Gorey Exhibit at Columbia

Illustration by Edward Gorey

Oh, sometimes it drives me crazy being geographically challenged. When will we get transporter technology? "Beam me up"... or beam me over to New York, in this case, where there is an exhibition of works by Edward Gorey at the Columbia University Library of Rare Books and Manuscripts. Check out Gorey Preserved here.

22 Ways to Fight Writer's Block

Since many of the regular readers of this blog write in some way or another, I thought that this infographic from Copyblogger would be useful. I know from personal experience that writer's block can be frustrating and emotionally fraught, and thought that these were good suggestions presented in a fun visual style.

Personally, walks on the beach help. Tea while reading something by an author that inspires me helps, and sometimes I re-read things I have written before (to remind myself that I have done it before and lived through it :-).  What methods do you use to get the words flowing? Leave me a comment.


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Art, Academia and Victorians

Had a busy day this past Friday, visiting with fellow art historian Hannah Sigur. Together we visited the de Young Museum, went to a meeting of the Victorian Society in an amazing period house, and went to a party at the downtown offices of academia.edu

Still Life with Grape Juice & Sandwiches (Xenia) 1994
by David Ligare, in the collection of the FAMSF.

Things were quiet at the de Young, as everyone's focus was on the Cult of Beauty exhibition opening at the Legion of Honor. We enjoyed the opportunity to wander around the nearly empty galleries, happy to spend some uninterrupted quality time with the art. One painting that completely transfixed us was Still Life with Grape Juice & Sandwiches (Xenia) 1994 by David Ligare. The wall text explains that Ligare often volunteered in a soup kitchen, and this is what they served to the people coming in for a meal. Xenia refers to the ancient Greek custom of gracious hospitality to guests, including bread and wine.  The details and the lighting in this painting were gorgeous. It's on display in a second floor gallery surrounded by still lives from the 18th and 19th century, as an example of how still lives and the often subtle messages they contain can still be relevant in contemporary art.

The historic home of
Richard Reutlinger

In keeping with the 19th century theme, next we went to a meeting of the Victorian Society in the absolutely astonishing home of Richard Reutlinger near Grove and Webster. From the Egyptian Revival parlor, to the themed bedrooms upstairs, every room is like an individual exhibit.  As I wandered the house, I noticed all the random period portraits he collected and wondered about them. I wondered if he invented stories for them, all those strangers, inhabiting his walls.

The Victorian Society meeting was in Reutlinger's basement, where he houses his collection of vintage player pianos (at least 6 plus 2 in the parlor).  The meeting itself was about the Society's Summer School programs in London and Newport, Rhode Island, featuring tours and field trips about the architecture and decorative arts of the period.  They include a through discussion of all classes of Victorian society from the home of the Vanderbilts to textile mills. The London tour includes fabulous gardens and the home of William Morris (among other locations). I previously posted about hearing the Director of the Newport program Richard Guy Wilson speak at the Walt Disney Family Museum about the "American Renaissance" and the World's Fairs. I hope, someday, to make it to one of these.

academia.edu logo

Moving on to something completely different, we dropped in on a party in the financial district at the offices of academia.edu, who were celebrating their 1 Millionth member. On the whole, it was a typical dotcom party with wine and foosball. Everyone was really friendly, and we stayed long enough to hear Richard Price, Founder & CEO, talk about his goals for the company. He said that academia.edu's mission was to make it easier for research to be shared, cutting the time it generally takes for traditional publishing (about a year and a half) to more-or-less instant. He hoped that this would open new dialogs in the sciences (see more about this). In conversation, he seemed amazed that two art historians would find the site useful, and wanted to hear all about it. We were also surprised when one of the staff members told us that they have heard of people using academia.edu's stats as a way to justify their research, and that academia plans to expand this feature. It's a great site, I wish them continued success!

Eisner Show Panorama

Screen Shot from Eisner Video

Gorgeous 360 view of the Eisner retrospective show at Rio Comicon (Rio de Janerio. The Living Spirit of Will Eisner was co-curated by the Brazilian filmmaker Marisa Furtado and CAPE partner Denis Kitchen. After Comicon the show moved to the Centro Cultural São Paulo (November-December 20110. It features 107 works by Will Eisner, plus a unique bronze sculpture of The Spirit, sketchbooks, publications and other materials related to Eisner's life and long career.

