cklablog

I especially love the Death of Marat, the Carrivagio and the Klimt. Very noice. The whole thing made me smile, and the Frida Kahlo made me lol a little.

This is well worth watching at full screen.

70 Million by Hold Your Horses ! from L'Ogre on Vimeo.

And this would be why.

!

. . . but wait!  There’s more!

Reportedly for an ad campaign, this clever photoshop diorama cracks me up. Making my tech tool of choice interface out of cardboard?  There’s a 1,000-word post-post-modern artist’s statement in here somewhere, but I won’t cry if I never see it. The fact it arrives into my thought-space sans intellectual fluffing is another reason art done for commercial purposes pwns most modern “fine” art, particularly the conceptual stuff.

^ Click for larger image

Street art by Berlin artists Mr. Tailon, Baveux Prod., Kone & Epox.  

They paste the Photoshop tool interface over this subway poster to remind the viewer of what they should already know — this version of our beauty ideal is phony as hell.  The ads for most fashion and celebrity print get Photoshopped into ludicrous physical impossibility.  

See the rest of the images here.

I’m currently reading this book, given to me by my lovely wife for my 38th birthday. She knows that Carrivagio is my best. Painter. Evar. This is only partially due to his technique; in fact, I probably prefer Diego Velazquez or Rembrant for skill and vision. You see, I like Carrivago for he fact that he was as deadly as Count Dante (although his weapon of choice was a sword, not his fingertips).

Michelangelo Merisi de Carrivagio was a duelist; a scofflaw murderer and a pugnacious street-tough who rendered his subjects with an uncompromising naturalism that would make him the most hated and influential Italian painter of his day. Carrivagio was larger than life. He had talent, he had vision, he had severe mental health problems, and he had enemies.

If you decide to pick up The Lost Painting, you’ll get a portrait of the life of Carrivagio, as well as a more detailed picture of the lives of the historians who are trying to peer through the fog of 400 years in order to better understand his work and his life.

Highly reccomended.

I think I might have a new favorite painter, and I don’t say that lightly.

I stumbled across this slide-show of some of Mancini’s works, and . . . I think I’m in love.

This guy paints like I wish I could, seriously. I’m particularly enamored with his older stuff before he went (more) insane. I certainly need to see some of these paintings live, but even on my computer screen, woah.

Brushwork like woah. Color and spatial composition like woah. That ephemeral sense of humanness* so absent from most paintings like woah.

Based on a few HTML pages and .jpgs, I’ve already put him up there in my Personal Pantheon with Diego Velazquez, Rembrandt, Caravaggio (the worst painter, but the deadliest sword-fighter of the lot) and Vermeer.

“After the Duel” 1872

^ This painting floors me. It has such a compelling narrative, the figure painting is immaculate, the subject is treated with so much empathy and like a lot of his works, the color and value composition is sublime.

“Self-Portrait” (circa 1880)

^ First off, I’m a portraitist at heart. I get post-modern art, and I generally like post-modern art, but I also believe two things regarding portraiture: that it is the most demanding painting task, and that portraits that allow us to empathize with the subject are the highest expression of that task.

Mancini’s paintings are full of life and heart, and seem *there* in that way that a poor-to-average portrait artist can never reproduce. But at the same time, he’s taking liberty with the painterly traditions, adding nonsensical brushwork and using expressive non-representational markmaking without ever letting go of the image’s core mission — to show us this person, and invite us to tell stories about him, or put him in our story.

Quite clearly, Mancini is also crazy, degenerating toward bona-fide bat-shit crazy as he ages.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

—–
*I bet the Japanese have a word for this concept.

Hey, if you aren’t familiar with his work yet, check out Banksy; he’s one of my favorite artists of all toooime.

Love,

Your moms’ last good time.

p.s.: Put ya stunta shades up! Gas, break, dip!