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May 17, 2012
 OK! THIS is my kind of art! Yes, I do love Botticelli, and Ansel Adams, and Sargent, and everyone I write about!
Childhood, memory, loss, and sexuality–these are some of the issues that Robert Gober has explored in his work since the 1980s. Considered one of the most important American artists of his generation, Gober has developed a unique sculptural practice that links many of the issues
underlying Surrealism, Minimalism, and Conceptualism to psychological questions concerning the body and our domestic environment.
Gober’s sculptural works address a variety of formal and humanistic concerns by juxtaposing functionality and dysfunction, and the familiar and the strange. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the series of sink sculptures for which Gober has become well known, such as his right-angle sink .
The sink carries a psychological charge
that is at once idiosyncratic and common, mysterious and humorous. The power of this imagery lies in the paradox of the nonfunctional aspect of his sinks; these sculptures suggest the ritual of cleansing while their lack of plumbing frustrates this possibility.
Mr. Gober stands at the forefront of a generation that emerged in the 1980s and devised new ways to fuse the personal and the political, the accessible and the mysterious. His art is a sometimes subtle, sometimes furious protest against what might be called delusions of normalcy;
 the sexual, racial and religious prejudices these delusions engender are examined at their point of origin, the childhood home.
He has communicated these themes in shifting ratios of folk art, Surrealism, Pop Art, Magic Realism and Social Realism, leavened by doses of the body and performance art of the 1970s. There are moments of eerie trompe l’oeil, as in his cast wax legs or torsos with individually applied hairs,
which jut startlingly from walls and corners, like phantom limbs or parts of bodies otherwise crushed by buildings.
Rather than using existing objects or having them copied by fabricators, as many appropriation artists do, Mr. Gober makes all his pieces in the studio, working alone or with assistants. (Even that white plastic crate and those green apples.) There may be countless little imperfections or a
breathtaking sense of perfection, but either way the almost devotional artisanship imbues common objects with an uncommon gravity, along with the sense of energy, growth and vulnerability that defines real bodies.
Mr. Gober has woven baskets, carved wood doors and playpens, and fashioned his signature sinks out of plaster painted with enamel. He has reiterated these forms in deviant versions: slanting and squeezing the playpens into child-unfriendly cages; twisting the doors into knots or doubling
them into cruciforms. Here, one wraps itself around a corner, like a splayed body. He has doubled or truncated his sinks to resemble tombstones, chests or awkwardly joined torsos.
His art includes things as seemingly innocuous as hand-laminated sheets of plywood, as monstrous as a hand-painted cereal box 80 inches tall and as quietly incendiary as wallpaper whose patterns alternate images of a lynched black man and a sleeping white man.
A recent hybrid is a sink with horrifically stretched wax children’s legs looping through the drain and faucet holes: a child deformed by the parental need for purity.
Other symbols of repressive cleanliness include bags of cat litter and rat poison in painted plaster, and cast bronze or pewter sink drains, sewer drains and culverts. A huge culvert penetrates the abdomen of a nearly life-size concrete Madonna that was in his controversial installation unveiled at the
 The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 1997.
I hope you enjoyed this post!
LOVE
JAMIE
May 16, 2012
 I came across this artist and absolutely fell in love with his talent! There is a gallery in New York that represents Thortnon ,one of the most important artists
who is a product of the Old South, but whose distinct assemblages of paint and
found objects helped define modern artistic sensibilities. Born and raised in Alabama with no
formal education or artistic training.  Thornton Dial was born in 1928 and is very much part of the
Southern Vernacular tradition.
A lot of Dial’s sculptures and assemblages often contain objects that might otherwise
have ended up in a landfill, like paint can lids, chicken wire, twine, old clothing, buttons and mattress coils.
 Dial’s work began to attract art-world attention in the 1980s. In 1993, it was the subject of a large exhibition that was presented simultaneously at the New Museum in the Whitney Biennial.
There is a huge exhibit at the Indianapolis Museum of Art called “Hard Truths: The Art of Thornton Dial” and I can honestly say I have not yet been to Indianapolis and am excited to go!
Love,
Jamie
May 15, 2012
I never considered myself a lucite chair girl until i built my house and realized in designing my open floor plan, that in order to really set off the Walnut slab Hudson dining table, and to see the artwork, I was forced into believing the value of working with lucite!
There is a project, that was in an issue of TRADhome online! Anyway, in this project, you will see, in wanting to highlight the flooring and the table base, a lucite klismos chair was the perfect solution. 
When you are working on the design of your dining room, or breakfast room, if your pieces of importance are not going to be the chairs, think of using lucite!
its not the poor bet anymore!
Happy Day!
Love, Jamie
May 14, 2012
Richard Pettibone’s small construction/paintings of the 1960s — appropriations of work by Warhol, Stella, and Lichtenstein — were a defining aspect of a peculiarly West Coast current of “Conceptual Pop.”
