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The big idea: why colour is in the eye of the beholder

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We might think the sky is blue and trees are green, but the truth is rather stranger

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After isolating himself from the rest of the world, Brian forges an unlikely friendship.

Directed by Jim Archer, Written by and Starring David Earl and Chris Hayward and Produced by Rupert Majendie. For more comedy shorts visit: www.MrBox.tv


DIRECTED AND EDITED BY: Jim Archer
WRITTEN BY AND STARRING: David Earl and Chris Hayward
PRODUCED BY: Rupert Majendie
CINEMATOGRAPHY BY: Toby Goodger

CAMERA ASSISTANT: Josh Govett
SOUND MIX: James Torrance
POST PRODUCTION: Rushes
POST PRODUCER: Mireille Antoine
COLOURIST: Simona Cristea

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Car burning and cow massages: French village quirks - in pictures

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Car burning and cow massages: French village quirks - in pictures

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Thomas Rousset went back to his childhood village of Prabert in the French Alps to create a surreal, fictitious world of pet buzzards and chickenpox sticker rituals

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Traditional china serving up the big issues of today - in pictures

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Paul Scott

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Blue and white transferware plates were hugely popular in the 19th century for their bucolic pastoral scenes. Over the past 30 years, artist Paul Scott, who lives in Cumbria, has updated the medium to address some very modern issues: the climate emergency, the refugee crisis, tensions in the Middle East. 'The original genre depicts a colonial, imperialist view of the world,' he says. 'My concern has been to rebalance the narrative with something more contemporary and inclusive.'

Using a mix of antique and specially commissioned plates, he refires the ceramics to let his prints sink into the glaze. 'I can raise issues people don't expect to see on blue and white plates: they are surprised, and it makes them look again at historic pieces.'

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Traditional china serving up the big issues of today - in pictures

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Blue and white transferware plates were hugely popular in the 19th century for their bucolic pastoral scenes. Over the past 30 years, artist Paul Scott, who lives in Cumbria, has updated the medium to address some very modern issues: the climate emergency, the refugee crisis, tensions in the Middle East.

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A post shared by Ugly Belgian Houses (@uglybelgianhouses)

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Objects of Desire review - surreal lobster phones and a seaside sleazorama

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he Design Museum may need to keep an eye out for unsuitable acts on all the erotic furniture in its often delirious exhibition of perverse design. Perhaps they should put up a sign: "No sex on the sofas, please!"

Objects of Desire explores the influence of the surrealist movement on modern interiors and fashion. It is a celebration of design gone awry: instead of rational functionality, the creations here infiltrate the irrational into the practical, attacking reality in the name of dreams. A standard lamp in the form of a life-size horse, a comfy chair made of soft toys, and above all those lubricious, curvy, velvet and leather sofas, make this exhibition a delightful orgy of bad taste.

It starts by making you look afresh at two cliches of modern art: Salvador Dalí's Lobster Telephone and Mae West Lips sofa, both created in 1938 in collaboration with his English patron Edward James. As they bask in a bright spotlight that brings out the tautness and fullness of that giant red mouth of a settee, we're encouraged to see them not simply as outrageous sculptures but actual items of furniture. James commissioned no less than 11 working Lobster phones from Dalí for his London house.

Looking afresh at cliches of modern art ... Mae West's Lips sofa, c 1938, Salvador Dalí and Edward James. Photograph: James Pike/© Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala- Salvador Dalí, DACS 2022

Dalí's dreamy furnishings are the quintessential expression of the utopian ideals of the surrealist movement that started in Paris after the first world war. This was a revolutionary attempt to destroy the bourgeois social order by releasing the obsessive, compulsive power of dreams into everyday life. While Dalí is conventionally seen as a traitor to the movement, he emerges here as one of the great creators of the modern world because he hurled its aesthetic into fashion, cinema and shop windows.

There are genuinely shocking photos of his theme park wonderland, The Dream of Venus, a pavilion he designed at the 1939 New York World's Fair. Models in bondage gear cavort in a seaside sleazorama that still, today, looks provocatively hardcore. Yet it is also a homage to the first and greatest surreal architect of all, Antoni Gaudí, whose buildings in Barcelona are triumphs of imagination over normality.

There could be more about Gaudí here, and indeed, the wider art nouveau movement, which brought a conscious decadence to late 19th-century design. What the show does have is a chair designed by Gaudí in 1900 whose carved wooden curves, varnished and polished to a pearly sheen, include organic feet, eyeball bulges, a heart-shaped back, and arms ready to enfold and hug you. It probably wouldn't be very comfortable but it expresses a dream of a chair that actually loves its owner.

A thing without a soul ... Tour, 1993, by Gae Aulenti, for FontanaArte. Photograph: Vitra Design Museum

That same fairytale enchantment takes some very bizarre forms here. Man Ray's iron with studded nails is another object all too well known as sculpture - but in this context you are struck by its attack on domestic chores, and their hierarchies, in the name of unreason. Marcel Duchamp's 1914 Bottle Rack is another masterpiece of surrealist obsession: what possessed Duchamp to exhibit this spiky metal object as art? Possesses is the right word, for he did not choose it, but it chose him. The same is true of a "slipper-spoon", a curious wooden spoon with a shoe carved on its handle that André Breton found at a Paris flea market: it obsessed him and he got Man Ray to take the photograph of it that's on show here.

Surrealism's relationship with the world of things has never looked more peculiar. There is an intense, deranged magic to the totally uninhibited way these poets and perverts fetishised the material world. Man Ray's photograph of the surrealist artist Meret Oppenheim shows her naked by a giant industrial wheel with black ink smeared over her hand and arm. It's an image of her as a creator, the artist in a printworks, that's as joyously erotic as her own sculpture of a furry cup (sadly absent).

Furniture for an oligarch's penthouse ... Horse Lamp, 2006, Front Design. Photograph: Vitra Design Museum

The exhibition argues that surrealism has come hack into its own in the postmodern era, when designers once again frolic freely with form and imagery. But the exhibits prove otherwise. Near these obsessional surrealist visions is a glass table mounted on bicycle wheels by Gae Aulenti in 1993. It's a homage to Duchamp, says the label. But it's a thing without a soul. So are many of the more recent objects in the exhibition. That 2006 Horse Lamp by Front Design is really just a grotesquely ostentatious piece of furniture for an oligarch's penthouse.

Such contemporary designs don't live up to surrealism at all. That is because they don't seem in the slightest bit obsessive. Postmodernism is ironic, playful, willed - but surrealism was none of those things. When Claude Cahun photographs herself in gender-bending guises it does not seem a choice, or a statement, but an inner necessity.

That may make this exhibition sound like a failure. On the contrary: it makes you see with great clarity how extreme and extraordinary this movement really was, and how hard to recapture. Seeing these jewels of surrealist intoxication next to Galliano fashion accessories and Björk videos just proves that surrealism, tragically, is dead. It is as dead as cubism - and as glorious. It was a modernist movement, after all: not the parent of today's playfulness but something infinitely more serious and revolutionary.

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Objects of Desire review - surreal lobster phones and a seaside sleazorama

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he Design Museum may need to keep an eye out for unsuitable acts on all the erotic furniture in its often delirious exhibition of perverse design. Perhaps they should put up a sign: "No sex on the sofas, please!" Objects of Desire explores the influence of the surrealist movement on modern interiors and fashion.

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Matter is a Relative Matter with Brian Catling: part 2

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Matter is a Relative Matter with Brian Catling: part 2

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amusement arcade machines

museumgalleries

and exhibitions

animated collecting boxes

interactiveexhibits

bonfires and
fireworks

If you enjoy my work, please help support it

I'm not starving, but donations do encourage me that my stuff is appreciated and to keep going.

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amusement arcade machines museumgalleries and exhibitions animated collecting boxes interactiveexhibits bonfires and fireworks If you enjoy my work, please help support it I'm not starving, but donations do encourage me that my stuff is appreciated and to keep going.

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‘Everything in Oxford was built with dodgy money’ – iconoclastic professor and fourth plinth artist Samson Kambalu

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‘Everything in Oxford was built with dodgy money’ – iconoclastic professor and fourth plinth artist Samson Kambalu

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As he prepares to unveil his fourth plinth sculpture, the cigar-smoking, boxing-glove-wearing artist talks about hat-banning colonialists, his journey from Africa to Oxford – and the joys of renouncing ambition

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'Four lads in jeans' meme made into statue in Birmingham

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History's greatest people have long been immortalised in statue form, from Julius Caesar to Admiral Lord Nelson. Now, a Birmingham artist has rendered four of his own city's men in bronze.

Local artist Tat Vision unveiled a statue of "four lads in jeans" outside Birmingham New Street station on Saturday - in reference to a viral internet meme sparked from a photograph taken a few years ago.

The picture of Kevin Rooney, Alex Lacey, Jamie Phillips and Connor Humpage was taken before they enjoyed a night out in 2019, but went viral the year after.

The Instagram post of Kevin Rooney, Alex Lacey, Jamie Phillips and Connor Humpage on a night out went viral Photograph: Kevin Rooney/PA

The photo of the four men clad in skinny jeans and posing awkwardly spawned multiple parodies and even an animation appearing to show them singing a sea shanty.

The artist said he hoped to pay tribute to the four men, "inspired by them Greek statues of old", though his bronze was put together using mannequins and papier-mache.

"It took me a few weeks, on and off, to make," Tat Vision told BirminghamLive.

"I used four women mannequins, which I covered in tight-fitting ladies jeans and tops. The heads are made from papier-mache and all of it was painted to have a nice, shiny bronze effect."

The artist said he was inspired by the much-ridiculed bust of Cristiano Ronaldo and the statue of Matthew Boulton, James Watt, and William Murdoch that stands near Birmingham library.

The sculpture was unveiled outside All Bar One in the city, close to the spot where the original picture was taken.

It was built as part of the Birmingham Weekender arts event in the city.

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'Four lads in jeans' meme made into statue in Birmingham

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History's greatest people have long been immortalised in statue form, from Julius Caesar to Admiral Lord Nelson. Now, a Birmingham artist has rendered four of his own city's men in bronze. Local artist Tat Vision unveiled a statue of "four lads in jeans" outside Birmingham New Street station on Saturday - in reference to a viral internet meme sparked from a photograph taken a few years ago.

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Francis Alÿs

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A New Show Traces How a Young Georgia O'Keeffe Transitioned From Drawings to Her Masterly Oil Paintings-See Images Here

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While museums around the globe are closed to the public, we are spotlighting each day an inspiring exhibition. Even if you can't see it in person, allow us to give you a virtual look.
What the museum says: "At the heart of the installation is Music, Pink and Blue, No. 1, a recent addition to the Seattle Art Museum's collection and a gift of late trustee Barney A. Ebsworth. The first complete expression of O'Keeffe's personal brand of modernism, 'Abstract Variations' brings Music, Pink and Blue, No. 1 together with Music, Pink and Blue, No. 2, from the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, for the first time in Seattle, along with loans from museums across the country.

Music, Pink and Blue, No. 1 is O'Keeffe's first major oil painting. She painted it after moving to New York City in 1918, departing from the more intimate media of charcoal and watercolor to take up the more public and ambitious medium of oil. Examples of her earlier drawings in the exhibition illustrate this transition, while subsequent paintings demonstrate what came later in O'Keeffe's work. Also on view are photographs of the artist by Alfred Stieglitz."

Why it's worth a look: The show had barely opened at the Seattle Art Museum before national closures were enforced. When museums reopen, this show is one to seek out for an enlightening look at a lesser known aspect of O'Keeffe's storied career.

Though best known for her oil paintings of lush petals and blossoms, O'Keeffe was a master of more intimately scaled watercolors and charcoal drawings, where she was able to practice a brand of abstraction that looks more akin to the work of Bauhaus artists like László Moholy-Nagy with geometric shapes and linear compositions. Alongside the drawings and paintings are photographs that Alfred Stiegletz took of O'Keeffe, who served as his muse and later became his wife. In the meantime, the museum is also offering some interactive aspects online.
What it looks like:

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A New Show Traces How a Young Georgia O'Keeffe Transitioned From Drawings to Her Masterly Oil Paintings-See Images Here

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While museums around the globe are closed to the public, we are spotlighting each day an inspiring exhibition. Even if you can't see it in person, allow us to give you a virtual look. What the museum says: "At the heart of the installation is Music, Pink and Blue, No.

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Artist James Turrell has achieved a kind of rarely paralleled notoriety in the art world: not only is he a popular favorite with the public, but he is also able to count critics, collectors, and even Kanye West as some of his biggest fans.

Turrell, who has a show on now at the Museo Jumex in Mexico City that includes wall-mounted works alongside larger installations, was an early pioneer of the Light and Space movement.

His work is also informed by his studies of perception, psychology, and the cosmos, which inspire him to create light installations and sculptures that verge on the sublime.

For the past four decades, he has been hard at work realizing Roden Crater, an ambitious Land Art masterpiece that is transforming the site of a now extinct volcano in the remote Painted Desert of Arizona into a celestial observatory.

It has been a long and complicated project. "People often ask me how much this crater costs," Turrell said in an exclusive 2001 interview with Art21. "It cost me two marriages and a relationship."

A devout Quaker, Turrell is heavily influenced by his spirituality, and the slow, quiet contemplation that is integral to its practice.

Speaking to Art21, he recounts one of his earliest memories, of visiting a Quaker meeting house and asking his grandmother what he was supposed to be doing. Her response: "Just wait, we're going inside to greet the light."

You could say that from that moment, Turrell has been chasing the light.

"I had this thought to just bring the cosmos closer down to the space we occupy," Turrell says in the Art21 episode, which originally appeared in the Art in the Twenty-First Century television series. One of the ways he's made that vision a reality is through a Quaker meeting house in Houston, Texas, which he outfitted with a Skyspace that opens up like a little window into the cosmos.
This is an installment of "Art on Video," a collaboration between artnet News and Art21 that brings you clips of newsmaking artists. A new series of the nonprofit Art21's flagship series Art in the Twenty-First Century is available now on PBS. Catch all episodes of other series like New York Close Up and Extended Play and learn about the organization's educational programs at Art21.org.

Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward.

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'It Cost Me Two Marriages and a Relationship': Watch James Turrell Explain the High Price of His Still-Unfinished Masterpiece

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Artist James Turrell has achieved a kind of rarely paralleled notoriety in the art world: not only is he a popular favorite with the public, but he is also able to count critics, collectors, and even Kanye West as some of his biggest fans.

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An alternative history of the British Isles, told through art.

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Boss Morris

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Joseph Cornell: how the reclusive artist conquered the art world - from his mum's basement

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he box is the central metaphor of Joseph Cornell 's life, just as it is the signature element of his exquisite and disturbing body of work, his factory of dreams. He made boxes to keep wonders in: small wooden boxes that he built in the basement beneath the small wooden house he shared with his mother and disabled younger brother, the two fixed stars of his existence.

As a boy, he saw Houdini perform in New York City, escaping from locked cabinets, wreathed in chains. In his own artwork, which he didn't begin until he was almost 30, he made obsessive, ingenious versions of the same story: a multitude of found objects representing expansiveness and flight, penned inside glass-fronted cases. Ballet dancers, birds, maps, aviators, stars of screen and sky, at once cherished, fetishised and imprisoned.

The same tension between freedom and constriction ran right through Cornell's own life. A pioneer of assemblage art, collector, autodidact, Christian Scientist, pastry-lover, experimental film-maker, balletomane and self-declared white magician, he roved freely through the fields of the mind while inhabiting a personal life of extraordinarily narrow limits. He never married or moved out of his mother's house in Queens and rarely voyaged further than a subway ride into Manhattan, despite being besotted with the idea of foreign travel and particularly with France.

He was on friendly terms with almost every artist who passed through New York during the middle years of the 20th century - among them Duchamp, Motherwell, Rothko, De Kooning and Warhol - and yet he was also profoundly solitary, a hermit who said to his sister regretfully in the last conversation they ever had, "I wish I hadn't been so reserved." Though he longed for larger horizons (the title of the retrospective currently at the Royal Academy in London is Wanderlust), he didn't attempt to physically escape his circumstances, choosing, rather, to master the hard knack of conjuring infinite space from a circumscribed realm.

Cornell was born on Christmas Eve 1903 in Nyack, a village just up the Hudson from Manhattan. Nyack was also the childhood home of Edward Hopper, another rangy, solitary artist fixated with scenes of voyeurism and enclosure (though they didn't meet, he taught one of Cornell's sisters to draw at summer school). In 1910, Cornell's beloved brother was born. Robert had cerebral palsy, struggled to speak and later used a wheelchair. From the beginning, Joseph considered him his personal responsibility.

The family's early years were a whirlwind of Christmas parties and trips to the enchanted playgrounds of Coney Island and Times Square. But in 1911, Cornell's father, an exuberant textile designer and salesman, was diagnosed with leukaemia. When he died a few years later it became unhappily apparent that he'd been living well beyond his means. Confronted by sizable debts, Mrs Cornell sold up and moved the family to New York City, renting a succession of modest houses in working-class Queens.

She wangled her oldest son a place at the prestigious Phillips Academy, but he was unhappy and friendless there and left in 1921 without so much as a diploma to his name. Unable to draw or paint, he had no notion of becoming an artist and that autumn took the first of many grinding jobs as a salesman in Manhattan. He hated the work and often suffered from physical ailments, among them migraines and stomach aches.

What leavened those years was the city itself. Any free time Cornell had was spent luxuriating in what he described as "the teeming life of the metropolis". He prowled the avenues and lingered in the parks: a gaunt, handsome man with burning blue eyes, leafing through racks of secondhand books and old prints, haunting flea markets, movie houses and museums, pausing sometimes to feast on stacks of doughnuts and prune twists.

The city he favoured was neither glamorous nor exclusive, but democratic: an arcade whose astonishments might equally be found at a Saturday matinee at the Metropolitan Opera or in the lit boulevards of Woolworth's. He built up a vast private museum from his excursions, toting home treasure in the form of rare books, magazines, postcards, playbills, librettos, records and early films. Stranger things, too: shells and rubber balls, crystal swans, compasses, bobbins and corks.

First, you acquire the materials and then you put them together. Cornell's career as an artist began when he encountered surrealism in the early 1930s. The touch paper was La Femme 100 Têtes by Max Ernst, a collaged novel that introduced him to the idea that art was not necessarily a matter of applying paint to canvas, but could also be made from real objects, estrangingly combined. Inspired, he began to make collages of his own, sitting with scissors and glue at the kitchen table of 37-08 Utopia Parkway, his home from 1929 until his death in 1972. He worked mostly at night, his mother asleep upstairs and Robert dozing in the sitting room, surrounded by model trains.

In this period, Cornell also began to assemble what he called dossiers on his favourite subjects: folders crammed with cuttings and photographs of the ballerinas, opera singers and actresses he worshipped, among them Gloria Swanson and Anna Moffo. Other explorations, which sometimes ran for decades, were meticulously catalogued by way of topic: Advertisements, Butterflies, Clouds, Fairies, Figureheads, Food, Insects, History, Planets. Categorisation mattered to Cornell, though so, too, did intuitive leaps and flights of fancy. "A clearing house for dreams and visions," he called his files - part research project, part devotional act.

The last time Cornell ever spoke to his sister, he said: 'I wish I hadn't been so reserved'

By the mid-30s, he'd discovered the two great mediums of his maturity: shadow boxes and films made by re-editing found footage. One of the most striking among the latter was Rose Hobart, which he made by chopping up the B movie East of Borneo and splicing it back together as a series of lingering, blue-tinted glimpses of the actor Rose Hobart, wrapped in a trenchcoat, intercut with enigmatic footage of jungle foliage and swaying palms. According to Deborah Solomon's biography, Utopia Parkway, at the first screening Salvador Dalí was so overcome with jealousy that he knocked over the projector, an incident Cornell found abidingly distressing.

Because of his lack of a formal art education and the unusual nature of his domestic situation, Cornell is often depicted as an outsider artist, but he was in the swim of things from the start. His early collages appeared in the groundbreaking Surréalisme show at the Julien Levy Gallery in Manhattan in 1932, alongside Dalí and Duchamp, and his first shadow box, Untitled (Soap Bubble Set), was in Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism, a major exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1936. Other artists were quick to see the value of his inventions (something that continued through the successive waves of surrealism, abstract expressionism and pop art). Despite his shyness, Cornell developed sustaining friendships, though he was never wholly comfortable with the business aspect of art.

In the winter of 1940, he took the bold step of resigning from his job. He set up a studio in the basement and began to concentrate on boxes, a project that would occupy him for the next 15 years. The early versions used readymade cases, but he soon began to build the frames himself, learning by trial and error to make mitre joints and use a power saw. Next, he'd age the box with multiple layers of paint and varnish, sometimes leaving them in the yard or baking them in the oven. Prosaic work that was followed by the poetry of assemblage, of finding the right objects or images to convey the subtle, transient feelings - nostalgia, say, or joy - that Cornell experienced on his voyages through the city and which he logged in his voluminous and ardent diary (itself a collage composed of scribbled notes on napkins, paper bags and ticket stubs).

The boxes came first one by one, and then in sets or families. Works from the Medici Slot Machine series are melancholy marvels in which composed princesses and slouching princes gaze sorrowfully from simulacra of vending machines, that offer but do not relinquish a child's treasury of jacks, compasses and coloured balls. In the Aviary series, lithographs of parrots cut from books and perched in cages are decorated with watch-faces or arranged as if for a shooting gallery. Or and Observatories: celestial lodging places for travellers passing between worlds.

Cornell found it agonising to sell these precious objects, frequently changing galleries and dealers so that no one person had too much control over his work. What he preferred was to give them away, especially to women. Cornell adored women. A deeply romantic man, he was cripplingly physically reserved, not helped by a jealous mother who repeatedly told him sex was repulsive. He longed to touch, but looking and fantasising were safer and had their own deep satisfactions. His diaries are filled with accounts of the women and especially teenaged girls (teeners, he called them, or fées) who caught his eye in the city, entries that veer between sentimental, creepy and painfully innocent.

Mostly he didn't make contact, and when he did - presenting a bouquet to a cinema checkout girl; mailing an owl box to Audrey Hepburn - he was often rebuffed or misunderstood. All the same, he built productive friendships with many women artists and writers, among them Lee Miller, Marianne Moore and Susan Sontag, who later told Deborah Solomon: "I certainly was not relaxed or comfortable in his presence, but why should I be? That's hardly a complaint. He was a delicate, complicated person whose imagination worked in a very special way."

The most fertile of his alliances was with Yayoi Kusama, the Japanese avant-garde artist famous for her all-encompassing use of dots. They met in 1962, when Kusama was in her early 30s. According to her autobiography, Infinity Net, their relationship was erotic and creative, though his mother did her best to quash it, once throwing a bucket of water over them as they sat kissing beneath the backyard quince tree. In the end, Kusama withdrew, exhausted by the claustrophobic intensity of Cornell's claims on her attention; the phone monologues that could go on for hours; the dozens of love notes that appeared in her mailbox daily.

As Cornell's reputation grew, his production of boxes slowed. Instead, he returned to the two mediums with which he'd begun: collages and movie-making. In his late films, which he began in the mid-50s, he no longer used found footage but employed professional collaborators to record material at his command, which he then edited. There's no better way of experiencing how he saw the world than by watching these celluloid records of his wandering, wondering gaze.

Take the ravishing Nymphlight, made in 1957 with the experimental filmmaker Rudy Burckhardt. A 12-year-old ballet dancer roams Bryant Park, the tree-lined square next to the New York Public Library. The camera's eye is perpetually distracted by small movements, by quickenings and quiverings: a flock of pigeons performing their aerial ballet; water gushing from a fountain; wind in leaves.

Halfway through, it becomes enraptured by a succession of people, among them a woman with a dog - an elderly vagrant, who gazes back impassively - and a trash-collector. It's hard to think of another artist who might have looked with such loving, serious attention at someone collecting garbage. What Nymphlight demonstrates is the radical equanimity of Cornell's vision, his capacity for finding beauty in the most unprepossessing of physical forms.

The last years were the hardest. In 1965, Robert died of pneumonia, and the following year Cornell's mother also died. In 1967, he was the subject of two big retrospectives, at the Pasadena Art Museum and the Guggenheim, as well as a lengthy profile in Life magazine. An ecstatic culmination of a life's work, one might think, assuming that what was being angled for was fame. But this had never been Cornell's interest or his aim.

Alone in the house on Utopia Parkway, he was ravaged by loneliness, and particularly by a longing for the physical contact he'd never really managed to attain. He hired assistants, mostly art students, to cook for him and help organise his work. He was visited by many devoted friends, but there still seemed to be something that kept him apart from other people: a pane of glass he couldn't quite break open or undo. And yet he never lost his ability to look and be moved - bowled over, even - by the things he saw, from birds in a tree ("cheery-upping of insistent Robin"), or shifts in the weather, to the marvellous traffic of his dreams and visions.

"Gratitude, acknowledgement & remembrance for something that can so easily get lost", he wrote in his diary on 27 December 1972, two days before he died of heart failure, inadvertently summing up the abiding genius of his own work. Then, perhaps glancing up at the window, he added his final words: "Sunshine breaking through going on 12 noon" - a last record of his long romance with what he once called the elated world.

Joseph Cornell: Wanderlust is at the Royal Academy, London W1, until 27 September.

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Joseph Cornell: how the reclusive artist conquered the art world - from his mum's basement

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he box is the central metaphor of Joseph Cornell 's life, just as it is the signature element of his exquisite and disturbing body of work, his factory of dreams. He made boxes to keep wonders in: small wooden boxes that he built in the basement beneath the small wooden house he shared with his mother and disabled younger brother, the two fixed stars of his existence.

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'Grandfather of Goth': fans campaign for US stamp honoring Edward Gorey

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campaign has been launched to recognize American queer artist Edward Gorey, whose "sinister whimsy" drawings inspired everyone from the novelist Lemony Snicket to film director Tim Burton, with a US postage stamp on his 100th birthday in 2025.

"Eccentric" isn't strong enough to describe the writer, illustrator, puppeteer and theatre designer known to some as the "Grandfather of Goth".

The late ballet fanatic stalked 1960s and 70s New York in ripped jeans, raccoon fur coat, costume jewelry and an Edwardian beard, and kept a mummified head stored in a closet.

He illustrated hundreds of books for authors like Samuel Beckett, TS Eliot and HG Wells as well as an emerging Andy Warhol, and won two Tony awards for his 1977 Broadway revival of Dracula.

Gorey created more than 100 tiny books filled with morbid, camp, Victorian-style crosshatch etchings, including The Glorious Nosebleed, The Fatal Lozenge and The Gashlycrumb Tinies, which dispatched children in rhyming couplets (beginning "A is for Amy who fell down the stairs" and ending "Z is for Zillah who drank too much gin"). He died surrounded by 25,000 books, leaving his fortune to animal charities in honour of his six cats.

Gorey illustrated TS Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, on which the musical Cats was based. Photograph: LA Heusinkveld/Alamy

"Goreyphiles" include film-makers Wes Anderson and Monty Python, fashion designer Anna Sui, Snicket creator Daniel Handler and Coraline author Neil Gaiman. His most obvious "fan", Burton, remains mute, although the set designer for The Corpse Bride and Nightmare Before Christmas reportedly confirmed the influence.

Yet, he's not a household name.

"He's that oxymoron: a mainstream cult," said Mark Dery, author of a Gorey biography, Born to Be Posthumous.

Looking through the Tunnel Calamity by Edward Gorey Photograph: filt3rtips/Stockimo/Alamy

"The people making culture are influenced by Gorey but ... the ordinary folks who dine on a steady diet of Hollywood blockbusters and Marvel franchises might not be aware that they know Gorey without knowing him."

The Edward Gorey House, a museum opened in his 200-year-old house in Yarmouth Port, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, after he died in 2000 aged 75, hopes to change that.

Last month they organised a letter-writing campaign to the US Postal Service, with Gorey now reaching "committee stage" for consideration as a celebrity stamp.

