Robert Rauschenberg

Good morning, ladies!!  It is such a pretty day today, and it is almost May, which makes me ever so happy, because it means that I am so very close to moving to Florida!  Yay!  Every time I have a very happy thought, I think of a line from a famous poem, called Jabberwocky – which was written by the guy who wrote about Alice in Wonderland.  It’s a poem made up with a lot of jibberish (fake words), but because of the way they’re said, you can figure out what they’re supposed to mean.  And when the father of the subject of the poem is happy, he says “O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!"…and day is the only real word there, but it’s perfect.  Frabjous!  I am totally calloohy today!

 

Today, I chose Robert Rauschenberg to tell you about.  He was an American and is another guy who changed his name – he was born Milton Ernest Rauschenberg.  I do like Robert a bit better than Milton.  But I’ve never understood going to all the trouble of changing your name and not picking something really cool!  I would really like to change my name to Skywalker.  Not because I love Star Wars so much, but because it’s an awesome name.   Your Uncle Patrick does not want to be married to someone named Skywalker, though, so I’m probably going to be stuck with Paula.

 

Anyway, back to Robert.  One time he was in a show where the artists had to submit a portrait of a gallery owner named Iris Clert.  Robert’s submission consisted of a telegram sent to the gallery declaring "This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so."  You have to think about that, right? Can 11 words be a portrait just because an artist says so?  It challenges what art means.  It’s also kind of a total cop out…but an interesting one!

 

At one point he made a bunch of pieces out of trash, then took them to Italy and sold most of them…then he threw the ones that didn’t sell into a river.  So I’m not really sure if he was one of those super-artsy people who have to make a dramatic point out of everything, or if he was a jerk who was making fun of the people who buy art (which is the only thing that really allows the art world to keep going)…but again, he was certainly interesting.

 

Below are three of his more famous pieces.  I like them and I don’t like them at the same time (I really, REALLY want to straighten out that wheel in the middle one, and set the clocks to the same time!), but since he seemed to be the kind of artist whose main goal is to agitate people, that’s probably exactly what he would have wanted. J

 

Know that I love you and think that you’re awesome;

Hugs and kisses,

Auntie Paula

XOXOXO

 

 

 

 

 

Peter Young

Good morning, my favorite small humans!  Happy Thursday to you!

 

Today is “Bring your kids to work day” at my office.  The place is over-run with small people!  I suppose if I had kids I might like this.  But as someone who does not have kids, what it really means for me is that all day long people I work with will be interrupting me to introduce me to their kids.  And the kids will be nervous about it, and I will be nervous about it (since I don’t hang out with kids much & am always worried about saying the wrong thing), so we will say hello and shake hands and all look at our shoes for a minute and then their parents will take them off to meet some other person.  It is a very, very strange custom.

 

And speaking of strange…today I picked Peter Young to be the artist I’m going to introduce you to.  He was born in Pittsburgh, which is a city your dad and I (and GramE and GrampE) lived in for part of the time while we were kids.  He’s considered an abstract painter, and although he’s still painting and showing work today, I think he was probably most famous in the 1970’s.

 

You can see a short video of Peter talking about his work at the link below, but I didn’t watch it, so I don’t know for sure what he says.  I mostly dislilke video clips, so I almost never actually watch them.  A long time ago I taught a class for people who wanted to become teachers, and to teach the class, I had to learn about different kinds of learning styles so I could teach the teachers about them, and there are basically 3 main ways people learn – visual learners learn by seeing (like watching a video), auditory learners learn by hearing (like going to a lecture), and what’s called kinesthetic learners are the people who really learn best by doing something themselves.  I am definitely NOT an auditory learner.  People start talking and I start thinking about the circus, or the moon, or whether or not I remembered to put on deodorant this morning.  So videos where you have to watch someone talk about something don’t do much for me – I’d much rather try to make a painting like Peter Young than listen to him talk about his paintings, and if I can’t do that, I’d still prefer to read about him than to listen to him.  Anyway, here it is, in case YOU are an auditory learner and prefer information that way!

