Dreaming about Art

Dream   by Dorothea Tanning, 1940

If anyone doubts the presence of women artists in the Surrealist art movement in the US, France and Mexico, they should run to the show In Wonderland at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.  The show is on until May 6.  Here you can see paintings, drawings and sculpture by a dizzying array of fascinating female artists.  Dorothea Tanning, perhaps one of the most prominent, died at the age of 102 this year.
She had recently turned her interest to poetry and published a new collection in 2011.

There are also many wonderful artists represented that I was not familiar with.  I especially enjoyed the photography of Rose Mandel.  I won't inflict you with the bad photograph I took of her photograph. 

Reception Talk

  I was able to give a talk  at my show "Seeing is Believing" at Waldorf College in Iowa.  The show was organized by art faculty member, and gallery director, Kristi Carlson.  Yes, it was the middle of winter but the reception was warm.  The picture in the background is "Ondine's Message".

Inevitability

There were many showstoppers in the exhibit Children of the Plumed Serpent: The Legacy of Quetzalcoatl in Ancient Mexico at LACMA. This amazing show has wonderful examples of textiles, codices, jewelry, sculpture and pottery from the culture of Southern Mexico. This mesmerizing piece was dated between 1400 and 1521.  There was not much information about its significance in this society but suggests a memorial of some sort. It is indeed a human skull embellished with turquoise, jadite and shell.

Does it remind one of a certain diamond encrusted skull by Damien Hirst?

Los Angeles County Museum of Art exhibit

The making of art

                                                       Girl with Goldfish by Henri Matisse

Here's a link to any interesting article by David Galenson (Painting by Proxy ) in the Huffington Post about the practice of creating art by a collection of workers, rather than the hand of an individual artist.  This long standing practice of using "helpers" by many commercially successful contemporary and earlier artists has been questioned by David Hockney, who currently has a hugely popular show at the London's Royal Academy of Arts.  Is art a "white-collar" job or a "blue-collar" job?  What is more important - the conception of the work or its execution?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-galenson/painting-by-proxy_b_1354368.html