SITA SINGS THE BLUES

Sita Sings the Blues is a beautiful animated feature film written, directed, produced and animated entirely by American artist Nina Paley.

The film weaves together events from the Ramayana, illustrated conversation between Indian shadow puppets, musical interludes voiced with tracks by Annette Hanshaw and scenes from the artist's own life. The ancient mythological and modern biographical plot are parallel tales, sharing numerous themes.

a note from the artist, Nina Paley.

MY PAINTINGS & DRAWINGS

This is a short film I produced for an arts and lecture evening at a contemporary art museum in Seattle. Artists were asked to "explain" their work, which is generally a bad idea. Art should approach the ineffable. At the very least it should arrive naked, stripped of wordy manifestos and "wall-text" jargon. If you're lucky, it will dance with you, tickle your brain, show a little passion. It won't settle too easily into a pigeonhole. It won't reveal itself all at once.

My work is inspired by classical painting as well as offbeat popular art, films noir, golden age cartooning, illuminated manuscripts, sideshow banners, German engravings, Mexican wrestling posters, and both foreign and domestic currency (which I will gladly accept for my art). But that doesn't "explain" it, really.

There is a professional language one uses to discuss art but often it's like explaining an orange by listing it's chemical ingredients. Something is lost. Not that my work is that complicated or impossible to discuss, but given the chance to defend it, I realized a dry, academic tact wouldn't serve me well (nor would it "explain" anything, really) so I respectfully skipped the traditional slides-and-lecture approach and presented this small film. Hope you like it.

For more of my artwork, please check out Bob Makes Art.

PART TWO:

CARAVAGGIO

The Cardsharps, c. 1594, oil on canvas

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, (29 September 1571 – 18 July 1610) was a brilliant, violent, rebellious artist who strode through the piazzas of Rome, Naples and Sicily dressed in black and carrying a sword. And he used it. In 1606 he killed a man in a brawl and had to flee Rome with a price on his head. Caravaggio got into another swordfight in Malta, and yet another in Naples, and not surprisingly he died a violent death. At the same time, he was the first great painter of the Baroque period, and received commissions from the Pope, among others. Despite being a badass, he was the most popular painter in Rome.

Shocking at the time, Caravaggio's art was peopled with lowlives and criminals--not your standard religious fare. When he took on religious subjects, he often painted them with grotesque violence, such as the decapitation of Goliath shown below. Look at the severed head, which is a self-portrait. Click on "The Cardsharps" above, and examine it in detail. The con game is beautifully rendered, a fine art masterpiece depicting the low art of card cheats.

David with Head of Goliath; a self-portrait

We're heading for Italy in a couple weeks, and in preparation we've been soaking up Italian art and history like bread soaks up olive oil. As an artist, I've always been inspired by the Italians even if they seem out of fashion in this era of timid conceptual art--much too sanguine for this pale anemic age. Caravaggio would run a sword through First Thursday artspeak like so much paper-thin prosciutto. You can hardly blame him. He was a ruffian, and while I don't exactly condone swordplay I find it kind of refreshing as I survey the contemporary scene. Don't worry, I won't be brandishing a sword on this trip to Italy--not even a Swiss army knife, thanks to post 9-11 airline rules-- but I'm bringing a little watercolor kit and a brush and look forward to retracing some of the same time-worn steps as Michelangelo Marisi da Caravaggio.

The following episode of Simon Schama's excellent series, "The Power of Art," focuses on the fascinating artist Caravaggio.

CRUMB AGONISTES

Robert Crumb, American Artist

People have mixed feelings about Crumb. Some call him an asshole, a jerk, a purveyor of pornography and juvenile crap, a sexist pig, a curmudgeon, a nape, a loon, a gelatinous lifeform with an unbridled id, a sicko, a creep, and a con artist. He may be all those things. Still, he's the best cartoonist of the last century, perhaps forever. He is our Daumier, and he works with an unflinching eye, a steady hand and gently flowing nib. Crumb spills his unconscious directly to the page without regard for puritan mores, or even common decency, yet art critic Robert Hughes called him "the Breughel of the 20th century."