Past examples include author James Baldwin, astronaut Sally Ride, and this year, the Native and African American sculptor Edmonia Lewis.

Why has recognition taken so long?

Dery said: "To my mind, what made him inimitable to becoming a mass phenomenon ... and taking his place in the pantheon of US culture ... is his profound queerness."

Gorey famously rejected classification: a gothic writer who wasn't goth, a children's author who didn't write for children, a graphic novel genre founder who insisted he wrote "Victorian novels all scrunched up".

Whether he identified as LGBT+ is a fierce debate between those who consider him a workaholic more interested in cats, and others, like Fun Home author Alison Bechdel, who revere his work's iconic queerness, regardless of his personal preference.

In 1980 Gorey told Boston magazine "I suppose I'm gay", but said that he didn't like the label, was "undersexed" and "a person before I am anything else."

'He left ambiguity, unfinished endings in his work and life.' Photograph: Jack Mitchell/Getty Images

(Ironically, this led to him being labelled as asexual or non-binary.)

"He was a man of mystery," said Kevin Shortsleeve, associate professor of children's literature at Christopher Newport University, Virginia, who considers Gorey on a par with Maurice Sendak, a contemporary Goreyphile who wrote the world-famous Where the Wild Things Are.

"He left ambiguity, unfinished endings, essentially 'white space', in his work and life ... letting people read between the lines and fill in themselves."

Born in Chicago in 1925, the hardcore anglophile drew on 19th century, acid-tongued, LGBT+ British satirists and "literary nonsense" writers including Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, cautionary tales, Penny Dreadful comics and woodcut drawings.

He graduated from Harvard in 1950, allegedly a member of its "gay underground" along with his roommate, the poet Frank O'Hara, during the rise of McCarthyism when LGBT+ communities were considered the "lavender menace".

Prof Shortsleeve credits the lack of mainstream success partly to that "conservative, pre-Stonewall era", with "sanitised" literature and LGBT+ figures living "flamboyant", coded lives hidden in plain sight.

The Curious Sofa didn't help.

Billed on the cover as "pornographic'" yet containing no nudity, with "action" taking place in furtive glances and innuendo, the 1961 book was eagerly stocked by children's bookstores wanting to repeat the success of Wuggly Ump - but was quickly removed.

"People were afraid of him," said Shortsleeve.

"His transgressive work marks a huge leap in nonsense, modernist and postmodernist literature that went unrecognised. When I ask 30 students who he is, one person raises their hand. For those who know, his impact is incalculable."

A fanbase he may have embraced is the death positive movement.

In 2018 The Death Salon hosted a Gorey party in Mount Auburn cemetery, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, featuring funeral directors and a "haute macabre" dress code. The $225 tickets sold out in 24 hours.

Megan Rosenbloom, Death Salon's director, hailed Gorey's gallows humour in the face of "western death denial", adding: "I get the same fuzzy feeling from Gorey as others do from Winnie the Pooh."

According to legend, Gorey quit New York for the Cape "in protest" when ballet director George Balanchine, whose performances he never missed, died in 1983.

Though he didn't immediately occupy the derelict house he bought, to avoid displacing the raccoons until they were "ready."

His increasing interest in animal welfare led him to sell his fur coats, which still appear at auctions.

New York Studio School art historian Karen Wilkin, who befriended him as a ballet student, recalls rooms "verging on hoarding ... suffering from fleas", with Gorey "a cultural encyclopedia" obsessively watching Japanese silent films or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, while sewing puppets now fetching thousands.

"I can hear his sighs," she said of the stamp campaign, "like: ' Why are they doing this?'. Secretly, he would have liked it."

One man who would buy many stamps is Ken Morton, son of Gorey's cousin Skee, immortalised in The Deranged Cousins ( Sotheby's is selling a first edition for $1,100), and the only child whose relationship with Gorey didn't involve murder by ink.

"I had no idea of his ... fame when I was growing up", said Morton, who remembers "Uncle Ted" in jean shorts doing jigsaws.

"It was after his death that I learned just how big a deal he was, globally. He may actually be incomparable."

At Gorey's house, between "dead" puppets flung under carpets purged of fleas ("G is for Gregory smothered under a rug"), a quote on the wall says: "Life is intrinsically, well, boring and dangerous at the same time. At any given moment the floor may open up. Of course, it almost ever does; that's what makes it so boring."

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'Grandfather of Goth': fans campaign for US stamp honoring Edward Gorey

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campaign has been launched to recognize American queer artist Edward Gorey, whose "sinister whimsy" drawings inspired everyone from the novelist Lemony Snicket to film director Tim Burton, with a US postage stamp on his 100th birthday in 2025. "Eccentric" isn't strong enough to describe the writer, illustrator, puppeteer and theatre designer known to some as the "Grandfather of Goth".

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The 10 strangest artefacts in Australian museums – sorted

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The 10 strangest artefacts in Australian museums – sorted

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From a hangman’s journal to ‘The Poo Machine’, here are some weird, unnerving and oddly touching objects in museums around the country

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Frame and glory: improvised goalposts around the world - in pictures

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Artist Neville Gabie admits that photographing goalposts is an obsession. "I walk the streets in an unknown town with a single focus: where do people play?" The fixation started in the 1990s when Gabie was based in South Africa. Walking around, he was surprised by how many improvised goalposts he saw. "These simple frames, in the glare of the sun, spoke of community and resilience in the face of hardship."

Since then, he has taken more than 1,000 photos of goalposts in countries from Antarctica to Morocco , a selection of which will be in the new show at the Design Museum in London - Football: Designing the Beautiful Game (8 April-29 August). "There is a language in the marking of a goalpost that connects directly to its location," he says. "A mirror into the economics and politics of a situation, which is as powerful as any."

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Frame and glory: improvised goalposts around the world - in pictures

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Artist Neville Gabie admits that photographing goalposts is an obsession. "I walk the streets in an unknown town with a single focus: where do people play?" The fixation started in the 1990s when Gabie was based in South Africa. Walking around, he was surprised by how many improvised goalposts he saw.

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The Chase Manhattan Bank is the primary sponsor of "The Most Wanted Paintings on the Web" at Dia.

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Why are artists poor?

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The Red Balloon | Oscar Winning Short Film | Drama | Classic Movie

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"The Open University" Playlist - BBC Ideas

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Explore "The Open University" at BBC Ideas. Watch this playlist to see our curated "The Open University" videos, and explore other "The Open University" related content.

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Front cover David McKee created the picturebook Six Men very early in his career. First published in the UK in 1972, it's now o...

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A Century of the Artist's Studio: 1920-2020 review - congealing palettes, fading light and magic

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t is a chamber of the mind, a room of one's own, a hothouse or a prison. It is an attic or an empty shop, a suburban lockup or a concrete cubicle in a disused acid factory that still takes coins for the meter and is a million miles from the white cube factory designed by architects where assistants manufacture blue-chip art for the rich. Yet they are all known, because of who goes there, and what they make, which may be something or a paralysed nothing whatsoever, as artists' studios.

A show with this theme opens at the Whitechapel Gallery next week. And it turns out be a riveting experience, achieved with great wisdom and drama by Iwona Blazwick and her team. A Century of the Artist's Studio goes in and out of this magical place in such inventive ways. There are spectacular reconstructions of actual studios - Matisse's bedroom in the south of France, hung with magnificent embroideries; Kurt Schwitters's Dada studio, all wild wooden stalactites - but the show also moves through global space, crossing five continents from the secret studios of Iran to the tiny kiosk in Manila where the father of Filipino art, Roberto Chabet, made conceptual sculptures.

The century flows through the show like an underground river. Egon Schiele sets up his drawing box in the office of a prisoner of war camp in 1916. Ten years later, Brancusi is labouring through the dark night in his Paris attic. Frida Kahlo, torso in plaster, works from her sickbed in the second world war while Picasso sets up studio in the 60s in a majestic French castle. Cindy Sherman makes herself up, character by character, in her Manhattan loft in the late 1970s, the flashbulb wire visibly trailing across the floor. In Johannesburg, William Kentridge doubles up to play two versions of himself on screen, arguing about the value of political art in the digital 21st century.

In films, photographs and paintings, the studio edges in at every turn. It is a place of cigarette butts and congealing palettes, the masking tape running out as the daylight fades too fast and the leg of the drawing table needs propping yet again. It is a place where the clock ticks with reproachful violence as no work gets done in Darren Almond's live feed of his studio. Where the canvases are still worryingly bare, in an exquisite tempera painting by Andrew Grassie (perfect paradox). Or the paintings have all gone, along with the students, in Paul Winstanley's photographs of deserted art schools, haunted by telltale hints of colours the decorators have tried to cover over with whitewash.

The studio is a place of heroics. The heap of paint rags in Lucian Freud's Holland Park studio, so lovingly depicted in the enormous portrait of his assistant, becomes a sacred relic in Darren Almond's photographic homage. The rags in Robert Rauschenberg's studio appear almost erotic in their sprawled abandon, photography by his friend Cy Twombly. And there are hints of Twombly's own paintings of high summer in the luminous dabs blossoming across the walls of Francis Bacon's studio, where he has wiped the excess of mauve, blue, pink and black from his brush. There is a fascination in seeing his colours isolated like this, and even more in the presentation of photographs found in that studio. It is sometimes said that Bacon couldn't draw and relied almost entirely on photos. This feels like the ocular proof.

The show teems with revelations. A startling 1925 shot of Alexander Rodchenko making photomontages in his Moscow studio looks fantastically advanced, except that he is wearing gaiters. Giacometti's painting of his studio, so spectral and sketchy, looks so like the photographed reality - diaphanous shadows, walls scribbled with sketches - as to confuse art and life. And a lifesize log cabin - a facsimile of her Nova Scotia home - shows that the Canadian artist Maud Lewis painted everything she loved upon everything she owned: birds, flowers and trees trail right across the walls and windows.

So many of the artists in this exhibition never had a separate studio. I am reminded of the great Cuban painter Carmen Herrera, who died last week at the age of 106, still painting dazzling abstractions in a room of her flat. A studio can be a floor, a hall or a kitchen, like the one shared by several artists in Iran, where the bowls of food look just like the bowls of paint.

Studios may bring privacy and peace. A beautiful painting by Wilhelmina Barns-Graham shows the perfect easel in the perfect studio, rectilinear, formal, everything in its place - the Platonic ideal. But studios may also be the stage for performing, throwing parties or fighting with art. A terrific painting by Maria Lassnig shows the Austrian artist literally struggling to get into - or is it out of - a newly primed canvas.

The studio becomes a place of pilgrimage. There are classic photographs here of Picasso painting for the cameras in Antibes, his masculinity barely concealed by a toga; and Jackson Pollock hard at it outside his Long Island barn for Hans Namuth to memorialise on film. This act of painting - this solo feat, this battling with one's demons - is gleefully satirised by Paul McCarthy in his violent video , in which McCarthy plays a clownish child lugging giant tubes of paint around his studio-cum-nursery. Painting is not so much heroic as a monstrous display of infantile male tantrums.

Women alternate with men, here, to coruscating contrast. The American painter Helen Frankenthaler, photographed by Gordon Parks, sits with poised intelligence upon one of her own canvases, in command of her art. The young African American artist Mequitta Ahuja paints herself hemmed in between easel, mirror, canvases and art history, but breaking free of the past. And the whole show opens with one of Louise Bourgeois's monumental caged Cells, all working hands multiplied in mirrors: a dynamic studio of the mind.

The studio, always a subject in itself, becomes increasingly central with time. Joseph Sudek was reduced to photographing nothing but his bare Prague studio, first under Nazi occupation and later Soviet dictatorship. Gregor Schneider 's German family home has been both studio and source of his terrifying films and installations for three decades (he is said to have once remarked that he might have been a murderer if he hadn't been an artist). And the Polish artist Mirosław Bałka has made art, piece by piece, from and in the house where he works outside Warsaw, inherited from his father. One of the last works here is a wooden angel beautifully sculpted from their fence and garden gate. Bałka's forebears made funeral monuments, just to complete the elegiac metaphor.

This is Iwona Blazwick's last show as Whitechapel director - she departs in April - and it is fittingly superb. She changed the whole nature of the gallery, turning it into a multi-part museum with a special welcome for the local community and for artists of all ages. Blazwick has presided over many great exhibitions, but I doubt the rooms have ever been more densely and revealingly used than they are here. Go if you possibly can. This is nothing less than a history of art by other means; a magnificent way of entering the minds of artists through the places where they worked, and what they made there.

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A Century of the Artist's Studio: 1920-2020 review - congealing palettes, fading light and magic

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t is a chamber of the mind, a room of one's own, a hothouse or a prison. It is an attic or an empty shop, a suburban lockup or a concrete cubicle in a disused acid factory that still takes coins for the meter and is a million miles from the white cube factory designed by architects where assistants manufacture blue-chip art for the rich.

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Francis Bacon Fragments Of A Portrait - interview by David Sylvester

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BBC Radio 4 - A History of the World in 100 Objects - Downloads

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Podcast downloads for A History of the World in 100 Objects

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2022 Oscar-Nominated Short: “Affairs of the Art” | The New Yorker Screening Room

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2022 Oscar-Nominated Short: “Affairs of the Art” | The New Yorker Screening Room

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I was Born, But... / Umarete wa mita keredo (Yasujiro Ozu, 1932) (English subtitles)

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John Berger / Ways of Seeing , Episode 1 (1972)

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John Berger / Ways of Seeing , Episode 1 (1972)

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UbuWeb Film & Video: Ivor Cutler: Cutler's Last Stand (2004)

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UbuWeb Film & Video: Ivor Cutler: Cutler's Last Stand (2004)

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BBC Sounds - Viewfinders: Ways of Seeing at 50 - Available Episodes

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BBC Sounds - Viewfinders: Ways of Seeing at 50 - Available Episodes

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Listen to the latest episodes of Viewfinders: Ways of Seeing at 50 on BBC Sounds

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BBC 100 - Celebrating 100 Years of the BBC

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1/6 The Rules Of Abstraction With Matthew Collings

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1/6 The Rules Of Abstraction With Matthew Collings

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The Open Eye Gallery is now showing the sensational Charles Fréger, The Wild and the Wise. One of Fréger’s series documents some of the pagan rites that still celebrate the cyclical patterns …

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Step into the night: American dreamscapes - in pictures

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Step into the night: American dreamscapes - in pictures

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Paul Guilmoth's intimate images of floating spider webs and icy waterfalls have one foot in the present and another in the past

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The art colony of St Ives in Cornwall became as important as Paris or London in the history of modernism during a golden creative period between the 1920s an...

