Stuff and Moonshine

Weekend Update

Sat, 09 Aug 2025 15:42:40 GMT

Got a new job, start on Monday. This means that when I had lunch with Mom yesterday I could tell her about being let go from the previous job without worrying her too much.

We went to the AGO. Turns out you can get a free pass for two adults through the Toronto Public Library site, although checking in goes somewhat more smoothly if you have a physical library card with you (I did not, and eventually had to log into the TPL site so they could check that my card number was the same as the one on the pass).

Lined up to spend sixty seconds in Yayoi Kusama’s mirrored installation Let’s Survive Forever, which lets you gaze at infinite reflections of yourself in a galaxy of stainless-steel orbs that sort of looks like the Sea of Holes sequence from Yellow Submarine.

Saw the Joyce Wieland retrospective, which was a bit overwhelming—Wieland did a lot of large-scale quilts and the like. Saw a video of an interview with Naoko Matsubara, a wood-cut artist with a dry sense of humour we both liked. Saw an exhibit of Latin American photography, mainly journalistic. The best item was the contact sheet for Graciela Iturbide’s Our Lady of the Iguanas, because you got to see all the other takes in which the subject is laughing or looking awkward or the iguanas are not in a dramatic enough pose.

ETA—Apparently Mom has a friend group who call themselves “The G7” (unclear if there are actually seven of them) and they do things together. Last month they tried playing croquet in a local park with the three remaining mallets from our family croquet set, and had a good enough time that they subsequently sourced a complete croquet set from the local freecycle group, but it’s been too hot and smoky to play.

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Once Again I Write a Fic for a Movie Nobody Else I Know Has Seen

Sun, 07 Apr 2024 00:14:13 GMT

Grapevine Readymade (1345 words) by moon_custafer
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Rebel (Movie 1961)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Tony Hancock & Paul Ashby
Characters: Tony Hancock, Paul Ashby, Josey the Existentialist
Additional Tags: 1960s, Artists, Gen or Pre-Slash, Paul's pov, Paul sincerely thinks Tony is a genius, Paul may be right
Summary:

“You’ll never guess who I ran into — Josey— you remember? The Existentialist? She’s in England, and she’s started a rock group.”

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The Rebel AKA Call Me Genius, Further Comments

Tue, 26 Mar 2024 00:45:12 GMT

So, the premise of this movie is that Tony is a passionate but supremely talentless artist who runs away to Paris where he somehow becomes the toast of the Rive Gauche and then accidentally becomes an art star when a famous art dealer (George Sanders) gets his worked mixed up with that of his friend Paul. Even before the latter happens, I think Tony’s popularity with the bohemians is supposed to be an emperor’s-new-clothes thing— but here’s the thing: his “bad” paintings really are more energetic and interesting then the movie’s “good” paintings.

Given that the movie ends with Paul making new paintings influenced by Tony’s style, and those paintings being acclaimed* maybe the point really is that it’s the synthesis of Tony’s enthusiasm and Paul’s skill that makes for great art. Apparently the movie was a favorite of many painters of the time, including Lucian Freud, and I’m curious to know how they interpreted it.

(also I’m pretty sure Tony had a green carnation in his lapel in one scene)

* Apparently all the paintings for this movie were done by the same artist, and the paintings seen at the end were taken from his most recent gallery exhibit.

ETA--

Apparently in 2002 the London Institute of Pataphysics reconstructed and exhibited all "Tony Hancock's" painting and sculptures from this movie.

Looks also like somebody did the same thing on a lesser scale and is trying to sell their copy of "Ducks In Flight."