His earliest works were shadow-box assemblages addressing his interest in model making, especially toy trains and airplanes. In the 1960s he found his voice in diminutive “copies” of newly famous New York pop artists.
Always framed and constructed upon miniature stretcher bars, they are usually presented in single-image replication.
 By the 1970s, Pettibone was combining and juxtaposing different images, introducing monochrome areas and gestural scribbles into these combinations, and experimenting with the simulation of photo-realist techniques.
The Brancusi sculptures from the 1980s are various sized versions of such iconic works as Bird in Space and Endless Column. In a conflation of modernism and modernist “taste,” the Brancusi simulations are often presented in
combination with his beautifully crafted homages to the pared-down forms of Shaker furniture. Pettibone’s visual punning and aesthetic elegance is evident in his simple juxtaposition of an elegant  Shaker table with a minimalist,
industrial I-beam.
In the late 1980s to the present, Pettibone pursued an obsession for the poetry and criticism of modernist Ezra Pound (another great appropriator) and created a group of paintings based upon the original covers of Pound’s publications.
In the 1990s, he engaged the work of Piet Mondrian, whose paintings he both replicated and “reduced” in sculptural constructions. But without doubt, his most insistent and unifying theme has been his ever-expanding colloquy with
 two paradoxical giants of 20th-century art, Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol
May 11, 2012
 I had the absolute pleasure of seeing Lucas’s work in person. WOW! His life is fascinating, as most of the artists that I love to write about, I do hope you enjoy learning about him.
Have a great day!
Love,
Jamie
Lucas Samaras is not the best-known artist in America, but among the cognoscenti he is considered a wizard, and among artists he’s an elusive legend: a loner, eccentric, master of unusual media, and visionary who has avoided
classification. He’s a solitary worker who has remained outside of movements, trends, or cliques, making work that is always original, provocative, and
surprising. Samaras stands out from the crowd in part because he tends to
work with unique subject matter—himself. He has interviewed himself, photographed himself, sculpted himself, and decorated himself and, in doing so, he has always seemed to be a work in progress. Samaras is not necessarily
a narcissist, even though one of his retrospectives was titled “Unrepentant Ego.” He is an intrepid self-investigator and he has made a career out of mutating his own image and likeness.
Samaras was born in Greece in 1936 and immigrated to the United States with his family when he was 11. He won a scholarship to study art at Rutgers University, enrolling in 1955, at a time  when the Rutgers art department
was a hotbed of innovation, with a faculty that included Alan Kaprow, who organized the first Happenings, and Geoffrey Hendricks, who, along with Kaprow, George Segal, Roy Lichtenstein, and students like Robert Whitman,
was instrumental in the Fluxus movement. Upon graduation, Samaras received a fellowship to attend Columbia University’s graduate department of art history, which afforded him the chance to get involved with New York City’s
burgeoning Happenings scene, where he met artists such as Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, and Red Grooms. His interest in performance also led him to study acting with Stella Adler.
May 10, 2012
 When I was out on the Eastern Shore of Long Island last summer, I ran across the work of Dorothea Rockburne. Her work is fantastic and will remind you of some very well known artists with similar pathos. i hope you enjoy this post!
Love, Jamie
Born in Montreal, Canada (1932). Lives and works in New York, NY. Attended the Montreal Museum School, Montreal, Canada (1948-1950). Attended Black Mountain College, Ashville, NC (1950-1952) where she studied with
Philip Guston, Franz Kline, Cy Twombly, and Robert Rauschenberg among other contemporaries. While at Black Mountain College, the teachings of Max Dehn, a renowned
German mathematician and close friend of Albert Einstein,
made arguably the largest impact on Rockburne’s work. Dehn educated Rockburne about Pythagorean and Euclidean geometry, group theory and topology, and
the concepts of harmonic intervals. Dehn’s teachings often merged the
 mathematical world and the natural world providing Rockburne with new and complex approaches to her work. Rockburne’s studies with Dehn, along with her interests in the Golden Mean,
astronomy, cosmology and lifelong
fascination with Egyptians’ use of proportion and light, invariably shaped her oeuvre.  Working with varied materials including industrial wrinkle-finish paint, tar, carbon paper and metal as well as natural materials such as canvas, paper, and
chipboard, Rockburne paints, cuts, draws, folds and calculates to create complex works of art built upon mathematical foundations.
May 9, 2012
 Larry River’s work is very highly sought after and is having a total resurgence in interest. I saw a couple of his pieces in a couple of museums and became very interested in his work.
I hope you enjoy this post, his work is great, his history re what his children think of him is a bit disturbing.
Larry Rivers is a quintessential New Yorker. Born in the Bronx in 1923, Rivers initially pursued a career as a jazz saxophonist, playing in New York City establishments until 1945 when he began painting.
He attended New York University from 1948 to 1951, studying under William Baziotes. At this time Rivers met Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and other Abstract Expressionists whose active style of painting
would prove to be River’s first major influence. While River’s oeuvre can be considered abstract for the most part, he also interspersed figurative works throughout his career. Many such works feature playing cards,
French currency, family members and the artist himself.