Another post about Whitney Houston

I’m going to take a moment to jump on the nostalgia bandwagon with everybody else writing about Whitney Houston.  She was beautiful and gifted with an amazing voice, which made her very public decline heartbreaking to watch.  Her career spanned decades, and I think her music managed to touch most of us at some point in our lives, whether we were pop music fans or not.

I never met her.  But I used to drive the freeways of LA with her voice booming over my cheap car stereo, trying my best to keep up with her.  Back in the late 1980’s – early 90’s, when I was working for the licensed merchandise giant Winterland Productions, we made T-shirts, posters and programs for her tours. At the time, Winterland was doing most of the major acts: Eric Clapton, Elton John, Michael and Janet Jackson, Madonna, U2, Cher, Springsteen, etc… out of all these, I hate to say, Houston always had terrible sales.  This was always a mystery, because lots of people obviously loved her. She was notoriously uneven and nervous in live performance, and I can only speculate that people were glad to see her, but didn’t find it a performance worth commemorating with a $25 T-shirt. 

When she nailed a performance though, she really knocked it out of the park. Her recorded performances were always spot on and mixed to perfection. I’ve seen many posts that include a link to her amazing rendition of The Star Spangled Banner at the Super Bowl in 1991 (such as this post on The Mary Sue, which also includes a lot of good biographical detail).   The one time I saw her live was at the 1994 Grammy Awards at Radio City in NY.

The producers made the weird choice of having her start the show singing the first verse of I Will Always Love You acapella, and she wavered a bit (plus the audience had no idea the show had actually started, and were still milling around schmoozing), but as the song went on she found herself, and the audience response soared along with her, applauding wildly at the big finish. I will always remember her this way, and I hope her troubled soul finally found some peace.

Censorship and Super Bodies in IJOCA

cover of IJoCA

I'm happy to say that my article Censorship and Super Bodies: The Creative Odyssey of Margaret Harrison has been published in hard copy in the International Journal of Comic Art (Vol 13, No 2, Fall 2011 page 369).  The article is primarily focused on Harrison's Captain America series, her censored 1971 gallery show, and other aspects of her long and interesting career, concurrent with the publishing history and character development of the Captain America character. Research on this topic was inspired by Harrison's 2009 exhibition at Intersection for the Arts, and the article includes interviews with Harrison, and Kevin Chen (Art Program Director, Intersection for the Arts, SF). Unfortunately, this article scans badly, so I can't post it in IJOCA's format. Here is the article as a pdf, for anyone that is interested.

The Fall IJOCA (750 pages!) also includes a very interesting symposium on women in Manga and another exploring language and textuality. Publishing the IJOCA is a labor of love for comics scholar John A. Lent and I am always amazed that he manages to pull together this mammoth publication. Thanks to him for cornering me at PCA after my presentation last year and encouraging me to finally publish it.

Previous posts about Margaret Harrison | Harrison Wiki

Wendy and the Lasso of Truth

If you can't see the photos in the slideshow above, click here to see them on Flickr
Click the link above to see the slideshow full-size with captions.

I met Wendy Crittenden in grad school at SFSU, where she earned her MFA. I was immediately drawn to her quirky humor and her equally quirky large-scale color photos. We looked for projects to work on together, and her photos of theatre facades were included in our Syndicate project for the Bay Area Now 5 show at YBCA (also with Tom Griscom; posts about this project). About mid-way through the MFA program, Wendy started to create small, intricately detailed drawings of people, animals, and things that were often unique takes on a well-known word or phrase.  When she started drawing elements of superhero costumes, I was really intrigued. She answers questions about her work below:

KM: Wendy, I think the contrast between your photography and drawings is interesting. Your photos tend to be in color on a large scale, making mundane architecture look heroic, yet the drawings are very intimate, small and detailed in black & white. Do these show different sides of you?

