Spotted this at a stodgy antique mall in Ballston Spa, New York… Rarely have any of Norman Rockwell’s paintings struck me as powerfully as this one, entitled “Summer Stock”

Thing is, I have acres of respect for the considerable chops of Norman Rockwell, but his obsession with capturing and venerating everyday life often leads to him to over-compensate. A strained exaggeration creeps in, cracking the integrity of his scenes, exposing them to gusts of corniness.

Here, everything gels… As the young actress applies her lipstick she is, for the moment, utterly divorced from the opulent costume she inhabits – a separation underscored by the abrupt shift between her strawberry blond hair and the bight brick red wig atop it. The power of this painting lies in locating this ordinary moment underneath and amidst the artifice. This is Rockwell’s wholesomeness at its most subtle – theater, and by extension, art, letting down its guard to remind us of its essential humanity.

Everything I love about the legendary Chicago band Naked Raygun is embedded somewhere on this, the cover of their latest 7.” A foxy cat-suited astro-cutie making a space jump while trailing a 50′s era satellite is not only awesomeness incarnate, it’s a great distillation of the whole Naked Raygun vibe.

Raygun filtered basic anxieties through the context of their cultural obsessions: comics (esp. Batman,) post apocalyptic movies, cold war espionage, car mechanics, and oddball dictators, to name a few at random. The result was muscular, brainy and cool and it extended to every facet of the band – amazing songs, striking album art, and effortless swagger & charisma (plus one of the great logos in rock – that raygun-R is the only tattoo I’ve seriously considered.) Recording again after close to a decade, it’s easily my favorite record art of the year, and a most welcome return.

Naked Raygun: Just for Me (B-Side) [download]


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Shots taken by Todd Selby of Robert Longo in his studio. For me it’s the smudgy texture of everything surrounding his deep, velvety drawings. Especially evocative are the shots of his supplies – more like mechanics gear, overlaid with an archipelago of black smears. Everything here suggests a great physicality behind the smooth rich sheen and stark contrast of his finished work. Longo has compared his drawing style to sculpture, saying “when I draw with graphite I smudge it with my fingers, move it around physically, it’s like clay. Painting is painting on the surface, covering up, where drawing is putting the picture into the paper like a photograph.”

It’s a testament to their power that they retain a so much of this muscularity, materiality, and weight when hung in the hermetic space of a gallery. However, they seem especially at home in the studio. It’s like seeing a big ship being assembled in dry-dock from far overhead, and seeing the complex mechanics behind something that will later glide with such heavy grace on the water.

(Below for your pleasure, are a few selections from his iconic 80′s series Men in the Cities. They have, I think, aged particularly well, and seem, now, emblematic of their era rather than beholden to it. Longo also maintains an excellent, comprehensive website with generous galleries spanning his entire career. Also, Selby’s ongoing, long running series of arty glitterati in their homes is amazing and worth checking out frequently)

Over the weekend I spotted the new Martin Amis book, The Pregnant Widow. I like Amis a ton, but with Amis you need to feel Amis-y to want to marinate in Amisland, and currently, me, not so much. Anyway, though, I was very taken with the cover art. It was a photo-realistic, yet aggressively cropped painting of a man and women nestled together against the slope of a picturesque valley.

What stuck me was the how powerful both the formal and narrative aspects of the painting were. The composition was riveting – this tightly packed moment given epic scale – and the weight of shared experience slung between the two figures was palpable. From what I know of the book’s plot and themes, which follow the tumultuous vicissitudes of a group of friends spending the summer in a remote Italian castle, it seemed a note-perfect choice – marred only by completely ham handed typesetting and design.

The painting, Il ne se plaignait jamais… (He never complained…), from 1976, is the work of the French painter Gerard Schlosser. Schlosser is most closly associated with the Narrative Figuration movement, a distinctly French mash-up of Pop and Photorealism.

His early work was rooted far more in a sexy cartoon pop aesthetic – like a combination of Guy Peellaert and Tom Wesselmann. As he evolved the work became more overtly photo-realistic, but just as meticulously staged – details are purposefully exaggerated, extraneous objects removed, everything is framed and arranged for as much narrative impact as any comic book panel. One critic described this dynamic perfectly, that for Schlosser, “framing is never a trivial gesture. It tightens the most significant narrative element, the small detail that summarizes the essence of a moment.”