Q: When was the last time a work of art made you cry?

A: I don't cry too easily. It must have been a long, long time ago because I really don't remember. Aline, on the other hand -- she cries at almost every movie. They manipulate her very easily.

Q: Where do you feel most at home?

A: In my room. With my stuff. My record collection. My artwork. My desk. My letter files. My photo files. My photocopy machine. When we moved to France, I basically just moved my room to France. Wherever I am, I just want to be in my room. If we had to live in Peking, China, I'd still be in my room.

Q: When are you most happy?

A: When I'm fulfilling my sex fantasies. When I listen to music that makes me ecstatic. I won't go into details, but my old '78 records give me musical ecstasy. There are also moments I've had with loved ones, with Aline and my daughter, that make me very happy.

Here is a documentary called "The Confessions of Robert Crumb" that might give you some clues about the artist. This is not the Terry Zwigoff doc, "Crumb," but an earlier film. Warning: this contains language as it is spoken, and viewpoints some will find offensive. Be forewarned.

THE CONFESSIONS OF ROBERT CRUMB (1987)


Recently, Crumb finished illustrating Genesis, the first book of the Bible. According to his website, Genesis comes in at 201 pages. He also finished the cover, an introduction, the commentary (for the back sleeve) and a Map, which will be in the beginning of the book. The book is going to production and it's planned to be released this fall.

a sketch from the Genesis project

And what are his plans now that Genesis is complete? Catching up on his correspondence, he says, which has been building up for some time now. And then take a little break—a trip to the States. He and Aline are talking about collaborating on a book upon his return, but that's later this summer. For now, enjoy these clips. Heaven will have to wait.

Interview from March 2007, SF Gate. To read the complete chat click here.

A BEATNIK SIT-COM

"Pull My Daisy" (1959) is truly beat cinema. The film is based on the third act of a Jack Kerouac play, Beat Generation, and features an all-star lineup of 1950s hipsters, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Gregory Corso, and artists Larry Rivers and Alice Neel. The film was directed by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie. Kerouac narrates.

The Beats put their stock in spontaneity and distrusted post-inspiration tampering. They believed art and poetry should spring from the mind fully-formed like Athena from the head of Zeus. Sometimes this method delivered inspired work, and other times it produced a half-baked shambling mess. This falls somewhere between the two, but is worth a look.

The story originally came from Neil Cassady, and is supposedly based on an actual event though it sounds more like an episode of a situation comedy. A railway brakemen entertains a respectable bishop. The brakeman's weirdo friends come spilling in the door, ruining everything. You know the type--mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, never saying a commonplace thing. In other words, trouble. I keep expecting Fred and Ethel to drop by with a jug of wine and some bongos. Go, man, go!

quiet on the set: orlovsky, corso, and ginsberg

BURNING MAN

What's the deal with Burning Man? It's 120 degrees in the shade and you have to pack in water...it's like Road Warrior on the surface of Mercury. What's the deal? Why not have the annual freakout in some mountain meadow with a babbling brook? How about in the dunes on some beautiful coastline? Am I just hopelessly square? What brings out all the freaks, neo-hippies, ravers, artists and strippers to bake in this hellish landscape? Is it the dope? The art? The naked people? Is it the sense of belonging? Are people tripping their brains out? WTF?

The art looks pretty cool...and it looks like people put a lot of work into their projects, so we tip our hat. Maybe this is the last chance for full-out craziness, the last hurrah for non-conformists on our orderly, dying planet. Okay, I can see that. I shouldn't rush to judgment. Who knows? Maybe someday I'll glue some toy dinosaurs on the Mazda and drive down to Death Valley or whatever godforsaken landcape they've chosen for their revels, and have a truly transcendent experience. I could make a hat out of tinfoil. Paint my ass blue. Get some roller skates, you know, and some bottled water, and head out beyond the Thunderdome. And why not?


Burning Man? Check out the official website here.

WHY ART?