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I’m Not Involved With the Local Contemporary Art Scene

Sat, 06 Aug 2022 19:26:32 GMT

But I’d like to call for a ten-year moratorium on the following:

Images of the artist huddled in a corner (nude or clothed)
Imagery drawn from the artist’s family photo album, especially if the faces are blank or one family member has been conspicuously cropped out

(Split pomegranates as a symbol of femininity are on thin ice)

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Friday Report

Fri, 12 Nov 2021 22:45:13 GMT

In a variant on the three-busses-finally-all-show-up-at-once phenomenon, I suddenly have interviews for multiple possible jobs. Here’s hoping one pans out. I don’t know how I did at the one today— the interview part seemed to go well but the technical test was, afaict, the graphic-design version of the Kobayashi Maru. I hope my reaction was the correct one.

I really like the costumes Rita Farr and Madame Rouge have been wearing on the last few episodes of Doom Patrol. I can’t find online confirmation of it, or even anyone else asking the question, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the costume department has been looking at photos of Maya Deren and other women artists of her generation.

Speaking of, I was looking up Saul Steinberg, who I mostly know from his work in the New Yorker, and he was married to a painter named Hedda Sterne, whose reputation fell victim to the usual fate of painters who don’t work in one trademark style, or at least neatly-divisible pyramids, i.e. critics either ignored her or classed her with various art movements she didn’t embrace.

Anyone else having trouble logging into Tumblr? Or is it just because of my latest software patch?

ETA— Andrew suggested a cold restart and Tumblr is working for me now.

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Weekend Report

Mon, 18 Oct 2021 17:46:12 GMT

I am delighted by this Twitter thread of people who have just discovered the paintings of Alex Colville and are amazed by their resemblance to video-game graphics from 12-15 years ago.

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Saturday Report

Sun, 29 Aug 2021 01:46:44 GMT

Today I read about 575 Wandsworth Road in south London. The owner was Khadambi Asalache, a Kenyan poet who bought the small house in the early 1980s as a fixer-upper, and ended up covering all interior surfaces with ornate fretwork he made from salvaged wood. https://vimeo.com/42393441

Also, sculptures/installations made from old windows, etc, and cityscapes made from cookies that gallery visitors then eat.

A fascinating tale of emergent behaviours in Skyrim.

The power went out for a bit, before sundown but during a thunderstorm, and my spouse photographed me with my laptop looking like I’m casting/researching dire spells or something.

Also:

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Couple O’ Links

Fri, 16 Oct 2020 00:53:26 GMT

Absolute mad lad Rene Magritte, his wife Georgette and some friends in a Surrealist home movie

Absolute mad lad David Lynch interrogates a torch-singing monkey

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For Anyone Needing a Short Break From Doomscrolling

Tue, 15 Sep 2020 18:18:12 GMT

Yesterday I learnt about Roy Lichtenstein’s Mme. Cézanne, which pleases me more than his better-known works.

Timeline:
1870s-90s   Paul Cézanne does a lot of portraits of his wife, Marie-Hortense, despite apparently not liking her all that much.

1943            Erle Loran writes an academic work on Cezanne that focuses on the compositions alone, and includes a lot of black-and-white diagrams showing the outlines of the figures, plus arrows and A, B, C etc labels. Apparently this was a pretty standard Modernist critical technique. The text includes this statement: "this diagrammatic approach may seem coldly analytical to those who like vagueness and poetry in art criticism.”

1962a           Roy Lichtenstein reads the book and considers this such a hilariously oversimplified approach that he blows up two of the diagrams and includes them as paintings in his first exhibit.

1962b          Consternation! Uproar! Loran sues for plagiarism. Various people argue over whether Lichtenstein transformed the diagrams into art or just appropriated them. Lichtenstein insists that he didn’t transform the images and that that’s the whole point. Someone comments that this is more outrageous than Duchamp’s exhibition of a print of the Mona Lisa with a moustache and a salacious pun graffittied over it.

2020:           Me: “Well it was certainly riskier than LHOOQ -- making fun of an artist is way less dangerous than making fun of an art critic.”

There is an ASMR channel on Youtube that is just a guy with an Aussie accent whispering interesting facts about Australia, like how the voting system works or how to make fairy bread.

Actually I think there might be more than one.

