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Collectables

New York’s Comic Con`11: Graphic Arts Meets Popular Culture

The crowds at Comic Con `11

As a treat and a belated birthday present, I was fortunate enough to go to New York City Comic Con, one of the East Coast’s largest ‘popular culture’ events, including some of the best-known comic and graphic novel artists, and my favorite– anime and manga characters. The editor of ARTES e-magazine arranged press passes for the event for me and my parents (because I am under 18) and the first thing that stood out for me was how easy our access to the convention was. We had decided that it might be fun to use this opportunity to apply my writing skills to describe the event, becoming the youngest writer to contribute a feature story to the magazine. I was very excited about the possibilities to be at this amazing show and on my first official writing assignment, telling the story from a young-person’s perspective. artes fine arts magazineMore

Florida’s Ringling Museum of Art Explores Power of Hip Hop

Vince Fraser. Bling Pop (2006-2007), digital print. Courtesy of the artist.

When I was about 12 years old looking through some Playboy magazines purloined from my father’s closet, I studied imagery that resembled some of the postmodern feminist works found in the Ringling Museum exhibition Beyond Bling: Voices of Hip-Hop in Art. What submerged in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s during hippie years, feminist years, and corporate power years has re-emerged here looking fresher than before the days of bra-burning and women wearing neck ties. A cluster of elderly women gazing at Mickalene Thomas’s work, Naughty Girls (Need Love, too), 2009, inquired, “How do you think she got into that pose and remained that way long enough for a photograph, much less a painting?” If you have to ask… fine arts magazineMore

Art Deco Silver: A Modern Design Revolution

Gorham silver coffee pot (c. 1932)

How can you explain the allure of silver? Like its rich cousin, gold, silver is one of those rare earth elements that has served the imagination and creative hand of artisans over the ages- often with breathtakingly beautiful results. Silver in its purest form is soft and pliable, reflective and lustrous when polished to a high shine and filled with beautiful light-effects when cut, shaped, hammered or cast.

Over the ages, silversmiths have taken their inspiration largely from nature to create works of art with both utility and beauty. Most familiar are the elaborate coffee services, candelabras and jewelry fashioned in the style of 19th Century Romanticism. These pieces showcased the craftsman’s skill with elaborate floral scenes and design elements inspired by the classical Revivalist style of the Romans and Greeks. In America, the austere, but elegant creations of the colonial silver-making tradition, popularized by our most famous silversmith, Paul Revere, can be found in many well-to-do homes.fine arts magazineMore

Waimea, Hawaii’s Wishard Gallery Offers a Tempting Glimpse of Paradise

If the aim of art is to lift our spirits to live softer, gentler lives connected to the natural world, Harry Wishard’s oil paintings hit the bull’s eye. His paintings capture the 18th and 19th century beauty of Hawaii before modern civilization left its imprint. As viewers transported to this earlier time we can’t help but question if modernization helped or hindered island life.  

A recent visitor to the gallery commented, “A part of Harry Wishard lived several hundred years ago.” Her observation was insightful. Wishard’s representational paintings don’t simply give us a historical glimpse of old Hawaii. They transport us into that world. There is a keen intimacy between the painter and his subject that is startlingly apparent. As viewers we are ushered into this almost sacred realm where Hawaiian heritage connects with the land or aina.  

(Above) Harry Wishard, Pohaku Opio (Hanalei), 2010, 20×30″ available as Giclee on canvas fine arts magazineMore

Indian Design Tradition Finds Expression in a Modern World

Traditional & Contemporary side-by-side at recent fashion event, with student-designer,Varshaben Uttambhai (left)

Editor’s Note: The western-most district of Kutch, in the state of Gujarat is one of the most ecologically and ethnically diverse districts in India.  Close to the Pakistan border and subject to a massive earthquake in 2001, the people have a reputation for strength and resilience. Kutch is a celebrated for its art, crafts, music, dance, people and nature. A plethora of brilliant hues, profusion of design, superfluity of culture, a cornucopia of music and dance— together in the arid lands of Kutch—creates a mosaic of culture and design tradition which reflects the identity and spirit of the region.   