Who needs Art? We're in a recession, right? During tough economic times we've always slashed health care, education, environmental protection, and programs designed to help the hungry and the homeless--critical social services--so why worry about something as ephemeral as "the arts?" Surely, we can jettison a few poems and paintings in favor of more pressing concerns...right? After all, who really needs painting, music, and literature?

The novelist E. L. Doctorow gave this speech before a subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee in the fall of 1981. It remains a timely statement on the value of art to the human spirit.

For the Artist's Sake

I have always disliked the phrase "the arts." It connotes to me furs and black ties and cocktail receptions, the patronage by the wealthy of work that is tangential to their lives, or that fills them not with dread or awe or visionary joy but with self-satisfaction.

"The arts" have nothing to do with the loneliness of writers or painters working in their rooms year after year, or with actors putting together plays in lofts, or with dancers tearing up their bodies to make spatial descriptions of the hope of beauty or transcendent myth.

So as a working writer I distinguish myself from the arts community. I am confirmed in this when I look at the National Endowment for the Arts' board and program structure. In the past, a very small percentage of the arts budget has been given over to literature, to the grants made to young writers or dramatists or poets of promise. In all the time since its founding, the N.E.A. has found only four writers worthy to sit on its immense board. Instead, the heavy emphasis has been on museums, opera companies, symphony orchestras: just those entities that happen to cater to patrons of "the arts."

I suppose I would have to confess, if asked, that I feel about opera, for instance, that it is not a living art in this country, that we do not naturally write and produce operas from ourselves as a matter of course as, for example, Italy did in the nineteenth century, and that, therefore, as wonderful and exciting as opera production may be, it is essentially the work of conservation of European culture; opera companies are conservators of the past, like museums, and their support by the National Endowment reflects this strong bias or belief in the arts as something from the past rather than the present.

The National Endowment programs I value most are just those likely to be proscribed: first, the programs of individual grants to individual artists in whatever medium — the programs endowing directly the work of living artists; and, second, those programs that do not separate the arts from life, from our own life and times but emphasize the connection — the artists-in-education program, the poets who go into schools, for example, and help children to light the spark in themselves. I cannot imagine anything more responsible than the work persuading a schoolchild to express his or her anguished or joyful observations — and to be self-rewarded with a poem or a painting. Whole lives ride on moments like that.

Or the inter-arts programs, the folk arts, the expansion arts — all bureaucratic terms for encouraging experiment and risk-taking on the part of artists, and for bringing artists in contact with people everywhere in the country, connecting people with the impulses inside themselves. Programs that encourage participation rather than the passive receipt of official art of the past are the ones I think most important: all the programs that suggest to people that they have their own voices, that they can sing and write of their own past — people in their churches, students in their classes or prisoners in their cells. These programs — just the ones branded so vilely by the Heritage Foundation Report as instruments of social policy or public therapy and slated for extinction by our new budgeteers — are the ones I value. And not from any vague idealistic sentiment either: I know as an artist where art comes from. I know there is a ground-song from which every writer lifts his voice, that literature comes out of a common chorus and that our recognition of the genius of a writer — Mark Twain, for example — cannot exclude the people he speaks for.

Art will rise where it is least expected and usually not wanted. You can't generate it with gala entertainments and $200-a-plate dinners. You can, if you're an enlightened legislative body, see to it that you don't ipso facto create an official state art by concentrating your funding on arts establishments. Other people may talk of how many billions of dollars of business is produced from the arts, but to me that is beside the point.

But saying even this, I cannot avoid the feeling that it is senseless for me to testify here today. People everywhere have been put in the position of fighting piecemeal for this or that social program while the assault against all of them proceeds across a broad front. The truth is, if you're going to take away the lunches of schoolchildren, the pensions of miners who've contracted black lung, the storefront legal services of the poor who are otherwise stunned into insensibility by the magnitude of their troubles, you might as well get rid of poets, artists and musicians. If you're planning to scrap medical care for the indigent, scholarships for students, day-care centers for the children of working mothers, transportation for the elderly and handicapped — if you're going to eliminate people's public service training jobs and then reduce their unemployment benefits after you've put them on the unemployment rolls, taking away their food stamps in the bargain, then I say the loss of a few poems and arias cannot matter. If you're going to close down the mental therapy centers for the veterans of Vietnam, what does it matter if the theaters go dark or our libraries close their doors?