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Weekend/ Monday and Tuesday Report

Tue, 09 Jun 2020 17:53:17 GMT

1. Beatrice let me scratch her ears on the weekend; she still only lets me pet her if Nana’s nearby as a reassuring presence, but given that two-and-a-half months ago she was hissing and running away if any humans approached, this is pretty good news.

2. Today’s puzzle on the jigsaw-puzzle app was of the painting Watson and the Shark – not sure which of the extant versions, but I googled it after I got to work and read Elizabeth McCracken’s account of her feelings for the version in the Boston MFA.

3. The wasps are back; the really tall Orkin Man came and sprayed for them again.

4. I looked up some of the cast of HBO’s The Outsider, and now I’ve watched Derek Cecil in the first episode of the short-lived Push, Nevada (2002) which is… certainly something.

It’s not even so much a knock-off as a parody of Twin Peaks, everyone delivering neo-noir dialogue with a weird lack of affect. It’s like one of the Kids In the Halls bits that blurs the line between comedy sketch and impenetrable art film (Cecil’s character would have been played by Mark McKinney). I can’t even tell if I loved or hated it. I kept having to stop every couple of scenes to just process how weird it felt, and I thought I was pretty used to weirdness. That the copy up on YouTube is a flickery, low-quality transfer just adds to the vibe.

Also, I need to know who recorded that rock cover of ‘Ring of Fire’ that plays at the end of the episode.

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Quarantine Arts & Crafts

Mon, 20 Apr 2020 21:26:01 GMT

I covered a styrofoam mannequin head I’d had for years with papier-mâché and painted it in a quasi-Futurist style. Question— should I put in an X or cross for the other eye, or leave the space blank?

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Update and Stuff

Thu, 20 Feb 2020 18:39:53 GMT

Andrew and I have spent the past couple of weeks battling what’s either a bad cold or a mild case of ‘flu (it’s been worse for him than for me), so I’ve made it into work without coughing on everybody, but haven’t done much that’s exciting, nor have I made it out to any demos in support of the schoolteachers’ union or the land defenders, alas.

This morning, for some reason,
( Read more... )

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This Month In Art Heist Theories

Fri, 05 Jul 2019 15:22:24 GMT

https://www.thedailybeast.com/did-whitey-bulger-pull-off-the-isabella-stewart-gardner-museum-art-heist-for-the-ira?

*Shrugs*—my guess is that if it’s been thirty years* since the theft and there’ve been no ransom demands, the paintings haven’t turned up on the black market, and no one’s responded to the offers of amnesty and a reward? Then the thieves weren’t professionals, they were obsessive art lovers who kept the paintings for themselves.

If this gets solved, it’ll be in ten or twenty years when some old guy dies of natural causes and the person who goes to clear out his apartment finds a dozen oil paintings hung up in his bedroom where he could look at them every day. Here’s hoping the person doesn’t assume the pictures are reproductions and throw them out—or then again, that may already have happened.

*I know the article suggests there’s an underground network that stashes stolen paintings until the heat is off, but if this is one of the most famed unsolved art heists of the twentieth century, a hundred years from now those paintings should still be identifiable enough to draw notice if anyone tries to fence them.

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Download Line Art from Museums

Fri, 22 Feb 2019 21:05:05 GMT

They suggest using the images as colouring-books, but I imagine it would be handy for collage, shrinky-dinks, etc.

https://lifehacker.com/download-coloring-pages-from-over-100-museums-1832753859

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Boycotting Tumblr today, so I have to make my single-sentence posts here

Mon, 17 Dec 2018 19:09:05 GMT

Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova, just doing adorkable couple stuff-- “stuff” in this case being “painting sets for the Bolshoi.”

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Day Off Report

Fri, 30 Nov 2018 00:41:14 GMT

Kristine, on Facebook, pointed out the Mickalene Thomas show at the Art Gallery of Ontario, and I’d taken the day off for a doctor’s appointment anyway, and had two days left on my AGO membership, so I went to see it this afternoon.

