TGIF

And I'm not even employed yet! The man at the Partagas cigar factor in Havana probably agrees with me right now. Have a good weekend everyone!

The Jig is Up

I've had an amazing five months, been to some beautiful places, and seen some amazing things, but for better or worse the jig is up. I'm moving back to New York city next month.

I am ambivalent about the move. On one hand, it will be great to back in a city I know and love, but on the other I will miss the itinerant lifestyle. Also, while I'm excited by the prospect of finding a new job and working on new projects (somewhere besides my kitchen table), I'm going to miss the luxury of waking up whenever my body tells me to to do some writing.
What all this boils down to is that my last few weeks in Playa del Carmen will be spent job hunting-- never the most fun task. I crawl through the job boards, craft up cover letters, and then send them off with little expectation of hearing back. I'm off to the job boards now in fact. At least hiring seems to be on the upswing and I have had a pretty encouraging response from the past week of applying. Keep your fingers crossed for me!

Sarah Lutz at Lohin Geduld

Burst, 2009

New work by painter Sara Lutz is going up at Lohin Geduld tommorow, and rather than noting the fact and tossing the release per my usual press release practice I wanted to share her work. Because of the gorgeous colors and textures of her oils, and because of the richness and playfulness of her work, I was hoping one of my lovely blog readers would go in my stead and report back with more images!

This is your mission should you choose to accept it.

Carlos Quintana

La cosa está mala 2008

Contemporary art in Cuba seems on one hand to be flourishing, with studios all over Havana asking you to come in and have a look at some brightly-colored, expressive paintings-- all done rather skillfully. They start to look the same after a while. However, Carlos Quintana had a show up (in a proper gallery, no less) that really impressed me.

Quintana was born in Havana in 1966 and went to art school there. I found that he moved to Madrid, where he currently resides, in 1993. The large canvases with bright washes and splatters of color that he uses belie the darker undercurrent of his figures. In the work below, he slaps on paint in a manner more violent than cartoonish, and the size of the canvas (79 x 79 in.) can overwhelm. Yet the Senorita's innocent expression and sea foam green dress add a wistfulness to the composition.

Senorita Elegante 2008

More, and better images of, his work on Artnet.

Naked And Nude

Artists, listen up. Don't change your art--just show a little skin. The nude has a long history in art as being provocative, symbolic, realistic, and many other things. Go one better, and use naked people not as some prettified, distant nude in a painting, but as naked people. Articles are still pouring out about Abromovic and MoMA, but now they are mostly about the use of two naked models in a doorway- a genre begun by Jerry Saltz, picked up by the NY Times, and now hawked by any widely-read publication for a general audience.

Abramovic herself is all but forgotten sitting there in her chair below. Don't worry though, this could work if you aren't (yet) an internationally known artist with a decades long career. Case in point: work by Brian Reed at Chair and the Maiden Gallery in February. The show got plenty of street attention, and even made the NY Times when a model in the window, wearing only something between a mobile and a spiderweb on her head, was asked by police to step down.

In terms of attention-getting, naked is the way to go. It is an amazingly effective and simple technique to get more people, some who don't even like art, to look at your work. Or is it nude? Whatever it is, it can still raise people's, ahem, hackles.

Heroin User

More hilarity available at My Third Eye Scratched.

Good Things Come to Those Who Wait

And I'm not only talking about the state-subsidized ice cream parlor in Havana, where Cubans wait in line for hours for the flavor of the day--at times with empty plastic containers in tow.*

This is where they hide all they good stuff: the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes' Coleccion de Arte Cubano. The museum proceeds chronologically from the pre-Colonial to contemporary post-Revolution Cuban art. Here they have a horde of works by the under-appreciated Fidelio Ponce de Leon and some of Wilfredo Lam's most famous paintings, including La Silla, as well as extensive drawings of his. After reading up on these painters a few months ago, it was a joy to see them.

Fidelio Ponce de Leon is an artist who is difficult to research, and there I was in the museum without even a pen to jot down the titles of his works! Unfortunately the museum is extensively staffed with gaurds who shout their Draconian policy of "No Foto," even when you are photographing the caption next to the painting. It is a shame because there were many interesting artists who were new to me. To top it off, now that I have returned to the land of the internet, I find that the museum does not have a website. I guess I'll have to wait a little longer on that one.

