El Anatsui: Gravity and Grace

Gravity and Grace
El Anatsui
Brooklyn Museum

The art critic and writer Holland Cotter has an article in the New York Times, "A Million Pieces of Home" (February 8, 2013), on the fascinating artist El Anatsui, who hails from Ghana but works in Nigeria and is currently the subject of a retrospective exhibition, "Gravity and Grace," at the Brooklyn Museum, February 8, 2013 to August 4, 2013, and most fascinating is his method for creating monumental works of art, which he developed almost by accident, as Cotter relates the story:

One day, by his own account, on a routine scavenging hunt through Nsukka, he picked up a trash bag filled with twist-off liquor bottle tops of a kind manufactured by Nigerian distilleries. Although it took him a while to realize it, he had found his ideal material: locally made, in ready supply and culturally loaded.

Liquor had come to Africa with colonialism. Production of rum propelled the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Later Africa had made a double-edged European import its own. And the history of all that was printed, in shorthand, in the brand names on the bottle tops: Bakassi, Chelsea, Dark Sailor, Ebeano.

In addition, crucially, the metal was visually magnetic. The colors - reds, yellows, silvers, golds - were bold and bright. And it was easy to manipulate, to "fold, crumple, crush," to quote the title of a documentary film on Mr. Anatsui made in 2011 by Ms. Vogel, a curator and former professor of African art and architecture at Columbia University.

Finally the bottle caps answered Mr. Anatsui's growing interest in expanding the scale of his art. Pressed flat, twisted, or cut into circles, then punctured, the caps could be wired together into panels or blocks, which were joined to form pliant, fabriclike sheets, each sheet a whole made of fragments, and, potentially at least, endlessly expandable. "When I started working with the bottle caps," he said recently during a trip the United States, "I thought I'd make one or two things with them, but the possibilities began to seem endless." The labor involved was arduous but communal, a kind of three-step performance. Studio workers in Nsukka made the initial blocks. Mr. Anatsui determined the configuration of the blocks into a larger works. Whoever installed the finished piece could hang and drape it as they pleased. No way was the only way, no way was permanent.

But don't get the idea that Anatsui is some untaught artist. He studied Western art in high school and university in what is now called Ghana, taught by European teachers in the twilight years of what was then a British colony, the Gold Coast. After leaving school, he immersed himself in Ghanaian traditions of art, seeking to indigenize himself, but he must have continued to absorb European ideas, and not only about art, for as the Brooklyn Museum informs us:

Reading French philosopher Simone Weil's 1947 book Gravity and Grace inspired Anatsui to explore the concepts of what he calls "the material and the spiritual, of heaven and earth, of the physical and the ethereal" by using a limited, contrasting color palette, as typified in this work, among his largest. The seriousness of Anatsui's project reveals itself in the limits to which he stretches his materials and process, while the title and form evoke a poetic interest in transcendence and connection.

Anatsui would appear to be an artist-intellectual since he reads Weil and applies her ideas in his artistic creations. This artwork, called "Gravity and Grace" -- inspired by Weil and inspiration for the retrospective's title -- is a rather large work of aluminum and copper wire, 145 5/8 inches by 441 inches (369.9 x 1120.1 cm), which means it's about 12 feet by 37 feet (about 3.7 x 11.2 m). Like all of these monumental works that I've seen photos of, this one seems both heavy and light, "the material and the spiritual . . . the physical and the ethereal" that Anatsui himself offers as a description of what he aims to explore.

To see more of Anatsui's works, click on the NYT's slideshow, the Brooklyn Museum's website, or Google's images.

Eli Park Sorensen on Two Theories of Art . . .

Eli Park Sorensen

Seoul National University

I always enjoy Professor Sorensen's column in the Korea Herald, for he jogs my memory on things that I've read about and motivates me to read up on them some more. Last Monday, in "The experience of continuity in an episodic age" (November 26, 2012), he reminded me of two antithetical theories of aesthetics, the first by Aristotle:

When Aristotle wrote his famous treatise on dramatic art -- the "Poetics" (ca. 335 BCE) -- he thought of "Oedipus Rex" as a play that contained all the necessary components of a well-designed work; mimesis (imitation or representation of life), catharsis (release of emotions), peripeteia (reversal of fortunes), anagnorisis (recognition or identification), and hamartia (the hero's tragic flaw or error). Aristotle's Poetics, however, makes references to a number of plays, many of which no longer exist. What singles out these plays -- including "Oedipus Rex" -- is according to Aristotle less originality and novelty; rather, it is the plays' extreme loyalty to a very specific set of rules.