What I love about his paintings is that they transmit on four equally powerful frequencies. They are wonderfully composed realist abstractions. They contain a powerful dose of concentrated storytelling. They celebrate the figure as landscape. And they frame a vantage point that is the very definition of intimacy – conversational, sexual, relational – in a way that is incredibly potent and evocative. They’re artful, moving, brazenly sexy, and, as Blackadder might say, as French as a pair of self removing trousers.

(Schlosser’s work is scattered about the web. Most of the sites are in French. No English monograph seems to exist. There are at least three French ones, a bit pricey and all difficult, it seems, to obtain)

Beauty, right? I found this a few months ago rifling through files at DuPont’s Hagley Museum, doing research for my Nylon article for Uppercase Magazine (which I previewed recently, here.) A wonderful example of something so basic, so dashed off, so ordinary – some corrections on a galley proof – that happen to merge, by chance, into something really artful.

A lot will be written, understandably, about Dennis Hopper’s indelible wild-eyed performances as an actor and his stature as a cultural iconoclast. More will be written, deservedly, about his gifts as a director (his 1980′s neo-noir the Hot Spot, with Jennifer Connelly and Don Johnson is a personal favorite…) Too little, unfortunately, will be written about him as an artist – as a photographer, painter, and patron.

Hopper, for all of his hippie-savage persona (and dissolute habits), was a man of considerable aesthetic gifts and a genuine passion for art (instilled in him, in that only-in-Hollywood-sorta-way, by non other than Vincent Price)

He found his home amidst the Pop Art scene, beginning in the early 60′s. He became a friend, collector and patron to Jasper Johns, James Rosenquist , Robert Rauschenberg , and especially, Ed Ruscha. In turn, they inspired Hopper in his own photography and painting – and over the years he built up a respectable oeuvre of solid, earnest work in the genre.

His paintings are the work, in the best sense, of a gifted amateur – accomplished, passionate, but with visible effort and little transcendence. His photographs, on the other hand, are far more distinguished – characterized by striking graphic compositions, technical adeptness, and a young Jane Fonda. That is, Hopper had an eye & chops, yes, but he was also, um… Dennis Hopper. As a result the photography is goosed by the presence of his fellow famous young and restless – It’s like Ruscha or William Eggleston doing Hollywood candids.

Here’s the thing though – To view Hopper as derivative is to miss what makes him matter as an artist. Genres and styles are defined by a handful of brilliant outliers, driven by a primordial vision that guides their craft. They do the heavy work of clearing spaces in the cultural landscape. The vast majority of us who want a passionate relationship with art inhabit these spaces, either as viewers, artists, critics, or patrons. Hopper’s work, for me, is a testament to that dynamic – not to defining art, as much as living within it.

I like my Modernism with club soda and two limes… Which is why I am so taken with the work of Erik Nitsche; it is positively effervescent.

My affection for his work is rooted in repeated sightings of the same thing – his poster for the Betty Davis showbiz melodrama All About Eve. It’s one of my favorite pieces of design… the cutout photos, clean but playful layout, and the signature Missile Command-esqe fusillade of arrows. I’m struck every time I come across it, and it has been big influence on my aesthetic, especially my collage work.

I finally did further research and discovered a wealth of amazing, brilliantly composed and crafted design that has since slipped under the waterline. Nitsche worked for a broad spectrum of clients including General Dynamics, Decca Records, Revlon, Saks Fifth Avenue, MOMA, 20th Centrury Fox, and the Container Corporation of America. Or to put it another way, across virtually the entire cultural landscape.

Poring over his work made me think of the title of a famous Mondrian – Broadway Boogie Woogie. It’s the painting whose emanations border on music, where the grid begins to pulse and shimmy. Piece after piece of Nitsche’s had this almost musical vitality – a backbeat of patterns and repetition over which he improvised variations punctuated with perfectly deployed grace notes and accents.

