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:

BROADWAY MURAL VANDALIZED

You won't be seeing this picture on Broadway!

Mark Campos told me the Broadway mural has been vandalized, and the segment I illustrated -- the jazz trio shown above -- was razored from the wall and stolen. The piece was an illustration of the Nat King Cole Trio, blown up to 6 x 6 feet, on a vinyl banner.

To quote Campos in the LiveJournal: "Art thieves have vandalized the Friends of the Nib mural at the old Jack In The Box location on Broadway. A segment of the mural, which is printed on vinyl banner material, was razored out of its place on the wall and removed. Below is a picture of the missing segment, which was created by renowned local painter and illustrator Robert Rini."

The missing link

"Renowned" might be going too far, Mark, but thanks for putting the word out. I participated in the mural project with my fellow Friends of the Nib (including Mark), and the project was sponsored by the city, Sound Transit, to beautify a boarded-up Jack in the Box. The artwork would have been up eight months on a highly traveled block of Broadway, in Seattle, if the vandals hadn't ruined it. Write if you know anything.

More pictures of the mural HERE.

THE ART OF THE BOOK

Behind the Covers with Dave Eggers, Chip Kidd, Milton Glaser and moderator Michael Bierut at the 92nd Street Y in New York, Dec 4, 2006.

BEAUTIFUL MEDIEVAL WOODCUTS

Once in a while, to balance out all the contemporary, topical, post-modern posts, I like to post something really old and extraordinary. This qualifies beautifully.
Medieval woodcuts! Being an artist who works heavily in line drawing, and pen and ink, I can't get enough of this look. Sea serpents, monsters, leaping stags, religious illustrations, old German blackletter, map marginalia -- there's plenty to be learned from the old stuff, even in this glossy, slick, Age of Photoshop. It seems that everyone is a graphic designer these days, and nobody can draw a straight line. Something is lost, when we cut ourselves off from our artistic past.
Yes, I may be out of step with the times. In another life I'd be some monk going blind by a sputtering candle, hunched over a scroll, scratching with a quill pen.

To see more authentic woodcuts, check out this great site here. To see my own humble attempt to imitate the old styles, see my riff on Durer and Bushmiller here.

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."

THIS MONKEY'S GONE TO HEAVEN

"Congo" the chimpanzee recently sold three paintings at a London auction house for more than $25,000. Howard Hong, an American collector, bought the paintings at Bonhams' auction house. The chimp art, painted when the animal was three, was included in a 1957 chimp art exhibition curated by famous zoologist Desmond Morris. Morris, author of The Naked Ape, had attempted to understand "chimpanzees' ability to create order and symmetry as well as to explore, at a more primeval level, the impetus behind our own desires for artistic creativity," auction house Bonhams said. The directory of modern and contemporary art at Bonhams added "We had no idea what these things were worth. We just put them in for our own amusement."


Pablo Picasso, noted human artist, is said to have had a painting by "Congo" hanging in his studio. The painting had been a gift.

To hear "This Monkey's Gone to Heaven," by the Pixies, please click button.