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March 29, 2013
 The artwork of Yoshitomo Nara is deceptively simple. Peopled with entities that call to mind toddlers or infant animals with their balloon heads, persimmon pit-eyes, and pinprick noses, each work is a peek  into a world that seems eerily familiar.
A long-term resident of Cologne, Nara is being met with increasing international attention, having already exhibited in Milwaukee, L.A., Cologne and Seoul and New York
With a couple of books both in their second run, a limited edition wristwatch and a clothing line that incorporates motifs from his artwork, Nara is well on his way to developing a cult following in Japan.
In the drawings, children are engaging in innocuous solo activities: holding a flag, playing in a box, sitting on a potty, holding a book, standing in a puddle. But sometimes they are brandishing sharp little implements–knives and saws. Nara   captures these scenes in a moment of stillness.
The enigmatic, abbreviated quality of Nara’s style may be an invitation for you to take your best sub textural potshot. But take care. In doing so, you risk revealing a lot about you, more than might be comfortable. Nara’s artworks are sticky-sweet booby traps, Rorschach tests for a post-modern innocence quotient. They are candy-cane puzzles begging to be deciphered, only to reveal the cavities inside our own grown-up hearts.
March 25, 2013
 Man Ray was one of the artists to be considered the embodiment of surrealism! There used to be a famous bar/hangout on 26th and Sixth in
the City called man Ray! Fond memories, less I digress! I hope you enjoy this post and my trail of thinking on Surrealism! Have a  wonderful day!
Love, Jamie
Man Ray, the master of experimental and fashion photography was also a painter, a filmmaker, a poet, an essayist, a philosopher, and a leader of American modernism.
Known for documenting the cultural elite living in France, Man Ray spent much of his time fighting the formal constraints of the visual arts. Ray’s life and art were always
provocative, engaging, and challenging.
 Born Emanuel Rabinovitch in 1890, Man Ray spent most of his young life in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The eldest child of an immigrant Jewish tailor, he was a mediocre student
who shunned college for the bohemian artistic life in nearby Manhattan. In New York he began to work as an artist, meeting many of the most  important figures of the time.
He learned the rudiments of photography from the art dealer and photographer, Alfred Steiglitz and began to experiment on his own.
In 1914, Man Ray married the Belgian poet, Adon Lacroix, and soon after met the experimental artist Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp was to be one of Man Ray’s greatest influences
as well as a close friend and collaborator. Together the two attempted to bring some of the verve of the European experimental art movements to America. The most energetic of these
movements was “dada.” Dada was an attempt to create work so absurd it confused the viewer’s sense of reality. The dadaists would take everyday objects and present them as if they
were finished works of art. For Man Ray, dada’s experimentation was no match for the wild and chaotic streets of New York, and he wrote “Dada cannot live in New York. All New York
 is dada, and will not tolerate a rival.”
March 14, 2013
 I was fortunate to have been introduced to the work of this sensational artist! The range of photographs as far as the depth of emotion, are nothing short of fantastic!
I hope you enjoy this post, Love Jamie
Jillian Edelstein was born in Cape Town and began her career as a photographer on the Rand Daily Mail. She moved to London in 1985 and before long her images were  appearing in leading publications including The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and Vogue.
Jillian Edelstein is one of the world’s most influential and celebrated portrait photographers
Her celebrity sitters have included Daniel Day Lewis, Helena Bonham Carter, Woody Allen, Nelson Mandela, Helena Bonham Carter, Blur, Bill Nighly, Hayley Atewill and Simon Pegg to name but a few.
Edelstein was the photographer charged with recording in her native South Africa the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings. Held all over the country across a four-year time span, the
Commission afforded victims the chance to confront their perpetrators and through their confessions seek, if not justice, then at least catharsis. Edelstein explains in her book, Truth and Lies precisely how she went about the four-year task.
March 12, 2013
 I have always loved photography. From Diane Arbus and her strange and haunting photographs, to Garry Winogrand and many others.
But William Klein’s story, of a Jewish kid, with immigrant parents, growing up in New York is a great one! His life’s explorations took him to Europe where he  really was able to develop his craft.
His photographs of fashion are thrilling and very inspiring to me! And his photos of people to me, have a strange and haunting interest.
In reading and learning about him, I came to find that the consensus was that people were terrified of him.
“As though it was the lion’s den,” the Vogue model, Dorothy McGowan, said of working with William Klein back in the 60s.
Supposedly Klein has mellowed somewhat, though he seems to still tell it like it is.
 “People ask me why I never went back home to America,” he says, “Have you seen those crazy right-wing assholes who want to be president? The place is so reactionary it
just makes me angry. If I lived there, you wouldn’t be interviewing me, I’d be dead from a heart attack by now.”