And so in my testimony for this small social program I am aware of the larger picture and, really, it stuns me. What I see in this picture is a kind of sovietizing of American life, guns before butter, the plating of this nation with armaments, the sacrifice of everything in our search for ultimate security. We shall become an immense armory. But inside the armory there will be nothing, not a people but an emptiness; we shall be an armory around nothingness, and our true strength and security and envy of the world — the passion and independent striving of a busy working and dreaming population committed to fair play and the struggle for some sort of real justice and community — will be no more. If this happens, maybe in the vast repository of bombs, deep in the subterranean chambers of our missile fields, someone in that cavernous silence will remember a poem and recite it. Maybe some young soldier will hum a tune, maybe another will be able to speak the language well enough to tell a story, maybe two people will get up and dance to the rhythm of the doomsday clock ticking us all to extinction.

--E. L. Doctorow

"For the Artist's Sake." E. L. Doctorow: Essays and Conversations. Ed. Richard Trenner. Princeton, NJ: Ontario Review P, 1983: 13-15.

CLASH OF THE TITANS

"Judith Beheading Holofernes," by Caravaggio, 1599

We usually look at art in nearly church-like settings--hushed, respectful museums and galleries--but some of the greatest artists were far from polite. In fact, some were outright thugs--Caravaggio springs to mind, painting brilliantly between drunken brawls and swordfights, finally fleeing Rome to escape murder charges with a price on his head. It would be hard to imagine the brooding master thriving in our current art scene, chatting up suburbanites over cheese platters on First Thursday. You just know someone would get skewered.


"Caravaggio," from Simon Schama's BBC series, Power of Art

Other artists had their battles on canvas. They didn't paint to pacify us with beauty, but to strong-arm us into seeing the world in a new way. In the last century, Pablo Picasso punched us in the nose and rearranged our faces. Henri Matisse did the same thing, albeit more gently, lyrically, with a few brushstrokes or paper cut-outs.

"Bull Skull, Fruit, and Pitcher," by Pablo Picasso, 1939

To some, "The Fight of the Century" will always be Ali vs. Frazier at the Garden in 1971, and to others the Kennedy/Nixon presidential debate, or maybe Hemingway walloping F. Scott Fitzgerald outside Les Deux Magots. Some say it was a battle of the bands, when the Stones followed James Brown on the TAMI Show, or when the Clash opened for the Who in 1980. My vote would be the clash between the two best artists of the twentieth century, Picasso and Matisse, who shook hands and came out painting.


Picasso and Matisse were the heavyweights, the undisputed masters of modern art. In 2003, their lifelong dialog was celebrated at the Museum of Modern Art. In this clip, Charlie Rose discusses the "Matisse Picasso" show with the MoMa curators, Kirk Varnedoe and John Elderfield.

"Icarus," by Henri Matisse, 1947

SEDUCED BY CERAMICS

Charles Krafft, American Artist from Seattle, has used the techniques of the Delft ceramics masters to create stunning porcelain artwork of switchblades, skateboards, and assault rifles. His disasterware series is beautiful fine china commemorating disasters such as the Hindenburg explosion, the sinking of the Andrea Doria, and the bombing of Dresden.


Perhaps his most controversial work involves "Spone," or human bone china--granulated calcified human "cremains" commonly known as mortuary ash -- added to a porcelain "slip" and used in a variety of funerary and commemorative art.

"I've always found the lowbrow fringe of contemporary pop culture infinitely more fertile than the highfalutin academic mainstream -- I prefer the company of criminals, undertakers and blue-haired ladies." - Charles Krafft

An interview in Salon.com can be found here.