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10 artist movies and docs to watch on Netflix, Amazon Prime and more | Blog | Royal Academy of Arts

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When you can't go to the art, let the art come to you. Here's our pick of the best artist biopics and documentaries available to stream in April.

Dir. by Mike Leigh, available to rent on BFI Player or Prime Video
Timothy Spall plays an aged, misanthropic William Turner (otherwise known as JMW Turner RA) whose main form of communication in the film is an expressive grunt.

It is a brilliantly ambivalent portrait of the 19th-century English landscape painter, whose technical innovations, though increasingly mocked by the public, are depicted as an obvious progression in his fascination with light ("The Sun is God!" were supposedly Turner's last words).

The artist also offers a springboard for director Mike Leigh's minutely detailed and impish depiction of early Victorian society; the snooty, insular hanging committee of the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition is reason enough to watch this biopic.

Find out who's who in the film Mr Turner.

Dir. by Aisling Walsh, available to rent on Prime Video
In Aisling Walsh's biopic, the story of painter Maud Lewis becomes a story of irrepressible creativity. No matter the abject conditions faced by the Canadian folk artist - juvenile arthritis, poverty, the loss of her child to adoption - she finds solace in painting. We see her birds, flowers and landscapes in bright, unmixed colours and painted from memory fan out over every surface of the tiny Nova Scotian house that she shared with her fish-peddler husband until her death in 1970.

If you like this, you might also like...

Other moving explorations of independent female creatives include the French-Belgian film (2008), about French self-taught artist Séraphine Louis. Working as a housekeeper in the early 20th century, Louis achieved public recognition for her detailed, religious paintings of nature, but suffered from psychosis and died alone in an asylum.

Dir. by Timothy Marrinan and Richard Dewey, available on Netflix
Shot in the arm, nailed to a Volkswagen, strapped to the floor between two electrically charged buckets of water. How does a conceptual artist first justify and then move on from his early performances? This question underpins Burden, in which we hear first-hand from the documentary's subject, American artist Chris Burden, as well as his acquaintances, detractors and staunchest supporters.

While a gap appears between the intense, troubled young man who appears in the early interviews, conducted in the 1970s, and the older, calmer Chris surrounded by dogs on his ranch-cum-workshop, his art was all part of an ongoing investigation.

Burden reveals that the sense of a "moment", whether violent or delightful (see Urban Light, 2008), was Chris Burden's lifelong preoccupation.

Dir. by Julie Taymor, available to rent on Prime Video
Frida Kahlo sits on a yellow chair wearing an oversized suit. She is staring at the viewer, surrounded by the thick black locks of her recently shorn hair. The Mexican artist paintedSelf-Portrait with Cropped Hair in 1940, a month after her divorce from the famous mural-painter and communist Diego Rivera, closing a chapter in their tumultuous relationship, which is the focus of this biopic. Kahlo's hallucinatory paintings are the visual touchstone for the film as they end pivotal scenes and inspire its use of nightmarish Day of the Dead puppetry. Furthermore, Salma Hayek's cheeky, provocative and highly believable portrayal of Kahlo is essential viewing.

Dir. by John Maloof, available to rent on Curzon Home Cinema or Prime Video
After buying a box of Vivian Maier's negatives at a Chicago auction in 2007, local historian John Maloof discovered further boxes and storage units containing over 100,000 negatives. He quickly became intent on finding out the story of their prolific author.

The resulting documentary follows Maloof as he attempts to solve the mystery, with a hotchpotch of material informing his investigation, including interviews with Maier's many employers and charges from her career as a nanny.

Yet in spite of these various voices, her street photography, much of it taken in Chicago and New York in the 1950s and '60s, speaks for itself. Part-journalism, part-portraiture, Maier's work exhibits a humorous and respectful regard for humanity, as well as fame-worthy sensitivity towards light and composition.

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10 artist movies and docs to watch on Netflix, Amazon Prime and more | Blog | Royal Academy of Arts

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When you can't go to the art, let the art come to you. Here's our pick of the best artist biopics and documentaries available to stream in April. Dir. by Mike Leigh, available to rent on BFI Player or Prime Video Timothy Spall plays an aged, misanthropic William Turner (otherwise known as JMW Turner RA) whose main form of communication in the film is an expressive grunt.

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W G Sebald

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ELLSWORTH KELLY Plant Drawings | Matthew Marks Gallery

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Rubber Plant 1957 Graphite on paper 24¾ × 20½ inches; 63 × 52 cm

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ELLSWORTH KELLY Plant Drawings | Matthew Marks Gallery

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Matthew Marks is pleased to announce Ellsworth Kelly Last Paintings and Ellsworth Kelly Plant Drawings , the next exhibitions in his galleries at 522 and 526 West 22nd Street. The nine canvases in Ellsworth Kelly Last Paintings , made in the months leading up to Kelly's death in December 2015, are the culmination of his seven-decade pursuit of a singular artistic vision.

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Field Recordings - A podcast where audio-makers stand silently in fields.

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Field Recordings - A podcast where audio-makers stand silently in fields.

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"Hundreds of people gather to demonstrate outside the Houses of Parliament whilst MPs hold the second reading of the 'Illegal Migration Bill', a piece of legislation that denies asylum to anyone risking their lives to cross the Channel in 'small boats'.

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Born in 1986 in Kostërc (Kosovo), PETRIT HALILAJ lives and works in-between Germany, Kosovo and Italy. His work is deeply connected with the recent history of his country, and the consequences of the political and cultural tensions in the region. But while confronting a collective memory, his work often originates from a personal experience and it is usually the result of an intimate process and a shared moment with someone he loves. His unique, and sometimes irreverent, way to playfully confront the essence of reality results in a deep reflection on memory, freedom, cultural identity and life discoveries. Kamel Mennour and Petrit Halilaj have been working together since 2014.

Petrit Halilaj's work has been shown in solo exhibitions at the New Museum, NYC; the Fondazione Merz, Turin; the Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Hangar Bicocca, Milan; the Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne; the Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn; the National Gallery of Kosovo, Pristina; the Kunsthalle Lissabon, Lisbon; the Foundation Galeries Lafayette, Paris; WIELS, Brussels; as well as in group exhibitions at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles; the Palazzo Grassi, Pinault Collection, Venice; and the Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster.

He represented Kosovo at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013. He received the Mario Merz Prize, and the special mention of the jury at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017. In 2019, he participated in the group exhibitions "The Palace at 4am" at NEON, Mykonos, Greece; "Homeless Souls" at the Louisiana Museum in Denmark; and the 15th Lyon Biennale.

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Born in 1986 in Kostërc (Kosovo), PETRIT HALILAJ lives and works in-between Germany, Kosovo and Italy. His work is deeply connected with the recent history of his country, and the consequences of the political and cultural tensions in the region. ...

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Capturing the nation in conversation, in partnership with the British Library.

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Patrick Coyle is an artist and writer based in London.

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About UbuWeb Sound

Originally focusing on Sound Poetry proper, UbuWeb's Sound section has grown to encompass all types of sound art, historical and contemporary. Beginning with pioneers such as Guillaume Apollinaire reading his "Calligrammes" in 1913, and proceeding to current practitioners such as Vito Acconci or Kristin Oppenheim, UbuWeb Sound surveys the entire 20th century and beyond. Categories include Dadaism, Futurism, early 20th century literary experiments, musique concrete, electronic music, Fluxus, Beat sound works, minimalist and process works, performance art, plunderphonics and sampling, and digital glitch works, to name just a few. As the practices of sound art continue to evolve, categories become increasingly irrelevant, a fact UbuWeb embraces. Hence, our artists are listed alphabetically instead of categorically.

UbuWeb embraces non-proprietary, open source media. As such, most of our newer files are encoded in the more universally readable MP3 format. However, when a recording is still in print and available, we only serve it in streaming RealMedia; we don't wish to take whatever small profits might be made from those taking the efforts to gather, manufacture and properly distribute such recordings. Instead, we hope that by streaming these works, it will serve as an enticement for UbuWeb visitors to support the small labels making this work available.

All MP3s served on UbuWeb are either out-of-print, incredibly difficult to find, or, in our opinion, absurdly overpriced.

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About UbuWeb Sound Originally focusing on Sound Poetry proper, UbuWeb's Sound section has grown to encompass all types of sound art, historical and contemporary. Beginning with pioneers such as Guillaume Apollinaire reading his "Calligrammes" in 1913, and proceeding to current practitioners such as Vito Acconci or Kristin Oppenheim, UbuWeb Sound surveys the entire 20th century and beyond.

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Japanese artist Mou Hitotsu no Kenkyujo has reinvented the humble flip book by using negative space and jawdroppingly well-animated art.

The expert use of negative space and secret cutout compartments pack these flip books with whimsical surprises. We can only hope that we haven't seen the last of these magical flip books yet.

According to the artist's blog, it looks like these eight or so marvelous flip book volumes were started in 2009.

More info: mouhitotsunokenkyujo.com | Amazon (h/t: colossal, travelry)

These books are available on Amazon, so take a look!

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Japanese Flip Books Reveal Magical Stories With Negative Space and Secret Chambers

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Japanese artist Mou Hitotsu no Kenkyujo has reinvented the humble flip book by using negative space and jawdroppingly well-animated art. The expert use of negative space and secret cutout compartments pack these flip books with whimsical surprises. We can only hope that we haven't seen the last of these magical flip books yet.

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Art is for anyone. It's just not for everyone. I know this viscerally, as a would-be artist who burned out. I wrote about that last year, and ever since, I've been beset - every lecture I give, every gallery I pop my head into, somebody is asking me for advice. What they're really asking is "How can I be an artist?"

When, last month, Banksy jerry-rigged a frame to shred a painting just when it was auctioned, I could almost hear the whispers: "Is that art?" This fall, the biggest museum event in New York is the Whitney's retrospective of Andy Warhol - the paradigmatic self-made, make-anything-art-and-yourself-famous artist. Today, we are all Andy's children, especially in the age of Instagram, which has trained everyone to think visually and to look at our regular lives as fodder for aesthetic output.

How do you get from there to making real art, great art? There's no special way; everyone has their own path. Yet, over the years, I've found myself giving the same bits of advice. Most of them were simply gleaned from looking at art, then looking some more. Others from listening to artists talk about their work and their struggles. (Everyone's a narcissist.) I've even stolen a couple from my wife.

There are 33 rules - and they really are all you need to know to make a life for yourself in art. Or 34, if you count "Always be nice, generous, and open with others and take good care of your teeth." And No. 35: "Fake it till you make it."
Five lessons before you even get started.
Lesson 1: Don't Be Embarrassed

I get it. Making art can be humiliating, terrifying, leave you feeling foul, exposed, like getting naked in front of someone else for the first time. You often reveal things about yourself that others may find appalling, weird, boring, or stupid. People may think you're abnormal or a hack. Fine. When I work, I feel sick to my stomach with thoughts like None of this is any good. It makes no sense. But art doesn't have to make sense. It doesn't even need to be good. So don't worry about being smart and let go of being "good."

Lesson 2: "Tell your own story and you will be interesting." - Louise Bourgeois

Amen, Louise. Don't be reined in by other people's definitions of skill or beauty or be boxed in by what is supposedly high or low. Don't stay in your own lane. Drawing within the lines is for babies; making things add up and be right is for accountants. Proficiency and dexterity are only as good as what you do with them. But also remember that just because it's your story, that doesn't mean you're entitled to an audience. You have to earn that. Don't try to do it with a big single project. Take baby steps. And be happy with baby steps.

Lesson 3: Feel Free to Imitate

We all start as copycats, people who make pastiches of other people's work. Fine! Do that. However, when you do this, focus, start to feel the sense of possibility in making all these things your own - even when the ideas, tools, and moves come from other artists. Whenever you make anything, think of yourself as entering a gigantic stadium filled with ideas, avenues, ways, means, and materials. And possibilities. Make these things yours. This is your house now.

Lesson 4: Art Is Not About Understanding. Or Mastery.
It is about doing and experience.
No one asks what Mozart means. Or an Indian raga or the little tripping dance of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers to "Cheek to Cheek" in Top Hat. Forget about making things that are understood. I don't know what Abba means, but I love it. Imagination is your creed; sentimentality and lack of feeling your foe. All art comes from love - love of doing something.

Lesson 5: Work, Work, Work

Sister Corita Kent said, "The only rule is work. If you work, it will lead to something. It's the people who do all of the work all the time who eventually catch onto things."

I have tried every way in the world to stop work-block or fear of working, of failure. There is only one method that works: work. And keep working.

Every artist and writer I know claims to work in their sleep. I do all the time. Jasper Johns famously said, "One night I dreamed that I painted a large American flag, and the next morning I got up and I went out and bought the materials to begin it." How many times have you been given a whole career in your dreams and not heeded it? It doesn't matter how scared you are; everyone is scared. Work. Work is the only thing that takes the curse of fear away.
An instruction manual for the studio.
Lesson 6: Start With a Pencil

Don't worry about drawing. Just make marks. Tell yourself you're simply diagramming, playing, experimenting, seeing what looks like what. If you can write, you already know how to draw; you already have a form of your own, a style of making letters and numbers and special doodles. These are forms of drawing, too. While you're making marks and drawing, pay attention to all the physical feedback you're getting from your hand, wrist, arm, ears, your sense of smell and touch. How long can your mark go before you seem to need to lift the pencil and make a different mark? Make those marks shorter or longer. Change the ways you make them at all, wrap your fingers in fabric to change your touch, try your other hand to see what it does. All these things are telling you something. Get very quiet inside yourself and pay attention to everything you're experiencing. Don't think good or bad. Think useful, pleasurable, strange. Hide secrets in your work. Dance with these experiences, collaborate with them. They're the leader; you follow. Soon you'll be making up steps too, doing visual calypsos all your own - ungainly, awkward, or not. Who cares? You'll be dancing to the music of art.

