© C. Ford
Four.
© C. Ford
Affinity
Art, Fun, & Nonsense.
© C. Ford
Three horses done. Time for more tea, then on to the rest. The rats had a fine time in the leftover paint from last night. :D
© C. Ford.
[My] Tomorrow (Saturday, 8th Oct.) will most likely see Affinity closed for the day, I absolutely have to work. I have a beautiful, 200 count, white muslin, 90″ x 108″, arriving soon, which I’ll be painting, then freehand quilting, so it can be quickly done and donated to Standing Rock for winter. I spent time on horse sketching, then pulled out my test fabric, which is most definitely not 200 count, it’s cheap muslin. Even so, I haven’t played with all the various fabric paints I’ve come by, and now’s the time, so that I don’t fuck up that lovely fabric on the way. I didn’t even get the first bloody horse finished today, and I managed to completely forget what hours bent over a table do to my spine. (Insert scream here.) The first horse is roughly 26″ x 14″. I have to finish the first horse, then get eight more done. (I also need to do this, not just for testing various media, I need to work out colours, patterns, all that jazz.) I really hate to disappoint people, and if I can get a few things posted, I will, but don’t worry if I don’t show at all. I’ll definitely be back on Sunday.
© C. Ford.
I keep forgetting, I got a beautiful elk hide at wačipi. It’s back to being safely tucked away for when I have time to work on it. Roughly 70something inches x 50something inches. No, I don’t know yet. Well, I know what I’m going to do with part of it, not all, and it’s something for us, so it won’t be for sale.
© C. Ford.
The artist Edwina Sandys with her sculpture “Christa,” the centerpiece of an exhibition of more than 50 contemporary works that interpret the symbolism associated with the image of Jesus. Credit Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times.
Edwina Sandys had seen this before: the 250-pound bronze statue of a bare-breasted woman on a translucent acrylic cross being installed in the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine.
This time around, however, she does not expect to see something else she had seen before: the statue being packed up after a call from a ranking church official telling her it had to go.
That happened the first time “Christa,” Ms. Sandys’s sculpture of a crucified woman, was shown at the cathedral in Manhattan during Holy Week in 1984.
A controversy erupted, complete with hate mail attacking it as blasphemous. Overruling the dean of the cathedral at the time, the suffragan bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of New York called the statue “theologically and historically indefensible” and ordered Ms. Sandys to take it away.
This time, it is being installed on the altar in the Chapel of St. Saviour as the centerpiece of “The Christa Project: Manifesting Divine Bodies,” an exhibition of more than 50 contemporary works that interpret — or reinterpret — the symbolism associated with the image of Jesus.
[…]
She came to know the Very Rev. James Park Morton, the dean of the cathedral for 25 years until 1996. “I said, ‘How brave are you?’” in 1984, she recalled. “He may not have said ‘try me,’ but words to that effect. I said, ‘How would you like to exhibit “Christa,” the female Christ?’ He said, ‘I’d be delighted.’ I took a deep breath, and that was that.”
Except with that, as Ms. Sandys put it, “all hell broke loose.” Angry letters arrived (the cathedral preserved them in its archives) and, according to Ms. Sandys, the suffragan bishop, Walter Dennis, “said he didn’t want it, and I had to come and get ‘Christa.’”
The full story of Christa is here.
Images courtesy the artist.
Tamara Santibañez – Landscape II (Massif) – 40″ x 60″ Oil on canvas, 2016. Image courtesy of Slow Culture Gallery.
Tamara Santibañez studio, image courtesy of CJ Parel.
[I really, really want to own that.]
Bomb Ayran, Slavs and Tatars, 2016.
Make Mongolia Great Again, Slavs and Tatars, 2016.
All via The Creators Project.
Thomas Chung in his workplace. Photo by Kyle Clayton.
There’s a terrific article about North Anchorage, Alaska artist Thomas Chung, who will be exhibiting tomorrow at Becky Gallery October 7, reception 5 – 8 p.m.