Aristotle was a man who liked order -- a place for everything, and everything in its place. He wouldn't have had a place for modern aesthetics:

Modern aesthetics -- emphasizing originality, novelty, innovation, and singularity -- has always had a uniquely troubled relationship with the series; mass-produced art adhering to a strict set of rules. In the essay "Art as Technique" (1917), the Russian critic Viktor Shklovsky argues that modern art's task is to "defamiliarize" things; to show the world in novel, wondrous ways. For in everyday life our perceptions are often dulled by habits and routines.

"Habitualization devours work, clothes, furniture, one's wife, and the fear of war," Shklovsky writes; "art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known."

Shklovsky is clearly a man who believed in breaking rules. Yet in his Art as Technique, he cites Aristotle:

According to Aristotle, poetic language must appear strange and wonderful . . .

Perhaps Aristotle and Shklovsky might have been able to have had a decent conversation after all, though Aristotle might have found Shklovsky citation of his words disconcertingly unfamiliar.

But maybe that was Shklovsky's intention . . .

Art Loses its Aura?

Paulina Longworth

Painted by Elena and Berta De Hellebranth (1930)

International Newsreel

New York Times

The New York Times has some interesting photos showing painters and sculptors at work, as in the photograph above, not one of the more interesting ones, unfortunately, but I couldn't copy a fascinating one showing Norma Jeanne Bernstein painting the singer and actress Tamara Drasin in 1931, a photograph in which the painting retains a special quality of mystery, potentially disconfirming Walter Benjamin's famous point about painting's loss of its aura, its uniquely 'sacred' quality originally derived -- if I might speculate, or perhaps vaguely recall -- from the artist as 'prophetic' figure whose halo was lost in the gutter (according to Baudelaire):

Walter Benjamin, in his famous 1936 essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," argued that photography and film changed the nature of all art, because they shifted attention from the artifact, which was unique and authentic, to the portable image, which could be reproduced again and again with no loss of power or value -- and from the painter's or sculptor's hand to the photographer's eye . . . . [T]he painting's uniqueness, which Benjamin called its aura, disappears in the photograph. (John Leland and Darcy Eveleigh, "Artists Caught on a Camera's Canvas," New York Times August 16, 2012)

The paintings above by the De Hellebranth sisters might never have had much of an aura to lose, for they certainly lack any in this photographic reproduction, but if you go to the actual article and look at Bernstein's painting of Tamara Drasin, the first in the gallery series, I believe you'll agree that the aura of this painting is retained in its photographic reproduction.

I realize Benjamin meant that an artwork that can be reproduced 'mechanically' lacks an aura -- and a photograph doesn't actually reproduce a painting -- but Leland and Eveleigh state that a painting's uniqueness, or aura, vanishes in the photograph, though they perhaps meant merely that photographs lack an aura.

Perhaps someone more knowledgeable than I can clarify this point.

Oh . . . Just One More Thing . . .

Steve Jobs with iPad
"ars longa, vita brevis"

(Wikipedia)

I thought I'd said my piece about Steve Jobs yesterday, but some other words of his that I'd previously read turned up in various tributes to the man and reminded me that there is just one more thing that I'd like to say about him. In several papers and also online, I saw a statement that he'd made in an interview with Fortune magazine back in 2000:

In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer. It's interior decorating. It's the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.

I've taken this quote from a BBC article, "In quotes: Apple's Steve Jobs" (October 6, 2011), because I couldn't find the original interview in Fortune, but if somebody else can locate that . . .

In re-reading these words, I realized that this is precisely how I feel about good writing. A beautifully written argumentative essay, for example, will look better on its surface, by which I mean the flow of its literary style, if it is well reasoned logically, well supported evidentially, and well organized thematically. Literary style isn't merely window dressing. It entails the selection of just the right word in exactly the right phrase or clause to say precisely what you mean to say. This requires attention to detail. A quick dash -- to suggest a light touch -- a comma, even if not grammatically mandated, or a period in the right place even if the sentence is a fragment.

And knowing when to stop.

Steve Jobs: End of an "Insanely Great" Era?

Exit Stage Right?

