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Archive for the ‘Favorite Things’ Category

Link Wray

Posted in Favorite Things, Video, tagged on May 6, 2011| 1 Comment »

I’ve got a lot on my plate this Friday morning as I’m in the last month before my annual show at the Principle Gallery so I thought I’d share a little music.  Wanted something with a bite today and I realized that I hadn’t written about Link Wray over the couple of years that I’ve maintained this blog.  Thought I had better rectify that oversight.

Link Wray, who died in 2005 at the age of 76,  was not part of my childhood and I don’t think his music made much of an impact on the AM radios of our region when he first emerged in the 1950’s.  I didn’t come across him until the late 70’s when he was in the midst of one of many career resurrections, gaining widespread popularity in Europe with his raw guitar instrumentals and with collaborations with other musicians such as Robert Gordon.  I read about him before I heard his music and was intrigued as one writer described how his music stood out from the other music of the 50’s.  This person described Wray’s guitar playing and music as being like long strings of profanity coming out of his radio as a teenager.  It was rough and rude and incendiary for that time.

By the time I heard him, the world had changed.  Wray’s aggressive playing had been adapted and transformed by other artists and he seemed a little in the past.  But listening to it with an eye to how it had contrasted with other contemporary music of its time, I could see the appeal. 

Here’s a clip from 1978 when I first came across him.

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Similau

Posted in Favorite Things, Neat Stuff, Television, Video, tagged , , on April 24, 2011| 3 Comments »

I wasn’t going to post anything today but when I flipped on the television first thing this morning to check out the news an episode of “I Love Lucy” was on with Ricky singing a beautiful song called Similau.  I’ve seen every episode of the show many, many times over the years and am always amazed at how talented Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz were.

Everyone knows about Lucy’s comedic sklils but it’s her dancing that I really admire.  She plays up the clumsiness in her  comedy dance routines creating bits that make me laugh every time I see them.  But periodically she flashes the grace and movement of a real dancer.  I don’t think a less talented dancer could create the comedic effect of her often failed dance attempts on the show.

Desi also flashed his wonderful talents on the show, both as a comedian and a real entertainer.  There are a number of his performances of songs on the show that I find really really fascinating with their Cuban beats that were popular in that time.  Of course, there was his signature Babalu but it’s songs like this one, Similau, that captivate me.  Not what you’d expect from one of the most popular sitcoms of all time.

I couldn’t find the version of the song from the show which featured a really interesting and more pronounced rhythmic counterpoint but this is an equally fine version taken from the Peggy Lee radio  show of that time. 

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Bluette

Posted in Favorite Things, Influences, Painting, Video, tagged , on April 22, 2011| 1 Comment »

Blue II- Joan Miro

When I’m painting, which is most of the time, there are occasional shifts in the work from day to day.  Sometimes they just happen without any forethought, an adding of an element here or there to change the balance of a composition or the touch of a color that may have been absent from the palette for some time. 

 
Then there are conscious decisions made in advance of coming work, such as the decsion ot work in a certain size or medium.  I came across some older work lately in my archives that made me make such a consious decision.  It was a group of  mainly nocturnal scenes done in deep gem-like transparent  blues.  They have a stark and moody feel and, while I always have really thought highly of them, have been out of my repertoire for some time. I’ve got to make an effort to revisit this work and see what emerges.  There’s something different in approaching a painting as an examination of  solely color rather than as harmonizing a landscape’s composition.  The focus on color seems to create its own mood and drama, one that comes across off the wall even in the starkest of compositions.
 
We shall see.  For now, here’s a video that speaks to the subject for me.  It’s Dave Brubeck’s Bluette played over the wondeful work of Joan Miro.  Enjoy.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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James Castle

Posted in Favorite Things, Influences, tagged , on April 19, 2011| 3 Comments »

Work by James Castle, Self-Taught Artist

I came across a very interesting website, The Foundation for Self-Taught American Artists .  I have featured a number of self-taught painters here, always finding their will to create and find a form of self-expression a truly fascinating thing.  I love how they overcome their lack of training or lack of materials to form a vocabulary that speaks of their own unique place in the world.  This site is dedicated to these artists who overcome.

James Castle

On the opening page of the site was a trailer for a documentary featuring the work of James Castle, who was born in 1899 in Idaho and lived there until his death in 1977.  Profoundly deaf since birth, Castle never learned to sign or even read or write but instead found expression in the drawings he created from a mixture of soot and saliva that he applied to scraps of paper with a sharpened stick that acted as a crude ink stylus.  Over the course of his life he created thousands of drawings, collages and other constructions that make up a truly unique and wonderful body of work.  He gained some regional recognition for his work but it wasn’t until after his death that he gained a wider audience.

I find great inspiration in seeing the work of artists like James Castle and hearing their stories.  Their work is a triumph of the creative spirit and I am grateful for the people and institutions that keep the work alive.  If you feel the same, The  Foundation for Self-Taught American Artists is a great site to visit.

