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Here at the republic, we’ve been hearing it from all over the map:
things have changed,
people have changed
whatever you were counting on, you’ll need to count on something else...
the party’s over, the merry–go–round is broken, and the tools to fix it are all gone.
We take sorrow seriously here, and sadness, and dispair. And grief. And there is a lot of all of this around, and we are not the ones to say to anyone: just get over it sunshine, nor do we deal in advice.
No matter what any of us feels about all this right now, what we can say for sure is this: nobody knows for sure where we are all headed.(some 8 billion of us, not including household pets).
But the fact that we don’t/can’t know what will happen tomorrow means, among other things, that we can count on a few surprises, discoveries, and once in a while: a truly “wow” moment or two. And there are lots of people out there who, every day, take on the job of making and delivering a one-of-a-kind experience for us–in music, in sculpture, in paint, in pixels. in steel wire and water. As always.
Around here, our general approach to what’s going on lately, and to most things before that, is to stand back and look at the big picture while clinging to a few simple, but sometimes overlooked, facts.
Such as the fact that we all live in the middle of nowhere (ok, “space”), there is no backup generator to provide heat, light, and water, virtually all of the people in the world have no idea who we are, each of us has and expiry date, we don’t know what love is, or how to find it….or keep it.
We all know these things to be true, apparently, and yet lots of humans, lots and lots, manage and have always managed, to not just carry on, but to rise above our sketchy circumstances and make something, which is by itself an act of defiance in the face of our precarious circumstances. And among the makers, we have a special fondness for visual artists, for (some) architects, and performers who risk everything.
Whatever is coming down the pipe for us in the next decade and beyond, there is no doubt whatever that all over the map there will be original images, objects, structures, and experiences, made by humans of all sizes and shapes and circumstances. And some of these ‘works’ will stop you in your tracks and adjust your dials. All right here on this rock in the dark. Because that’s who we are.
With that in mind, we had a look around for a few recent examples of what humans get up to when they take on the job making something new. We have made a point of not thinking too much about the impact of work like this. Mostly it is love at first sight followed by “yes” Which sometimes leads to love.
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Regine Schumann
This artist works and lives in Cologne Germany. We first saw this just a few days before selecting it for this post. It definitely says Yes to all the right questions. Thank you Ms Schumann
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Shio Kusaka
Ordinary/Extraordinary. Clay, glass objects suitable for the home, any home, now, tomorrow or 100 years ago. Very nice.
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Vilhelm Sundin
We saw from across the room a picture of a heavy snowfall in a city. Up close we saw the snow was moving, falling. It was a beautiful thing. Silent. All of us see so much video all day all night. How much of it is beautiful?
Video art by Swedish born Canadian artist Vilhelm Sundin can be viewed in person at Monte Clark Gallery in Vancouver
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Patkau Architects, Patricia and John, Vancouver BC
Interior of the Audain Art Museum in Whistler BC. If you visit no other building in Canada, visit this one.
Patricia and John Patkau and their team are among the very best in their profession anywhere. oh yes.
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Tham + Videgard Architects
Scandinavia is always worth a look for the kind of design and production of objects, from cutlery to houses and public buildings, that whispers “quality” “quiet” “sensible” and “uncluttered”. A team of Swedish architects, Bolle Tham and Martin Videgard now at work is producing their own portfolio of houses and public buildings (etc) that embody these qualities –with very clean and quiet and tasty results. Brace yourself
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Olafur Eliasson artist Danish + Icelandic + multimedia + prolific
Mr Eliason has built a unique practice and continues to search and surprise.
You can hear him talk about what he does in this video
You can see a new exhibition of what he does this Fall in New York City at the Frick Madison
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James Turrell Light + Space
Mr Turrell creates spaces filled with light. People linger. Something happens. He has been doing this for a long time. There is nothing like it and no one like him.
Current exhibit at Mass moca in Massachusetts
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Ai Wei Wei ARTIST. Provocateur. Man of the World
Ai Wei Wei is a truly international/world artist. He delights as much as he disturbs. You feel you might welcome him to your home and yet is one of the most famous people on earth. His work always provokes in some way, it raises issues often overlooked. But he never preaches. He makes things. Happen. For which we can all be grateful
And, just to put this in perspective, a long time ago in a desert in Peru someone and their friends made something to be enjoyed by birds and space travellers. That’s who we are.
So here at the end of the year/beginning of the year, we find ourselves thinking about what matters most/what matters least. Through all the buzz, all the fear, all the lunacy, all the loss, what starts to matter more and more to some of us is that humans are also very well equipped to make something BEAUTIFUL and never before seen. Hold that thought. And take a look up there, that, made by Robert Motherwell. (it’s now at the MOMA).
Who knows why, but the objects of eye-popping beauty-made-by-humans that rush to the front of the mind, for us at least, so often seem to be those made with the simplest palette of all: Black. White. Black + White. Look up, the amazing Mr Calder, his amazing THING, all BLACK set in a white, light filled room.