Klein ranks as one of the great iconoclasts of postwar American photography “I’m an outsider, I guess,” he says of his groundbreaking early work. “I
 wasn’t part of any movement. I was working alone, following my instinct. I had no real respect for good technique because I didn’t know what it was. I was self-taught, so that stuff didn’t matter to me.”
March 5, 2013
 Now that the weather out west is absolutely stunning, and we can once again go outside and light up the bbq, my thoughts go towards landscape. Topher delay has been a huge inspirational landscape designer to me!
Her work is unparalleled and her love of her craft reads through all of her projects.
When San Francisco artist Topher Delaney begins work on a design for a sanctuary or healing garden, she doesn’t talk plants. She wants to know all about her client’s early childhood, specifically the first six years. With a background as a cultural anthropologist, Delaney believes her work is to tag into what people’s
 experiences were at that young age because those years determine where people will proceed in life
and what will provide comfort.
Delaney is personally drawn to places on the edge — the ocean where she now lives, and the wide open spaces at the edge of the Rocky Mountains in Wyoming where she lived as a child. She also likes to help people whose lives are on the edge, who are in the midst of change. Her personal experience with breast cancer inspired
her focus on healing gardens as a way to reach out to these people. “It was a turning point,” she says. “I thought, ‘Here I am, how do I make a difference?’ I didn’t set out to make healing gardens. I didn’t even know what they were. I just decided it was important to me to create places for people to decompress.”
The gardens I create or discover with private clients are similar to a short story or, in some instances, a tabloid novel. It’s always a great read. Physical literature I want to reread on a constant basis. Public clients, in some senses,
are similar to private clients in that there is a narrative, which reveals the personality of a community. My challenge is to illuminate the philosophy ,which guides this complex set of values and to develop, in the form of beautiful gardens and environments, complex integrations
which may be interpreted through multiple metaphors.
An interest in creating installations which are both affected by and affecting the terrain extant. I am particularly interested in both the personal interpretation and the personal narrative expressed through the manipulation of land
Creating gardens with others helps me make daily maps of a physical world which, quite frankly, I seem to have less knowledge of as time expands.
I enjoy the social aspects of consideration, and I enjoy the generosity of those with whom I work. I enjoy the fact that each day is the practice of attention to the literal and figurative breath of creation
I hope you are enjoying these experiences!
LOVE,
 JAMIE
February 27, 2013
Along with many of my addictions, I am in love with Pinterest! I love how easy it is to be inspired by others. The other day I saw a painting hanging above someone’s bed and the painting of amazing! I clicked on the photo to see who the artist was. It was an American artist named PHILIP TAAFFE! I googled him and was instantly in love with all this work! I hope you are instantly in love as I was!
Love,
Jamie
Philip Taaffe was born in New Jersey in 1955 and later made his way to New York City to study at the famous Cooper Union where he gained his Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1977. Taaffe is an American Artist, who has shown his works all around the world. He is considered by many to be one of the best painters in the world still alive today!
He works with a diverse range of techniques using various subjects. Many of his works are filled with color and movement. How the art looks from far away maybe drastically different when you walk up close.
Taaffe first solo exhibition was in New York in 1982. He has traveled widely in the Middle East, India, South America, and Morocco, where he collaborated with Mohammed Mrabet on the book Chocolate Creams and Dollars, translated by Paul Bowles (Inanout Press, New York: 1993). His work is in numerous public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art; and the Reina Sofia, Madrid. 
February 21, 2013
 Bernd Becher, known with his wife, Hilla, were known for photographing relics of industry in the changing urban landscapes of late-20th-century Europe and the United States.
The Bechers were considered “among the most influential artists of our time,” “their systematic photography of functionalist architecture, often organizing their pictures in grids, brought them recognition as conceptual
artists as well as photographers.”
The Becher school, influenced “generations of documentary photographers and artists.”
They worked together on the record of the industrial landscape that became their life work.
They were fascinated by the similar shapes in which certain buildings were designed. In addition, they were intrigued by the fact that so many of these industrial buildings seemed to have been built with a great
deal of attention toward design.
 They shot only on overcast days, so as to avoid shadows, and early in the morning during the seasons of spring and fall. Objects included barns, water towers, cooling towers, grain elevators, coal bunkers, oil refineries,
blast furnaces, gas tanks, storage silos, and warehouses. At each site the Bechers also created overall landscape views of the entire plant, which set the structures in their context and show how they relate to each other.
 One of their first projects, which they pursued for nearly two decades, was published as “Framework Houses” (Schirmer/Mosel) in 1977, a visual catalog of types of structures, an approach that characterized much of their work.