Carry a sketchbook with you at all times. Cover a one-by-one-foot piece of paper with marks. But don't just fill the whole page border to border, edge to edge. (Way too easy.) Think about what shapes, forms, structures, configurations, details, sweeps, buildups, dispersals, and compositions appeal to you.

Now do this on another surface, any surface, to know what kind of material appeals to you. Draw on rock, metal, foam-core, coffee cups, labels, the sidewalk, walls, plants, fabric, wood, whatever. Just make marks; decorate these surfaces. Don't worry about doing more. All art is a form of decoration. Now ask someone what ideas they get when they look at what you've made. They've just told you more about what you've already done. If the other person sees it in your work, it's there.

Next, draw the square foot in front of you. This can be tight, loose, abstract, realistic. It's a way to see how you see objects, textures, surfaces, shapes, light, dark, atmosphere, and patterns. It tells you what you missed seeing. This will be your first masterpiece. Now draw the same square foot from the other side. You are already becoming a much better seeing machine and you don't even know it.

Lesson 7: Develop Forms of Practice

For instance, on the subway, while waiting or sitting around, practice drawing your own hands. Lots of hands on the same page, hands over other hands. Other people's hands, if you want to. You can draw other parts of your body that you can see, too. But you have to look and then describe with your pencil or pen what you see. Don't make it up! Mirrors are fine, even if you want to draw only where your cheek turns into your mouth. Play with different scales, make things bigger, smaller, twisted.

Exercise: Forget Being a Genius and Develop Some Skills
﻿I think all artists should:
* Build a clay pot.
* Sew pieces of fabric together.
* Prune a tree.
* Make a wooden bowl on a lathe, by carving.
* Make a lithograph, etching, or woodblock print.
* Make one hokey Dalí-like painting or mini Kusama light installation to get this out of your system.

You are now in possession of ancient secret knowledge.

Lesson 8: Now, Redefine Skill

Artistic skill has nothing to do with technical proficiency, mimetic exactitude, or so-called good drawing. For every great artist, there is a different definition of skill. Take drawing classes, if you wish; learn to draw "like the masters." You still have to do it in an original way. Pollock could not draw realistically, but he made flicking paint at a canvas from above, for a time, the most prized skill in the art world. You can do the same - your skill will be whatever it is you're doing differently.

Lesson 9: "Embed thought in material." - Roberta Smith

What does this mean? An object should express ideas; art should contain emotions. And these ideas and feelings should be easy to understand - complex or not.

These days, an artist might exhibit an all-brown painting with a long wall text informing us that the artist took the canvas to Kosovo near the site of a 1990s Serbian massacre and rubbed dirt on the canvas for two hours while blindfolded to commemorate the killing. Recently, while I was looking at boring black-and-white photographs of clouds in the sky, a gallerist sidled up to me and seriously opined, "These are pictures of clouds over Ferguson, Missouri, in protest of police violence." I started yelling, "No! These are just dumb pictures of clouds and have nothing to do with anything."

There is a different way. In the winter of 1917, Marcel Duchamp, age 29, bought a urinal at J.L. Mott Iron Works on Fifth Avenue, turned it on its side, signed it "R. Mutt 1917," titled it Fountain, and submitted it to the non-juried Society of Independent Artists exhibition.

Fountain is an aesthetic equivalent of the Word made flesh, an object that is also an idea - that anything can be an artwork. Today it is called the most influential artwork of the 20th century.

This project of embedding thought in material to change our conception of the world isn't only a new development. When we see cave paintings, we are seeing one of the most advanced and complex visual operating systems ever devised by our species. The makers of the work wanted to portray in the real world something they had in their head and make that information readable to others. It has lasted tens of thousands of years. With that in mind ...

Exercise: Build a Life Totem
Using any material on any surface, make or draw or render a four-foot-tall totem pole of your life. From this totem, we should be able to know something about you other than what you look like or how many siblings you have. Include anything you want: words, letters, maps, photos, objects, signs. This should take no longer than a week. After a week, it's finished. Period. Now show it to someone who does not know you well. Tell them only, "This is a totem pole of my life till now." That's all. It doesn't matter if they like it. Ask them to tell you what it means about your life. No clues. Listen to what they tell you.

Lesson 10: Find Your Own Voice
Then exaggerate it.
If someone says your work looks like someone else's and you should stop making it, I say don't stop doing it. Do it again. Do it 100 times or 1,000 times. Then ask an artist friend whom you trust if your work still looks too much like the other person's art. If it still looks too much like the other person's, try another path.

Imagine the horror Philip Guston must have felt when he followed his own voice and went from being a first-string Abstract Expressionist in the 1950s to painting clunky, cartoony figures smoking cigars, driving around in convertibles, and wearing KKK hoods! He was all but shunned for this. He followed his voice anyway. This work is now some of the most revered from the entire period. In your downtime ...

Exercise: An Archaeology
Make an index, family tree, chart, or diagram of your interests. All of them, everything: visual, physical, spiritual, sexual. Leisure time, hobbies, foods, buildings, airports, everything. Every book, movie, website, etc. The totality of this self-exposure may be daunting, scary. But your voice is here. This will become a resource and record to return to and add to for the rest of your life.

Lesson 11: Listen to the Crazy Voices in Your Head

I have my own sort of School of Athens in my head. A team of rivals, friends, famous people, influences dead and alive. They're all looking over my shoulder as I work; none of them are mean. All make observations, recommendations, etc. I use music a lot. I think, Okay, let's begin this piece with a real pow! Like Beethoven. Or the Barbara Kruger in my head says, Make this sentence short, punchy, declarative, aggressive. Led Zeppelin chimes in with, Try a hairy experiment here; let it all show. All the Sienese paintings I've ever seen beg me, Make it beautiful. D. H. Lawrence is pounding on the table, Alexander Pope is making me get a grip, Wallace Stevens listens to my language and recommends words, Whitman pushes me on, my inner Melville gets grandiose, and Proust drives me to make longer and longer sentences till they almost break, and my editor cuts these into eighths or edits them down to one. (Writers need editors. No exceptions.) These voices will always be there for when things get tough.

Lesson 12: Know What You Hate
It is probably you.
Exercise: Make a List of Art
Make a list of three artists whose work you despise. Make a list of five things about each artist that you do not like; be as specific as possible. Often there's something about what these artists do that you share. Really think about this.

Lesson 13: Scavenge

Life is your syllabus: Gather from everywhere.

Andy Warhol said, "I always like to work on ... things that were discarded, that everybody knew were no good." He also understood that "department stores will become museums," meaning that optical information can come from everywhere, even from a Celestial Seasonings package.

Originality did not conveniently die just in time for you and your generation to insist it no longer exists. You just have to find it. You can do this by looking for overlooked periods of art history, disliked and discredited styles, and forgotten ideas, images, and objects. Then work them into your own art 100 times or 1,000 times.
This is the fun part.
Lesson 14: Compare Cats and Dogs

Okay, this sounds ridiculous, but call your dog and it comes right over to you, placing its head in your lap, slobbering, wagging its tail: a miraculous direct communication with another species. Now call your cat. It might look up, twitch a bit, perhaps go over to the couch, rub against it, circle once, and lie down again. What am I saying?

In seeing how the cat reacted, you are seeing something very close to how artists communicate.

The cat is not interested in direct communication. The cat places a third thing between you and it and relates to you through this third thing. Cats communicate abstractly, indirectly. As Carol Bove says, "You don't just walk up to beauty and kiss her on the mouth!" Artists are cats. (And they can't be herded.)

Lesson 15: Understand That Art Is Not Just for Looking At
Art does something.
In the past 100 years or so, art has been reduced to being mainly something we look at in clean, white, well-lit art galleries and museums. Art has been limited this way, made a passive thing: another tourist attraction to see, take a picture in front of, and move on from.

But for almost its entire history, art has been a verb, something that does things to or for you, that makes things happen. Holy relics in churches all over the world are said to heal. Art has been carried into war; made to protect us, curse a neighbor, kill someone; been an aid in getting pregnant or preventing pregnancy. There are huge, beautiful, multicolored, intricately structured Navajo sand paintings used in ceremonies to ask the gods for assistance. The eyes painted on Egyptian sarcophagi are not there for us to see; they are there so the interred person can watch. The paintings inside the tombs were meant to be seen only by beings in the afterlife.

Have you ever cried in front of a work of art? Write down six things about it that made you cry. Tack the list to your studio wall. Those are magical abracadabras for you.

Lesson 16: Learn the Difference Between Subject Matter and Content
One of the most crucial lessons there is!
The subject matter of Francis Bacon's 1953 Study After Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X is a pope, a seated male in a transparent sort of box. That's it. The content might be a rebellion or an indictment of religion. It might be claustrophobia or hysteria or the madness of religion or civilization.

The subject matter of Michelangelo's David is a standing man with a sling. The content might be grace, beauty - he was just 17, if you know what I mean - pensiveness, physical awareness, timelessness, eternal things, a form of perfection, vulnerability. This content is High Renaissance. Bernini's David, made 120 years later, is Baroque - all action and drama.

When you look at art, make subject matter the first thing you see - and then stop seeing it.

Try to find the content in a painting by Robert Ryman, who has been making almost-all-white work since the 1950s. Ask what Ryman's (or any artist's) ideas are and what his relationship to paint is, to surface, to internal scale (meaning what size brushstrokes were used in the work), to color. What is white to Ryman? Note the date: 1960. Why would he make this painting then? Would this have looked like other art at the time? How would it have been different? Ask yourself what else was being made then. How is the work hung on the wall? Is it in a frame? Is the stretcher or surface thick, thin, close to the wall? How is this like or unlike other almost-monochrome works by Ellsworth Kelly, Barnett Newman, Agnes Martin, or Ad Reinhardt? Is the surface sensual or intellectual? Does the painter want you to see the work all at once or in parts? Are some parts more important than others? Is every part of the surface supposed to be equally important? What are the artist's ideas about craft and skill? Do you think this artist likes painting or is trying to paint against it? Is this anti-art? What is Ryman's relationship to materials, tools, mark-making? How do you think he made the work? How might it be original or innovative? Why should this be in a museum? Why should it not be in a museum? Would you want to live with it? Why or why not? Why do you imagine the painting is this size? Now try a Frida Kahlo.

Exercise: Compare These Eight Nudes
﻿Forget the subject matter - what is each of these paintings actually saying?

Lesson 17: See As Much As You Can

Critics see by standing back, getting close, stepping up and back; looking at a whole show, comparing one work to another; considering the artist's past work, assessing developments, repetitions, regressions, failures, lack of originality; etc.

Artists see very differently: They get very close to a work; they inspect every detail, its textures, materials, makeup; they touch it, look at the edges and around the back of the object.

What are the artists doing? They will say, "Seeing how it is made." I would say, "Stealing."

You can steal from anything. You should! You better! Bad art teaches you as much as good art. Maybe more! Great art is often the enemy of the good; it doesn't leave you enough room to steal.

Lesson 18: All Art Is Identity Art!

This is because it is made by somebody.

And don't worry about being "political" enough: Kazimir Malevich painted squares during World War I; Mark Rothko made fuzzy squares during World War II; Agnes Martin drew grids on canvas during the Vietnam War. All art is a confession, more or less oblique.

Artists who claim that art is supposed to be good for us need also to see that there are as many ways of art being "good for us" as there are works of art.

Lesson 19: All Art Was Once Contemporary Art

Never forget this, that all art was made by artists for and in reaction to their time. It will make you less cynical and closed off and more understanding and open to everything you ever see. Please do this! It applies to all of us.
A guide to the snake pit.
Lesson 20: Accept That You Will Likely Be Poor

Even though all we see of the art world these days are astronomical prices, glitz, glamour, and junkie-like behavior, remember that only one percent of one percent of one percent of all artists become rich off their artwork. You may feel overlooked, underrecognized, and underpaid. Too bad. Stop feeling sorry for yourself; that's not why you're doing this.

Lesson 21: Define Success

But be careful. Typical answers are money, happiness, freedom, "doing what I want," having a community of artists, having people see what I do.

But ... if you marry a rich person and have lots of money, would you be satisfied with just the money? Also, Subway sells a lot of sandwiches, but that doesn't make them good.

What about being "happy"? Don't be silly! A lot of successful people are unhappy. And a lot of happy people aren't successful. I'm "successful," and I'm confused, terrified, insecure, and foul all the time. Success and happiness live on different sides of the tracks.

Do you want the real definition of success? The best definition of success is time - the time to do your work.

How will you make time if you don't have money? You will work full time for a long time. You will be depressed because of this for a long time - resentful, frustrated, envious. I'm sorry, that's the way it is.

But you're a sneaky, resourceful artist! Soon you figure out a way to work only four days a week; you start to be a little less depressed. But then on Sunday night, you're depressed again, back on your ride-to-nowhere job that's still taking up too much of your time.

But you are really sneaky and resourceful; this is a life-and-death matter to you. Eventually - and this comes for fully 80 percent of the artists I have ever known - you scam a way to work an only-three-days-a-week job. You may work in a gallery; for an artist or a museum; as a teacher, an art critic, an art handler, a bookkeeper, a proofreader, whatever.

Now you aren't depressed anymore: You have time to make your work and hang out more; you are now the first measure of successful. Now get to work. Or quit being an artist.

Lesson 22: It Takes Only a Few People to Make a Career

Exactly how many? Let's count.

Dealers? You need only one dealer - someone who believes in you, supports you emotionally, pays you promptly, doesn't play too many mind games; who'll be honest with you about your crappy or great art, who does as much as possible to spread your work out there and try to make money from it, too. This dealer doesn't have to be in New York.

Collectors? You need only five or six collectors who will buy your work from time to time and over the years, who really get what you're up to, who are willing to go through the ups and downs, who don't say, "Make them like this. " Each of these six collectors might talk to six other collectors about your work. Even if you have only six collectors, that's enough for you to make enough money to have enough time to make your work.

