More graphite: James Busby at Stux

Wingspan, 2012

James Busby also uses graphite to create a monochromatic palette in his works. Busby's Wingspan: New Works exhibition up at Stux Gallery through March 17 shows many large, textured graphite panels. Wingspan, above, shows the artist manipulating the wet graphite over white gesso to create a beautifully textured surface. The lines are painstakingly hand tooled.

Disc 2, 2011

The artist's previous work in graphite was smaller, like the work above. Busby used a layer of graphite that he then ground down to a smooth sheen as a surface. In works like this, the colors that come out so clearly in this photograph are more subdued and vary depending on the angle you look at them. After moving to a larger studio, his work also got bigger. Cart, below, show him "framing" one of his polished graphite surfaces with a cart he found in this new studio, already covered in flecks of fiberglass. 

Cart, 2012

The texture of the fiberglass somehow migrates to Busby's large newer works. I greatly prefer the traces of the human hand left in the mark-making of works like 3 Panel, with its expansive 96 x 144 inch surface.

3 Panel, 2011

Richard Forster's Graphite Realism

Hesser nude with tape, 2011

Richard Forster has his first solo exhibition up at FLAG Art Foundation, featuring three series of graphite drawings of incredible skill. These simulacrums of photographs resemble soft, serene Gerard Richter photo paintings. However, the small size of the works and trompe l'oeil details, through clever borders and watercolor tape effects, differentiates them, as does the overall effect of seeing them in a series.

One of the series, installation view above, depicts workers dismantling the Bauhaus, from archival footage. The subtle monochormatic grpahit of the palette, the close but faked realism/ photojournalism, and the perfection of the subtly drawn lines are calming and interesting at the same time.

His other two series come from vintage photogrpahs of naked woman, in a sort of Victorian style, and from aerial views of the coastline near the artist's hometown, Saltburn-by-the Sea, England. The coastline drawings feel especially meditative, as if all the tiny strokes making them have been completed in a kind of trance. The exhibition is up at FLAG Art Foundation in Chelsea through May 19.

Incoming sea's edge on fourteen consecutive occasions at random time intervals, Saltburn-by-the Sea, Jan 5 2010; 11:30am-11:37am

Hyperreality and 1Q84

I'm in the middle of 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami (fantastic, genius, must-read). As I was reading it this morning, I got sucked into a tangent about hyperreality and the "medium is the message." Then someone I know posted this photo, and suddenly I'm glancing out the window to see if there are two moons in the sky.

Note, gentle reader, I might be overly caffeinated.

Also of interest: Thomas Edison's eccentric job interview questionnaire.

Tarot: Culturally Resonant Imagery

Not a whit, we defy augury. There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come—the readiness is all. Since no man, of aught he leaves, knows what is't to leave betimes, let be. -Hamlet

A friend read my Tarot cards the other night. As he explained my present, past, and future cards, he pointed to specific details on the card faces that supported what he was saying (the hanged man on the card isn't dead, the strength goddess isn't breaking the lion but controlling it). I could see and understand what he was talking about, and the drawings seemed in fact to be knowable, as if I could study them and learn what they mean.

He was using a medieval deck, or so I thought. In fact, the Rider-Waite tarot deck with its medieval imagery were created and first published in 1909. Although tarot can be traced back to the 15th C. Italian court, these pretty and meaningful-looking images, the most common in the English-speaking world, were the successful product of an artist-medium collaboration who stripped  a traditional deck of Christian symbols and simplified the pictures. They remind me very much of William Blake etchings. 

We laughed afterwards when I said that for someone who isn't a very spiritual person, I must appear very superstitious. In my apartment, I have a miniature Virgin Mary, a collection of fat Chinese Buddhas of all sizes, a large Javanese Buddha head, a leather Ganesh medallion meant to bring good fortune, and a red-tasseled Chinese good luck charm that I keep on my door. My charms and totems might not signify what they were intended to to me but, like the Tarot cards, I think we are born and bred to respond to this culturally resonant imagery in some basic way.

Dickens is 200, and I ramble

Happy 200th, Charlie!

I feel immersed in Charles Dickens's world and awed at how productive he was because I am reading the new biography Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin. Always short of money the first half of his life, Dickens took on an enormous amount of work writing and editing for newspapers and monthly serials with ever-looming deadlines. It makes me feel that one ought to just produce, produce, produce  without fretting too much over perfection. Sure, the deadlines, strain, and constant labor created some bad melodrama but also some wonderful characters. (What are the chances this could work for my writing?)

Dickens wasn't all genius and light. Despite becoming a moral crusader publicly, I'm just getting to the scandalous part  of the biography when his personal life shows him as his worst: bullying, sacrosanct, and cruel. I have great sympathy with his wife between the constant pregnancies for over a decade and then being summonarily put aside and made fun of as fat to friends while Dickens took up with an actress. Of course, he died at 58 less than 10 years later, which shows what happens when you take up with actresses. The biography itself is excellent, but if you are feeling lazy, as I often do when staring at 400+ pages, may I recommend:



Also, I'm inspired to try a Dicken's novel as it was meant to be read originally- in serial form. Or close to it. I could sit down every week and read one chapter of Bleak House or Our Mutual Friend or maybe The Pickwick Club! Any recommendations on which would be best?

For more blathering about Dickens:

• A Tale of Two Centuries on NPR
• The Guardian reviews Claire Tomalin's Charles Dickens: A Life. The biography is fantastic, and evocative of Dickens's times. However, it is also this author's opinion that children today don't have the attention spans for Dickens, which I don't see as true at all. His works are quite melodramatic and meant to be read in short installments, and difficulty with the language is more one of distance than attention span.
• A YouTube commercial for the book with its author.

Oh, swoon-worthy Eugenides!

Check out my guest post on Reading Between the Lines. I discuss "swoon-worthy" author Jeffrey Eugenides' new book The Marriage Plot as it compares to his novel Middlesex, and I ponder many other questions relating to the author.

Lady Rosa of MoMA

Lady Rosa of Luxembourg, Sanja Iveković

God, I love the atrium at MoMA. Sure, it's not where Ivekovic originally intended her sculpture Lady Rosa of Luxembourg to stand. But where else can you put a 69-foot obelisk?

Aside from in Luxembourg that is. More about the exhibition Sweet Violence here and about Lady Rosa here.

Installation view, Luxembourg, 2001