There doesn’t seem to be a published monograph or survey of his work, but you can cinch one together from across the inter-web. U&lc and New York Times Book Review art director Steven Heller wrote an excellent short biography and career assessment for Typotheque called the Reluctant Modernist that is well worth reading. BustBright, the after-hours studio of Los Angeles designers Katie Varrati and Derrick Schultz, maintains an excellent and growing Flickr survey of his work… and below you’ll find my own homage to Nitsche from a few years back:

Risk, 12″x 12″ Collage on board, 2008

These plates are from an edition of Ivan Kotlyarevsky’s 1798 poem Eneida, a ribald retelling of Virgil’s Aeneid. Kotlyarevsky transposed Aeneas, the Trojans, and Greek mythology into the folklore of Ukrainian Cossacks. It is among the first major works written in Ukrainian, and is a cornerstone of Ukraine’s national literature. Wonderfully, it also defines the very notion of a burlesque – vulgarizing lofty notions like love, family, faith and battle, feigning seriousness in the face of absurdity, and is packed to the gills with slapstick humor, comic skits, bawdy songs, and, natch, healthy portions of friskiness…

This particular version, printed in 1969, in Kiev, Ukraine, is, simply stated, one of the most beautifully designed, illustrated, typeset and produced books I’ve ever seen. Sturdy and stout, clad in a satisfyingly course gray canvas, it opens onto a corker of a title page. From the swashbuckling script of the authors name, the elemental block-y-ness of the title, and the illustration of a muscular and languid Cossack/Trojan, it’s a bravura opening gesture. From there, graphically, the book never flags – block after block of typeset verse on heavy cream paper. But the heart of the book lies in the illustrations, by A. Bazylevych, whose style is a deft hybrid of wood block engravings, thick-lined expressive cartooning, and abstract color blocks.

My recollection of the book from childhood is profoundly visceral. I can recall my father reading vignettes that swirled thrillingly in a noggin already stuffed with mythological adventures. But it’s the illustrations that left an indelible impression. It’s a phantasmagoria of soldiers and sieges, gods and devils, maidens and crones, battles and scraps, feasts and revelries, a cosmos of melodrama. Looking at them again after a span of decades, my recollection is immediate and electric – what’s vital in art, in fiction, and in life seems to spring forth in an exuberant, lusty, unruly parade.

Appreciation of Christopher Gallego’s craft keeps sliding into a meditation on the distinct character of common things. That’s why I love this particular quartet of paintings; they a series of reminders – testimonials, really – to the distinctive heft and sturdiness of double lined paper bags, the particular ambiance of a living spaces stripped bare, the accretion of texture on a drop cloth, or the contrast between old blistered frames and the smooth glass they cradle…. More work here…

In weighing the loss of Frank Frazetta I think about what I always think about when I think about Frazetta – Caravaggio.

That is, he, like Caravaggio, took the fables and fantasies he passionately depicted just seriously enough, a precise ratio of rigor and rapture. It’s why the work is so powerful, so definitive – Frazetta painted with just enough supple realism, while conjuring just enough alien atmosphere, that he imbued the fantastic with the weight of fact.

(above, Frazetta’s covers for Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars series)

Swan Float, a sculpture by Christyl Boger, was a highlight of a recent show, at Philadelphia’s Clay Studio that was filled with strong work: Of This Century: Residents, Fellows and Select Guest Artists. While not pictured, it was of a piece with the work above – a classically elegant, expressive nude entwined with an inflatable beach toy. I was bowled over by its formal beauty, impressed with the perfection of its craft, and amused by its absurdity. The world is a richer place for art that can, without being glazed in snark, simultaneously recall both Bernini and Jeff Koons. (For more on Boger visit her site, here. Great stuff abounds, with the only sour note being a jargon clotted artist’s statement that obscures, rather than clarifies, the art’s formidable power and charms.)

Girl with Dolphin, 2007, earthenware, glaze
BroodXX, 2005, earthenware, glaze
Float, 2006, earthenware, glaze

Large format oil paintings by Benjamin Anderson. (hat tip: this isn’t happiness)

A fine time to recognize the graphic radness of Ukrainian Easter egg designs, and the steady, crafty hand it takes to make them…

Some photographs and art by John Foxx. Foxx, driven to merge his love of the cracked pop art of Roxy Music with the exhilarating rush and tabloid sensibilities of the Sex Pistols, formed the first, and still astonishing, version of Ultravox! He left to pursue purely electronic music, and under the name Dennis Leigh, established himself as a successful graphic designer and artist, working on book covers for Salman Rushdie and Anthony Burgess, among others.