Another place that holds some good stuff, if you'll allow me to toot my own horn, is Escape Into Life online arts journal, which posted an essay of mine last night. You might remember that I wrote a bit about Gauguin before on this blog, about the time I was writing about Ponce de Leon and Lam. If you want to continue the stroll down Memory Lane, check out Paul Gauguin and Savageness on Escape Into Life.


*You can buy roughly 50 scoops for the equivalent of 1 USD!, so it makes sense to fill up while you can.

Non-political streeet art in Cuba?

It wasn't all Che and political slogans. Somebody in Cienfuegoes had a lot of fun with the mural above and below. Click for the full size version of the mural above to see how nicely the artist did her eyes.



In Havana, this long wall along the Paseo Marti had an intricate mural running down toward the Malecon. What's going on? I'm not entirely sure, but it involves a cigar, a film strip, and the head of Aristotle on a column interspersed with darker, more realistic scenes.





I suspect, rather than being deviant, these works must have gotten the official stamp to have survived in the prominent locations that they have.

Everywhere El Guerrillero Heroico

I didn't buy the T-shirt, but that doesn't mean the iconic image of Ernesto "Che" Guevara wasn't before my eyes everywhere I went the past 10 days. Che has become the definitive symbol of rebellion, a legendary leader of revolution, and in this widely reproduced image a 20th c. pop culture icon.

At the right is the popularized cropped version of Guerrillero Heroico, as the photograph taken by Cuban State Photographer Alberto Korda during a speech by Castro at the funeral for the victims of the La Coubre explosion in Havana, Cuba. It was taken on March 5, 1960 and Korda willingly shared the image when anybody he could- gratis- in order to share the ideals of Che. Korda has said that when he shot the picture he was drawn to Guevara's expression of "absolute implacability" as well as anger and pain.


Slogans, such as "Hasta la victoria sempre" and "una de las mas nobles formas de servir a la Patria es consagrarse al trabajo," appear next to the image, restating his ideals and beliefs in the revolution. By the end of the 1960s, mass produced posters and lithographs and the adoption of the image by Pop artists, turned the image of the charismatic and controversial leader into a cultural icon around the world. His death in Bolivia in 1967 elevated his status to that of a martyr, and his popularity in Cuba, where his family still resides, remains as high as ever. This image of him was first seen in Cuba at his funeral, and since proliferated there as it has in the rest of the world.

Guantanamera

It's my new favorite song, because of or despite the fact I heard it a lot when I was in Cuba the past 10 days. In many ways the trip was an eye opener for me, and I took 538 pictures to prove it (Holy Fidel!). Music is in all the squares and streets from radios in the morning to the ubiquitous live bands at night. I was staying in casa particulares, private houses that rented rooms, and I began to suspect after a few nights that every Cuban knows how to play an instrument and dance salsa.



The cheerfulness of the music and the dancing glosses over some of the harder aspects of Cuban life, but at night in Havana when the dim lights hide the cracks and dirt of some old square, and the musicians play Guantanamera, it can be truly magical.

And the winner is...

I loved some of the comments on 'in these shoes,' however, I could not let it prejudice the results of my highly-advanced gaming system. Dun-dunna-nah!



Christine!

Sally Thorpes Rowles!

And Kim!

Congratulations, and I'll be in touch about how to receive your Art House Sketchbook Monthly Project!


On another note, don't think I died from la gripe when you don't hear from me for the next 10 days or so. I'll be in the land of Che statues and big cigars. Hopefully without a fever!

Today is the last day...

to win an awesome Sketchbook Project from Art House Co-op in Brooklyn and be part of a worldwide art project. Check out the post and leave a comment on this month's theme, in these shoes, to win.

Count down until 11:59 pm--the cut off time for comments-begins now. My super high-tech coffee mug drawing will have to be done in the morning, due to a sudden, horrible case of la gripe.