And then there is Henri Matisse, no slouch with colour, he was, but often, OFTEN, he put the reds and blues and acid greens to one side and made DRAWINGS–in charcoal, graphite, conte, ink, No colour necessary. None. It’s all there.
Oh good gravy, even simpler even more reduced and amplified. Achingly beautiful. H. Matisse, encore.
![Maria Likarz-Strauss: Draft for the FABRIC “Montag” [Monday]](https://www.mak.at/jart/prj3/mak-resp/images/cache/f0d8bd91ab52929aeb93d658598e56cb/0xEB6907BFDC54F1BE34230B006608F918.jpeg)
Not sure who she is, but Maria Likarz Strauss (1928 Vienna) is up to the challenge embracing colourlessness in the name of striking go-tell-someone-about-this-ness.
The pen + the ink for centuries the main way of conveying information from one hand and one mind to one pair of eyes. We have other tools now, but even so, the power and seductiveness of the inked line has no competitor. Artists everywhere know this. Paul Klee knew it. Intimately. Thankfully
The ‘white’ of Mr Klee’s drawing has drifted in the direction of sand or warm chocolate milk, as opposed to say snow or salt. We approve. Found here.
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Wassily Kandinsky made some of the most colourful pictures of the last 100 years, but he too sometimes paused, took a breath, and showed us the power of B+W, musical, explosive..
Keith Haring. Young. Subway artist. Gifted draftsman. Brief life. Draped in black. And white.
We are not done with this dark/bright discussion. But for now, a pause, the last word, for now, to A. Calder again. Giving us a wire “drawing”. Aquarium. It’s all there.
Originally posted in January 2019
Painters, photographers, and law enforcement officers have shown a lot of interest in capturing just one side of us, a side of us we don’t usually see.
Italian artists working 500 years ago and more gave us some of the most arresting one-sided portraits we will ever see. Up top, that’s Federico da Montefeltro giving his wife Battista Sforza the eye, courtesy of Piero della Francesca. And that beautiful face in the round frame belongs to an unnamed Florentina painted by Paolo Uccello (1397-1475). More here
Here’s a lady caught at the window by Fra Filippo Lippi (c 1406–1469). Her eyes don’t quite meet his, and maybe that’s the story here. From this nicely gathered collection of side portraits.
Moving up the road to France and a bit closer to our time, we found this lovely drawing by Jean-Joseph Bernard, 1785, at Vanderbilt University. Just pen and ink with watercolor on paper.
Staying in France for a moment, here is a carved profile of an homme who from this angle seems both aristocratic and capable of beating somebody up. Image found here
This group called Portraits of Lawgivers lives in the House Chamber of the U.S. Capitol Building. Each of the men depicted is a person who, some say, contributed to the laws that now underlie the US justice system. We think that’s Hammurabi up there.
Madame X, as she came to be called, was an American in Paris in the 1880’s who did well in marriage, generated much gossip, and attracted the attention of painter John Singer Sargent who asked if he could paint her. She said yes and the resulting portrait of her, with her gaze averted stage left, was judged just s bit too, you know. Despite the averted gaze and the “X” everyone recognized the woman in black as “that woman”. See her here now, at your leisure.
Jumping ahead to modern scandalous celebrity, getting your “mug” shot shortly after an arrest, profile on one side and full face on the other, is almost a rite of passage for film stars and musicians of the last 70 years or so. Mr Hendrix got out of the Toronto jail soon after and went on to play another day.
20th century artists like Man Ray rediscovered the power of the sidelong view even when no crime had preceded the shot. This is Lee Miller in his Paris studio. Some of course thought it a crime that a woman this beautiful could also be a talented, brave, and prolific photographer.
Isn’t she lovely, actress Billie Dove. We don’t care what she’s done.
Audrey Hepburn photographed by Yousaf Karsh and, bless her, she turned just a little toward us. From Boston.com
The silhouette was not just a fad, it was an obsession at a certain point. If you hadn’t been caught from the side on black paper with scissors well you just hadn’t arrived. This nice example from England found here
Many got the whole damned family scissored and pasted. This is the Sturge Family, ca. 1820 presented in the collection of the Library of the Society of Friends (The Quakers)
Some silhouettists snipped black images of everyone they met, apparently. Here’s a book of hundreds of them at the Smithsonian Institute
Back to where we started, in Italy, this must be counted among the most beautiful portraits ever produced, and it is amazing how much it conveys while only showing us one side of this woman’s story. Her name is Giovanna Tornabuoni, and she died in childbirth. Painted posthumously by Domenico Ghirlandaio about 1490. She now lives in a museum in Madrid and was recently the star of an exhibition there reported here.