Paul Sakuma, Associated Press

(Image from NYT)

My first computer was a Mac, but I got it rather late, and second-hand. Even though I had done some word processing on a friend's computer in 1985, I didn't yet know how to open a new document when I took that Mac with me to Germany in 1989, and I had to write to a friend back in Berkeley for long-distance assistance because Germans were unfamiliar with Apple products at that time and could offer no advice.

Despite my own grave ignorance, I knew very well who Steve Jobs was, and why he was important. I knew because I had arrived in the Bay Area in January 1980 to start a graduate degree later that year in history of science at Berkeley, and most of my cohort were enamored of computers and soon could talk only of Steve Jobs. I therefore knew that he was a genius long before I understood why he was a genius.

I only began to understand when I bought my first Powerbook, around 1993. In fact, I purchased two -- one for me, and one for Sun-Ae, my girlfriend at the time and now my wife (of course). On that laptop, I wrote my doctoral thesis. That same computer accompanied me to Australia and Jerusalem, then on to Boston for a conference in 1999, when I purchased a new version of the Powerbook, sleek and seductive. I took that one to Korea, only to find that Korea was not a good country to own an Apple computer.

I eventually switched to Korean computers for convenience and have even missed the iPod, iPhone, iPad revolution despite their 'conquest' of Korea . . . but I still think of myself as a MacMan, or rather an Apple-Man.

So, I discover myself saddened by the departure of Jobs and find myself wondering if this is the end of an "insanely great" era, and I'm not alone in reflecting on Jobs the cultural-technical-business phenomenon and what his absence might mean. In "What Makes Steve Jobs Great," Joe Nocera, writing for the New York Times (August 26, 2011), tells us:

The businessman I met 25 years ago violated every rule of management. He was not a consensus-builder but a dictator who listened mainly to his own intuition. He was a maniacal micromanager. He had an astonishing aesthetic sense, which businesspeople almost always lack. He could be absolutely brutal in meetings: I watched him eviscerate staff members for their "bozo ideas."

The Steve Jobs I watched that week was arrogant, sarcastic, thoughtful, learned, paranoid and "insanely" (to use one of his favorite words) charismatic.

The Steve Jobs the rest of the world has gotten to know in the nearly 15 years since he returned to Apple is no different. He never mellowed, never let up on Apple employees, never stopped relying on his singular instincts in making decisions about how Apple products should look and how they should work.

As Nocera remarks in closing, Jobs is stepping down "at the too-young age of 56," presumably because of cancer.

From Nocera's article, one would be justified in imagining Jobs as disliked, but nothing could be further from the truth, as Claire Cain Miller tells us in "Where Some Earn Enmity, Jobs Won Affection" (New York Times, August 25, 2011):

Steven P. Jobs -- domineering, short-tempered and anything but warm and fuzzy -- has done something few business people in history have ever accomplished: engender genuine affection . . . .

That Mr. Jobs is seriously ill gave the tributes [of affection] a poignancy and sense of foreboding. But the aloof man in a black turtleneck -- who spent the last month on a yacht with his family, according to people with knowledge of his whereabouts -- also managed to foster familial emotions among those who work in technology and business and ordinary people who use Apple products . . . .

On Twitter, many of the posts expressed love for Mr. Jobs, an emotion that rarely surfaces in business chatter.

Even his critics love him:

One sometimes critic of Mr. Jobs, Glenn Kelman, the chief executive of Redfin, an online real estate agency, wrote on the company's blog: "I still remember exactly where I was, standing in a Dolores Street apartment with a cereal bowl in my hand, when he came on TV to say a competitor had no poetry. It made me think poetry had a place in business and that in turn made me think I had a place in business, too."

Well, maybe that's not quite love, but I also remember that statement by Jobs, and it endeared him to me as well . . . though I didn't go into business. Jobs wasn't insanely great on his own, he wasn't alone. Never forget that he started Apple with a friend of genius, Steve Wozniac, and pulled in a great businessman, John Sculley. Every great man has creative, hardworking people behind him, and the journalist Rachel Metz reminds us that "Behind Apple's products is longtime designer Ive" (Boston.com, August 26, 2011), drawing attention to the role of Jonathan Ive:

Ive, known to his friends as "Jony," has led Apple's design team since the mid-'90s. Working closely with Jobs, Ive has built a strong legacy at Apple, ushering in products that are sleek and stylish, with rounded corners, few buttons, brushed aluminum surfaces and plenty of slick glass.

