Just east of Radar O’Rielly’s home town of Ottumwa, Iowa is a tiny little town called Eldon. You make a few turns down some narrow little lanes and there at the end of one road is the house from the painting American Gothic by Grant Wood. It’s a lot smaller than I expected, though to be honest, until I saw in noted on the map, I had never given it any thought at all. American Gothic is one of the most paradied images of all time with hundreds of people and things standing in for the grumpy couple in front…
Category: art
Andrew Wyeth-Looking Out, Looking In
One of the great things about the internet is you can find an image of just about any work of art ever made. This is also one of the bad things about the internet, because people decide why should I go to a museum when I can just google it? Well, because a few pixels spread across a computer screen is not the same experience as standing where the Master stood as he/she applied the paint to the canvas. The National Art Gallery in Washington, DC has a collection of Andrew Wyeth’s paintings and sketches having to do with windows…
Exit Through The Gift Shop
Imagine that you are a struggling artist-or worse yet, a struggling street artist. Not only is your art generally not worth much, but it is a crime to make it and someone doing Community Service will be along shorty to cover it up. But all is not that bad, a handful of street artists are being taken seriously, chief among them a man known as Banksy. Exit Through The Gift Shop is the story of a handful of graffiti artists who have taken the art of defacing private and public property to a new level. Not content with plain old…
Google’s Art Project
Dear old Mom wanted to be an Artist when she grew up. She took one of those mail order courses where you draw a turtle and bought a lot of books containing the Works of The Masters. She sketched three things a day, and yet, she never got past that kind of middle school phase where her work looked ok, but never looked exactly like Art. I went through a small Artist phase myself, sketching and drawing and never becoming any better. The Wife went to college and studied Art. She painted mostly abstracts on 3×4 foot canvases, with an…
Andrew Wyeth
Andrew Wyeth 1917-2009 Andrew Wyeth was one of the last great American artists-his work was often confusing, but you could look at it and see that it was meant to be something. This was a rare thing in art after Picasso took the world by storm and whole generations of artists decided that random dots and lines and swirls could be considered great art. There are still great artists, they are just not making the kind of art that I tend to like. N.C. Wyeth, Andrews father, now that was great art. Of course, N.C Wyeth was not considered a…
Rene Magritte Paintings
René François Ghislain Magritte (21 November 1898 – 15 August 1967) was a Belgian surrealist artist. He became well-known for a number of witty and thought-provoking images.-Wikipedia To be honest I was always more impressed with the works of M.C. Escher, but when you look around and try to find other artists like Escher, Rene Magritte is a name that often pops up. Rene Magritte paintings have that slightly out of whack quality that all surrealist images have. Rene Magritte paintings don’t quite have the same level of skill and talent as surrealist Master Salvidor Dali. I always got the…
Paris 2008 by Jonathan Yeo
As far as sexy images of Paris Hilton go, Paris 2008 by Jonathan Yeo is pretty tame. Especially since the artist made the portrait by using pictures taken from porn magazines. I wonder if the pictures used for this collage were pictures of Paris Hilton from porn magazines? Jonathan Yeo got the idea for the collages after the cancellation of a commission by the White House for a portrait of President Bush in 2004. He made the Presidential Portrait, anyway, but in the form of a collage using bits of pornographic magazines. I think he should make a whole series…
The New York City Waterfalls
There are four of these pretty cool man made NCY Waterfalls on the New York City Riverfront. I think the one under the Brooklyn Bride has to be the best of The New York City Waterfalls. It’s just that I think a waterfall needs some kind of backdrop to look like a proper waterfall. The others look like those optical illusions of a faucet hanging in midair while water runs out of it over a clear plastic hose. It’s cute, but not exactly art. I have always been more of a fan of permanent art myself-the Brooklyn Bridge itself is…
The Blue Dog of George Rodrigue
“This Blue Dog came into my life, and changed everything. It just hit like a rocket ship, and just bang!, you know?” -George Rodrigue George Rodrigue paints Blue Dogs, and rather a lot of them. Well, I guess really he just paints one blue dog several times. The Cajun Artist George Rodrigue has been painting this blue dog since around 1984-it’s supposed to be a sort of werewolf, or at least, be inspire by a werewolf. George Rodrigue is one of many artists whose names I am familiar with from seeing them on CBS Sunday Morning. The Meet the Blue…
The Armory Show-But Is It Art?
The Armory Show is all about Current Art. The International Fair of New Art, is the world’s leading art fair devoted exclusively to contemporary art. In its tenth annual exhibition, The Armory Show 2008 celebrates the spirit of contemporary art. The exhibition includes many of the most important contemporary dealers showcasing new art from around the world. It could be argued that there hasn’t been any real Art since before 1900-or before the impressionists, or before Picasso, but Art has always had it’s odd followers who liked the latest things. Even if the latest things look mostly like what you…