Critics? It would be nice to have two or as many as three critics who seem to get what you're doing. It would be best if these critics were of your generation, not geezers like me.

Curators? It would be nice to have one or two curators of your generation or a little older who would put you in shows from time to time.

That's it! Twelve people. Surely your crappy art can fake out 12 stupid people! I've seen it done with only three or four supporters. I've seen it done with one!

In 1957, gallery owner Leo Castelli discovered Jasper Johns while visiting Robert Rauschenberg's studio. Castelli immediately offered Johns his first solo show. It was there that Alfred Barr, the founding director of New York's Museum of Modern Art, purchased three works. Additional works were bought by Philip Johnson and Burton and Emily Hall Tremaine. Before the show even went up, executive editor Thomas Hess put a Johns on the cover of ARTnews.

In 1993, Elizabeth Peyton's New York breakthrough was staged by dealer Gavin Brown in Room 828 of the Chelsea Hotel. Visitors asked for the key to the room at the front desk. They went upstairs, unlocked the door, and entered a small studio apartment facing 23rd Street. There they saw 21 small-to-medium-size black-and-white charcoal-and-ink drawings of dandies, Napoleon, Queen Elizabeth II, Ludwig II, and others. Any of the works could have been stolen; none were. Since then, Peyton has had museum shows all over the world; her works sell for close to a million dollars. According to the hotel ledger, only 38 people saw the show after the opening. It doesn't take much.

I can't sugarcoat this next part: Some people are better connected than others. They get to 12 faster. The art world is full of these privileged people. You can hate them. I do. It is unfair and unjust and still in operation around women and artists of color especially, not to mention artists over 40. This needs to change and be changed. By all of us.

Lesson 23: Learn to Write

When it comes to artist statements, Keep it simple, stupid.

Don't use art jargon; write in your own voice, write how you talk. Don't try to write smart. Keep your statement direct, clear, to the point. Don't oppose big concepts like "nature" and "culture." Don't use words like interrogate, reconceptualize, deconstruct, symbolize, transcendental, mystical, commodity culture, liminal space, or haptic. Don't quote Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida. Those guys are great. But don't quote them. Come up with your own theory. People who claim to hate or have no theory: That's your theory, you idiots!

Important things are hard to write about. That's the way it is. Deal with it. And if it's pretentious to say, don't say it.

Exercise: Artist's Statement
﻿Write a simple 100-to-150-word statement about your work; give it to someone who doesn't know your work. Have them tell you what they think your work looks like. Note the differences.

Two Tips:
( A) Don't make writing a big deal. Just write, you big baby! You already know how to write.

( B) Never just say, "You tell me what it is." That's pompous bullshit. When it comes to your work, you're the best authority there is.
Psychic strategies for dealing with the ugliness (inside and out).
Lesson 24: Artists Must Be Vampires

Stay up late every night with other artists around your age. Show up. Go to openings, events, parties, wherever there are more than two of your kind.

Artists must commune with their own kind all the time. There are no exceptions to this rule, even if you live "out in the woods." Preferably commune in person, but online is more than fine. It doesn't matter where you live: big city, small city, little town. You will fight and love together; you will develop new languages together and give each other comfort, conversation, and the strength to carry on. This is how you will change the world - and your art.

To protect yourselves, form small gangs. Protect one another no matter what; this gang will allow all of you to go out into and take over parts of the world. Argue, sleep with, love, hate, get sick of your fellow gang members. Whatever happens, you need one another - for now. Protect the weakest artist in your gang, because there are people in the gang who think you're the weak one.

Lesson 25: Learn to Deal With Rejection

In 1956, "after careful consideration," the Museum of Modern Art rejected a shoe drawing by Warhol that he had given to the museum. Monet was rejected for years from the Paris Salon exhibitions. The work of Manet and Courbet was rejected as scandalous, sensationalist, ugly. Manet's paintings were said to exhibit "inconceivable vulgarity." Manet didn't want to show with Cézanne because he thought he was vulgar.

Stephen King's most renowned and first book, Carrie, was rejected 30 times. King threw the first pages of the book out. His wife went through the trash, rescued them, and persuaded him to keep writing.

The Beatles were rejected by Decca Records, which believed "guitar groups are on the way out," and "the Beatles have no future in show business."

But don't just ignore criticism. Instead, keep your rejection letters; paste them to your wall. They are goads, things to prove wrong. You may be Ahab about these bad reviews, but don't get taken down by them; they don't define you.

Much trickier: Accept that every criticism can have a grain of truth to it, something you did that allowed this person to say what was said. You might be ahead of your time, but the person couldn't see it. Or maybe you're doing something that isn't up to snuff, that allowed them not to appreciate your work, or you haven't found a way to make your work speak to the people you want it to speak to. That's all on you.

In general, you must be open to critique but also develop an elephant skin. And remember that nothing anyone says to you about your work can be worse than the things you've already thought and said to yourself 100 times.

I always tell anyone criticizing me, "You could be right." It has a nice double edge that the person often never feels and that gives pleasure.

Lesson 26: Make an Enemy of Envy

Envy looks at others but blinds you.

It will eat you alive as an artist; you live in the service of it, always on the edge of a funk, dwelling on past slights, watching everything, always seeing what other people have, scanning for other artists who are mentioned instead of you. Envy erodes your inner mind, leaves less room for development and, most important, for honest self-criticism. Your imagination is taken up by what others have, rather than what you need to be doing in your own work to get what you want. From this fortress, everything that doesn't happen to you is blamed on something or someone else. You fancy yourself a modern van Gogh, a passed-over genius the world isn't ready for. You relinquish agency and responsibility. Your feelings of lack define you, make you sour, bitter, not loving, and mean.

Poor you. Too bad that all those other "bad artists" are getting shows and you're not. Too bad they're getting the articles, money, and love! Too bad they have a trust fund, went to better schools, married someone rich, are better looking, have thinner ankles, are more social, have better connections, or use their connections, networking skills, and education. Too bad you're shy.

A secret: Almost everyone in the art world is almost equally as bashful and skittish about putting themselves out there. I'm unable to attend seated dinners. We all do the best we can. But "poor me" isn't a way to make your work better, and you're out of the game if you don't show up. So grow a pair of whatever and get back to work!

Lesson 27: Having a Family Is Fine

There is an unwritten rule - especially for women in the art world - that having children is "bad for your career." This is idiotic.

Probably 90 percent of all artists have had children. These artists have mostly been men, and it wasn't bad for their careers. Of course, women were tasked almost exclusively with domesticity and child-rearing over the centuries, not permitted in schools and academies, not even allowed to draw the nude, let alone apprentice to or learn from artists. That is over.

Having children is not "bad" for your career. Having children means having less time or money or space. So what? Most children raised within the art world have amazing lives.

As artist Laurel Nakadate has observed, being a parent is already very much like being an artist. It means always lugging things around, living in chaos, doing things that are mysterious or impossible or scary. As with art, children can drive you crazy all day, make you wish all this could go away. Then in a single second, at any point, you are redeemed with a moment of intense, transformative love.
Jerry's cosmic epigrams.
Lesson 28: What You Don't Like Is As Important As What You Do Like

Don't say, "I hate figurative painting." You never know when you will see a so-called figurative painting that catches your attention. So don't be an art-world undertaker pronouncing mediums dead! "Painting is dead," "The novel is dead," "The author is dead," "Photography is dead," "History is dead." Nothing is dead!

Lesson 29: Art Is a Form of Knowing Yourself

Art is not optional, not decorative landscaping in front of the castle of civilization. It is no more or less important than philosophy, religion, economics, or psychology.

Lesson 30: "Artists do not own the meaning of their work." - Roberta Smith

Remember: anyone may use your art - any art - in any way that works for them. You may say your work is about diaspora, but others might see in it climate change or a nature study. Cool.

Lesson 31: All Art Is Subjective

What does this mean? We have consensus that certain artists are good, but you may look at a Rembrandt and find yourself thinking ... It's pretty brown. That's fine! It doesn't mean you're dumb.

It does mean that while there is one text for Hamlet, every person who sees the play sees a different Hamlet. Moreover, every time you see Hamlet, it is different. This is the case with almost all good art. It is always changing, and every time you see it anew, you think, How could I have missed that before? Now I finally see! Until the next time it rearranges your thinking.

This brings you into one of art's metaphysical quasar chambers: Art is a static, non-changing thing that is never the same.

Lesson 32: You Must Prize Vulnerability
Radical vulnerability.
What's that? It's following your work into its darkest corners and strangest manifestations, revealing things about yourself that you don't want to reveal until your work requires you to do this, and never failing in only mediocre or generic ways. We all contradict ourselves. We contain multitudes. You must be willing to fail flamboyantly, do things that seem silly and that might get you judged as a bad person.

Can you?

Lesson 33: Be Delusional

At three a.m., demons speak to all of us. I am old, and they still speak to me every night. And every day.

They tell you you're not good enough, didn't go to the right schools, are stupid, don't know how to draw, don't have enough money, aren't original; that what you do doesn't matter, and who cares, and you don't even know art history, and can't schmooze, and have a bad neck. They tell you that you're faking it, that other people see through you, that you're lazy, that you don't know what you're doing, and that you're just doing this to get attention or money.

I have one solution to turn away these demons: After beating yourself up for half an hour or so, stop and say out loud, "Yeah, but I'm a fucking genius."

You are, now. Art is for anyone, it just isn't for everyone. These rules are your tools. Now use them to go change the world. Get to work!
How to Be an Artist*This article appears in the November 26, 2018, issue of New York Magazine. Subscribe Now! by Jerry Saltz will be published March 17, 2020.

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Jerry Saltz's 33 Rules for Being an Artist

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Jerry Saltz on how to be an artist. New York magazine's art critic on his 33 rules to take you from clueless amateur to generational talent (or at least help you live life a little more creatively).

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An ECA Project

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The purpose of this post is to describe 10X10, an ongoing project initiated at Edinburgh College of Art, that each year brings animators and composers from a range of European universities together in a virtualized collaborative process. Currently, this project is being handled in a way that allows an interesting, but passive, survey of trends and tendencies. Future iterations could conceivably be used to drive enquiry in a more active way by addressing explicit questions around European social and cultural issues, via the medium of animation.

Fig. 1. The logo of the 2019 edition of 10X10.

10X10 began as a small local project for undergraduate animators in their penultimate year of study at ECA in 2010. It was set up by Alan Mason and Donald Holwill to try and explore the potential for ultrashort filmmaking to unlock creativity and productivity in their students. Those of us with students will understand how difficult it can sometimes be to get them to relinquish a precious idea and move on to the next, and the next, and the next. With its requirement for participants to make a film a day, for each one of ten working days, this project was a very successful way of allowing our students to actualize a body of work and review it critically without the fear of the only thing they had made that semester not meeting their notion of an acceptable standard. Better best in a field of ten than a field of one...

In 2011 ECA's Animation Department received an invitation to present student work at the World Festival of Animated Film in Varna, Bulgaria. We decided to showcase 10X10X11. Our ridiculous 24-hour turnaround time for these films was viewed with some incredulity from the audience, but the results of our students' work intrigued a few academics who were facing similar challenges with their own students. A plan was developed with Tsvetomira Nikolava to bring students from New Bulgarian University and the National Academy of Theatrical and Film Arts in Sofia on board for 10X10X12.

From this point on the project developed a momentum of its own, we were able to bring composers from the Reid School of Music studying under Yati Durant to the project, crafting scores for films or scores to inspire films in the same 24-hour turnaround. The online components of this project through its Vimeo channels, attendant SoundCloud site and Facebook groups meant more and more people were asking if they could participate. To date we have had students from institutions in the Netherlands, Italy, Bulgaria, France, Taiwan, Canada, South Africa, Switzerland and the USA take part.

An interesting aspect to the project is that the academics involved perceived it as a gruelling activity, we were not placing other scheduled activities in abeyance, the animation had to be fitted into the gaps between the necessities and commitments of life beyond animation, so we required our students to participate. Each year though, increasing numbers of alumni have asked if they could return to take part in the project, and some have done so for the last six years. So perhaps, despite the ridiculous deadlines, those participants see some merit in those fortnights of intense effort?

The students have made literally thousands of these films, as you can see below:

In recent years we have established a unified theme for Fridays on the project, other than that, the students are free to explore whatever subjects and themes they want. Some use the epigrammatic structure to experiment with method, some use the ten films to make a linked narrative, some choose to respond to their dreams of the night before, or whatever life throws on them at their way into the studio. The themes that we have set in the past have come from invited guests, or to commemorate a colleague (Tsvetomira Nikolova sadly passed not long before 10X10X17, so we devoted a day to elephants, the subject of her last uncompleted film).

This project, as I mentioned at the start of this post, could be used as a research engine to drive out multiple musical and animation responses to whatever questions we give to the participants, across a wide range of nations, and experience. 10X10X20 will also be the 30-year anniversary of ECA's Animation Department, the 30-year anniversary of the McLaren Awards at the EIFF, the 10-year mark for this project, and the end of UK's first year apart from Europe... What sort of questions can we be asking of 10X10X20's participants?
Jared Taylor is currently Programme Director for Animation at Edinburgh College of Art, a part of the University of Edinburgh. His industrial background in animation is from the interactive sector. He has worked as a designer and producer for small independent games studios developing for clients such as LEGO, Konami, Square Enix, and Nintendo. His interests are in hybrid forms of animation and the emergent/subversive use of technology, even if that technology comes in the shape of a pencil. His current research focus is on digital recreations of proto-animation optical toys such as phenakistoscopes and praxinoscopes.

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The purpose of this post is to describe 10X10, an ongoing project initiated at Edinburgh College of Art, that each year brings animators and composers from a range of European universities together in a virtualized collaborative process. Currently, this project is being handled in a way that allows an interesting, but passive, survey of trends and tendencies.

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Jonathan Gibbs took the Cheltenham Painting Fellowship in 1978 and has been an art college lecturer since that time. He taught at the Gloucestershire College of Arts and Technology, Bath College of Higher Education, and the University of Middlesex as a part-time lecturer until 1990, at which time he was appointed to lecture at Edinburgh College of Art. Gibbs is now Programme Director of Illustration, Edinburgh College of Art School of Design.