Apple's pride in this work is evident even in the packaging: Open up any iPhone box, for example, and see Apple proudly proclaim, "Designed by Apple in California." Six of Ive's works, including the original iPod, are even part of the collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

People who have worked with Ive describe him as humble and sweet, quiet and shy, but also confident, hard-working and brilliant. Paola Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design for MoMA, said she knows "hardly anybody that is so universally loved and admired" as Ive.

"Products have to be designed better now for people to buy them because of Jony Ive and Steve Jobs and Apple," Antonelli said. "All of a sudden people have gotten used to elegance and beauty, and there's no going back."

I've read that Ive himself looks back to the German design expert who worked for Braun, Dieter Rams, but others will have to confirm this point. I learned a bit about Rams when my wife recently translated an article reviewing his career at Braun, and a point was made in that article -- to which I unfortunately have no link -- about Ive's debt to Rams in designing the iPod, possibly modeled on the Braun radio designed by Rams. This isn't meant to detract from the originality or either Ive or Jobs, for there are always predecessors.

Anyway, my point is that Jobs didn't make Apple great on his own. His success built on the work of predecessors and associates. Jobs is a technical genius, an innovative businessman, and even a great artist, but others at Apple share these talents -- as a group, at least, if perhaps not individually to the same degree as Jobs. So, with Ive and other brilliant individuals still at Apple even as Jobs steps down, perhaps the era of insanely great products there won't draw to a close for a while . . .

Dario Rivarossa starts to blog . . .

EkHeart in Eden

Dario Rivarossa

(Image from (He)Art by dhr)

My cyberfriend Dario Rivarossa, who posts comments here quite often, is an amusing, humorous, multitalented fellow, combining erudition with intellect, curiosity with discipline, and artistry with ethic, among other things, such as a talent for languages and skill as a translator.

He is also now a blogger, and his Blogspot blog is titled (He)Art by dhr.

Actually, I hadn't realized that he wasn't already a blogger. But I guess that I'll have to accept that he's a neophyte to the art of blogging, for here's the evidence from his initial post:

Hello?...

Why, hello. Or is it, "Hello?"

Dear Reader & Blogger

Gasp! How did he know that?! I am a reader, obviously, but how did Dario know that I also blog? Naturally, he knows that I am a blogger, but how did he know that I would visit and read his first entry? This man has preternatural foresight! Unless he was referring to the web host for Blogspot blogs, namely, Blogger, and for some obscure reason was apostrophizing it with a greeting . . .

welcome to my first attempt to start a Blog. I will know if it worked only after seeing it online.

It 'seems' to be working. Ah, here's some more:

Since I am no mother-tongue, the texts will contain several mistakes, but it doesn't matter: they will be outnumbered by the mistakes in the contents. E.g. I already registered this web address two times, and cannot delete the 2nd copy . . . I dunno-how skipped the Instruction page, so I am improvising . . . Now, will our hero one day succeed in modifying the Profile

I could probably give some advice . . . but what fun is there in that? Let this 'none-of-a-mother-tongue' struggle with the new medium of blogging. Why, blogging is the cutting edge of cyberspace, so one must blaze one's own path with that keen, avant-garde edge. Besides, I'll be overjoyed to see some other fellow's self-inflicted wounds, for the vanguard carry sharp, two-edged swords. Dario's careless cuts will make me feel so much better about my own wounded self.

Basically, the Blog aims at showing my drawings, mostly Fan Art devoted to classical Japanese Anime characters (reworked), and odd&ends freely based on the verses of poets like John Milton.

Uh-oh, people. Another Miltonist hawking his Miltonia. But at least Dario's blog will display art that hasn't been recycled from Wikipedia, unlike the found-art images supplied by yours truly. Dario will be recounting the future adventures of a certain "EkHeart," apparently a cyborg of the 23rd century.

This is the first drawing, sort of a Manifesto.

The revolution will be blogged.

Bye! --------- and, buy, in case ;-)

There it is, the initial double-punning, sales-pitching, counter-cultural dénouement, enclosed in case, yours for the low price of . . . free.

You can't do better than that.

Bernar Venet: Artful Figures?

