Humor in Art

I love humor in art. The blog of Malaysian tee shirt designer Chow Hon Lam certainly qualifies. He's a terrific graphic artist with a fantastic sense of humor. If you need a dose of silliness, here's a place to get it...  Here's the link.

Mesmerizing Japanese cell phone ad

I try to post every kind of art I find that I think someone in the Tomball Art League will be attracted to. When I saw this fantastic video posted on Facebook, I immediately thought of Bob Trivers and his inspirations in wood.


This is an art piece with fascination.


It is introduced this way. "This beautiful ad was done by Drill Inc, a Japanese advertising agency, and it features a wooden ball rolling down the homemade marimba in the midst of Kyushu, Japan’s woodlands. Simply awesome."

And it is. Here is the website. I hope you love it.

Google Art Project

Warning: This website may devour hours of your life.

Opportunity: This website is a glorious passtime.

If you’ve used Google Maps or Google Earth, you’ll be familiar with that lovely feature that lets you tour down a street and see 360 degree views as you turn around.  In the Google Art Project, you will use the same technology to tour the inside of seventeen famous art museums.

You can walk along the halls of the Museo Reine Sofia in Madrid and notice the Juan Gris paintings on the walls. You can amble virtually from gallery to gallery in the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia . You can stop to look at a ultra-high resolution image of Birth of Venus in the Uffizi Museum in Florence or zoom in to check out Van Gogh’s brushstrokes on Starry Night in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

The website even lets you create your own art collection. Capture full-size images of paintings or close-up details, add your own notes to your image, and come back to them over and over. 

But you might set an alarm before you begin, if you have anything else you need to do! 

Off-beat books to inspire your summer travel

Travel season is upon us! I'm featuring some hidden gems; some off-beat travel books to inspire your artistic experience of interesting places. The library has only one or two copies of each of these so you'll probably have to request them.

Georgia O'Keeffe and New Mexico: A Sense of Place by Barbara Buhler Lynes

This catalog for a 2004 travelling exhibition of Georgia O’Keeffe’s work features the genius’ landscape paintings and beside them, photographs of the sites she painted.  You’ll quickly notice that the macro textures of landforms carved by eons of erosion was O’Keeffe’s primary interest and that the micro-texture of soil and vegetation was not important to her at all. I thought it was a great way to get inside O'Keeffe's head. It combines paintings, photographs, and geological charts as well that describe the landscape in parallel scientific, visual, and evocative languages.  A great book if you’re an artist traveling with a geologist!

The book also contains tidbits of her life story that illuminate the person she was and her long love affair with the New Mexico landscape.

Metro Stop Paris: An Underground History of the City of Light by Gregor Dallas

Gregor Dallas, a historian, writes about key moments and characters in the human history of Paris through, of all things, its subway stops.  I hope it stirs your imagination as it did mine as you read about famous philosophers and poets, kings and citizens, life and death, and link them to the arrondissements of Paris.

At the first metro stop,  Denfert-Rochereau, in the part of Paris once called Hell, there are catacombs, and from 1830, the guillotine. The Trocadero metro stop elicits memories of French Cuban author Anaïs Nin and her Viennese psycho-analyst lover Dr. Otto Rank. The Gare du Nord neighborhood is where St. Vincent de Paul’s charitable relief happened. Saint-Germain-des- Près brings you to the heart of Paris’ intellectual soul on the Left Bank. And the last stop, Pere Lachaise, takes you to the famous cemetery where renowned cultural figures are buried, including artists David, Ingres, Delacroix, Corot, Caillebotte, and Ernst.

Leonardo’s Universe: The Renaissance World of Leonardo da Vinci by Bulent Atalay and Keith Wamsley

Whether or not you’re planning a visit to Italy or just trying to understand mathematical principals in art, this book is a treat. If I tell you it was published by National Geographic you’ll know that the photographs and diagrams are excellent. The geography of Leonardo’s life and work and the story are wonderful, too.

Cody Hooper: Abstract artist

When I viewed the website gallery of San Antonio abstract artist Cody Hooper, I found myself thinking of him as a southwestern Piet Mondrian. This talented emerging artist experiments with the glowing effects of layers of glazes. He also exhibits a brilliant sense of proportion. Lovely, evocative, beautifully composed abstract compositions. Just wanted to share him with you...

"What We See Changes Who We Are"

I'd like you to meet JR. JR is a semi-anonymous French photographer and artist whose work lives in the tradition of England's Banksy. JR's art, while not intentionally political, is deeply political. And social, and provocative.

JR embeds himself in neighborhoods, favelas, and villages around the world, learns the stories of the people who live there, and photographs them. Then he pastes their massive images onto local canvases like buildings, buses, trains, and bridges.

His latest global art project is called Women are Heroes. The images above are from that project. He has gone into poor villages where the women, the mothers, are the only stability in the family, and honored them in this images.

In the next set of images JR has photographed Palestinians and Jews who do the same job--taxi drivers, dentists, writers, etc.--and placed them side by side. He asks the viewer: "Can you tell who is who?"

JR believes that "guerrilla art is about provocation and pushing limits to start dialogue. It has the capacity to engage and break down barriers in ways art in galleries or museums does not. The audience is often those who are least likely to be exposed to art." http://blog.tec/com/2010/10/20/meet-jr/

JR recently gave a talk at the annual TED conference. (TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and is about "ideas worth knowing".) Conference organizers invite interesting people to give an 18-minute talk about their work. JR's talk won the 2011 TED Prize: $100,000 and an invitation to make one wish to change the world. JR's wish? "I wish for you to stand up for what you care about by participating in a global art project, and together we'll turn the world...INSIDE OUT."

Here's the link to JR's amazing TED video.

Literary Love: 12 Books of Art and Architecture

Here's a website with images of art and architecture created with books as the medium. A perfect match, says this librarian...

To the left is the art of Mike Smiley, shown on the website.