The fifth floor is tricky to find (you have to go to the sculpture atrium at the back to find the elevator that goes there) but it was worth it, especially as a big fan of collage, and also of paintings that probably included collage at the sketch stage (i.e. some sections of Thomas’ paintings look like they include real vintage wallpaper, but upon closer inspection the design is hand painted. The rhinestones, otoh, are all real.) Also liked the “living room installations” that straddled art and seating for visitors (Thomas’s main theme is Celebrating Black Women, but she also likes 1970s Interior Design, apparently because it reminds her of her childhood.)

I paid a bit less attention to the video installations, only because I’m generally less into video installations than into paintings (I’d prefer to watch the videos on my own time than in a gallery), but I did walk in on a clip of Eartha Kitt as Catwoman and noted that it was from her debut episode, in which Catwoman attacks the all-white Gotham Fashion Society with a bomb which leaves them unharmed but turns their hair frizzy — subtext very much intended, I suspect. Show runs until March 24th, 2019.

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Early-Week Links Round-up

Tue, 25 Sep 2018 18:17:17 GMT

The Sprawling Obsessive Career of Fritz Lang “Film historian David Kalat once proposed rules for a Fritz Lang drinking game: Whenever a Lang film shows an angry mob or a woman in a nightgown, everybody takes a shot.” Angry mobs definitely, but in the movies I’ve seen I can only recall one scene of a woman in a nightgown.

While looking up the awesome stunt rider Dorothy Herbert (who I know from her role in The Mysterious Doctor Satan) I came across the also-awesome “proletarian art collectors” Dorothy and Herbert Vogel.

Watched the trailer for Stan and Ollie (2018) several times. I’m usually wary of fat suits for both aesthetic (they look unconvincing) and political (they’re arguably pretty close to wearing blackface) reasons; a portrayal of a historical figure whose appearance is sufficiently well-known to require make-up anyway? might be an edge case. OTOH I’m *really* impressed with Steve Coogan’s look as Stan Laurel – he’s got fewer prosthetics to hide behind (think they might have built out his ears) and he is absolutely nailing the eyes and mouth. What I’m saying is I still want to see this movie, though it looks to me as though they exaggerated tensions between the team in order to create a plot.

Also, yesterday I learned that Jack Benny’s cameo in It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World was originally written for Stan Laurel, which explains why the character wears a derby and drives a 1930s car (Laurel turned it down, having retired the act when Babe died).

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Mid-Week Links Round-up

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 17:59:38 GMT

I tried making some (non-animated) reaction images to try and link to when needed. So far they haven't worked in any of the threads in which I've wanted to use them.

While looking up the Otto Dix portrait, I also found his painting of Dr. Wilhelm Mayer-Hermann ; I’d known for years that “I’m just going to make everyone look ugly ‘cos I hate’em” wasn’t really Dix’s motivation (apparently he and Dr. Heinrich Stadelmann were pretty good friends, and a lot of his sitters were proud to have been painted in his snarky style ) but I love it that Dr. Mayer-Hermann, years later when both he and the painting had separately ended up in New York, apparently liked to visit his portrait in the Museum of Modern Art and eavesdrop on people’s reactions.

Wow, Florence Bates had an interesting life.

Gearing up for Hallowe’en: “When He Died” by Lemon Demon is the cheeriest slice of horror you’ll hear this week:

When he died
Turns out he left behind a mansion full of other people's skulls
The odd thing is
they never found his own

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Early-Week Links round-up

Tue, 26 Jun 2018 12:50:08 GMT

There will be a protest outside the US Consulate in Toronto this coming Saturday (June 30); in the interests of honesty there will also be one on July 1 outside the Toronto Immigration Holding Centre (385 Rexdale Blvd, Etobicoke), which also holds child detainees. I’ll be at the former but doubt I’ll be able to get to the latter as it’s not quite as easily accessible by public transit (it's doable by my standards, but Andrew isn't up for anything that requires changing bus routes more than once).