Much as we love the profile portaits we found, we are very very glad that Jan Vermeer (go here) coaxed this lady to turn toward his canvas and to us. Perhaps the gift of her gaze is all the more powerful because we have been deprived of it. Maybe that’s the power of the profile–to increase the appetite for more of her face.
originally posted June 2014
The art of the line is ancient. It is often instant and permanent. It is seductive. It is everywhere. It is drawings, it is maps, it is documents, it is cartoons, it is a record of our heartbeat, of our brain activity, of earthquakes. It is tattoos. At its sharpest, and at its best, we think, it is ink and pen..
This extraordinary drawing in pen and ink was made by a scientist trying to understand the complexity of the brain. Spanish neuroanatomist Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852-1934) left more than 2900 drawings mostly of brain cells mostly in pen and ink of what he saw through his microscope. The process of drawing what he saw through the lens led to new theories about how the cells of the brain worked. He earned a Nobel prize. His theories have held up well under he scrutiny of much more complex instruments developed in the last 85 years.
1904 drawing by Santiago Ramón y Cajal of cells in the cerebral cortex of a child. New York Times Article has this and more
PENS, Real Pens >>Dip Pens
Just a few of the metal pen nibs available today. These found at Pendamonium
If you want to make impressive lines in pen and ink sometime this week, you have two good choices– pens with nibs that are dipped ink (dip pens) and fountain pens that carry their ink inside. This is somewhat equivalent to an acoustic guitar versus a synthesizer for making music, and beautiful though they often are (we have a few), we will leave fountain pens for another time. (As for ballpoints and felt tips, we will leave them alone entirely. Iif you are a genius you might make something agreeable and lasting with them, but for the rest of us, these are best reserved for jotting down grocery lists or “notes to self”, etc.)
Metal nibs have been manufactured on a commercial scale in a wonderful variety of styles for at least 200 years. Once you have one or two, find yourself just the right holder (consider weight /shape /material, as if you were selecting a tennis racquet or pool cue) to hold the nib securely and a bottle of ink, most often brown or black. Those of us who care about the quality of the lines we produce in pictures or prose will at some point find themselves in possession of nibs, many nibs, several comfortable holders, and a bottle or two of real ink.
Making your mark. It’s quite addictive. A nice presentation can be found here
And if you spill some ink, it often makes its own magic.
Whatever your pen, whatever your ink, whatever your goal, this combination of sharp instrument and strong dark fluid will serve you like no other combination.
For a very long time these simple materials and methods were all that was available.
Now there are dozens (hundreds!) of possibilities for making words and images visible to each other. Yet many artists in our time still rely on pen and ink to make their mark. One artist working right here in the 21st century has been drawing maps. Of cities. With pen(s) and ink.
This is a hand-drawn ink map of a section of Inverness Scotland, 6 and a half feet wide, completed by artist Carl Lavia and photographer Lorna Le Bredonchel found here Their goal is to render 68 cities in the UK in this meticulous beautiful fashion. You have to admire not only the outcome but the determination and effort.
OK back to work. If you want to make the most out of your dip pens and your collection of metal nibs, you will need to do some thinking about INK, about Drawing inks.
Fortunately, as with the nibs themselves, we still have available INKS that are essentially the same as what were used by artists and scribes an calligraphers of the past. The packaging has changed a little as have a few ingredients, but their quality and qualities remain high. Some will make marks that will outlast their makers. These and more to be found at My Modern Met.
We’d like to finish this exploration/lovesong about Pen and Ink with the reason we started it in the first place: our deep and lasting love for the images generated in this medium by a few of our favourite pen-and-ink artists.
JJSempe 
Ronald Searle 
Aubrey Beardsley 
Len Norris 
Ronald Searle
Arthur Rackham R Crumb
Mitsumasa Anno 
Mitsumasa Anno
James Thurber 
James Thurber
We hope some of those above are already familiar to you. If so, treat yourself to a reunion with one or two. And if some are new and unknown, do check them out. Making so much happen with simple lines is, we think, one of the miracles of our species. Here are some links to those above to get you hooked.
JJ Sempe Ronald Searle Aubrey Beardsley Len Norris Len Norris_2 Arthur Rackham R Crumb
The final line, rightly so, to Mr Steinberg,
Maybe I’m not using the right pen….
Sometimes the best discoveries don’t require meticulous planning, a long journey, or special shoes. Sometimes you just have to see what’s in front of you.
This is some of what Belgian photographer Harry Gruyaert has been seeing and recording for the rest of us over the last 40 years.
He is credited with helping to prove the point that European photographs could be in colour and still be taken seriously. Not that there is anything wrong with black and white.
Mr Gruyaert claims that he doesn’t think much about all this, and he avoids talking about it if at all possible.
The British Journal of Photography did manage to get a few words out of him, which can be read here
All images © 2015 Harry Gruyaert / Magnum Photos
the republic of less 