Critic Robert Christgau offered a typically astringent and succinct summation of Ultravox! – “John Foxx’s detached, creamy baritone works against the instrumentation’s electronic cast for a streamlined rocksy music that suits titles like “Dislocation” and “Someone Else’s Clothes.” But unlike Bryan Ferry Foxx talks as if he’s detached clean through, unlike Brian Eno he’s encumbered by delusions of existential significance, and unlike both he’s never funny”

Dead on, yes, but… Foxx’s detachment and existential musings led him to the two great themes that have animated his work ever since – the idea of the Quiet Man and London Overgrown. From these two themes he has build a rich, self sustaining aesthetic world that comprises music, photography, fashion, and in a modest way, philosophy.

The Quiet Man is, in essence, a new wave take on the man with the grey flannel suit which Foxx inhabits, literally. Dressed in a ordinary grey suit, Foxx embarks on long treks where he explores the full texture of urban anonymity. London Overgrown is a sustained rumination on nature subsuming the modern urban landscape. His musings on both, well worth reading, can be found here, on his comprehensive blog/site.

What is worthwhile here are not the themes themselves – as notions they are familiar to any thoughtful person – but the quality body of work Foxx has wrought from them. The first three Ultravox! records, the pioneering solo work like the minimalist synth of Metamatic, the pastoral electronic pop of the Garden, ambient pieces, and his continued and concurrent exploration of these themes in music, video, photography, and writing, are all worthwhile.

He has a great new single out under the moniker John Foxx and the Maths, aptly described by the UK Arts Desk as ” a very deliberate step back into his own past for a couple of songs that sound as if they were minted in 1980… acelebration of old analogue sounds in collaboration with producer and synthesizer archivist extraordinaire, Benge. Both songs are flecked with requisite android moodiness but stand up in their own right rather than sounding like retro pastiches.” Available on itunes here. More selections below.

Ultravox!: Young Savage (Peel Session): [download]


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Ultravox!: Artifical Life: [download]


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Had the good fortune of attending the reception for Edel Rodriguez’s small, dense, eclectic and impressive show at UArts last week. The exhibit, a retrospective of his work from 1990 from the past 20 years, featured an wide selection of drawings, paintings and posters. The work ranged from editorial work from Time, Newsweek, and the New Yorker to Broadway posters to children’s books and a passel of personal work. The common thread – an exuberant line, broad textured use of color, and wonderfully deft technique.

Cool chap as well, enthusiastic and open… we took to talking about a piece I was quite taken with – a mono-print of a fetching museum guard from a series commissioned by German Playboy. To my delight Edel sent me the balance of the prints, a few which I’ve excerpted above. They’re all great, but the museum guard is the cats pajamas… Enjoy, and if you are in Philly, see the show here: UArts Anderson Hall, Von Hess Gallery, 7th Floor,  333 S. Broad St. It’ll be up till May. More on Edel Rodriguez here, and here.

Simply magical illustrations by Louis Darling for Eleanor Cameron’s 1958 young adult lark, Mr. Bass’s Planetoid. The book is the third in the six volume Mushroom Planet series. The books follow the adventures of two young boys, David and Chuck, and their travels to the Mushroom Planet, a small class M moon in an invisible orbit 50,000 miles from Earth covered in various types of mushrooms and populated by little green people.

I love how Darling’s illustrations merge the feel of classic mid-century boys adventure books with the epic, scientifically rigorous space art pioneered by artists like Chesley Bonestell.

The book has some personal significance as well. It’s like this – The whole Mushroom Planet series begins when the two boys, spurred by a mysterious newspaper advert, construct a rocket from everyday materials. Well, when I was a squirt, my cousin convinced me, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I could build my own functional rocket. More about that in this post, here, but suffice it to say, I spent the better part of that summer absolutely sure I was space bound.

The vividness of my belief was, to this day, one of the most powerful manifestations of my imagination. So when my cousin brought over Mr. Bass’s Planetoid recently, it was quite something to feel that childhood fantasia reduced to an idea in a book I was holding in my hand 30 years later. Rather than a cold shower of demystification, though, the moment gave a fresh gloss to a tired conceit – the power of the best fiction and art to make imagination tangible.

Contents of studio clipping tray. Happenstance, slightly nudged. [larger image]

Still buried under a mountain of advertising. Meanwhile, some preparatory drawings by Alphonse Mucha, just cause they’re breathtaking and beautiful and it’s Monday…