 

http://peteryoung.detritus.net/?q=taxonomy/term/1

 

Some of Peter’s work reminds me of Jackson Pollock (who I will tell you about another week!) – like this one (Peter Young first, then a Jackson Pollock after it)

 

 

But a lot Peter’s work is abstract but very specifically patterned, like these:

They almost look like illusions, don’t they?  Like another picture is going to form itself out of the patterns?  They are strange and very beautiful to me, even as they kind of make my brain hurt, because I really want to find something else hiding in there.

 

So that is some of the work of Peter Young, and I hope you have a fabulous, wonderful weekend!

Know that I love you and think that you’re awesome,

Hugs and Kisses,

Auntie Paula

 

 

 

Sally Sheinman's Wishing Booth

Hello lovely ladies!

 

Happy Mid-April!  J  I hope that your world is full of sunshine and happy today!

 

This week I thought I’d chose to introduce you to an artist who has done some interactive work.  I like art that involves the viewer!

 

Sally Sheinman who was born in the US but I think she’s living in the UK now.  She’s a painter and a paper artist, and she does a lot of projects made up of many pieces – so instead of one big painting, she might make hundreds of small ones that relate to each other.  Very fun!

 

One of her major recent projects was a series of 6 “wishing booths” – these happy, bright colored boxes that people could step inside, and they were full of little nooks and crannies that had pretty little objects in them, and you could leave a wish inside by writing it on a sticky note (or sometimes even on the booth itself)…and then as other people came in, they could read the wishes that the people who were there before them had left behind…which made these lovely little boxes a very special place full of shared dreams; I love that so much.

 

Some of the wishes were things like “I wish my mom would let me have a dog.”, some were about changing the world by ending cancer or racism, some were wishes to be different…everyone that came into the booth got to leave a wish that meant something special to them, and when the project was over, all the wishes were put on-line. 

 

She also did a lovely project called “days”, where she made 365 little boxes, each one different, to represent the things that happened on each day over a year of her life.  Visually I think this is especially amazing, because it shows how different one day can be from the next – you could be shiny pink polka dots with frilly strings today and so-blue-it’s-almost-black tomorrow, and they’re both lovely and interesting bits of who you are.

 

There’s a quote from Sally that I appreciate a lot – she said “I really dislike the belief that every piece of art work requires an explanation. If most people do not get it, then I believe you have failed as a visual artist.”  And that’s very cool – it tires me out sometimes how people are so focused on meaning behind art.  Sometimes art is about the emotion that you get from seeing something that’s beautiful to you, and what it means to you might be something completely different than what it means to me, and I’ve always thought that was a really good thing.  So I think Sally is pretty cool.

 

And that’s it for this week – I am hoping that today is full of beautiful wishes for you.

Know that I love you and think that you’re awesome.

Hugs and Kisses,

Auntie Paula

 

Cupcake Awesomeness

https://www.youtube.com/user/MyCupcakeaddiction

A little bonus link for my lovely niece who is humoring her Auntie Paula with the art stuff...this lady is an artist with cupcakes! She posts 2 new awesome videos every week.

Edna Hibel

Morning ladies!

 

Happy Wednesday to you! J  All is well in the wilds of New Jersey today, and this week Wednesday is a tiny bit less crazy than Thursday, so I thought I’d do our artist of the week now while I have the time.  And this week I’ve chosen one of your GramE’s favorites, Edna Hibel.  GramE has a few Hibel original pieces in her house – next time you visit, ask her to show them to you and tell you what she loves about them!

 

When I was younger, I didn’t really like Edna’s work – mostly because I’d only seen some of her softer, more pastel toned things… it’s grown on me as I’ve gotten older, and I do think she did some truly beautiful things. 

 

Edna lived in the United States and was a working artist right up until she passed away in December of last year at the age of 97.  She was very involved in charity work for women and children, and a lot of her pieces were of mothers and their babies.