Parabole de la fonction y=2x^2+3x-2 (left)

and

Gold Saturation with four N (right)

Bernar Venet

(Image from JoongAng Daily)

A couple of days ago, I mentioned that "I like to read articles on things that I know nothing of to see if they spark ideas on things that I know something about," and I've now come across the French artist Bernar Venet, who has a similar method for seeking inspiration:

"I confess, I don't understand math well . . . . I get fascinated by what I cannot understand. As I cannot understand math, I can express it as abstract paintings."

Being an artist, Venet would undoubtedly know something about painting, and I can see how mathematics as inspiration would lead to abstraction in painting.

Though Venet is renowned, I learned of this French artist only yesterday in an article by Moon So-young, who often writes fascinating articles on art for the JoongAng Daily. Yesterday's was titled "Making art of numbers and figures" (March 14, 2011) and alerts readers to the Venet exhibition running until April 14 at the Seoul Museum of Art near Deoksu Palace in central Seoul. Moon usually offers something to reflect upon in her art reviews, and she doesn't fail to do so here in this exhibition announcement, either:

American art critic and poet Donald Kuspit wrote in his book Bernar Venet Art and Mathematics: In Search of the Sublime that Venet's mathematical murals "are more sublime than mathematical, or rather use mathematics as a springboard to the sublime."

To put this statement into context, Moon adds:

The 18th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant said the feeling of the sublime, unlike the feeling of the beautiful, is accompanied by awe, fear or some kind of displeasure from an object due to its overwhelming and unfamiliar qualities.

This suggests that those individuals with math anxiety who visit the exhibition should be able to enjoy an experience of the sublime in Venet's mathematical paintings. But I wonder what mathematicians might make of such paintings.

Anyway, for those intrigued by the idea of math as inspiration, visit the exhibition, read the short JoongAng article, or -- even better yet -- click over to Bernar Venet's own website and explore on your own.

Peter Zumthor: Architect

Oculus

Peter Zumthor

Photo by Julian Faulhaber

(Image from The New York Times)

I like to read articles on things that I know nothing of to see if they spark ideas on things that I know something about, and I came upon an interesting statement by the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor quoted by Michael Kimmelman in "The Ascension of Peter Zumthor" for The New York Times Magazine (March 11, 2011):

"I think the chance of finding beauty is higher if you don't work on it directly," Zumthor has said in describing his philosophy. "Beauty in architecture is driven by practicality. This is what you learn from studying the old townscapes of the Swiss farmers. If you do what you should, then at the end there is something, which you can't explain maybe, but if you are lucky, it has to do with life."

I'm not entirely sure what to make of Zumthor's statement, but I find an elusive beauty in the images of his works within the Times article, so he must know what he's talking about even if I don't know for certain. I suspect he means that beauty cannot be readily grasped at in the abstract by the artist, but is better found through working within the constraints of deep experience, which informs the beauty that "has to do with life."

I know nothing of architecture, but I have a bit of experience with poetry, and I find some sense there to what Zumthor says. My most effective poems stem not from an attempt to write poetry, but from a need to express myself, within the framework offered by experience, upon the desire for something greater than what life ordinarily offers, given through what life has to offer.

Perhaps I'm not alone. What, for instance, is John Milton's Paradise Lost, if not an expression of that imperiled desire, an oculus of, and for, the blind?

Mystery of Vivian Maier, Photographer Extraordinaire

Vivian Maier 1926-2009

(Image from Vivian Maier: Her Discovered Work)

A mystery is unfolding over at Vivian Maier: Her Discovered Work, a blog maintained by John Maloof in honor of Vivian Maier, an obscure woman who might turn out to have been one of the greatest street photographers of the twentieth century. Here's a brief account by Mr. Maloof of how he discovered Ms. Maier:

I acquired Vivian's negatives while at a furniture and antique auction. From what I know, the auction house acquired her belongings from her storage locker that was sold off due to delinquent payments. I didn't know what 'street photography' was when I purchased them.

It took me days to look through all of her work. It inspired me to pick up photography myself. Little by little, as I progressed as a photographer, I would revisit Vivian's negatives and I would "see" more in her work. I bought her same camera and took to the same streets soon to realize how difficult it was to make images of her caliber. I discovered the eye she had for photography through my own practice. Needless to say, I am attached to her work.

