Wednesday, December 02, 2009

Surreal Saints of Breasts and Eyes

Agatha of Sicily
Giovanni Cariani (circa 1485 - 1547)
National Gallery of Scotland
Breasts on a plate
Saint Lucy
Francisco de Zurbarán Spanish, 1598 - 1664,
Eyes on a plate
detail from 'Saint Lucy', Francesco del Cossa, 1473,
oil on panel, National Gallery of Art
Eyes depicted as flowers.
Photo by Manuel Álvarez Bravo
Nude woman holding a plate of eyes.
LINK

Tuesday, December 01, 2009

Pink Lady of the Canyon

How the heck did that get there? The story goes: "One Saturday morning, on October 29, 1966, a massive 60-foot-tall painting of a nude pink lady holding flowers suddenly appeared as you headed into the tunnel on Malibu Canyon Road. " Read full story by marc at:

Monday, November 30, 2009

Fake Snow Portraits from the Past


My flickr friend, Steve Chasmar, posted these photos in his
and it got me thinking- could I find anymore cabinet cards portraits from the late 1800's of winter tableaux with fake snow? Sure enough
The American Photography Museum
has a page of them. I think these are quite dreamlike and fascinating! A lot of them were staged and shot in the summer months. Steve's photo shown here (bottom) looks to be touched up with white paint to get a snowy effect.

Sunday, November 29, 2009

Surreal Bubble Woman #2

Sally Rand 1934
Alice Daquet (KAZUHIRO NOGI/AFP/Getty Images)
A couple years ago, I blogged about an American surreal bubble woman, Sally Rand. Here we have a modern French version, Alice Daquet (a.k.a. Sir Alice) who performed on November 25, 2009 at the opening ceremony of 'No Man's Land'- an art's festival located at the former office building of the French embassy in Tokyo. Hey, it looks like Sir Alice gets around. Here's a youTube of her that was made in Taiwan.
Photo/story via Jezebel.com.

Saturday, November 28, 2009

Kay Nielsen, Beautiful and Sad

Little Mermaid Sketch
Little Mermaid Sketch
Rapunzel illustration
In Powder and Crinolin illustration
Kay Nielsen (1886-1957) was an amazingly talented Danish illustrator in the first part of the 20th century. The book shown above was his first commission -completed in 1913. The next year, he did artwork for East of The Sun West of The Moon, old tales from the North. In 1924-25 he illustrated Hans Andersen's fairy tales and stories by the Brothers Grimm. In the years between these books, he designed stage scenery for Copenhagen theater. In 1930, another illustrated book called Red Magic was published.
Kay Nielsen travelled to California to work on a stage production of Everyman at the Hollywood Bowl in 1936. He decided to stay in California and he applied for a job in the Walt Disney animation department. He worked on designs for Fantasia and they were lucky to have him. He also did designs for future projects, The Little Mermaid (above) and a sequel to Fantasia, but, unfortunately, he was laid off in 1940. He was 54.
Kay Nielsen died in poverty in 1957, at age 71, in a house donated to him by friends. He executed four murals in Los Angeles schools and churches during the last couple of decades of his life. This is kind of a sad ending for someone who was truly one of the great, important artists of fairy tale picture books and who's designs for animations were equally remarkable and innovative. In 1975, a book was published that included his work and people began to appreciate him again. In 1977, some of his friends came forward with 42 paintings- never before seen- held in trust, for a book called, A Thousand and One Nights.
The Scepter : see more of Kay Nielsen's beautiful pastel/watercolor sketches for The Little Mermaid 1941
Golden Age Comic Book Stories Blog : lots of illustrations in color and B&W from Kay Nielsen's picture books.
Thanks, finsbry at flickr (set of KN images)

Friday, November 27, 2009

"The Believer" Art Issue 2009

I bought a copy of "The Believer" magazine's 2009 art issue the other day. First of all, the cover has very funny Charles Burns version of an Edward Hopper painting. Inside, there is a huge Jerry Moriarty poster and an interview (by Chris Ware) of the eccentric artist, illustrated by examples of his paintings. I always liked Moriarty's work, "Jack Survives", back in the days of RAW Magazine. (RAW was a large-format comics anthology edited by Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly from 1980 to 1991.) Buenaventura Press recently published The Complete Jack Survives as a hardcover book.
In this same issue of "The Believer", there is another cool interview with one of my favorite comic artists, Aline Kominsky-Crumb (creator of Love That Bunch, The Complete Dirty Laundry Comics and editor of Weirdo). This is a great ART issue with much, much more, but
if I told you everything my blog post would be way too long and gushing, so here's a link to see for yourself:

Thursday, November 26, 2009

1920's Board Game Art



My friend Janet alerted me to this vintage shop on Etsy called
Above are two games from the 1920s available in their shop (follow link). The cover graphics on old games are really interesting...especially this one called "Hokum" which I had never seen before!
Hokum is "The Game for a Roomful", not just a style of blues music.
(Thanks, Janet.)