February 12, 2013
By traveling back and forth to New York, I have had the extreme pleasure of being able to spend alot of time looking in gallerys and museums!
I fell in love with JULES OLITSKI! I hope you fall in love with his work! Enjoy this post!
Love, Jamie
Here we can see why he is to be appreciated as one of America’s most outstanding modern painters.”
Born in Russia, Olitski (1922–2007) moved to the United States as a child. He first received international acclaim as a maverick Color Field painter, one of a group of highly regarded artists in the 1950s and 1960s employing intense color in abstract formats as the carrier of emotional meaning. It was a pivotal time for Olitski, whose paintings of that period featured bold colors and flat graphic shapes. He continued to experiment with techniques and processes during the remainder of his career.
“Olitski’s sweeping and grand shapes offered a different type of pictorial drama than that of his many colleagues and led to his experiments with very large fields of near-monochrome color,” Kennedy said. “These often enormous paintings became known as his landmark Spray paintings, which are at once minimal yet complex in their gradations and subtle shifts in hue.”
 Later, in his Baroque and High Baroque paintings—so-called because of their lush colors and surfaces—the artist accentuated physicality as an expressive element. Though his paintings were staunchly abstract, he looked to the Old Masters of the Renaissance, the Baroque and the Dutch Gold Age. Olitski was a great admirer of Rembrandt and El Greco and they influenced his work.
In his Late paintings, Olitski introduced abstract forms and shapes that narrates on both spiritually charged and classical themes.
February 1, 2013
 I am so in love with this landscape architect! His work speaks to me, it is elegant and formal and haute casual at the same time!
I also wanted to say Thanks for all the lovely emails regarding the blogs! I am so flattered that you are enjoying all the topics I love!
I wanted to answer why there is no comment form on the blog, deliberately by me, as I don’t write the blogs to secure responses. I write them ,as I think it is so wonderful, the world we live in and the beauty it has to offer.  So I feel my small contribution each day is to bring you a bit of beauty.
Thanks so much, to all of you for taking the time to read my thoughts.
Love
Jamie
Since 1997 Luciano Giubbilei has been creating serenely beautiful gardens in locations on three continents.  Giubbilei is known for the understated elegance of his designs, but is constantly evolving his approach, both in response to individual
clients and as his ideas develop. His work draws on his Italian heritage, especially the Renaissance gardens of the Villa Gamberaia in Tuscany, and a distinctively classical combination of restraint and opulent materials.
Giubbilei’s approach is a modern take on that Renaissance formality. “I like a strong axis, projecting the lines of the house out into the garden.” The elements are traditional: the green “room”, with its rectangular carpet of grass, framed by hedges and trees,
and decorated with architectural objects. The contemporary feel comes from his use of such things as woven willow panels, fastigiate hornbeams, timber decking and the simple, unadorned shapes of modern furniture, pots and plinths.
 “I try to make everything beautiful at night – trees and pots picked out with uplighters.”
“But my gardens are really installations. I would not want you to compare what I do to an English flower garden, where there is such understanding of nature. This is different and has a  different function, and the results can be quite instant.”
Have a great day!
Love,
Jamie
January 28, 2013
 Everyone that knows me, knows I am in love with the color white! My all time favorite artist for this was always ellsworth kelly, but tha’s for another post!
Today, I am bringing you another
Robert Ryman was born in Nashville, Tennessee in 1930. Ryman studied at the Tennessee Polytechnic Institute and the George Peabody College for Teachers,  Nashville, before serving in the United States Army (1950-52). Ryman’s work explodes the classical distinctions between art as object and art as surface, sculpture and painting, structure and ornament.
Emphasizing instead the role that perception and context play in creating an aesthetic experience. Ryman isolates the most basic of components‚ materials, scale, and supports‚ His work enforces limitations that allow the viewer to focus on the physical presence of the work in space.
Since the 1950s, Ryman has used primarily white paint on a square surface, whether canvas, paper, metal, plastic, or wood, while working with the nuanced effects of light and shadow to animate his work. In Ryman’s work , wall fasteners and tape serve both practical and aesthetic purposes. Neither abstract nor entirely  monochromatic, Ryman‚’s paintings are paradoxically surrealist.
About his work, Ryman says,
“I don’t think of my painting as abstract because I don’t abstract from anything. It’s involved with real visual aspects of what you are looking at whether wood, paint, or metal‚ it’s how it is put together, how it looks on the wall and works with the light…Of course, realism can be confused with representation. And abstract
painting‚does not mean abstracting from representation‚ My work is involved mostly with symbolism. It is about something we know, or about some symbolic situation…I am involved with real space, the room itself, real light, and real surface.”
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