery, which isolate and concentrate the aromas. The commercial potential remains questionable, in part because of the challenges of displaying or advertising aromas (scratch ‘n’ sniff?). And then there’s the price: Christophe’s scent sculptures "range from $15,000 to "$20,000 depending on the complexity of the formula."

You might visit Lee’s Art Shop near Carnegie Hall “for something prosaic,” but you’ll “leave wishing you were an artist,” reports David W. Dunlap in the New York Times (1/29/12). Lee’s is a family-owned store, located in what “was once among the more elegant branches in the Schrafft’s restaurant chain.” That would be 220 W. 567th Street, “half a block from Carnegie Hall” and in strategic proximity to the Art Students League.

As David writes: "Imagine just what seas and skies could be rendered with the blue acrylic paints alone: cerulean, cobalt, indanthrene, manganese, phthalocyanine, Prussian and ultramarine; applied with brushes like brights, fans, filberts, flats, hakes, liners, riggers, rounds or shaders, made of goat, pony, squirrel, ox or badger hair; on rolls of canvas up to 6 feet wide and 18 feet long — Pollack size."

Founded in 1951 by Gilbert and Ruth Steinberg, Lee’s is now run by two of their children. The store has since expanded into kind of a “mini department store,” according to chief operating officer Anthony Basile, “offering stationery, gifts, scrapbook and presentation materials,” among other items. But art supplies are still the heart of its business, with its “brushes and canvas and stretchers and easels” displayed in “inviting density.” As Anthony says: “People love a treasure hunt.”

MIT Media Lab scientists have developed a camera that can capture the speed of light, reports John Markoff in the New York Times (12/13/11). This technology "scans and captures light," and enables the scientists to "record about 500 frames in just under a nanosecond, or a billionth of a second." The image itself, of light passing through liquids and objects, is captured "in less than two trillionths of a second." That’s super-fast, obviously, but what it does, in effect, is create a slow-motion movie (video).

"It is so much slow motion you can see the light itself move," says Andreas Velten, a member of the MIT Media Lab team. "This is the speed of light: there is nothing in the universe that moves faster." That sounds impossible, but not nearly as nuts as the project’s original objective, which was to create a camera that could see around corners. The idea was that "by capturing reflected light and then computing the paths of the returning light" it would be possible to build "images coming from rooms that would otherwise not be directly visible."

Ramesh Raskar, who leads the project, suggests some intriguing applications. "Imagine if you have this in your phone 10 years from now," he says. "You will be able to go to your supermarket and tell if your fruit is ripe." The breakthrough is the ability to create pictures of "information that until now had been rendered only as data and charts." Dr. Raskar calls the project "femto photography," using the "term for quadrillionths of a second," and admits that the potential is a mind-bender. "We’re still trying to get our heads around what this means," he says, "because no one has been able to see the world in this way before."

Faris Al-Shathir is pairing “fashion designers with architects to create stunning retail spaces,” reports Bee-Shyuan Chang in the New York Times (1/12/12). Faris is a former art student and sometime interior designer who, in 2008, co-founded a non-profit group called Boffo with Klaus Biesenbach, then a curator for the Museum of Modern Art. Their first project, in September 2009, involved taking over “a former Bible factory in Brooklyn” and inviting “150 artists to create at will.” (link)

The following year, Boffo partnered with Spilios Gianakopoulos, an architect, where they “organized a series of pop-up boutiques at HL23, a luxury condominium along the High Line that had a vacant trailer that was used as a sales office.” (images) Boffo put together “five teams of fashion designers and architects” to create “a series of temporary stores.”

During Fashion Week last fall, designer Nicola Formichetti and Gage/Clemenceau, created a retail space that “looked like the inside of a shattered kaleidoscope (images). Last September, a collaboration between Irene Neuwirth and architect Marc Fornes transformed “a former jewelry boutique into a phantasmagoric concept store, with terrarium displays and gold, coral-shaped sculptures (images) that looked like something out of Barbarella.”

Maggie Sheffield is one of a growing cadre of artists who double as babysitters, reports Laura Hedli in the Wall Street Journal (12/29/11). Maggie works for a company called Artist Babysitting, founded five years ago by Shannon Darin, an aspiring Broadway actress. Shannon stumbled into the concept quite by accident. She took babysitting jobs to make ends meet, and when auditions or some such created conflicts, "she often relied on her artist friends to fill in." The point-of-difference was doing creative projects with the kids, and Shannon now has "a clientele of more than 350 families on word-of-mouth recommendations."

Kristina Wilson, a singer, took a different route to a similar destination. After juggling her Morgan Stanley day job with "auditions, rehearsals and performances," she resolved to create "a company that was for the arts, by the arts, with the arts, with the artist as the help." The result is Sitters Studio, with branches in both New York and Chicago. Her New York office includes three studios "and some of the artists use them to run their own theater companies, or just to warm up before auditions."

Both Shannon and Kristina "share a specific, targeted concept for artist babysitting — one with a throwback twist: Television and surfing the internet are strongly discouraged and, for the most part, prohibited … The pricing for both companies begins at around $20 an hour and can rise depending on the number of children, and both offer their services at various hotels for a higher fee." Both employ about 90 sitters, most of whom are performance, not visual, artists. Some parents appreciate the interaction with "a range of creative adults — an opera singer one week, a photographer the next." As one parent put it: "No matter who comes, my kids are having an enriching experience."