Here’s the trailer for the Castle documentary, James Castle: Portrait of an Artist.   I’ll be looking for it.

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So Long It’s Been Good to Know You

Posted in Current Events, Favorite Things, Video, tagged , on April 17, 2011| 2 Comments »

I was going to talk a little about one of Woody Guthrie’s songs about an incident that occurred in the formative years of the labor movement, the Ludlow Massacre of 1914. 

It’s a haunting song about a haunting event which happend in Colorado where striking miners who had formed a tent village were set upon by the National Guard on the orders of the Colorado governor.  They snuck in and soaked the outer tents with kerosene and set them ablaze then opened fire on the miners and their families as they fled.  20 were killed, including 11 children.  Just another of many incidents in our history that is practically unknown to the average man in the street, the person who doesn’t realize that the importance of protecting the working class against the avarice of those who would exploit them is rooted in such tragedies.  People who don’t realize the historical importance of the labor movement in this country and how it relates to the present standard of living.

There’s a lot more to be said, of course.  But it’s Sunday and the world deserves a rest.  You can find Guthrie’s Ludlow Massacre on YouTube, along with many of his classic documentations of working America.  I thought I would play a little less dark song by the great American troubador/poet/pot-stirrer instead.  Here’s So Long It’s Been Good to Know You. 

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Subliminal Woodpecker

Posted in Favorite Things, Influences, Neat Stuff, tagged , , , , on April 14, 2011| 1 Comment »

We have quite a few pileated woodpeckers that call our woods home.  They’re a very large bird, about the size of a crow, and the clatter of their pecking echoes loudly through the forest as does their distinctive cackle.  They do a hell of a lot of damage to the white pines but I love seeing and hearing them, which  always reminds me of the Woody Woodpecker cartoons from my childhood.  I was a big fan for a short time but moved on eventually to what I felt were more sophisticated cartoons, such as the Warner Brothers work of Chuck Jones and Tex Avery.  But I still have warm memories when I hear that crazy woodpecker laugh clatter through the trees.

I was also reminded of Woody when my friend Brian recently sent me an interesting link to a New York Times article that talked about one of his animators, Shamus Culhane.  During a scene depicting an explosive moment, Culhane inserted cels into the film that contained art that more resembled that of the abstract expressionists that that of a traditional studio cartoonist.  There is a multimedia link on the page that shows the sequence in a frame by frame breakdown and amid the very smooth edged cartoon rendering there suddenly appears a  short series of frames with raw, rough brushstrokes.  When you see it in slow-motion, you realize how different htis was for normal cartoon fare. 

The article points out that this was not Culhane’s only foray into the edgier side of cartooning, describing other cartoons where other abstract imagery is inserted and a prankish few that contained bawdy hidden humor such as doorways  in an Eastern castle being phallic shaped.  Maybe theose caartoons really were a bad influence after all?

Anyway, it was an interesting article and one that will come to mind whenever my pileated woodpeckers send their shrill laughs through my woods.

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Movie Poster Art

Posted in Favorite Things, Influences, tagged on April 12, 2011| 3 Comments »

A friend wrote to me recently, telling me of speaking with an elderly relative who told him about his earlier career as a graphic designer and how he had worked on a number of movie posters.  It made me think of all the great old movie posters I had always seen and enjoyed over the years.  I particularly liked the early ones, pre-computerization, that featured  great graphics and wonderful illustration art.  They were meant to grab the passerby’s eye and quickly give an impression of the film.  Some are quite beautiful and stand up as objects of art in their own right.

Doing a little digging  brought me to a book, Starstruck, by collector Ira Resnick that has about 250 images of posters from his large collection.  There is a nice feature on his website that allows you to browse the first several pages of the book to give you a feel for the artwork shown.  It has some great imagery which puts it on my list of books to get.

Page from "Starstruck" by Ira Resnick

I definitely have been influenced by popular entertainment and advertising in my own work.  It would be easy to deny it but we are so bombarded in our culture that to do so would be disingenuous.  I remember stopping and looking at movie posters in the lobbies of theatres from an early age, pulled in by the colors and images.  There was a poster shop in downtown Elmira (actually a front for their adult books and material in the back) that I used to frequent as a teen.  The posters hung from the ceiling like stalactites, hundreds of them in all sorts of styles.  Some were funny, some were racy and some were plain stupid.  But my faves were the movie posters.  I can still see many of them in my memory.   As I said, they definitely inspired how I see color and shape.

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Couldn’t Do Nothin’

Posted in Favorite Things, Video, tagged , on April 10, 2011| 6 Comments »

One of my favorite performances of live music came about 20 years ago in October of 1991.  It was at The Haunt in Ithaca.  There is a newer, larger Haunt in Ithaca now but the old one was tiny, tucked well off the street in an alley of sorts.  It held maybe a hundred or so people.  I went with a friend to see the legendary Buddy Guy and some opening act we’d never heard of before. John Campbell.  As we stood just off the edge of the very compact stage waiting this tall character with long hair appeared. He was very gaunt with a strange glow about him and and you couldn’t help but look at him as he passed.  He seemed very inward and serious.  A little scary, actually. 