BANKSY

Banksy is a street artist. Banksy is a gallery artist. Banksy is a vandal and undesirable who scoffs at the law. Banksy is an astute social critic who uses grafitti writing and stencils to make his statements. Banksy is absolutely brilliant. Banksy sucks.




Banksy is a British street artist, and that's about all we know. Banksy is policeman's nightmare, and a wall-text addict's wet dream. Banksy believes art should be out of the galleries and into the streets. Banksy believes art should be off the streets and into the galleries. No one knows the true identity of Banksy. Everyone knows who Banksy is. The films above were taken from Banksy's website. The films show Banksy's knack for sneaking art into artless places.

Grafitti can be art. Grafitti doesn't have to be stupid. Go Banksy.

VANDALIZED ARTWORK

In case you missed the KOMO news broadcast on TV about the Friends of the Nib mural on Broadway, click on this link:

The TV broadcast:
http://www.komonews.com/news/23965359.html

The mural was vandalized further since the initial story here.

Public art has been debated since the time of the Greeks. The debate is alive and well in Seattle, with these latest acts of vandalism. Can the public handle "art" that is not under lock and key? Should all art be locked in museums and galleries, under the watchful eyes of gallery attendants and security guards?

With the mural in shreds, we're left with an ugly, boarded-up, abandoned building. Thieves have robbed us of a chance -- a chance, not a guarantee -- of seeing something beautiful...or at least original, or challenging, or creative.

We're left with a gray strip of blight on the sad end of Broadway.

WHO'S LAUGHING NOW?

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands - The auction house thought the portrait was a 17th century Rembrandt knockoff, and valued it at just $3,100. But the British buyer who paid about 1,500 times more than that apparently knew what he was doing.

Experts have confirmed "Rembrandt Laughing" — bought for a bargain price of $4.5 million at an English auction house in October — is a self-portrait by the Dutch master himself, depicted with his head tilted back in easygoing laughter.

William Noortman from Noortman Master Paintings, specializing in Dutch and Flemish masters, said it's worth $30 million to $40 million, adding: "I'm very surprised it didn't make more at auction."

- Associated Press

For other Rembrandt self portraits, click HERE.

ANIMAL ART BENEFIT FRIDAY

Come to the animal benefit -- and help us raise some dough for a good cause. Click on poster to enlarge.

NEW DYLAN ART SHOW

Dylan is a busy man. When not writing and performing songs tirelessly, deejaying a popular radio show, or writing his award-winning memoirs, he's busy drawing pictures.

After a successful art show in Germany last year, the songwriter has an art show opening at the Halcyon Gallery in London next week, featuring a collection of over 200 pictures, mostly color variations on the artwork published in "Drawn Blank."



In a rare new interview in the London Times Dylan discussed his art, his memoirs, and Barack Obama.

“Well, you know right now America is in a state of upheaval,” he says. “Poverty is demoralizing. You can't expect people to have the virtue of purity when they are poor. But we've got this guy out there now who is redefining the nature of politics from the ground up...Barack Obama. He's redefining what a politician is, so we'll have to see how things play out. Am I hopeful? Yes, I'm hopeful that things might change. Some things are going to have to.” He offers a parting handshake. “You should always take the best from the past, leave the worst back there and go forward into the future,” he notes as the door closes between us."

For more information:
The Halcyon Gallery, London.
Buy "Drawn Blank" at Amazon.com

WORKINGMAN DEAD: ALTON KELLEY

Alton Kelley passed away Sunday

Psychedelic poster artist Alton Kelley died Sunday at the age of 67. Kelley, who teamed up with longtime collaborator Stanley Mouse (pictured below, Kelley on the left) created some of the greatest psychedelic posters of the Summer of Love, Haight-Asbury hippie scene, including iconic work for the Avalon Ballroom, the Family Dog, Winterland, the Fillmore, and various Bay Area bands like the Airplane and the Grateful Dead. They designed the covers of Dead albums "American Beauty" and "Workingman's Dead."