I’ve been compulsively googling Erich Ohser/E. O Plauen since Friday, and have turned up these early cartoons (not sure if they’re part of a sequence or separate drawings on the same theme), as well as some adorable photos of him and his son. Damn the nazis.

On a lighter note, looking him up involved running several German-language websites through Google Translate, with somewhat quirky results. One description of Ohser’s physical appearance that I’m pretty sure meant to say something about "his ample figure" got rendered into English as "his cozy growth."

Huh. It looks as though someone’s doing a digital-streaming dramatization of Christie’s The Mysterious Mr Quin, except they’re kind of trying to go Sherlock, with a contemporary setting and a much younger Mr. Satterthwaite live-blogging events. Not entirely sure that’ll work, but you never know.

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A woman on the bus this morning was drawing on her tablet

Thu, 08 Feb 2018 15:15:13 GMT

– a picture of a greyhound carrying a small lantern in its mouth and running through falling snow to a light source somewhere out of frame. The dog’s eyes were slightly more cartoony than I liked, but the modelling was very nice; she had started with an outline sketch and worked on it over twenty minutes or so. I think it may have been a gift for a friend because at the end she wrote “Happy Birthday” (I think – I was reading it upside down) at the top.

I should probably get back to using my own Sketch app – I used it a couple of years ago to do the illos for Jason’s re-issue of Sensible Stories, so it’s a more powerful tool than you’d expect.

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Radical

Wed, 03 Jan 2018 22:18:41 GMT

I’ve never watched any of Black Mirror, but it’s one of those shows I can’t help but be aware of, because people online talk about it, compare current events to episodes, or post jokey descriptions of the show’s ethos like: “What if phones…. But too much?”

During the break, people were talking about recent episode “U.S.S. Callister,” so I went and looked up the summaries and reviews of that, and then I had to look up “San Junipero,” which sounds lovely (and deliberately atypical for the show) and now I’m thinking about the current ‘eighties-aesthetic revival (I thought there was going to be one in the late ‘90s, but it never really got off the ground except for the music.) I was a kid in the ‘eighties, but I wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention to pop culture, though I did eventually notice that everyone at the time seemed to be nostalgic for the ‘fifties. Probabaly depended on the circles one moved in, though. In some places, I gather, it was all Patrick Nagel.

So then I googled Nagel, or rather, I googled “prints ‘80s artist Duran Duran album cover.”

Nagel himself is something of an enigma. There don’t seem to be any interviews with him; reminiscences I’ve read suggest he was slightly surprised, though not displeased, by his sudden rise to success in the early ‘eighties, and didn’t particularly want to be famous himself (the one time he did appear as a local celebrity, participating in an ‘aerobathon’ for the American Heart Association, it killed him.) Most descriptions of his work make the connection to Post-Impressionists and to the Japanese woodblock prints that had inspired them, but there’s no word from Nagel confirming this (though it’s hard to imgine him going through art school without encountering either body of work). According to a footnote on Nagel’s wikipedia page, his biographer Rob Frankel* makes the suggestion that the artist, who had been an Army Ranger during the Vietnam War, may have been influenced by the work of mapping terrain.

Anyway, while he still has his die-hard fans, and is also coming back into fashion as the ‘eighties are now old enough to be cool and retro rather than just dated, bring him up and at least one person will sneer about “nail-salon art.” The association of the imagery with “feminine” businesses may be part of what drove his work out of fashion in the 1990s (though anyone so intensely associated with the ‘80s probably couldn’t have remained popular in the decade immediately following – the pendulum swings hard.)

Possible reasons for the popularity of Patrick Nagel-style imagery on salon business signs:

80sautopsy (http://www.80sautopsy.com/2011/08/12/patricknagel/) suggests the dark hair/pale skin/red lips combination may appeal particularly to Asian management/clientele (see above about Japanese prints).