Wendy Crittenden.
big boy, 2009.

WC: I guess they're different sides of me, I don't generally think of them that way though.  I see each as a different process that I can tap into my imaginative space with:  the drawings usually start with a title and then the image arises where the photographs are a process of my meandering through space and then manipulating what I see into a more interesting and iconic visual image - in this case the title comes after the image is made.  Each process is a way for me to solve a puzzle, that puzzle is "How do I draw/photograph this in a way that is unexpected and witty?"  If it feels even just a little bit hokey or sentimental, I scrap it.

As for color, I love bright saturated color, which is evident in the photography.  The more I have been shooting photographic images in the desert, though, the more muted that palette has become.   The drawings are a muted palette because I started out with santa beards, wanting to make white on white drawings for the sheer challenge of it...  and then I evolved to using different shades of white to bring out or subdue certain elements of the drawings.  Bright white is usually used to highlight the most poignant element of the drawing, at least in regards to the title, and the other shades I use to give more depth to the image.  I use translucent paper so that I can work the backside of it with white to add depth, and sometimes I add another layer of paper behind to create even more depth with white.

Wendy Crittenden. bated breath, 2010.

KM: I remember that you like to base your drawings on traditional fables. What's your favorite one?  What's your favorite source material?

WC: As for fables, I actually think that I only have one drawing that is based on an Aesop Fable, telltale, based on the Ass in the Lion's Skin, but I intend to pursue more.  My drawings are actually mostly based on phrases and the history of phrases; sometimes the actual history, sometimes the misunderstood history and sometimes my own imaginative interpretation of the phrase.  My favorite misunderstood and often misspelled phrase is bated breath, I had a hard time parting with the drawing I did of that.

I'd have to say my favorite source material is the phrases that I just mentioned.  I have a list of "to draw" phrases that is always growing.  I usually draw the one that I am most excited about at the time I am looking at the list.  Usually the newest added wins.  However, I am currently working on a drawing of a whippet on very tall stilts, I think it will be titled stilted.  I just had an urge to draw my dog on stilts, for the absurdity of it.  She already has long legs, why would she walk on stilts!?

Wendy Crittenden.
lasso of truth, 2009.

KM: You do lots of drawings referencing superheroes. Often it's an isolated item central to the character, like Wonder Woman's lasso. What do these mean to you?

WC:  The superhero drawings, in particular the lassos of truth, are related to my santa beard drawings.  I like isolating one of the iconic items about a well known character and then I redraw it without any context; it's not only pushing an iconic element further than the character, it's also a way for me to collect multiple examples of that item to point out how each is so different from the other though they are all the same thing.  Like fingerprints, snowflakes, or Becher water towers, but santa beards and lassos of truth.  I love it.

KM: I remember you had a long talk with Margaret Harrison after her Intersection show at their gala when they moved into the M5 space. Did she influence you?

WC:  I did have a lovely talk with Margaret Harrison, I don't think the talk was influential, but her early work is.  People themselves don't affect me, but seeing their work does.  I love the way she drew her early work that was shown at Intersection for the Arts that year.  Especially the women, I recall a woman with a lemon that I adored and the women in the sandwiches (Take One Lemon, 1971 and Good Enough to  Eat, 1971 can be seen on the Tate web site).  That's some witty stuff.

KM: The TV series Parenthood bought one of your drawings, soft serves, as a prop. Have they used it?

WC:  I don't actually know if Parenthood has used that drawing.  My drawing soft serves was purchased for the third season's set design, but I haven't seen any current episodes.  I don't subscribe to cable, I just watch old seasons of shows on Netflix, and to be perfectly honest, I only started watching episodes of the first two seasons after they purchased the piece.  It's a great show, and the set design of the first two seasons is really good, so I imagine that if they have used the drawing, they have used it well.  I will be looking out for it once the third season comes out.

KM: Any upcoming shows/goals?

WC:  I don't have any current shows coming up, I am mostly focused on making more large drawings right now.  I am quite obsessed with detail, so much so that the large drawings can be very time consuming.

See Wendy's etsy store here.