Cecilia Paredes's Faces in the Wallpaper

Art Noveau, 2009 and left, Chrysanthemum, 2009

These photographs by Cecilia Paredes trick the eye by seeming to be floral wallpaper, then encourage a deeper look when you realize a person is there. The Peruvian artist paints and photographs herself to blend into her linen backdrops. Paredes states,

“I wrap, cover or paint my body with the same pattern of the material and ‘re–present’ myself as part of that landscape. Through this act, I am working on the theme of building my own identification with the entourage or part of the world where I live or where I feel I can call home. My bio has been described as nomadic so maybe this is also a need of addressing the process of constant relocation. There is also the factor in my mind that flora as we know it, is coming to be endangered so with all these preoccupations, I think that in these works, aesthetics bind with the anthropologic in order to register fragments of personal and social memory.”

To me, it speaks of women's decorative role in society, their being told to be quiet and blend in, and here the artist blends with disquieting force.

Nocturne, 2009

Flamingos!

It was a very pink weekend in Rio Lagartos, where the pink crustaceans give the water as well as the flamingos a rosy hue. These awkward bundles of pink sticks look even stranger when they fly and appear as one straight line in the sky.

Mayan Clothes, Contemporary Painters

The show Panaramico de la Plastica Yucatanese at the Center for Visual Arts in Merida, with its focus on contemporary Yucatan artists, caught me by surprise by including many pieces of women, specifically in traditional Mayan costumes.

Carol Acereto, Belleza indigena, 2008

Having been in Merida about a month now, I would no longer make the mistake of thinking the artist is idealizing the past--rather it expresses an opinion about a changing present. Acereto's painting features young girls in traditional Mayan dress, white embroidered around the square neckline. Even today in Merida women wear the traditional white shift dress to go about their lives, as do Mayan women who come into Merida for the markets. Surprisingly, perhaps, I also see younger women wearing a top in the same style with jeans--is traditional Mayan dress as in vogue as a t-shirt?

Sandra Nikolai, Chismorreo en el mercato yucateo, 2009

Sandra Nikolai's women you might see at any market, which is as frenetic as the scene above suggests, and the colors remind me of the brightly-painted buildings. The florid palette and bustling brush strokes make sense to me after walking through the sensory cacophony of the markets.

Sandra Nikolai, Otra garnachita, 2009

A tortilla maker? Whatever little street food is being made, the artist treats the subject with dignity and I love the strong lines of the hand. It seems like the Mayan heritage is being explored, and valued positively, in these works. As a middle-aged man on the street told me yesterday, Spanish was his second language--Mayan his first, and his village an hour outside of Merida continues to make hammocks as its industry.

Jaime Barrera, Homenaje a Cy Twombly, 2009

On the other hand, he spoke fluent English and worked as a waiter at a restaurant called Main St. It's a changing world. A homage to one of my favorite painters hung in the show as well, which overall testified to a variety of influences and interests among contemporary Yucatan painters.

Blog Giveaway: Sketchbook Project from Art House Co-op

Got the doodles? The grand art of doodling deserves more respect than it commands. If you have an itching for the pristine pages of a new sketchbook, some inspiration, and a way to share your work with the world, have I got the blog giveaway for you: the folks over at Art House Co-op in Brooklyn organize worldwide art projects, and today they are offering a chance for 3 readers of Art Ravels to win a Sketchbook Project Monthly: April.

Each month the community votes on a theme for its sketchbook, and then you have two months to work on the sketchbook that they mail you. The theme for April is "in these shoes." "In these shoes" is just a place to start, so feel free to use the books to try out new things, tighten up your skills, or just have fun. Mail it back, and it will be included in the permanent collection of the Brooklyn Art Library where anyone can come in and look through it. Steven and Shane started Art House Co-op in Georgia in 2006 before opening the Brooklyn Art Library in Redhook this past February, so if you're in NYC you can check out your new neighbors and your new work at the same time!

Here's what to do: leave a comment inspired by this month's theme by next Wednesday, April 7 11:59 pm. (If you don't have a blog, send me an email address at which to contact you if you win.) I will then write your name on a piece of paper and enter you into my super high-tech coffee mug drawing, winner to be announced next Thursday. Maybe this time next week a new sketchbook will be on its way to your door!