OF A GOLDEN AGE

After years and years of doodling, painting, collages, newspaper layout, graphic design, and generally obsessive aesthetic behavior, I have a very particular eye. The phrase “Don’t let perfect get in the way of good” should be tattooed on the inside of my eyelids because I spend a LOT of time letting perfect get in the way and have long given up on trying to make other people see things my way.

All that is to say: I am picky. Book covers are one of the major reasons I can’t get behind the Kindle and never will. And you know what? I LOVE this book cover made by one of Kelly’s art students. Not only in that “What great student work!” way — this is a really clever, well-thought-out design.

In fact, I like it better than any of these Amazon search results.

I recently finished paying monthly installments on the first artwork I’ve ever purchased, from a gallery in the LA area called Nucleus.

Nucleus has a comprehensive and beautiful website, where they sell both artwork and prints of some of their artwork. The experience I had when dealing with them was completely positive from beginning to end. My payment plan was reasonable and enabled me to purchase this startling, wonderful thing which I will have for the rest of my life.

The financial jump from purchasing posters — which are costly! — to art prints is surprisingly small.

Today is Arlington Heights’ A Walk in the Park Fine Arts Faire, which was similar to my hometown’s annual festival, except awesome instead of completely terrible in every way. I bought this charming little item:

It’s the right size to be a soapdish or a kitchen spoon rest, but I really just like looking at it so it will probably remain decorative. Dishwasher safe, food save, microwave safe — good stuff.

The artist is Sue Dix of Suramics. Her more serious-looking pottery is beautiful and really well crafted. She explained to us how one particular copper glaze is used, where you fire it in the kiln and then place it in a sealed space with something that’s burning. As the material burns, it uses up the oxygen and changes the way the copper oxidizes, giving it a lovely varied patina in a very short time.

My friend and coworker Emily has a birthday today. She always has beautiful flowers from her garden in a vase on her desk and I thought some small tributes might be in order. I gave them to her in an envelope and she got them matted (!) and framed.

And a detail of each panel, clockwise from top left:

• Billy Joel and his newest wife are divorcing. This aside on their ages made me chortle:

(she’s 27, he’s 60; if the age difference were a person, it would arguably still be too old for her)

• Sonia Zjawinski recently published one of the stupider ideas in recent memory: Trolling popular photo website Flickr, making and framing your own prints of photos you like for free. As the commenters (and the Nytpicker) point out, this is to photography what unauthorized downloads are to the music industry: Illegal.

People in the comments drew all kinds of analogies, but there’s no need: this is a crappy thing to do. You aren’t stealing from faceless millionaires or record label corporations, it doesn’t have any awkward nobility the way music downloading does, and many of these photographers would likely give you the permission if you’d only ask — they’d probably be delighted to know their work was in someone’s home. And if cheapness is the key here, hell, offer to PayPal each photographer ten bucks.

The real craw-sticker here seems to be that this blog post ran in the New York Times, which apparently has no common-sense regulation anymore.

• My new breakfast of choice: 1/2 cup Grape Nuts, 1 6-oz Dannon All Natural Nonfat Plain Yogurt, 4 packets of Truvia, and a few drops of pure vanilla extract. The yogurt and subsequent ingredients basically recreate the vanilla Dannon Light n Fit, with Truvia instead of a digestively caustic artificial sweetener, and straight yogurt instead of a long list of ingredients studded with chemicals. 280 calories, 1 gram of fat (0 saturated), 28% of daily fiber, 28% of daily protein.

Seong Moy (b. 1920s) is a modern artist and printmaker whose work is atraditionally gestural:

      

Having never seen the man himself, I found it charming when the Smithsonian Flickr feed posted this photo, demonstrating that indeed Seong May was conservative in appearance — excepting, of course, his sly Mona Lisa smile.

But those browline glasses! My goodness.

• I am a sucker for cute things, and, as anyone who’s ever shown me a picture of a hamster can attest, easily moved to giggling. Artist Scott C. called this painting (thumbnail at right) Cutest Thing Ever, and as I just told Marty: it may not be the cutest thing ever, but it’s definitely a contender.

• At Andy’s house last night we played some Beautiful Katamari, which is not quite as adorable as Katamari Damacy was in college but is still super twee.

      Andy: Do they have twee in Japan?
      Me: Japan is twee.

• Random House UK has an ongoing contest for a child aged 7-12 to design a cover for their upcoming release of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan.

• And from the “grotesque abuse of cuteness” file: costume shop owner Ann Bruno, wearing a bizarre Easter Bunny outfit, accused of pretty maliciously cyberstalking a fellow businesswoman.

I can’t stop looking at Tower of Babel by Peter Brueghel the Elder.

Thanks, FreeRice.com Famous Paintings category.

Artist David Horvitz linked to his latest collaborative project, which is the title of this post. You contact via email, give your address, and receive confirmation of where you can go to pick up the resulting photographs. From the description at the website:

We would like to make it clear that we have no intentions in promoting sales in these places, which will mostly include major US drug-stores. We think of it more as infiltrating these spaces with our games.

going to museums makes my brain explode with aesthetic joy and intellectual stimulus. something in my brain feels sated after staring into the eyes of a painting i’ve never seen before, knowing how beautiful and full of talent some people are. milwaukee has a large collection from one particularly hip elderly woman benefactor: a picasso, a kandinsky, clashy fauves, even a mildly-ugly chagall, and hundreds of others. the picasso is called “the cock of liberation,” something we giggled over without embarrassment until we reached the georgia o’keeffes, which gave us something dark, soft, warm-colored and cavernous to giggle about anew.