With a background in cultural anthropology, Chung combines symbols from various myths and stories along with contemporary brands like Coke and Jägermeister
“There’s something kind of funny about Jägermeister,” Chung said as he held a rubber circle mat with the deer and cross logo. “He’s that saint who was a hunter and ran into a deer and this glowing, crazy cross appeared and that’s how he found God. Now it’s a coaster.”
The full article is here. You can see more of Professor Chung’s work here.
Ron Amato has a kickstarter for his project, a book called The Box.
Focused on themes of isolation, desire, conflict and empowerment, Ron Amato’s photographic series and upcoming book, The Box, speaks to human experiences of self-discovery and community building. Using a series of boxes to create visual metaphors, Ron echoes his development from adolescence to adulthood through over 100 color, and black and white photographs. Evoking first his youth in Brooklyn, New York during the 1960s and 1970s, moving through his coming out as a gay man and to his present position as a respected professional photographer and teacher, Ron creates a vivid portrait of struggle and triumph.
Individually the photographs evoke powerful responses. However, they achieve the scope of their power only in relation to each other.
Reflecting the square of the boxes in the photographs, this 96-page book is designed in a 10-inch square format. It has a hard cover and dust jacket. It is available with an embossed, cloth covered slipcase at specific pledge levels. The printing will be of the highest quality from a renowned Italian printing house.
You can read and see more here. Ron Amato’s website: http://www.ronamato.com/
Johnson Tsang is an extraordinary, brilliant sculptor. The work is absolutely stunning. I’m going to show a lot here, the ones that impacted me the most, but that’s different for every person, so click on over to see the whole series. Click on images to see at full size, the detail…oh.
‘Two in One’
Lucid Dream Series
Published only once in 1973, Les Diners de Gala was a dream fulfilled for surrealist artist Salvador Dali who claimed at the age of 6 that he wanted to be a chef. The cookbook pairs 136 recipes over 12 chapters (the 10th of which is dedicated to aphrodisiacs) with the his exceptionally strange illustrations and collages created especially for the publication. The artworks depict towering mountains of crayfish, an unusual meeting of a swan and a toothbrush in a pastry case, and portraits of Dali himself mingling with chefs against decadent place settings. Recipes include such delicacies as “Thousand Year Old Eggs”, “Veal Cutlets Stuffed With Snails”, “Frog Pasties”, and “Toffee with Pine Cones”.
…Despite the unusual ingredients and preparation methods, many of the old school recipes in Les Diners de Gala originated in some of the top restaurants in Paris at the time including Lasserre, La Tour d’Argent, Maxim’s, and Le Train Bleu. Lest you think anything in the book might be remotely healthy, it offers a cautionary disclaimer at the outset:
We would like to state clearly that, beginning with the very first recipes, Les Diners de Gala, with its precepts and its illustrations, is uniquely devoted to the pleasures of Taste. Don’t look for dietetic formulas here.
We intend to ignore those charts and tables in which chemistry takes the place of gastronomy. If you are a disciple of one of those calorie-counters who turn the joys of eating into a form of punishment, close this book at once; it is too lively, too aggressive, and far too impertinent for you.
…Only around 400 copies of Les Diners de Gala are known to survive, most of which sell for hundreds of dollars. However Taschen has finally made this rare book available for the first time in 43 years as a new reprint currently available for pre-order.
Via Colossal Art.
This wonderful piece of artwork was brought to my attention by Daz, and I’m so grateful. This was done in 1536. Makes you want to smile, doesn’t it? Makes me laugh, because I think we’ve all had at least one “OGNI HOMO ME GUARDA COME FOSSE UNA TESTA DE CAZI (Every man looks at me as if I were a dickhead)” moment in our lives.
Artists, no matter when they were active, never cease to delight me. If there’s one thing to be sorry about in having a relatively short life, it’s that I won’t be around to see all the delightful artwork which will abound in the future. The importance of art cannot be underestimated, this is vital to us, to our humanity. It’s often quite good for fostering and embracing rebellion, too, even the tiny ones.
Immersion, Andres Serrano.
