Lowell Birge Harrison - Fifth Avenue at Twilight
c.1910. Oil on canvas. 76.2 x 58.42 cm
Detroit Institute of the Arts (United States)
Makoto Sasaki: Tokyo Layers. Frantic Gallery, Tokyo, Japan.
Each photo-image by Japanese artist Makoto Sasaki in his new series ‘Tokyo Layers’ has been enhanced in such a way that the pictured city seems to be busier still, enabled by his unique method of image creation. Tokyo has been captured by Sasaki as an accumulation of all of the city’s busy and frenetic energy told through his long, moving exposure, and interruption of light works of art. Layers of luminosity and elongated buildings have been realized in a manner that contemplates the inhabitants within the futuristic structures rather than focusing upon the bustling metropolis as a singular organism. The prints produced by Sasaki in ‘Tokyo Layers’ have been developed without any digital adjustments, but instead achieve their painterly quality from the artist’s movement when the original image was captured. Frantic Gallery notes that the cyberpunk, futuristic gothics or urban-ghost aesthetic is intrinsic but rather than this motif being the primary subject of the artist, he instead focuses upon a representation of the city of Tokyo’s essence as a work of art.
Reverse of Volume RG by Yasuaki Onishi
Yasuaki Onishi uses the simplest materials – plastic sheeting and black hot glue – to create a monumental, mountainous form that appears to float in space. The process that he calls “casting the invisible” involves draping the plastic sheeting over stacked cardboard boxes, which are then removed to leave only their impressions. This process of “reversing” sculpture is Onishi’s meditation on the nature of the negative space, or void, left behind. It appears to be a suspended, glowing mass whose exact depth is difficult to perceive. Almost like stepping into an inner sanctum or cave-like chamber, the semi translucent plastic sheeting and wispy strands of hot glue envelop the viewer in a fragile, tent like enclosure speckled with inky black marks. Visitors can walk in and out of the contemplative space, observing how the simplest qualities of light, shape, and line change.
Wednesday’s Work of the Day:
Untitled, Cy Twombly, 2001. MoMA.
“Twombly’s fusing of thought, mark-making, narrative, history, myth, and formalism made me see that there is no such thing as purely abstract or representational art. He’s the artist who made me see that all art is equally abstract and that something as simple as handwriting and scribbling, unleashed, can be art.”
Jerry Saltz Celebrates the Life and Art of Cy Twombly, New York Magazine.
Photographs of the Swiss Alps from Nick and Maggie DeWolf’s 1959 vacation.
Nick (who graduated from MIT at 19 and eventually founded Teradyne Corp before abandoning the technology industry and moving to Aspen, Colorado) passed away in 2006, leaving behind a prolific collection of over 50,000 film exposures, which are steadily being processed, scanned and uploaded to Flickr by his son-in-law Steve Lundeen.
View many, many more here.
So breathtaking.
NOSTALGIA: The October 1932 Vogue Cover Illustrated by Carl Oscar August Erickson
Dropspin, Melanie Authier, 2008, 60 x 50 inches, acrylic on canvas
Strangely mesmerizing sculpture by French contemporary artist Daniel Firman. Exhibited back in 2008, this life-size piece was seen at the Fontainebleau Castle in Paris, France. Called Wursa, the sculpture is balancing on its trunk 18,000 km above the earth. Firman consulted with a professional taxidermist to construct this piece making it look as real as possible.
Roman Opałka was a French-born Polish painter who painted numbers. In 1965 he began painting a process of counting – from one to infinity. Starting in the top left-hand corner of the canvas and finishing in the bottom right-hand corner, the tiny numbers were painted in horizontal rows. As of July 2004, he had reached 5.5 million. (x)