Few artists of the twentieth century rival River’s versatility and desire to experiment, as evidenced by his ability to work in different genres and with a diverse range of media. In the early 1960’s Rivers worked with
Universal Limited Art Editions to produce a color lithograph titled Last Civil War Veteran, published in 1961, and in 1963 he joined Marlborough Gallery. His irreverent and often humorous handling of politics,
 history, and sex in his later works created much controversy and affirmed his position as innovator and artistic pioneer.
Rivers is represented by many museums around the world, including: The Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; The Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland; Dallas Museum of Art, Texas; Los
Angeles County Museum of Art, California. In New York he is represented in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Jewish Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
The Museum of Modern Art, and The Whitney Museum of American Art. In Washington, D.C. he is represented at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, The
 Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, and The National Gallery of Art. He is also represented by the Tate Gallery, London, England; the Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City, Mexico; and the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Caracas, Venezeula.
May 8, 2012
SO! my younger daughter has been asking me for an EGG chair!! I was so interested to understand her fascination at 12, with this iconic design that I decided to do a little back history on Arne Jacobson. I found her an EGG chair and she is so excited about this! We covered it in the perfect shade of orange mohair!!
Today, Arne Jacobsen is remembered primarily for his furniture designs.  However, he believed he was first and foremost an architect. According to Scott Poole, a professor at Virginia Tech, Arne Jacobsen never used the word ‘designer’, notoriously disliking it. His way into product design came through his interest in Gesamtkunst and most of his designs which later became famous in their own right were created for architectural projects. Most of his furniture designs were the result of a cooperation with the furniture manufacturer with which he initiated a collaboration in 1934  while his lamps and light fixtures were developed with Louis Poulsen.  In spite of his success with his chair at the Paris Exhibition in 1925, it was during the 1950s that his interest in furniture design peaked. A major source of inspiration stemmed from the bent plywood designs of Charles and Ray Eames. He was also influenced by the Italian design historian Ernesto Rogers, who had proclaimed that the design of every element was equally important “from the spoon to the city” which harmonized well with his own ideals.
Enjoy!
Love,
Jamie
May 7, 2012
 I was introduced to david smith’s work last week. it is fantastic!
I hope you enjoy this post!
Love, Jamie
David Smith’s preoccupations with human and animal form had less to do with a romanticized yearning for a pre-industrial past or, as some critics have suggested, opportunistic cultural
grave robbing, than they had to do with an abiding interest in the transformative aspects of technology. In Gary K. Wolfe’s book, “The Known and the Unknown, The Iconography of Science Fiction,
” an analytical and theoretical study of the recurring icons that appear throughout the science fiction genre, he states that “Technology not only creates new environments for humanity,
it also creates new images of humanity itself, which tend to mediate between the natural environment of mankind and the artificial ones it has created, between the past and the future,
and between the known and the unknown.” Smith was interested in the ambiguity of form and the ambiguity inherent in the materials he used. He dwelt upon the fact that steel could be
used to make agrarian tools and destructive weapons; it had the potential to manifest a wide spectrum of psychological impulses.
Like the Minimalists, Smith explored serial forms and radically pared down gestalts, though for him these are attempts to explore anthropomorphic and psychological states through
 dialectical processes rather than intellectualized rejections of the immediate past. He made imaginative improvisations that broke with the history of the carved monolith placed on a pedestal,
connecting instead the concept of the totem with the starkly formal, and in his final phase he experimented with scale and geometric forms to explore a duality of structure and collapse
and to give his imagination free play.
He liked steel’s anonymous qualities and the fact that it was used to support or embellish almost every public structure.
May 4, 2012
I saw a painting of Verne Dawson’s recently and really loved the vibe of the painting and his style of painting. His story behind his thought regarding his subjects is very interesting! I hope you find this as wonderful as I do!
H ave a great day!
Love,
Jamie
Verne Dawson investigates the continuities between ancient culture and contemporary life through myths, folktales, and traditions that have vanished or become detached from their origins and meanings.
Dawson is also concerned that we have lost our connection to the natural rhythms that governed our ancestors’ lives. In Pagans, on view in 2010, he explores multiple traditions invented to explain natural phenomena,
particularly those relating to astronomy. On the four sides of the canvas, each season is represented  by its corresponding modern-day pagan figure: winter is represented by Santa Claus, spring by the fool,
summer by the Green Man, and fall by death or Dracula. They hold playing cards representing their calendrical significance.
Also represented, among others, are Mother Goose, Little Red  Riding Hood, Mary and her lamb
, Jack and his beanstalk, Jack and Jill, the three men in a tub, Old Mother Hubbard’s shoe and her children, and Jason’s ship Argo.  At once utopian and apocalyptic, Pagans combines myths and fairytales to argue for the
regenerative qualities of a culture in harmony with nature.
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