Word of the Day : pandiculate

Self-Portrait, Yawning, Joseph Ducreux, before 1783. Oil on canvas, 45 x 35 in. 

pandiculate : To fully stretch the torso and upper limbs, typically accompanied by yawning.

recto

This might help those who can't remember the difference between verso and recto.


click to embiggen

Kneeling Nun, verso, by Martin van Meytens, c1731

a notable detail of the painting revealed below

Chuck Close at work

click to embiggen 

Chuck Close at work. From Graphis Magazine #313 (no date printed but I think it is from around 1998) It is an interesting insight to how he works.  It looks like a two inch square grid at a 45º angle, he starts at the top blocking color in several rows, and then each grid tile is given a "dot."

 At first it might appear to be that he fills in a band of the grid from the top down but compared to the finished piece and there were changes made in the corners. Aside from the background there is a little use of line that extends outside of an individual grid box. For example, part of his glasses and part of the shirt collar.

The lift he uses to raise himself to paint higher portions of the painting appears to be a Big Joe Lift In-Between Handling Manual Stacker IBH1018 or a very similar model.

Another photo in the article shows Close working in a different workspace where the painting can be lowered down into a hole in the floor. When he moved studios he retired his Big Joe lift and started moving the painting. 

Below is the finished painting.

Alphonse Mucha's wife and the painting Woman in the Wilderness

detail of Alphonse Mucha's painting Woman in the Wilderness, 1923 juxtaposed with the photograph of his wife Maruška posing for the painting.
(click to embiggen)

seen here

Woman in the Wilderness, 1923, oil on canvas, 201.5 x 299.5 cm (79.3" x 117.9")
(click to embiggen)

an attempt to show the scale of the painting

civility : pissing on a grave

Eduardo Labarca appears to urinate on the grave of Jose Luis Borges on the cover of his book The Enigma of the Modules

"Peeing on that tomb was a legitimate artistic act," … "I am not just a person who goes around peeing on tombs, but a writer with a serious oeuvre," he said today.

By legitimate he means fake :

 The photo has provoked outrage in Borges's native Argentina, even though Labarca admits the stream of water descending on the great man's grave actually came from a bottle of water hidden in his right hand.

 The reason for it all :

"Anyone who is offended by this is very short-sighted," he said. "Borges was a giant as a writer but I feel complete contempt for him as a citizen. As an old man, almost blind, he came to meet the dictator Pinochet in the days when he was busy killing."

p.s. if you find the design of Borges' gravestone as interesting as I do there then someone has already done the research on it.

How Orwellian : Antiwar songs and prowar songs

Josef Stalin practices his Nazi salute
(eventually, Seeger realized Stalin wasn't the bees knees, but that wasn't until 2007.)

from Pete Seeger's New York Times Obituary :

When he returned to New York later in 1940, Mr. Seeger made his first albums. He, Millard Lampell and Mr. Hays founded the Almanac Singers, who performed union songs and, until Germany invaded the Soviet Union, antiwar songs, following the Communist Party line. Mr. Guthrie soon joined the group.

During World War II the Almanac Singers’s repertory turned to patriotic, antifascist songs, bringing them a broad audience, including a prime-time national radio spot. 

"Antiwar songs" and "antifascist songs"?  Why didn't the writer use the available symmetry in terminology :  Seeger played antiwar songs and prowar songs.

Those weren't really anti-war songs. They were less against war in general and more against any opposition to the revanchist wars of the USSR and their Nazi partners in crime. Opposing any effort to prevent Poland from being invaded and carved up is somehow "antiwar" while the NY Times describes his songs after the invasion of the USSR as "patriotic, antifascist songs" instead of prowar songs.

Seeger was essentially saying "Leave poor Stalin & Hitler alone! Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, and Finland are faraway, foreign, irrelevant places" until his pet USSR was attacked that is.

To paraphrase Grouch Marx : These are my principles, if you don't like them … well, the party might tell me if I have others.