Maciej Ratajski - Is This Art?, 2010

Henri Matisse, Woman with a Hat, 1905, oil on canvas (via SFMOMA)

“Stone Fields” by Giuseppe Randazzo

Malu Stewart appropriates Claude Monet’s “Nympheas” series by embroidering with pipe cleaners.

Gregory Peck between scenes of To Kill a Mockingbird (1962).

Anthony Perkins sleeping in between takes on the set of Psycho.

Gelsey Kirkland, right, with dancer Mary Mills Thomas of the American Ballet Theatre Studio Company, photographed by Mary Ellen Mark in New York City for Vanity Fair, June 2007

Gelsey Kirkland joined the New York City Ballet in 1968 at age fifteen, at the invitation of George Balanchine. She was promoted to soloist in 1969 and principal in 1972. She went on to create leading roles in many of the great twentieth century ballets by Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, and Antony Tudor including Balanchine’s revival of The Firebird, Robbins’ Goldberg Variations, and Tudor’s The Leaves are Fading. She is perhaps most famous to the general public for dancing the role of “Clara” in Baryshnikov’s 1977 televised production of The Nutcracker.

Marilyn Monroe

Danilo Martinis . http://www.danilomartinis.com/

Ivan Albright, The Farmer’s Kitchen, c. 1934

From the Smithsonian American Art Museum:

Ivan Albright’s obsessively detailed painting style put on canvas the crushing impact of drudgery and advancing age. The swollen, red-knuckled hands of this farmwife preparing to clean radishes, pushed forward until they are impossible to ignore, evoke an aching sympathy. The cast-iron stove has become a tool of torture this woman cannot avoid in her daily grind. Wrinkles multiply over her drooping flesh, speaking too eloquently of years full of ceaseless labor. The family cat offers this farm wife no companionship, but shrinks away from her. Outside in the fields must be a farmer husband equally worn by long labor. The burden of empathy for this hard life, made yet harder by the Depression, is almost unbearable.

Who is this poor farmwife, limp with weariness and lined with toil? One of Albright’s neighbors in Warrenville, Illinois, posed for the painting. But no individual can explain the emotional freight of Albright’s depiction. He aged and distorted every person he painted, young or old. Albright painted flesh that does not heal as living flesh does, but crumples and shows the scars of every event with equally cruel clarity.

Victor Hugo

“Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two has the grander view?”

Victor Hugo

Lessons from a shopaholic

Greetings! Last Sunday Dr. Jack Dalhousie dropped by my studio. He's a guy who collects art from coast to coast and stashes it in his pad in Toronto. "Over two hundred now," he said. "Dealers love me. I'm a shopaholic." Jack's a specialized shopaholic; he wears beat-up clothes and drives a second-hand Mercedes. I told him I'm a workaholic. "Good on ya," he said. "Nothing wrong with that. Without compulsive painters there'd be no compulsive collectors." Dr. Jack is a professor in a Faculty of Medicine. We talked briefly about "Memantine"--an Alzheimer's and OCD drug now found useful in controlling compulsive shopping. "I never touch drugs," said Dr. Jack. We talked about compulsions and how they might be useful to people who invent and create. With Scotch-aid we came to a few conclusions: People who love their work tend to work compulsively. People who don't love their work consider compulsive workers to be confused at best and, at worse, ill. People who love their work feel a bit sorry for those who don't. Compulsions can't be bought or sold. Compulsions are useful to society. I asked the doctor if he thought people might be taught to be compulsive. "It's contagious," he said. "When you're around others who have it you tend to get it. But you have to feel it's your own possession, your own thing. It's possible, I guess, to fall crazy in love with any darned thing. But you've got to make the first move. "I can't control my compulsiveness and I sometimes feel a bit of buyer's remorse," he went on, "but it goes away because I love the stuff I collect. I love art, but I also get off on my accumulation of what I think is the best stuff. What about you workaholics? Do you feel worker's remorse?" I told him most of us feel remorse when our work is not as good as it could be. I told him the desire to do better contributes to our compulsiveness. I told him many, if not most, creative folks have experienced some sort of compulsion and surrendered to it.   "No drug, he said, "except occasional satisfaction, can arrest desire."   Best regards, Robert PS: "Most artists work all the time. Especially the good ones. I mean, what else is there to do?" (David Hockney)   Esoterica: We are drawn to our labour of love because it fills our cups like no other nourishment. The making of art is a private puzzle and working out the puzzle is beguiling. Let the folks who don't love their work look forward to their retirement from it. We creative folks (and some others) have a different mind-set. "Work cures everything," said Henri Matisse. "I need to work to feel well," said Edouard Manet. "Work is more fun than fun," said Noel Coward. "Work is the ultimate seduction," said Pablo Picasso. "I work day and night without sleep," said Jules Olitski, "The paintings keep me fired up." Current Clickback: "A friend indeed" looks at having a friend or agent sell your work. Your comments will be appreciated. Read this letter online and share your thoughts on useful or not-so-useful compulsions. Live comments are welcome. Direct, illustratable comments can be made at rgenn@saraphina.com The Art Show Calendar: If you or your group has a show coming up, put an illustrated announcement on The Painter's Keys site. The longer it's up, the more people will see it. Your announcement will be shown until the last day of your show. The Workshop Calendar: Here is a selection of workshops and seminars laid out in chronological order that will stimulate, teach, mentor, take you to foreign lands or just down the street. Many of these workshops are recommended by Robert and friends. Incidentally, if you are planning a workshop and have photos of happy people working, feel free to send them to us and we'll include a selection in the workshops feature at no extra charge. The Painter's Post: Every day new material is going into this feature. Links to art info, ideas, inspiration and all kinds of creative fun can be found in this online arts aggregator. If a friend is trying to subscribe to the Twice-Weekly Letter via Constant Contact, please let her or him know that confirmation is required and to reply to Constant Contact's confirmation email. You can also follow Robert's valuable insights and see further feedback on Facebook and Twitter Featured Responses: Alternative to the instant Live Comments, Featured Responses are illustrated and edited for content. If you would like to submit your own for possible inclusion, please do so. Just click 'reply' on this letter or write to rgenn@saraphina.com