Gibbs work has been selected for the John Moores Exhibition, Liverpool, the Royal Academy, London, the Hayward Gallery, London, Royal Scottish Academy and the Scottish Gallery of Modern Art. He has contributed to many group exhibitions in the UK. Gibbs has illustrated the Collected Poems of Robert Frost for the Folio Society, London, and has made additional book designs and illustrations for Faber & Faber, Penguin, Picador and Random House. His works have been purchased by the UK Government Art Collection; the Arts Council of Great Britain; the Scottish Arts Council, Leicestershire, Suffolk, Loudoun and Kilmarnock Councils; and private collections in the UK, USA, Singapore and Hong Kong.
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Jonathan Gibbs took the Cheltenham Painting Fellowship in 1978 and has been an art college lecturer since that time. He taught at the Gloucestershire College of Arts and Technology, Bath College of Higher Education, and the University of Middlesex as a part-time lecturer until 1990, at which time he was appointed to lecture at Edinburgh College of Art.

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The Stephen Collins cartoon | Life and style | The Guardian

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The Stephen Collins cartoon | Life and style | The Guardian

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Cartoonist Stephen Collins' weekly dose of "stupid stuff and hopefully lots of animals"

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Ivor the Engine and the Story of Smallfilms

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Ivor the Engine and the Story of Smallfilms (2005)

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Open Eye Gallery's annual 'On a Small Scale' exhibition is on the horizon, so it's time to get on my A5 mojo.
Some time ago I found an old pad of blank manuscript paper in the house amongst a heap of music books. I found the pale blue-grey, thin, mechanical lines of the staffs on creamy paper exciting, full of the possibilities of unheard melodies played on strange instruments. I decided to keep it for drawing.
I began a test piece over the weekend, thinking I could perhaps make something for the exhibition, but things didn't go quite as I had imagined.

I began by sprinkling small watercolour dots over the surface in a manifestation of unfettered notation, a sort of musical asemic text. All was good at this point, but when I began drawing it didn't go so well. The paper is smooth with little bite, it absorbs more ink than the Japanese paper I normally use, and there isn't enough control of the pen pressure so my marks look rather clumsy. I began to overthink the reference to music and nothing looked like the picture I had in my head.
I prefer the watercolour dots on their own. They dried in tiny crisp dots with fine, darker halos, but the pen-work is out of harmony in every sense.

A fine technical pencil may work better, so here's the plan:

1. Try again on the found manuscript paper using technical pencil
2. Prepare for drawings with hand-drawn monotype staffs on Japanese paper

It means mechanical staffs v. hand-drawn; both have equal appeal. I have a feeling the monotype/drawing option may be best for the exhibition, as the pencil option may look like a blank sheet from a distance - but is that a problem? I have never shied away from work which doesn't shout, but whispers.

I never knew the tragedies in Mary Shelley's life until Wednesday, when the midweek pick-me-up from Brain Pickings by Maria Popova landed in my inbox, along with this exquisite passage by Mary Shelley:

"Winter passed away; and spring, led by the months, awakened life in all nature. The forest was dressed in green; the young calves frisked on the new-sprung grass; the wind-winged shadows of light clouds sped over the green cornfields; the hermit cuckoo repeated his monotonous all-hail to the season; the nightingale, bird of love and minion of the evening star, filled the woods with song; while Venus lingered in the warm sunset, and the young green of the trees lay in gentle relief along the clear horizon."

The latest drawing in my new series of work. It was impossible to take an evenly lit photograph today in spite of excellent iPhone, the drawing is more delicate than it looks in the above photo. I tried scanning but I couldn't get the scanner to work in a typical day of technology versus me. After spending the morning investigating drivers and repeated attempts to make a scan, B fixed the scanner just by looking at it, urgh! so annoying. However, the scanned details shown below are much closer to the original.
It's plain to see I would much rather be drawing than photographing and publishing them. On that subject, there has been quite a commotion in the artists' quarter of Instagram recently ...

Work began on Monday drawing into the frottage plant prints I made the previous week. Here we have four details (above) and two drawings in their progress so far. I'm pleased with how the work is going, but thought I may have got more done than I did.

I didn't actually get that much time to spend drawing every day, in fact a couple of days saw no drawing at all because I spent a lot of time in the real garden this week. A dry, warm weather front came in following heavy rainfall during previous weeks. The soil dried out rapidly and watering was required nearly every day. Weeds and grass had grown ferociously during the wet spell, and on Thursday I completely remodelled a flower bed at the front of the house, digging out old plants, grass and weeds and planting some new astrantia, aquilegia, and some I don't know what they are at all, donated by our kind neighbour who just happens to be a demon gardener - I do love a chaotic flower bed full of surprises. It kept me busy working and musing on those weird things which come out of the ground, seed heads blowing around, curly tendrils, bulbs, branching things and the fascination of the sweet pea pods drying into twisty shapes, their seeds showing more prominently through their cases; and when I came back indoors, my pen moved to depict them.

One day the sun shone down through the chestnuts, illuminating their spreading leaves like giants' hands, bringing to mind this most beautiful poem.

When I am Among the Trees
by Mary Oliver
​
When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.
I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.
Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, "Stay awhile."
The light flows from their branches.
And they call again, "It's simple," they say,
"and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine."

The first steps in a new body of work were taken this week when I made 16 frottage prints of plant life as the 2008 work mentioned in last week's entry. Using an inked roller passed over a sheet of paper placed on top of various twigs and curly seed heads produced the same delicate, slightly fuzzy marks. The papers used here are from Awagami Factory in Japan, chosen from a selection pack I received in April from Jackson's Art. They are an absolute delight to use, I think I'm in love! Delicious edges. (Paper porn, sorry).

In 2008 I inked up the actual plants to make prints because I was using a 285gsm Fabriano Rosaspina print paper for those, which is too thick for a successful frottage technique. It was a lot less messy to make rubbings this week, using the much lighter papers of 90gsm; and now I have used up my collection of garden oddities, they have gone from the table top and my work room is nice and tidy again.

The umbel image to the right of the image below is actually on Fabriano Rosaspina which I still use regularly, used in this instance as a bed to lay the plant pieces down before placing the print paper over them. I wanted to include the nice edges on the prints. I kept it after the run of work together with bits of leaf skeleton and seeds which got stuck to it in the process, gluing them permanently where I found them. I like its vaguely scruffy look, and it will no doubt become something in its own right soon.

Carrot top update - it did flower! No longer attached to the plant in its pot, I cut the triffidy bit off because it was draining too much energy from the rest of the plant, but it has flourished just in water. The rest of the plant is looking very pretty, with delicate frondy leaves and doing well now it has more energy.

The process of its growth reminded me of some forgotten work I made years ago. I took prints from some umbels by inking them up with a print roller, then transferred the image onto paper by placing the sheet over the inky plants and rolling the back of the sheet with a large wooden roller. Then I began to draw into the prints - the tentative marks show the very earliest beginnings of mark-making techniques I use today.
I can just about make out the year 2008 beside my signature in the lower right corner. I showed this one in Perthshire Open Studios that year and a friend bought it. I then forgot all about it until 2014 when a I visited the friend's house and spotted it hanging in a frame in the lounge. I have no other record of this work than the above photo I took that day - difficult to capture though the glass in its frame on the wall, but I'm glad I have it. It took me ages to locate and dig it out of my photo album. The friend moved to France and then disappeared (I fear the worst) and I will most likely never see this work again.

It was worth taking the time to find the image, not only am I glad to see it again but I mentioned in my last post that I fancied doing something different with my new work moving on, and this is it. My collection of weird stuff on my work room table keeps growing, and it's got to move on to make space, so I will try making some prints from them to draw on with all my current mark-making. I am excited about the prospect.

Just two weeks on and my avocado stone sprout is going crazy. The first one to sprout is pictured below, but the latest, No.3, is really scaring me - its root is all twisty, and when I move the jar it lashes around like a worm, and it has produced something snaky and hairy in its water. Nature is terrifying, I'm the rabbit caught in the headlights - I don't want to look, but I can't stop looking.

These are my very first successes after many years of trying to get an avocado stone to sprout! (Apologies for hairy finger, looks like everything is sprouting right now)

I just can't believe how this detail from Before There Were Saturdays relates to the current avocado stones sprouts, given I have never had any success with growing them before.
By the way, I am thinking about doing something different with new work moving forward. I still haven't found what it is, but it will happen.

Photos of a parking lot we walk through on our daily amble with the dog, the paint which marks out the spaces for cars suggesting strange alphabets, and the word eep! I had a friend with a cat called Eep when I was a student in Aberdeen.
I'm still not really getting down to any real work on my lovely new paper. My hands have stopped shaking, but we have had a stressful time this week sorting out business with our solicitor, still trying to get my father's estate concluded following my brother's death and making our wills etc. Who would have thought it would take over four years.

​Instead, I have been in a sort of pattern-making frenzy (see my Binky McKee blog) which has kept me sane during difficult times. There is something about the jigsaw-puzzle nature of pattern-making which is totally absorbing, forcing anxiety and negative thoughts far out of my mind, a soothing, quiet activity with a practical and useful product as the end goal. And lots of cheerful flowers to draw!

For the first time in my life I have managed to get avocado stones to sprout. In the past I used the cocktail sticks/ jar of water standing on a sunny windowsill method to absolutely no avail, but a couple of months ago Molly told me she had successfully sprouted one by wrapping a peeled stone in wet kitchen roll, sealing it up in a plastic box, and simply leaving it for 6 weeks. I used this method for three avocado stones, of which only one failed. At the same time I tried two with the cocktail stick/windowsill method, of which one has sprouted! I must be growing green fingers.

It's the most fascinating thing to observe, below is a sketch I drew in wonder yesterday. Until now, I have never seen a rooting and sprouting avocado stone but there is an uncanny resemblance to my drawing Before There Were Saturdays .

Flushed with success, I have been telling my friends all about it - with mixed reactions. My 'second brother' (oldest and best friend since I was 11 years old) in Germany said, "My flatmate in Edinburgh used to do that. You know, darling, they make very boring plants with just great big ugly leaves that do nothing". He grows marvellous, glamorous orchids which probably explains his opinion.
My other best friend in London, who it turns out has been making avocado plants this way for years and is currently sprouting lichee stones just by putting them in water, exclaimed with great enthusiasm: "Oh yes! How wonderful, they grow into lovely plants with lovely great big leaves!"

Remember those carrot tops I was drawing on 6 June? Well, here they are now! They grew root-like tendrils from the eyes on the stumps, so I planted them in a pot the other day and they are now 23cm tall. I'm not sure what the two triffidy bits at the top are going to be, in my dreams they'll produce gorgeous big umbels like the ones below!

This is a sketchbook work from 2015 which I have been increasingly drawn to recently. I don't really know why, I think it just encompasses some of the ideas I have been putting together in my head for The Architect's Garden series (my Dad designed yachts and other marine vessels as well as buildings).
In my mind, this drawing has titled itself The Black Pearl (from the 'Pirates of the Caribbean' films). Today that galleon seems to sum up my feelings: menacing, dishevelled, yet with battered sails still flying bravely and defiantly in the black-hearted winds of change. If Covid19 hasn't decimated my close friends and family, cancer has.
​RIP Robin John Walker, beloved brother, 13 July 1962 - 20 June 2021.

... to all our American friends!

I took this photo 4 years ago at the Edinburgh Christmas market and something about it makes me think of fireworks and celebrations, so very appropriate for today. Only 4 years ago, though. So many unbelievable events have happened since then, it feels more like 10 years ago.

I really got into 1930s book endpapers a couple of weeks ago. I made a few with the risograph textures I had been using for my Binky McKee patterns (above) and couldn't resist experimenting with a cut-out element from my recent drawing In No Way Pure. The result is pictured below, I had to do it by hand as I couldn't work out how to make a mechanical repeat tile (too much maths involved) but, hmm interesting!

Shortly after drawing last week's sprouting carrot tops, I drew a the core of a bell pepper. Its flesh had been cut away for a salad leaving the arched pyramid form with its bustle of seeds inside, rather like a deconstructed buttressed church sheltering a congregation. Or a big ghastly alien throat, if you prefer. It hung around in my work room and began involving itself in a most interesting process - I wouldn't say it was decomposing, because nothing went mouldy (wrong PH for mould, perhaps, a bit like sourdough culture?) - the fleshy parts just began to disappear leaving the seedball intact, I suppose by dehydration. I drew it again collapsing upon itself, pictured below.

I didn't throw it away after drawing it, I seldom do throw away these things, hence my collection of gross objects which will freak anybody out when I die and they come to empty my room. But look what it has become now. The photos below show what's left; it's the size of a conker now, and the small remaining part of the base of the pepper (right pic) has become a pretty flower. From a big, proud, glossy green fruit my bell pepper has gone to this - fascinating, as Spock would say. It actually feels nice to handle.
Oh well, I suppose it happens to us all in time! I will get around to drawing its remains soon which will clarify what I see, something photos cannot do. And I may even experiment with growing the seeds.

Growing carrot tops in a saucer of water on the windowsill.
With everything in the world blooming, growing, seeding and dying back all at once there is so much all around to draw. I'm not sure how it works, but drawing from life especially in the summer when there is so much cyclical life of plants on display feeds into the larger drawings, where my studies become the things, or the subject matter, of the larger works.

I really enjoy drawing from life, and don't use photography to draw from if at all possible. I do use photos as a reference for my Binky McKee pattern making because the work is highly stylised and there is no need to understand spacial positions. My larger ink drawings may not appear to require spacial information, but I definitely do need it in order to get to grips with an organism and how it works. (More here on how I use photos for my Binky work).
Here is a little collection I made over the last week of things I want to draw:

A perfect haul of treasures and lots of drawing to do!

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Open Eye Gallery's annual 'On a Small Scale' exhibition is on the horizon, so it's time to get on my A5 mojo.Some time ago I found an old pad of blank manuscript paper in the house amongst a heap of music books.

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David Shrigley is a British visual artist. This is his web site with his stuff on it.

