{ Monthly Archives }
February 2011
Dana Tanamachi
I’ve been sort of doodling type in the margins of notes and things at meetings recently. I’ve always held pretty firmly that if I’m in a meeting, I should be paying attention, and it’s rude to doodle. Opinion changed. If I’m gonna sit through meetings where I’m needed for about 5 minutes of the total hour, then I’m going to be using that time to make some pretty/interesting/gross/blasphemous. Possibly all of those at the same time. Not possible? A flower with an E8 sequence in the middle shitting on a baby Jesus. That’s just off the top of my head. But none of what I’ve casually been doodling is close to being as wonderful as the work of Dana Tanamachi. Of course, she isn’t doodling, she’s making fully-formed, kick your teeth out through your eyes works of awesome. But she is making them in chalk, a very impermanent medium. All it would take was one drunken Kiefer Sutherland to bump-slide his way past that wall, and whammo, all fucked up. It’s like sculpting with soap bubbles. “But Brad,” you’re saying, “couldn’t she just seal it with something?” “Readers,” I reply, “go fuck yourselves; I don’t have to take that kinda crap from you.” Here’s to hoping that someday my shitty doodles even resemble Tanamachi’s work. Should take me another five or six straight years of meetings.
Martin Ouellette
Some day you’re walking down the street, probably a few hours after it’s rained, and the sun has come out to warm you as you walk. A quick flash of light catches your eye and you look down to see a few big shard of broken glass refracting the sun through the water in the gutter, creating a dancing array of jagged light. Or you walk out of your house and see, on a mailbox in front of you, some long forgotten flyer, tagged, pasted over with other ads, torn, discarded for time to consume with its slow, ponderous chewing. Now if you’re Martin Ouellette, this is what happens to you all day everyday. He’s found a vision of beauty in the detritus and discarded ephemera of the world; one man’s trash is another man’s hyperrealist painting. Ouellette takes macro photos of all the scraps floating around on the streets, and renders them in staggering detail to emphasize the complex beauty we toss out and walk by without noticing. Will any of this give you an infant’s wonder at all things great and small, no, but it might help you occasionally notice beauty where you weren’t expecting it. That’s pretty much modern art encapsulated.
Videos
Keeping you coming back through inconsistency.
Emilio Santoyo
I feel like, given enough cough syrup and enough time, these are the kinds of drawings I would produce. Let’s hope I have some paints around at the time, otherwise I’m going to revolutionize “mucus painting.” That idea actually just made me gag a little. Well, you can’t have art without suffering.
Carly Waito
Beautiful, hyper-realistic paintings of minerals/crystals by Carly Waito. Came across these while looking for a new tattoo idea. I think I’ve found it, but now I need to find the world’s greatest tattoo artist to make it happen. That probably means I need to hitchhike to Japan. I’ll see you guys in 4 or 5 months.