My further suggestions:

Nagel’s minimalist, high-contrast style translates easily to clip art, making it easy for sign companies to produce.

The cool colour palette may allow these signs to hold up to long-term UV exposure better than ones that go for warmer, more naturalistic depictions.

*To date there’s only been one biography, which effectively means there’s only really been one major perspective on the man; I don’t know enough about Frankel to know what biases to look for in his opinions.

RPG forum discussion from 2006: https://forum.rpg.net/archive/index.php/t-241170.html

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Trying to Think About More Pleasant Things for the Moment

Sat, 02 Dec 2017 22:38:54 GMT

Swung by the Friends of the Merril Collection’s holiday party and spoke to a few people, but didn’t stick around for The Northlander — Andrew couldn’t face the idea of sitting in stackable plastic chairs for the length of a feature film. Instead we went to the AGO to use our memberships to see the Del Toro show again. I also took the opportunity to look at the Florine Stettheim exhibit. I ought to have remembered before seeing it that she was one of the sisters who had the arty dollhouse. Sadly there were no photos on display of the dollhouse, but I rather liked her paintings, especially the ones of her sister Ettie. I’m still unsure how I feel about the fragmentary footage of Four Saints in Three Acts (for which Stettheim designed the costumes and sets— appropriately enough as her work is probably the nearest visual equivalent to Gertrude Stein); I think I’d have liked it better if more of it had had a soundtrack.

Afterwards we had coffee in the restaurant they’ve put into the ground floor of the Grange, enabling me to partake of one of my favourite pastimes: drinking coffee in picturesque surroundings— in this case, a Georgian mansion with Modernist furnishings. Must remember to take advantage of it a few more times before our membership runs out.

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Poor Millicent wore a Surrealist comb, Made of bits of mosaic from St. Peter’s in Rome

Sun, 01 Oct 2017 03:03:52 GMT

We tried going to Nuit Blanche this year, but Andrew got overwhelmed by the crowds pretty quickly, so we saw exactly one thing that was part of the show, a performance piece at the Art Gallery of Ontario which turned out to involve a lot of shouting, so we retreated to the Dutch Old Masters room, then went for pizza. It was after that we tried to navigate a crowded sidewalk and Andrew decided he’d had enough; probably just as well, as his leg started bothering him while we tried to find a streetcar stop and then a cab. On the upside, I hadn’t visited the Old Masters in a while and looking at them up close, seeing the individual brushstrokes, as opposed to looking at them in photographs in which they look impossibly polished and realistic, made me think “I could do this.” I’ve no idea if this burst of confidence was warranted, but at the pizza place I took some snapshots that I think could translate well to that painting style.

The earlier part of the day was pretty good too. Andrew found two jackets at the thrift store, including a tuxedo jacket he was very pleased with (and wore out later to Nuit Blanche), and we tried a diner in Parkdale, Peter’s Corner Cafe, which we’d never gone into before even though it’s been there for years, and it was pretty good (my gyro was serviceable, but Andrew got the Montreal smoked meat on rye and says it was almost as good as what they serve at Kaplansky’s.)

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Another Weekend, Another Gorgon

Sun, 20 Aug 2017 02:20:04 GMT

Apotropaic #5, oil on glass.

Went for a somewhat more realistic style this time.

I painted over a framed copy of one of those creepy Ann Geddes babies-in-costume pictures. I think this is an improvement.

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The Week's Best Headline

Thu, 03 Aug 2017 11:51:56 GMT

http://www.catholicnews.com/services/englishnews/2017/ottawa-archbishop-surprised-by-negative-reaction-to-robotic-spider-on-cathedral.cfm

I like that La Machine asked the cathedral to host the giant spider specifically so it could echo Louise Bourgeois' giant-spider sculpture Maman, across the street.

ETA -- it's not like churches haven't hosted art projects before involving, oh, say, a live stag.

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