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BAFTA Film Awards 2013 WINNER - 'Short Animation'
BAFTA Scotland Awards - AWARD FOR ANIMATION

Watch 'behind-the-scenes' here - vimeo.com/32500808
themakingoflongbird.com

AWARDS include:
EDINBURGH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2012 - British Short Film Award & Mclaren Award
GLASGOW SHORT FILM FESTIVAL 2012 - Scottish Short Film Award
BROOKLYN FILM FESTIVAL 2012 - Best Animation
ANNECY INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF ANIMATED FILM 2012 - Award for Best Graduation Film
STUTTGART INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF ANIMATED FILM 2012 - Young Animation
EXPOSURES FILM FESTIVAL 2012 - Programmers Choice Award
WARSAW INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2011 - Short Grand Prix
DOK LEIPZIG 2011- 54th International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film - Golden Dove & Mephisto 97.6 Audience Award
GIRAF ANIMATION FESTIVAL 2011 - Audience Award
ROYAL TELEVISION SOCIETY Student Awards - Winner - Undergraduate Animation

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BAFTA Film Awards 2013 WINNER - 'Short Animation' BAFTA Scotland Awards - AWARD FOR ANIMATION Watch 'behind-the-scenes' here - https://vimeo.com/32500808 www.themakingoflongbird.com AWARDS include: EDINBURGH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2012 - British Short Film Award & Mclaren Award GLASGOW SHORT FILM FESTIVAL 2012 - Scottish Short Film Award BROOKLYN FILM FESTIVAL 2012

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The official home of stop-motion artist PES.

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The official home of stop-motion artist PES.

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Home of stop-motion artist PES, creator of the shortest film ever nominated for an Oscar, Fresh Guacamole

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Rejected - Best Oscar Award Winner Movie

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Don Hertzfeldt

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Rejected - Best Oscar Award Winner Movie

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J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours

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Turner Bequest LIV 1-116a

Sketchbook bound in boards covered in calf leather, with one broken brass clasp
116 leaves of white wove paper, with single modern flyleaves of speckled off-white paper at front and back; most pages washed with a mauve-pink ground; page size 115 x 164 mm; watermark '1794 | J Whatman'
Inscribed by Turner in ink '90 Scotland' on label on spine ( D40777)
Numbered 227 as part of the Turner Schedule in 1854, and endorsed by the Executors of the Turner Bequest inside front cover ( D40778)
Blind-stamped with Turner Bequest monogram on front cover, top left

Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856

This is one of the group of sketchbooks that Turner took with him on his tour to Scotland and the Lake District in the autumn of 1801. Although the artist labelled it 'Scotland' (see D40777), Finberg renamed it 'Dunbar' 1 to distinguish it from the other books used in the course of the itinerary: Edinburgh, Scotch Lakes, Tummel Bridge, and Scotch Figures (Tate; Turner Bequest LV, LVI, LVII, LIX). The English sections of the journey are represented by the Helmsley, Guisborough Shore and Chester sketchbooks (Tate; Turner Bequest LIII, LII, LXXXII). There are some Yorkshire and Northumberland subjects in the present book, too.

For the most part, Turner seems to have drawn in this sketchbook in the reverse order of the present page numbering, and many of the images are inverted relative to the foliation. Topographically they progress from Rievaulx, Scarborough and Whitby in Yorkshire, northwards along the Northumbrian coast and into Berwickshire, where he drew the sequence of dramatically sited castle ruins along the coast: Fast, Dunbar and Tantallon. These do not occur in geographical order. He proceeded to North Berwick in East Lothian, and on to Roslin, south of Edinburgh, where he made a fair number of drawings, though these are all rather slight. The drawing of Rievaulx on folio 1 recto ( D02614) is consequently out of sequence and should be seen as part of the suite of Rievaulx subjects that occurs towards the end of the book (folios 102 verso-106 verso; D02784-D02792).

The final leaves (folios 108-116; D02795-D02810) had been removed from an earlier point in the book (see the technical notes below); they seem to have been drawn on while Turner was still in Yorkshire, having much in common with the series of studies along a rocky coast that occur in the little Guisborough Shore sketchbook (Tate; Turner Bequest LII). Turner is likely to have taken lodgings in Edinburgh before visiting Roslin, as suggested by the note inside the back cover of the Scotch Lakes sketchbook (Tate; Turner Bequest LVI): 'Edinburgh to Roslyn 6 M ¼'.

Several obvious sites are not recorded here: Turner had followed a similar route on his tour of 1797, when he travelled from York and Ripon to Berwick and the Abbeys of the Tweed Valley, and he did not, for the most part, return to places already covered on that visit. Many of these sites, however, recur in three sketchbooks, Bass Rock and Edinburgh, Edinburgh, 1818, and Scotch Antiquities (Tate; Turner Bequest CLXV, CLXVI, CLXVII), which Turner used on his tour of Scotland in 1818, collecting material for the Provincial Antiquities of Scotland, issued from 1819 with text by Sir Walter Scott. In 1822 he returned to Edinburgh by ship, making sketches of places on the Berwickshire and East Lothian coast from out at sea in the King's Visit to Scotland sketchbook (TB CC). As Finberg observes: 'The wild and desolate scenes between St. Abb's Head and Dunbar seem to have deeply impressed Turner's imagination'. 2

Finberg recorded John Ruskin's inscription on an old wrapper: '227. The Brown book at Dunbar. Many fine rough sketches on brown paper'. 3

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J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours

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Turner Bequest LIV 1-116a Sketchbook bound in boards covered in calf leather, with one broken brass clasp116 leaves of white wove paper, with single modern flyleaves of speckled off-white paper at front and back; most pages washed with a mauve-pink ground; page size 115 x 164 mm; watermark '1794 |

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The Art of the Book #6 with John Wolseley – Kids' Home Publishing

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The Art of the Book #6 with John Wolseley – Kids' Home Publishing

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Biography of 'TAIT, Margaret'
Film-maker, poet and author
Born: 1918, Kirkwall
Died: 1999, Kirkwall

Margaret Tait trained in medicine, graduating from Edinburgh University in 1941. She was called up into the Royal Army Medical Corps in 1943, serving overseas until 1946. By the late 1940s her interest in film began to dominate. She enrolled at the Centro Sperimentale di Photographia in Rome, studying there from 1950 to 1952.

Returning to Scotland, she established Ancona Films in Edinburgh's Rose Street, completing her first film of the street in 1956 and a number of other works on aspects of the city. She wrote poetry and produced several books. Tait moved to Orkney in the 1960s, making a series of films over the following decades inspired by the Orcadian landscape and culture.

All but three of her thirty two films, which she produced between 1952 and 1998 were self-financed. There was no funding forthcoming for her type of films, which she would describe as film-poems. In the mid 1980s she returned to a screenplay that had its inception in the 1940s. The feature length Blue Black Permanent began shooting in 1992 with Margaret directing. Her final film Garden Pieces was completed in 1998.

For additional biographical and contextual information go to LUX at https://lux.org.uk/artist/margaret-tait
Researcher: Janet McBain
Films associated with 'COCOZZA, Enrico'

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Film-maker, poet and author Born: 1918, KirkwallDied: 1999, Kirkwall Margaret Tait trained in medicine, graduating from Edinburgh University in 1941. She was called up into the Royal Army Medical Corps in 1943, serving overseas until 1946. By the late 1940s her interest in film began to dominate.

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Back with a bang: Japanese fireworks from the 1800s - in pictures

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The Japanese word for fireworks, hanabi, means "fire flowers", which seems particularly fitting when you look at these illustrations from the late 1800s of Japanese fireworks bursting into life. Taken from catalogues published by the British company CR Brock and Co (now Brocks Fireworks), they advertised the wares of Hirayama Fireworks and Yokoi Fireworks and have recently been digitised and put online by the Yokohama city library. The founder of Hirayama, Jinta Hirayama, was among the first to incorporate brighter colours into Japanese pyrotechnics (previously they emitted only subdued oranges), boosting their beauty and appeal. In Japanese culture, fireworks are highly valued partly because they are so transient, like real flowers.

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Back with a bang: Japanese fireworks from the 1800s - in pictures

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The Japanese word for fireworks, hanabi, means "fire flowers", which seems particularly fitting when you look at these illustrations from the late 1800s of Japanese fireworks bursting into life. Taken from catalogues published by the British company CR Brock and Co (now Brocks Fireworks), they advertised the wares of Hirayama Fireworks and Yokoi Fireworks and have recently been digitised and put online by the Yokohama city library.

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Triadisches Ballett von Oskar Schlemmer - Bauhaus (Best Quality)

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Triadisches Ballett von Oskar Schlemmer - Bauhaus (Best Quality)

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Jeremy Deller: The Bruce Lacey Experience - video

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This documentary, created by Jeremy Deller and Nick Abrahams, captures the spirit of this visionary artist, a wild man who worked with the Beatles and Spike Milligan, dabbled in performance art before such a thing existed, and created an early automaton named Rosa Bosom. Here's an overview made exclusively for the Guardian. Watch the full film at The Bruce Lacey Experience, co-curated by Deller, at London's Camden Arts Centre

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Jeremy Deller and Nick Abrahams, theguardian.com

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Jeremy Deller: The Bruce Lacey Experience - video

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Deller's documentary captures the spirit of this visionary artist, a wild man who worked with the Beatles and Spike Milligan, dabbled in performance art before such a thing existed, and created an early automaton named Rosa Bosom. Here's an overview made exclusively for the Guardian

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KEVIN ATHERTON
IN TWO MINDS
1978-2011

Performing live at Seeing in the Dark October 2011 (Extract)

In Two Minds is a two monitor installation first exhibited in the Serpentine Gallery, London in 1978. This work consisted of Atherton on one video monitor asking questions of himself on the other monitor. The questions, typically of that time, largely address the nature of the piece itself. At the time of making the piece he had no intention of using it beyond the Serpentine show, the rough and ready state of the black and white tapes attest to this. However, the ‘open’ or ‘incomplete’ nature of the work allows him to ‘re-enter’ it and create a new live version, where as a 60 year old man he can answer questions put to him by his 27 year old former self.

Seeing in the Dark is an exhibition and series of events inspired by artist run groups from the 1970s and ‘80s, such as Newcastle’s Ayton Basement and Basement Group, and London’s 2B Butler’s Wharf. These groups were formed by artists with diverse practices (music, performance, film and video) inhabiting vacant industrial spaces to produce opportunistic and eclectic events.

19 Oct - 12 Nov 2011

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Richard Artschwager: The artist who doesn't fit any category | Documentary "Shut up and Look"

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Richard Artschwager: The artist who doesn't fit any category | Documentary "Shut up and Look"

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Andrew Kotting

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EDITH WALKS is a 60 minute 66 second feature film inspired by a walk from Waltham Abbey in Essex via Battle Abbey to St Leonards-on-Sea in East Sussex. The film documents a pilgrimage in memory of Edith Swan Neck.

Bits of King Harold's body were brought to Waltham for burial near the High Altar after the Battle of Hastings in 1066 and his hand fast wife Edith Swan Neck is seen cradling him in a remarkable sculpture at Grosvenor Gardens on the sea front in St Leonards. The film re-connects the lovers after 950 years of separation. 

The 108 mile journey, as the crow flies, allows the audience to reflect upon all things Edith. A conversation in Northampton between Alan Moore, Iain Sinclair and Edith Swan Neck is also a key element to the unfolding ‘story’. 

With images shot using digital super 8 iphones and sound recorded using a specially constructed music box with a boom microphone, the film unfolds chronologically but in a completely unpredictable way. The numerous encounters and impromptu performances en route are proof, as if needed, that the angels of happenstance were looking down on us, with EDITH as their hallucination.   

With David Aylward, Claudia Barton, Anonymous Bosch, Jem Finer, Andrew Kötting, Alan Moore and Iain Sinclair

“Who you walk with alters what you see; the view, the prospect ..”

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Ben Rivers - Slow Action

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Slow Action, Ben Rivers

Slow Action continues my exploration of curious and extraordinary environments, and applies the idea of island biogeography - the study of how species and eco-systems evolve differently when isolated and surrounded by unsuitable habitat - to a conception of the Earth in a few hundred years; the sea level rising to absurd heights, creating hyperbolic utopias that appear as possible future mini-societies.

Slow Action is filmed at different sites across the globe: Lanzarote - a beautiful strange island known for its beach resorts yet one of the driest places on the planet, full of dead volcanoes and strange architecture; Gunkanjima - an island off the coast of Nagasaki, Japan, a deserted city built on a rock, once home to thousands of families mining its rich coal reserves; Tuvalu - one of the smallest countries in the world, with tiny strips of land barely above sea level in the middle of the Pacific; and Somerset - an as yet to be discovered island and its various clades.

This series of constructed realities explores the environments of self-contained lands and the search for information to enable the reconstruction of soon to be lost worlds.

The film's soundtrack - narratives by writer Mark von Schlegell - detail each of the four islands' evolutions according to their geographical, geological, climatic and botanical conditions.

Slow Action, inspired by novels such as Samuel Butler's Erewhon, Bacon's The New Atlantis, Herbert Read's The Green Child and Mary Shelley's The Last Man, embodies the spirit of exploration, experiment and active research that has come to characterise Rivers' practice.

Slow Action has been co-commissioned by Picture This and Animate Projects. In association with Matt's Gallery.

The project is also supported by Bristol City Council, Arts Council England, Daiwa Japan Foundation, the Elephant Trust and the British Council.

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Slow Action, Ben Rivers Slow Action continues my exploration of curious and extraordinary environments, and applies the idea of island biogeography - the study of how species and eco-systems evolve differently when isolated and surrounded by unsuitable habitat - to a conception of the Earth in a few hundred years; the sea level rising to absurd heights, creating hyperbolic utopias that appear as possible future mini-societies.

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Hilma af Klint

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Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future | The Guggenheim Museums and Foundation

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This exhibition featured bold, colorful paintings by a long-underrecognized innovator of abstract art, Hilma af Klint (1862-1944).

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The Time Machine (1960) Testing The Time Machine

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The Time Machine (1960) Testing The Time Machine