This is a small piece that I used here last year in a blogpost featuring Richard Thompson’s song Shoot Out the Lights. I showed this piece but didn’t say anything about it which I think was an oversight because it is one of my personal favorites from this particular series. It’s called Two Sides and is [...]
Archive for the ‘Favorite Things’ Category
Jim Nutt’s Obsessive Portrait
Posted in Favorite Things, Painting, tagged Chicago Imagists, Jim Nutt, Pop Art, Roger Brown, Surrealism on February 22, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
I wrote last week about the work of the Chicago-based artist Roger Brown, who was part of the Chicago Imagists which were a group of artists who were inspired by the pop imagery of comic books as well as surrealism. Another artist who was in this circle was Jim Nutt, born in 1938 in Massachusetts and educated [...]
Batter Up!
Posted in Favorite Things, tagged Babe Ruth, Banzai Babe Ruth, baseball, Moe Berg, Robert K. Fitts on February 17, 2012 | 4 Comments »
Oh, it’s that time of the year once more. Pitchers and catchers reporting to warm southern sites. The first tentative soft toss of the ball and the swing of the bat. Spring training is starting and for diehard baseball fans it is the true beginning of the year, a time when the disappointments of last year [...]
Roger Brown’s Rhythms
Posted in Favorite Things, Influences, Neat Stuff, tagged Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago Imagists, Comic Book Art, Primitives, Roger Brown, Surrealism on February 15, 2012 | 1 Comment »
I was looking up something totally unrelated to his work when I stumbled across the paintings of Roger Brown, a painter who was one of the group of Chicago Imagists, an informal school of art in the late 1960′s that had it roots in comic book art, Surrealism and Primitivism. The work was highly individual [...]
Joseph Yoakum’s Imaginary Landscapes
Posted in Favorite Things, tagged Foundation for Self-Taught Artists, Hairy Who, Joseph Yoakum on February 10, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
I’ve been working on my large painting, as I have noted in the past few posts here. I decided to take a few moments this morning to explore one of my favorites sites at the Foundation for Self-Taught Artists, just to browse for a bit to maybe clear my mind before jumping into today’s work. [...]
Some Good Advice
Posted in Favorite Things, Influences, Quote, tagged Chuck Close, Phillip Glass on February 5, 2012 | 6 Comments »
I’ve been a fan of the work of Chuck Close for some time, admiring the grand scale that much of his work assumes as well as his evolution as an artist, especially given his challenges after a spinal artery collapse left him paralyzed from the neck down in 1988. He regained slight use of his [...]
Ellis Island Photos
Posted in Favorite Things, Photography, tagged Augustus Francis Sherman, Ellis Island, Photography on February 3, 2012 | 3 Comments »
This photo caught my eye recently. It’s a shot of a Romanian piper, most likely a shepherd, taken around 1906. It was taken by Augustus Francis Sherman, a registry clerk who worked at Ellis Island, the primary processing point for immigrants coming to America around the turn of the early 20th century. Sherman was an amateur [...]
The First Modernist?
Posted in Favorite Things, Influences, Neat Stuff, tagged Grant Wood, Thomas Chambers, Thomas Cole, Thomas Hart Benton, William Matthew Prior on January 31, 2012 | 6 Comments »
Once again, I came across a painter from the past of which I knew absolutely nothing. That is nothing new but when I first saw these paintings I was shocked he was unknown to not only me but to most other people as well. Actually, his biography is pretty thin in content but the sheer [...]
A Visit to the Heartland
Posted in Favorite Things, Neat Stuff, tagged Fatima Ronquillo, Watts Fine Art, Wendy Chidester on January 30, 2012 | 4 Comments »
I came home from my roadtrip last week and decided to take a few days off from the blog. It was a pretty good trip, even with some iffy weather for travelling, that crossed some of the flat, open farmlands of the midwest. Heartland. On this trip, I was especially encouraged by my visit to Watts Fine [...]
The Coney Island Coaster of David Levine
Posted in Biographical, Favorite Things, Influences, tagged Coney Island, David Levine on January 23, 2012 | 2 Comments »
I’ve written here before about the work of David Levine, the late artist best known for his wonderful caricatures of public figures and politicos that graced many magazines for several decades, writing once about a caricature of composer Richard Wagner and another time about a painting of a pig’s head . Despite his fame as a pen-and-ink caricaturist, Levine [...]