“Christ immersed in urine” “To depict Christ in a bucket of urine”
Before we get anywhere at all here, I just need to yell a bit about the above idiocy. That’s manufacturing hysterical drama. No one went back in time, found out whether or not Christ actually existed, then kidnapped him, dunked him in a person sized bucket of urine, took his photo, then sailed back to the current time. It’s a cheap plastic crucifix in a glass of urine. Encouraging cheaper and cheaper versions of religious icons wasn’t Serrano’s idea, that belongs to the church. It’s also on the church that it was some sort of good idea for people to carry and wear a miniature execution device. Dunking a bit of plastic gimcrack into a glass of piss is not at all the same thing as dunking an actual person or god (if you can find one) into a bucket of piss without their consent. Okay, on to the outrage:
Now the American’s most infamous image – P*** Christ [sic] – will be shown at a politically-charged exhibition called Torture at the Void Gallery on October 8.
The exhibition also features images depicting the Hooded Men – a group of 14 men arrested at the height of the Troubles and, according to the European Court of Human Rights, subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment. In 1987, Serrano received international attention for P*** Christ, igniting heated debate on the freedom of artistic expression and the public financing of controversial artworks. The image will go on show in Derry along with a second piece from the Immersion series, Black Supper, a dark re-imagining of da Vinci’s Last Supper.
A photo from the exhibition entitled ‘Torture’ by Andres Serrano.
Rev Roger Higginson of Coleraine Free Presbyterian Church said the artist’s desire to shock could be his way of hiding a lack of talent.
Oh lord. Here we go.
He added: “Men like these artists are actually quite cowardly because they make a mockery of Christ in a way that they wouldn’t if it was Mohammed or the Muslim faith because that would put them in danger.
Oh for fuck’s sake, not this bullshit again. Is this idiocy never going to die? As for Immersion (Piss Christ) being a mockery, it wasn’t intended that way by the artist, it actually had to do with the cheapening of religious icons. A great many people didn’t perceive of it as mockery, either. If the Muslim faith encouraged followers to festoon themselves with a cheap plastic instrument of execution, with someone hanging on it, I’d be happy to dunk it in some piss and photograph it. We’re once again faced with the particular idiocy of pretending that we’re talking about a different religious belief, too. Same basic story, same basic beliefs, same god, so please, shut up.
“It is easy for people like him to take a cheap shot and mock Christ, mock Christian people and mock the Bible.
Really? Like you’re making it easy? People who actually take the time to mock Christianity often find themselves in danger, subjected to death threats and massive harassment from the so-called faithful flock. You don’t even need to indulge in actual mockery. Just saying something Christians don’t like is often sufficient. It’s ridiculous to pretend otherwise.
“His depiction of the Lord is offensive, not just to me as a man but it offends me greatly because this is how he portrays the Lord who gave up his life for all of us and this artist has thrown that sacrifice back.
Sigh. The sacrifice was thrown back. I’ve heard that before. How? Exactly how does it do that? It sounds suitably dramatic, but I suspect it doesn’t actually mean one damn thing. It’s true enough that El Shaddai is a nasty, mean, petty minded asshole of a god, but y’know, his kid is supposed to be a tad better on that stuff. So maybe Jesus wouldn’t be all that concerned. Also, this sort of isht coming from a religion which openly states someone who did truly horrible things would get the standard “get out of hell free” card makes this outrage as sturdy as wet paper.
“If you consider artists like Leonardo da Vinci or Rembrandt, they didn’t set out to shock people or be controversial because they had real talent and their work spoke for itself. Perhaps if, as an artist you need to shock and cause offence and outrage to get your work noticed, it may be because of a lack of real talent.”
Hahahahahaha. Oh my. Someone doesn’t know a gosh darn thing about art or artists. If we must talk about a lack of talent, the priesthood seems to be a profession for people remarkably lacking in any meaningful talent. How about we have that chat? There’s a good deal more outrage and asterisked spelling here, I’ve had my fill. The exhibition launches on October 8 at 7.30pm and runs until December 17, at Void Gallery in Derry.