At the forefront of present-day Indian culture is the convergence of the traditional and the modern. This phenomenon affects issues from politics to religion to the arts as people strive to move forward economically and professionally while maintaining their heritage, identity, and individuality. A pursuit exists for a balance between what was and what is, especially for those with a direct link to tradition. In Kutch, where the legacy of intricate embroidery stretches back centuries and is still visible in the everyday dress of its residents, the past stands arm in arm with the present. fine arts magazineMore

Soft Sculpture Artist, Ed Bing Lee, Explores Modern World with Time-Honored Technique

Ed Bing Lee, BURGER 2 (2006), 5x5x5”, waxed linen, linen, cotton floss, cotton. All photo credits in this story: Ken Yanoviak

When a Pittsburgh gallery representative asked Ed Bing Lee if he could create a teapot for an upcoming exhibition he thought, “of course, that’s child’s play.” Then his imagination went to work. “I like the idea of taking an art form that already exists and then reinterpreting it,” Lee says. “I knew I could do a regular teapot, but if you look at something and it leads you to something else, that’s what I like.” Leafing through reproductions of “Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji,” by the Japanese printmaker Katsushika Hokusai, Lee found a favorite, “The Great Wave off Kanagawa,” created during the 1820s. Lee envisioned the great wave washing up over the top of the teapot and a fully-occupied fishing boat projecting underneath as the spout. Four and a half months and countless knots later, Lee completed the 8”x 8”x 8” teapot (see the video story, below).fine arts magazineMore

Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Decorative Arts & Sculpture Curator, Eike Schmidt, Evaluates a Masterpiece

Jacobus Agnesius (attrib.), St. Sebastian, ivory, 25.2″ tall (c.1638). Image courtesy Andrew Butterfield Fine Art

The Saint Sebastian by Jacobus Agnesius is one of the largest and most spectacular ivory statues ever made. In its luscious yet exacting portrayal of the human body, its grim depiction of emotional and physical suffering, and its suggestion of the exaltation of religious release, it concentrates the essence of Baroque art in a unique way. Not only is it significantly larger than almost any other ivory figure to survive, but it was made in emulation of the grandeur and the seriousness of monumental marble sculpture. Jacobus Agnesius aspired to carve this ivory in the spirit of the Laocoon or Gianlorenzo Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne. The result is a work of extraordinary power and beauty, one that epitomizes the Baroque artistic ideal to express the strongest, deepest and most sublime emotions via an extreme muscular tension and contortion of the human body. Morevoer, spanning 64 centimeters (25.2 in.) from the right foot to the left index finger, it is amongst the largest ivory figures ever made. As the size alone indicates, the hitherto unpublished Saint Sebastian, now in a New York private collection, must have been a very important commission for Jacobus Agnesius, whose oeuvre is systematically reconstructed and analyzed in the following pages. fine arts magazineMore

Cultural Observer, Joseph Nolan, Reviews New Book of Contemporary Photography and Essays

W. Eggleston, Shotguns- Lucia Burch, early 1980s

 William Eggleston’s photographs document that space where the banal gives way to the beautiful; the ordinary to the extraordinary. For Now offers unique images from a unique artist and it marks yet another pairing of two creative minds who have similar blind spots for those borders that supposedly exist between high art and low. 

 For Now is the culmination of film-maker Michael Almereyda’s year-long excavation of Eggleston’s archives. Uncovering private treasures spanning four decades, like an archaeologist, Almereyda has uncovered a new view of the man who defined the artistic possibilities of color photography. fine arts magazineMore

U. Florida’s University Gallery Featured Historical Circus Banners

Fred Johnson, Bearded Lady (c. 1930). Collection Howard and Robin Marks

Twenty-one paintings were featured in Sideshow, an exhibition that highlighted a traditional piece of Americana – circus sideshow banners. The exhibit, co-curated by Dr. Amy Vigilante for the University of Florida’s University Gallery, included the work of legendary banner painters Fred Johnson, Snap Wyatt, Jack Cripe, Jack Sigler and Johnny Meah. 

Sideshow banners and their creators have long been excluded from discussions of art; a primary dilemma has been the inability to fit them neatly into any category of art making. Though they are, in fact, oil paintings on canvas, banners were not created to be and are not embraced as fine art, and are most often described as American self-taught or folk art. fine arts magazineMore

Ascher Scarves: A London Company’s Devotion to Fine Art and Fashion Dates to 1940s

In dream-like sequence, a gossamer stream of vintage Ascher scarves glides by, rippling, hypnotic and weightless, to the table…silken reminders of an earlier, elegant era…each unique and even more stunning than the last, in color, design and flow. They are simultaneously quite delicate and bold…perhaps reflecting their complex genesis…. 

This tale is, aptly, a tapestry of sorts, as Peter and Sam Ascher told me recently, replete with armies and battles fought, fair maidens, heroes, great houses and even slain “dragons”— all hieroglyphs woven throughout their family saga. 

Left: Antoni Clave, Combat de Coqs (1947), screen-printed on silk crepe (1947).  Find the framed image in the vintage publicity photo, below. All photos courtesy of Ascher family fine arts magazineMore

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