 

Her most famous pieces were created using stone lithography, where giant pieces of stone are used like stamps, one for each color, and then layered on top of each other to create pieces of art.  For her more complex pieces, she would use up to 32 different stones, and then sometimes she would hand paint gold leaf on top of them – very pretty! And all the layering of colors creates a feeling of translucence – like you can see light passing through the colors – which I do just love, especially in her bolder colored pieces.   She was considered to be an innovator in her techniques, some of which are still closely guarded secrets.

To me, a  lot of her images make me think of Leonardo DaVinci’s sketchbooks (one of his sketches is below) – something about the lines, and the softness of the expressions.  I had an art teacher once that hated when the line wasn’t one bold, graphic, strong line – she would yell at us “No hairy lines!!  No hairy lines!!” and we would all giggle.  But I always thought things looked more alive, more like they could move when they’re “hairy”.

 

 

Anyway, that’s this weeks’ artist – I hope you enjoyed her, and you can enjoy seeing some of her real, original work at GramEs!

Know that I love you and think that you’re awesome,

Hugs and kisses,

Auntie Paula

XOXOXOXO

 

 

 

 

 

Birthday!! Birthday!! Birthday!!

(added note: Dang it!  This got stuck in my in-box, so now it’s a late happy birthday, but HAPPY BIRTHDAY all the same!)

 

PRINCESS SHANNON!

 

Can’t believe you’re ELEVEN!!  Crazy.  Totally CRAZY!  J

Miss you and love you and sending you tons of fabulous birthday wishes.

 

Easter Eggs

And as an added bonus, check out these AWESOME Easter Eggs your GramE and I made when she visited me in New Jersey last month!

We knew we wouldn’t see each other ON Easter, so we went ahead and had fun ahead of time.  How cool are they?  Much fun!

Animation Cels

Hello lovely princesses Shannon and Eva!

 

Happy Thursday from New Jersey!  Guess what?  THE SUN IS SHINING HERE TODAY!  woo-hoo! 

 

I am still madly busy with finance things, but this week I thought I'd show you the world's most expensive animation cell.  Now, I should note, that expensive art isn't always GOOD art.  Matter of fact, a lot of REALLY expensive art is pretty crappy.  But in this case, at least there's a reason for the expense.

 

Back in the days before computers, Animation cels (short for celluloid, even though by the time this piece came around they were made out of cellulose acetate …because celluloid had a nasty habit of catching on fire!) were these transparent sheets that cartoons were painted on. Then the see through sheet (or sheets) was laid on top of a painting of a background scene.  That way they could keep the background the same and not have to repaint it in each frame, but keep the characters on the scene moving around.  It takes thousands and thousands of cels to create even a very short cartoon; in most animation there are 24 frames in every second of film!

 

As an example, here are six frames of a red ball – see how it's in a slightly different position in each one?  You could create a cel of each of those balls, and then put one background behind it, and if you repeated them over and over very fast, you'd see the red ball bouncing up and down in front of your background!

 

 

(Before cel animation existed, you had to use a flip book to make things move – remind me next time I see you to show you how to make one – they're fun!! Your dad and I used to take little notepads that Grampie would bring home from work and turn them into flipbooks of little stick figure people doing things.)

 

Fun fact!  The Little Mermaid was the last movie made using cel animation process!

 

So the most expensive cel that I could find is a handpainted one  from a Disney cartoon, 1935′s "The Band Concert" in which Mickey attempts to conduct Goofy and other characters in a rousing performance of "The William Tell Overture." There's a wind storm, a crazy bee, & Donald Duck keeps playing the wrong song, so it's a funny cartoon. This cel is the only production cel in existence to feature Mickey and the full band, and this cartoon was the very first one done in color, so it's pretty special!  It sold in 1999 for $420,000.  That's a lot of money!

 

What's interesting to me is that although this is one of the most famous animation cels ever, and even though I tried really hard to find out, no one knows who actually painted it – I guess because teams of animators would work on each project.

 

In any case, here it is, I hope I didn't bore you too much with all the info!

Know that I love  you and think that you're awesome.

Hugs and kisses,

Auntie Paula

XOXOXOXOXO