After some researching, I have only little information about Vivian. Central Camera (110 yr old camera shop in Chicago) has encountered Vivian from time to time when she would purchase film while out on the Chicago streets. From what they knew of her, they say she was a very "keep your distance from me" type of person but was also outspoken. She loved foreign films and didn't care much for American films.

Some of her photos have pictures of children and often times it was near a beach. I later found out she was a nanny for a family on the North Side whose children these most likely were. One of her obituaries states that she lived in Oak Park, a close Chicago suburb, but I later found that she lived in the Rogers Park neighborhood.

Out of the more than 100,000 negatives I have in the collection, about 20-30,000 negatives were still in rolls, undeveloped from the 1960's-1970's. I have been successfully developing these rolls. I must say, it's very exciting for me. Most of her negatives that were developed in sleeves have the date and location penciled in French (she had poor penmanship).

I found her name written with pencil on a photo-lab envelope. I decided to 'Google' her about a year after I purchased these only to find her obituary placed the day before my search. She passed only a couple of days before that inquiry on her.

I wanted to meet her in person well before I found her obituary but, the auction house had stated she was ill, so I didn't want to bother her. So many questions would have been answered if I had.

Questions answered? Perhaps. But she sounds like a very private woman, especially in remarks about her presented in this ten-minute documentary: Street Photographer’s Work Discovered A Few Days After Her Death. The documentary title is somewhat perplexing, given Mr. Maloof's words above, until one realizes that it refers to the fact that he learned Ms. Maier's name only a few days after her death. That sobering fact focused my mind on questions about the meaning of a person's life. I wrote to a friend concerning Ms. Maier and her artistic aim, a possibly quixotic quest that led her to take more than 100,000 photographs over the course of her adulthood, which in turn led me to openly wonder about the meaning of her life:

She may turn out to be one of the great photographers of the 20th century, but she never attempted to display any in a gallery. Indeed, she seems to have left most of the photos undeveloped. Her work was uncovered by chance, and even her name was unknown until the young man who had obtained the photos found it in one of the boxes that he had purchased. He conducted an internet search and came up with a single reference, an obituary of only a day or two before.

If Ms. Maier turns out to be great, I wonder what the meaning of her life was. Did she know she was great? If so, why live in obscurity? Why not display one's work? We might recognize and acclaim her greatness, but what good is that for her now?

I realize that these are rather ill-formed questions, but perhaps readers can intuit what I'm trying to get at. One wants greatness to be acclaimed, the great individual to be broadly recognized, a deserved reward to be justifiably showered on the one who achieved greatness . . . lest life be unfair.

Life, of course, is unfair. Greatness is no guarantee of reward, and in Ms. Maier's case, she in fact appears not even to have sought any recognition and acclaim for her work. Indeed, as noted above, she didn't bother to develop the vast majority of her photographs. Was that profound confidence . . . or deep insecurity? Given the description of her as "outspoken" in her views on things, and her confidence in her opinions about films, I venture that she was profoundly confident, so sure of her artistry that she saw no need even to see the developed results. Yet, the mystery remains.

To see for yourself what Ms. Maier saw through the camera lens alone, visit John Maloof's blog -- or also a website, maintained by Jeff Goldstein, offering several more of her photographs (from among the more than 12,000 negatives he obtained) and a recognition that "sequestered, private motivations" focused her artistic vision.

Perhaps we'll learn more about those motivations over the next several months and years as we learn more of her art and life . . .

'Spirit' of En-Uk's Art . . .

Ghost

(En-Uk Sequoya Hwang)

Although this isn't one of En-Uk's more colorful images, it is one that a visitor to his blog asked permission to copy onto a tee-shirt:

Hi, my name is Easy.

I am now one of your fans. :)

I saw all your drawings and thought they were nice. I am gonna be following this blog.

Also, i wanted to use your Ghost drawing as a design on my tshirt before, but i thought i have to ask your permission.

(I saw the Ghost on your father's blog. :))

Thanks . . .

En-Uk readily gave permission:

Hi! Thank you for commenting! You can put it on your t-shirt. Bye.

Recent readers will recall that Hoju-Saram expressed interest in a couple of images:

Your son should open up a gallery. I'd pay good money for "Kim Jong-il Smell," and "Wow."

Maybe a showing would be worthwhile some day. En-Uk's colorful drawings seem well-liked, and Lollabrats even took them seriously, as readers will recall:

[T]he crazy outlines, spare details, interesting "framing," and the use of the fill-in color function with colors from the default pallete make these images unexpectedly compelling to me.

