creative

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“The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.”—Frida Kahlo

“There has never been any division between my life and my work,” the Italian sculptor Marisa Merz once said. She created this piece, on display at the Tate Modern, in 1966 for her home and as a gallery installation. Untitled (Living Sculpture) triggers a whimsical and fantastical undercurrent as you walk beneath these jellyfish-like creations hanging from the ceiling. “It was made from thin strips of shiny aluminium, clipped together and suspended from the ceiling to form great coiled and spiralling forms,” according to the museum’s commentary, “inviting us to explore the relationship between material and space.” Read more about Merz’s work and see another view of this installation by clicking the image.

We seemed to walk through Trafalgar Square at least once or twice a day during our stay in London. One Friday morning we passed an artist recreating Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus—using paint and brushes, of all things—on the sidewalk (or some medium laid out on it) outside of the National Gallery. Amidst the constant threat posed by heavy foot traffic, the artist had finished the painstakingly detailed piece when we returned several hours later. The result: a surprisingly accurate and altogether remarkable reproduction of an iconic image. [Click the photo to view larger in new window.]

One of the first items to greet visitors at Musée National d’art Modern’s elles@centrepompidou exhibition, this display of messages—simultaneously humorous, provocative and all too true—from Guerrilla Girls is the perfect welcome to the thematic show. The exhibit seatures the work, culled from the museum’s collection, of women artists of all disciplines in the 20th and 21st centuries. Elles@centrepompidou runs until February 2011. Luckily, the wonderful antics of Guerrilla Girls, the self-described “conscience of culture,” has no end date. Read all about the “feminist counterparts to the mostly male tradition of anonymous do-gooders like Robin Hood, Batman, and the Lone Ranger” on their website. [Click on the image above to open larger in a new window and zoom in to read.]

We purchased our tickets a few months in advance, and now only a few hours of anticipation remained until we saw Modest Mouse. But before we headed to the Melkweg in Amsterdam for the show on Sept. 7, we came upon these rodents: neither mice nor modest. And to think, this wasn’t even the Red Light District. At this moment the paint was still wet, as the artist set up another stencil on another side of this temporary construction wall. As for Modest Mouse and the big show, the band rocked through a wisely crafted setlist, which included—as the sixth song of the night—“King Rat.”

“Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.”—W. Somerset Maugham

“An art which isn’t based on feeling isn’t an art at all…feeling is the principle, the beginning and the end; craft, objective, technique—all these are in the middle.”—Paul Cézanne

Dressed in familiar traditional garb, a Tibetan Buddhist monk hunched over a square table in the middle of the glass-enclosed atrium of the Jepson Center for the Arts in Savannah, rubbing a metal rod he held in his right hand against the serrated surface of a long, thin metal funnel (called a chak-pur) in his left. As tourists of the historic district’s antebellum mansions entered the conspicuously contemporary structure to escape the sudden summer storm, joining those who intended to attend this event, the monk remained solely focused on task before him, despite the squeaking sneakers, increasingly audible chitchat, and camera flashes. The colored grains of sand flowed like liquid through the chak-pur (a result of the vibrations caused by the metal rod) on to the wooden platform, guided by the monk’s steady hand and concentrating mind.

After nearly 30 hours over several days, the group of lamas from the Drepung Loseling Monastery eventually completed the mandala, a remarkably intricate circular design composed of millions of grains of various colored sand. Once finished, it was destroyed. Read more…

“Creativity means going against what you’ve learned.”
—Anthony Bourdain