We thought he was just  somebody heading backstage then he stepped up on the small stage with the three fellows following him and picked up a well worn Gibson acoustic guitar as the other three took up their instruments.  He started fingering a few notes, blues progressions then broke into a full fledged guitar attack with the rest of quartet.  The rest of that night was blues guitar nirvana in this little crowded club.  Buddy Guy, appearing afterward,  was, well, Buddy Guy, which is to say great.  A memorable performance  but Campbell was spectacular, belting out all sorts of blues including extraordinary slide moves on his National resonator guitar.  Having expected nothing it was like finding something new and wondeful, something you couldn’t believe had existed without your prior knowledge.

John Campbell died less than two years later at the age of 41.  He never achieved  huge fame although he was well known in the blues community.  But I will always remember being in that tiny club  that night, discovering a hidden treasure, which is what he remains.  Here’s a song he played that night:

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The Work of Lorenzo Scott

Posted in Favorite Things, Neat Stuff, tagged , on April 9, 2011| 7 Comments »

I often like to periodically check out sites that deal in folk art and one of my favorites is Candler Arts, an Atlanta based site that has an online gallery and blog.  I generally find something new and interesting, most often the result of self-taught artists.  This piece for sale there recently caught my eye.  It’s a painting of God expelling Lucifer from Paradise by Lorenzo Scott, a self taught visionary painter from the Atlanta area.  I was intrigued by the composition and decided to look up more on Mr. Scott.

Born in 1934 in Georgia, he moved in the 1960’s to New York City, where he noticed the numbers of people who who paint and sell their work outside the museums there.  He had maintained an interest in drawing since he was boy in school to the point of distraction from his studies but that was about the extent of his knowledge about art. Inspired by these other artists, he started going to the Metropolitan Museum and began studying the works of the Renaissance masters, examining closely how they painted the features of their subjects and the manner in which they composed their pictures.  In a way, he went through a Renaissance guild-like training as an artist without the benefit of a Master to fine tune and influence his talent. After several years in NY, Mr. Scott returned to Atlanta and continued his studies before the paintings of the High Museum there. 

 What emerged was a truly interesting mix of Renaissance-influenced imagery and the folk art hand, a unique interpretation that had classic themes and the raw immediacy of the self-taught visionary.  Vibrant.  His work caught the attention of collectors and curators and over the years he has been the subject of several museum shows and has placed his work in a number of museums, including two at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC.  In the 1990’s he began to include with his classical based compostions a bit of work with more contemporary and traditional folk art themes, many based on visions that, Mr. Scott has said, come to him while asleep. 

His framing is also unique.  They are generally self-made from from lumber topped with bondo, the autobody filler, then painted with gold paint.  They carry that same mix of classical and folk as the paintings and are a perfect companion for the work.

It’s great to see folks who find a way to tap into this inner pool of creativity, inspired by brushing against things far removed from themselves.  For Mr. Scott it was seeing the work of the masters and carrying their work forward in his own personal style.

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Diego Rivera’s Paean to Labor and Industry

Posted in Favorite Things, Influences, Opinion, Video, tagged , on April 6, 2011| 1 Comment »

Yesterday, I wrote about the mural controversy in Maine where the work depicting the history of labor was removed from a state building.  It made me think of other murals and immediately brought to mind the work of Diego Rivera,who I have written briefly about here before and who was arguably the greatest muralist of recent history.  Rivera’s work often focused on the struggle of the worker. 

The Mexican Rivera (1886-1957) was an ardent Marxist who saw the mural as a way to to make expressive art available to the masses, away from the confines of museums and galleries which he saw as elitist.  But it took money to commission his masterpieces so he was often working with those powerful forces that he often eyed with suspicion.    There were episodes where the two sides bumped heads, the most famous coming when his mural at Rockefeller Plaza in NYC was destroyed because of his inclusion of Lenin in the mural and his subsequent refusal to remove it.

The work he considered his finest was centered around the worker and the industry of America.  In 1932-33, Rivera painted , under the auspices of Henry Ford (who is depicted in the mural) and at the height of the Great Depression, an epic mural at the Detroit Institute of Arts.  Covering more than 447 square yards, Detroit Industry is massive.  It is filled with vibrant imagery depicting the worker, in both a heroic and subservient manner, as integral cogs in the rhythmic throb of the busy industrial world.  It is a feast for the eyes.

I have always been drawn to Rivera’s work on a gut level, drawn in by his gorgeous color and exciting composition.  When I see his grand murals I am deeply humbled and this work is no different.  I am pleased that it has survived the changing tides of political favor without somebody suggesting it be painted over.  If anything, it should remain if only as a reminder of the part the worker has played in building the wealth of this country at a time when the American worker is quickly overlooked by industry in favor of cheaper, unregulated labor on distant shores.

Here’s a video showing the scope of Rivera’s work.  As an artist, I am both inspired and intimidated by the sheer amount of amazing work here. 

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