Kazuki Takamatsu

Coin Sculptures by Stacey Webber

1. The Craftsmen Series, Silver Collection: Tape Measure

Materials: nickel, silver, silver dimes, silver quarters

L x H x W: 28” x 3” x 1”

Date: 2009

Photo Credit: Larry Sanders

2. The Craftsmen Series: Hammer

Materials: pennies

Description: hollow constructed pennies

L x H x W: 4” x 10” x 12”

Date: 2008

Photo Credit: Tom McInvaille

Artist & Sculptor: Jamie Salmon “Fragment #3” Silicone, Pigment, Fiberglass, Acrylic and Hair 60 cm x 25 cm x 80 cm 2008

"A person starts to live when he can live outside himself."

Albert Einstein

My Paintings that sold in the recent Bloor West Village Art Tour, June 1-3, 201`2

Tribute to Monet

Red Tulips

Family of Birches

Honfleur

Tree with Lily Pond

Birches Three

Hearts which bleed...

One cold and blessed winter...

Hung Out to Dry by Générik Vapeur

Displayed during the 2011 international arts festival in Munster, Germany called Flurstücke 011, which is really fun to say.

Artist: website / photo by Ingeborg (via: StreetArt in Germany / colossal)

Mirror Lake by Franklin Carmichael, 1929

Autistic artist Stephen Wiltshire draws spellbinding 18ft picture of New York from memory… after a 20-minute helicopter ride over city Read more

Charybdis by William Pye is an installation with a spinning vortex that can be observed from multiple levels.

About the piece:

The sirens Charybdis and Scylla resided in the Sicilian Sea. Homer tells us that because Charybdis had stolen the oxen of Hercules, Zeus struck her with a thunderbolt and changed her into a whirlpool whose vortex swallowed up ships. In Charybdis the circular movement of water inside a transparent acrylic cylinder forms an air-core vortex in the centre. Steps wrap around the cylinder and allow spectators to view the vortex from above. 

How it works:

An air-core vortex is generated within a circular dish. Water rises and falls within the dish in a cyclic program of water activity. When the system is full and flowing over the perimeter and down the sides, the top surface is comparatively flat and smooth, only broken by the vortex in the middle. However, as the level drops, the body of water seems to take on a life of its own, increasingly rocking and swaying as its volume diminishes unaided by any outside force.

Matt Wisniewski | on Tumblr - Miles to go

And in other news…

In the last month we have seen Edvard Munch go for $120 million, Mark Rothko sell at $87 million and Roy Lichtenstein auction off at $44.9 million. Now one of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s untitled pieces from 1981 is on the chopping block and already stirring up rumors of record prices…

Pictured: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled, 1981.

Read more here.

Hands of devotion: details from Maerten van Heemskerck’s newly conserved Ecce Homo altarpiece painted in 1544, on loan from the National Museum in Warsaw (Muzeum Narodowe w Warszawie).

Encirclement, Installation by Beili Liu

Encirclement is created with hundreds of thistle plants, stemming perpendicularly from the wall, outlining two silhouettes of a standing and a bending figure. The performer then positions herself inside the thistle field, disguised/ camouflaged with thistledown. The beautiful plants surround the body as if protecting her, while she is in fact being embraced by the countless thorns of the plants.

Tim O’Brien

Pablo Picasso’s first self-portrait

CS Lewis

“If I discover within myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world” C.S. Lewis

Roberto Osti 

www.robertoosti.com

Petri Kiss - Watercolor and colored pencils on paper - 2010

Frida Kahlo 2012 pencil and ink by Iain macarthur www.iainmacarthur.carbonmade.com