From his longer remarks and aesthetic analysis, I surmise that Lollabrats knows what he's talking about in his words of praise for the collection of works in En-Uk's 'gallery'.

I suppose that I should wait, however, and see how En-Uk's style develops. He does like art, but he's only been working on this art blog for a few months now, so I don't yet know if his daily output will be sustainable.

But he's not yet flagging . . .

Obama-Inspired Kitsch!

President Barack Obama

(Image from En-Uk's Art Blog)

Yesterday morning, I showed En-Uk this website featuring "Bad Paintings of Barack Obama," and the aesthetic shock so unsettled little En-Uk that he simply had to add his own contribution . . . which looks somehow Peruvian, Egyptian, and Pentecostal simultaneously. It sort of serves to pep one up! At En-Uk's website, I commented:

Note Obama's cool, yet fiery aura!

And for those who like a soundtrack to accompany their kitsch, here's the You Tube version of "Bad Paintings of Barack Obama"! If I could only master up-loading videos, I would tape Sa-Rah playing my own "Yes, he can campaign" song as soundtrack to En-Uk's depiction of Obama and get millions of hits!

The Campaign Song

Oh, I think we may maintain
that Obama can campaign!
We hardly need explain
that he's got a campaign-brain!

Yes, he can campaign!
Yes, he can campaign!
Yes, he can!
Yes, he can!
Yes, he can campaign!

Oh, conservies, don't complain,
for Obama can campaign!
Why, he out-campaigned McCain!
Even Clinton felt his pain!

Yes, he can campaign!
Yes, he can campaign!
Yes, he can!
Yes, he can!
Yes, he can campaign!

Oh, we might sound not quite sane,
but Obama can campaign!
He'll prove each bane-foe vain
in an eight-year campaign-reign!

Yes, he can campaign!
Yes, he can campaign!
Yes, he can!
Yes, he can!
Yes, he can campaign!

Perhaps this would spark a new career that could turn out better than my previous one . . .

En-Uk's "Singer"

Singer

En-Uk Sequoya Hwang

(Image from En-Uk's Art Blog)

My ten-year-old son is still continuing his art blog and recently sketched and colored the figure above, titled "Singer," about which En-Uk tells us:

This drawing is called "Singer." I made this drawing because I like singers.

Well, I like singers, too, but I've never sketched and colored anything remotely like this, so there must be more going on in En-Uk's mind than I can fathom. I have to agree with commentor CIV:

Wow. This is outstanding. Nice work, En-Uk.

En-Uk has blogged on an artwork of his own making daily since beginning his art blog on January 13th, and he's now started another blog: En-Uk's Animal Blog. This one also has some points difficult to fathom, e.g.:

A grown polar bear can hit something very hard -- it is about like a 3 ton piece of metal hitting something.

I may have to fathom this one with a grain of slowly dissolving salt . . . though En-Uk does seem to know more about animals than I do.

Lazy morning...

The Beauty of Vogon Poetry:

"O Beauty, who dost betwixt

thy fever'd buttocks

my beleaguer'd skull embrace."

-Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz, poet and bureaucrat

(Image from Wikipedia)

. . . for me to post a paste job.

Sometime during Seoul-Town's night, J. J. Mollo left a new comment on my post "Gypsy Scholar Receives a Threat...":

Why do you have to be so rational? What's wrong with you? You have an unnatural preference for Truth and Beauty. That could hurt your career. Get over it! Open yourself up to the hate!

I responded, uncharacteristically, with a bit of honest reflection:

JJ, maybe you're right. Perhaps I should be more open. Possibly, I've been too close-minded.

Okay, I'll confess to a prejudice. I've never really liked Vogon poetry, and ... well, I hate to admit this, but I think that Vogon poetry reveals the Vogon's inner nature, which seems to me to exemplify soulless bureaucracy.

Besides, Vogons are ugly. Their best features are their atrociously ugly eyebrows, which if drawn upward in surprise happen to hide their disgustingly ugly noses. Unfortunately, Vogons are rarely surprised.

I much prefer Dolphins ... even though they, too, have noses on top of their heads...

Okay, I've 'fessed up to my prejudice against Vogons and for Dolphins. Anybody else willing to reveal their dark hates or moist loves?

Or will I be abandoned, left hanging, just twisting in the dusty winds...