Kelley and Mouse helped create the acid-infused look of san francisco in the 1960s

"Stanley and I had no idea what we were doing," Kelley told The SF Chronicle last year. "But we went ahead and looked at American Indian stuff, Chinese stuff, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, Modern, Bauhaus, whatever. We were stunned by what we found and what we were able to do. We had free rein to just go graphically crazy. Where before that, all advertising was pretty much just typeset with a photograph of something."

ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG DIES AT 82

Robert Rauschenberg (American artist, 1925-2008) died Monday night at his Florida home. Irrepressible, playful, hard-drinking spirit, he blurred the lines between art, sculpture and photography, and used everything -- print, paint, and assembled found junk -- and made us see the art in it. He threw everything on board, and sidestepped the angst of Abstract Expressionism. Rauschenberg helped open up the possibilities. For the NYTimes obit, click HERE.


-from "Robert Rauschenberg: Man at Work"

WE LOVE YOU!

Do you still believe in LOVE in this tired, cynical, ironic, post-modern age? I hope so. Come down to the Cafe Racer, famed clubhouse of the notorious art gang Friends of the Nib, for a Valentine's Day Party and Art Show! No white-wall gallery pretensions here, just good food, booze, and pure love. Art for sale, and artists in attendance. Leave the TV behind for some actual human interaction -- you won't be sorry!

Thursday, February 14th, from 7 till 10PM. Cafe Racer, 5828 Roosevelt Way NE.

WORLD'S SMALLEST SCULPTURE

English artist Willard Wigan is pretty amazing. Working with rice, or grains of sand, and a surgical blade, he makes the world's smallest scultures. This is his Statue of Liberty in the eye of a needle.

Persnickety fact-checkers may insist there are a few smaller sculptures, but I should remind them those have been made with lazers. Wigan works by hand. In 2001, Japanese scientists made a tiny sculpture of a bull that measured 10 micrometers by seven (a micrometer is one-thousandth of a millimeter). We say "Bull!" Wigan is the man!

Willard Wigan's tribute to "The Wizard of Oz."

LE MYSTERE PICASSO

The third volume of John Richardson's A Life of Picasso has just been published. I just read a review in the New York Review of Books, and now I wish I had the books -- and a time machine! Here is an excerpt from the review by Andrew Butterfield.

The book starts with Picasso's trip to Italy in the spring of 1917 in the company of Jean Cocteau, Sergei Diaghilev, and Léonide Massine, three of his four collaborators on the ballet Parade that they were then planning. Erik Satie, the composer of Parade, stayed home in Paris, but Igor Stravinsky joined the group in Rome and swiftly became close friends with Picasso. Stravinsky and Picasso studied the Sistine Chapel and the museums of Rome, and with Massine and Cocteau explored the ruins of Pompei and Herculaneum. In Rome they went to the puppet theater, and in Naples they attended performances of commedia dell'arte, experiences that not only helped shape Parade but later directly inspired the ballet Pulcinella which Stravinsky, Massine, and Picasso created in 1920.

For the entire review
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20892



A clip from the documentary "Le Mystère Picasso", produced and directed by H. G. Clouzot. France 1956.

KOMAR AND MELAMID

You may remember Russian graphic artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid from the time they combined survey results to ascertain popular preferences in art, and came up with the most pleasing,"perfect" painting. Of course, these Ruskies are having a laugh, right? (Komar and Melamid founded sots art, a strange combination of conceptual art and Soviet pop art, with some Dada thrown in for good measure) America's Most Wanted Art is shown above -- a landscape, with natural beauty and wildlife, and a beloved historic figure, George Washington. K and M made their point -- not only about the weakness of collectivist art, art by committee, but also a little slap at popular art itself.

Well, the Ruskies have done it again. This time they've collated their surveys and come up with the perfect popular song. According to the duo, "most participants desire music of moderate duration (approximately 5 minutes), moderate pitch range, moderate tempo, and moderate to loud volume, and display a profound dislike of the alternatives."

What do you think? See if your tastes are mainstream normal -- click the button to hear The Most Wanted Song.


Alternative tastes? Follow a different drummer? According to K and M, fewer than two hundred people worldwide will enjoy The Most Unwanted Song: