Patio parties are back with drinks, eats and music at the Ella Sharp Museum MLive.com
Read the original post:
Patio parties are back with drinks, eats and music at the Ella Sharp Museum - MLive.com
Patio parties are back with drinks, eats and music at the Ella Sharp Museum MLive.com
Read the original post:
Patio parties are back with drinks, eats and music at the Ella Sharp Museum - MLive.com
The 12 Best Patio Furniture Deals on Amazon to Revamp Your Outdoor Space for Summer Entertainment Tonight
See the rest here:
The 12 Best Patio Furniture Deals on Amazon to Revamp Your Outdoor Space for Summer - Entertainment Tonight
What is Wayfairs Black Friday in July? Save up to 80% on patio furniture, hot tubs, more OregonLive
Read this article:
What is Wayfairs Black Friday in July? Save up to 80% on patio furniture, hot tubs, more - OregonLive
Athletes win air conditioning battle with IOC after Olympics pledged to be the 'greenest ever' Daily Mail
More:
Some paintings have the power to make art come alive, buta new activation this week willtruly makebrushstrokes jump off the canvas.
In honor of the late American painter Edward Hopper's birthday (he wouldbe 142 years old!), the Meatpacking District is hosting a series of 3-D interactive painting installations that you can become a part of. The free event, titled "Step Into Hopper" pays homage tothree of the artist'srenowned works from July 19 through July 22 in Gansevoort Plaza (38 Gansevoort St.)
RECOMMENDED:Five of the coolest things to see at this years Whitney Biennial
In this first-of-its-kind event, see life-size re-creations of Nighthawks, Soir Bleu, and Early Sunday Morning. Youll be able to pose with these recognizable works and createyour own interpretations of theart with the help of live performers. Activities begin at 1pm on Friday, July 19, then run all day Saturday-Monday, before wrapping up at 5pm on Tuesday, July 23.
The activation, hosted by Meatpacking BID, was created in partnership with The Whitney Museum of American Art, whichis home to the most Edward Hopper works of any museum worldwide.The museum celebrates the artists July 22 birthdayevery year as a tribute to his impact on American art.Hopper was one of themost prominent realist painters of 20th-century America and is widely known for his depictions of the urban and rural American experience.
Take a seat inside Hoppers iconic diner scene, complete with a live barista serving coffee from a neighborhood vendor on Saturday, July 20 and Sunday, July 21, from 11am onward while supplies last.
Transporting visitors into Hoppers introspective take on French caf culture, a clown performer will be present on Friday, July 19, Saturday, July 20 and Sunday, July 21 to set the scene.
Step off the bustling streets of present-day New York City and into the stillness of this portrait of Seventh Avenue in the 1930s all weekend.
If you want to see the original paintings of "Soir Bleu" and "Early Sunday Morning," head to the Whitney where they're currently on view.After viewing his art at the Whitney, you can make some art of your own and even explore a map showing NYC spots he painted.
For the more athletic art lovers, there's even a 60-mile round-trip bike ride from the Whitney Museum to the Hopper House in Nyack.
See the article here:
You can step into Edward Hoppers paintings in NYCs Meatpacking District this weekend - Time Out
Riviera Coast Scene,Winston Churchill, circa 1935 Heather James Fine Art, Palm Desert
During his downtime, Winston Churchill had a hobby: The celebrated statesman was an avid amateur painter.
Now, an exhibition in California is spotlighting the former British prime ministers artistic side. Ten of his works are on display at Winston Churchill: Making Art, Making History, which is open at Heather James Fine Art in Palm Desert.
Not only was Churchill one of the greatest statesmen of the modern era, but his personal foray into painting showcased his inner workings with resulting artworks that are technically adept and aesthetically beautiful, says Jim Carona, the gallerys co-founder, in a statement. These works read like pages out of his diary, mementos of the moments and places that were meaningful to one of the most important men of his day.
The ten images, which have never been publicly displayed, come from the largest private collection of Churchills works outside of the United Kingdom. They include landscapes, seascapes, a still life and an interior portraitall bursting with vibrant color.
Churchill took up painting in 1915, when he was 40, according to the gallerys website. Following a disastrous military campaign during World War I, his sister-in-law,Lady Gwendoline, handed him a brush and suggested he try his hand at art.
Painting became a passion that Churchill would return to for the rest of his life. He took inspiration from Impressionists and Post-Impressionists such asJohn Singer Sargent andPaul Czanne. Like many of them, he enjoyed painting en plein air.
The self-taught artist was open to experimenting with new styles and dedicated to improving his technique. In his 1948 bookPainting as a Pastime, he described how he meticulously honed his craft.
I had hitherto painted the sea flat, with long, smooth strokes of mixed pigment in which the tints varied only by gradations. Now, I must try to represent it by innumerable small separate lozenge-shaped points and patches of coloroften pure colorso that it looked more like a tessellated pavement than a marine picture.
He also reflected on the experience of coming to painting later in life.
To have reached the age of 40 without ever handling a brush or fiddling with a pencil, to have regarded with mature eye the painting of pictures of any kind as a mystery, to have stood agape before the chalk of the pavement artist, and then suddenly to find oneself plunged in the middle of a new and intense form of interest and action with paints and palettes and canvases, and not to be discouraged by results, is an astonishing and enriching experience. I hope it may be shared by others.
The politician rarely sold his works. Instead, he kept them in his home or gave them to friends, colleagues and even some famous figures. Recipients of Churchills work included Elizabeth II and several American presidents, such as Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman, among others.
Winston Churchill: Making Art, Making History isnt the California gallerys first showcase of the statesmans work. Six years ago, the gallery, which has a close working relationship with the Churchill family, staged a different show featuring ten of his paintings.
Churchill created over 500 artworks in his lifetime. According to the gallery, he painted about half of them in the 1930sjust before his first term as prime minister began in 1940. Some even believe that his art influenced his work.
Although painting was just a hobby, Churchill learned new skills which he used in his political and diplomatic life, saidDuncan Sandys, Churchills great-grandson, in a 2018 statement. It gave him a sanctuary during adversity and, I believe, made him more effective in 1940 as Hitler prepared to invade Britain.
Winston Churchill: Making Art, Making History is on view at Heather James Fine Art in Palm Desert, California, through December 31.
Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.
Here is the original post:
Check Out Ten Never-Before-Seen Paintings by Winston Churchill - Smithsonian Magazine
Art, they say, is in the eye of the beholder.
Depends on the beholder I suppose, but I see nothing of any merit, originality, or genuine provocation in a painting called Jesus Speaks to the Daughters of Jerusalem, that depicts Jesus on the road to Calvary, disfigured with a Looney Tunes cartoon face.
The artist, who goes by the name of philjames reckons his work is allegedly about, reimagining and re-presenting historical painting and sculptural forms to generate a sense both of the familiar and the uncomfortable through the displacement of notions of time, place, and history combined with the seemingly seamless interweaving of somewhat obscured pop-cultural references. Yeah, right!
Im all for making people think again about long-assumed images, and that certainly includes Christians, but this offering seems more Emperors new clothes than cutting-edge and constructive commentary. In other words, totally naked, in all sorts of ways.
In Sydney, Australia, where the picture was displayed, there was an organised and active protest, to the point where the picture was eventually removed. A Roman Catholic group named Christian Lives Matter launched the campaign, and called the paintingshocking disrespectful art. The artist and workers at the gallery claim that theyve received numerous abusive calls and letters and even threats of physical violence. If so, thats repugnant.
The founder of Christian Lives Matter, Chris Bakhos, thanked the hundreds of supporters who had respectfully called for the work to be removed and said that the picture was, another cheap and low attempt at mocking Christianity.
For many years now there has been an open season on Christianity, in art, literature, television, film, and theatre. We are widely mocked and criticised in popular culture. There are many reasons for that, one being that the consequences of having a pop at Christians/Christianity are either positive or harmless. Theres prestige in mocking what is still considered part of the establishment, and in spite of what some may claim, the possibility of physical violence or career damage is minimal.
The obvious contrast here is with Islam. Ive interviewed Salman Rushdie, author of the Satanic Verses, who was attacked and almost murdered, KurtWestergaard, the Danish cartoonist who drew the picture of Muhammad wearing a bomb in his turban, and lived the rest of his life under police protection, and others who have felt the sting of religious extremist intolerance. So, theres clearly inconsistency if not hypocrisy on display, and also a certain smugness.
The obvious contrast here is with Islam
But all that being said, the Jesus-like response to any controversial issue is based not on the failings of others but on the call of the Gospel. Were made by God to worship and to love, to celebrate the heart set free, but also to relish all that is given to us, and that certainly includes art and literature. The vocation of the Christian is not to limit but to broaden our vision, not to be reactive but pro-active. The Church has been the hand-maiden of creativity, whether it be the magnificence of the renaissance, the literature of Dostoyevsky and Tolkien, or even Monty Pythons Life of Brian.
If the last seems out of place, let me explain. The very freedoms, the very openness, that allows what seems to be mockery of the faith is a product of the precise Christianity that seems so under siege. Such authentic liberty would never exist in an atheistic society witness the former Soviet Union, Maoist China, National Socialist Germany or various Islamic states. The paradox that these ostensible radicals fail to appreciate is that the license they enjoy is a consequence of what they appear to despise.
The paradox that these ostensible radicals fail to appreciate is that the license they enjoy is a consequence of what they appear to despise
As for the works themselves, we have to differentiate. Anything that obliges me to think deeper about my faith is to be welcomed, even if it does sometimes hurt. Nobody welcomes a trip to the doctor but it doesnt mean we dont have to go.
Take the above-mentioned Life of Brian for example. There were demonstrations back in 1979 and the film actually banned in certain places. But today when we watch it, we see not Jesus mocked at all, but a biting rejection of collective foolishness, herd mentality, and not listening when truth is spoken. Much of the Christian response at the time was shameful.
Jesus with a fatuous cartoon face isnt the same thing at all, does nothing to make us think, and is insulting rather than constructive. My response, for what its worth, would be to politely ask the artist or the museum director out for lunch or a coffee, to explain what the Christian faith means, to talk about how fellow believers in so much of the world face daily persecution, the horror of blasphemy laws, and how we feel when we see what we hold so dear insulted for no apparent reason. It might work, it might not. But then we have to have faith, dont we?
See the rest here:
LEXINGTON, Kentucky In between receiving her MFA and becoming an assistant professor of painting at the University of Louisville, Megan Bickel took an unusual detour for a career artist, earning an MA in Digital Studies in Language, Culture and History at the University of Chicago.
I share this information because I think knowing Bickels twin pursuits makes her work more readable, if not fully knowable.Knowledge, visual perception, and the disruption of both by new technologies are at the heart of the artists current exhibition, Orgonon, at Institute 193. Together, her 12 recent paintings all firmly ensconced in both the digital and the tactile convey a vibrant and disquieting sense of what it feels like to be alive right now: to witness a flourishing of creativity amid war and environmental destruction and to sense an uneasiness with artificial intelligence even as weve come to depend on it in our daily lives and interactions.
Bickel begins the works by digitally collaging her own photography, often selecting textural imagery, such as cloudscapes, grass, and trees, or sequined, mesh, and holographic fabrics. She reproduces the collages on canvas with an inkjet printer before mounting them on hardboard; she then intervenes with oil and acrylic paints, sometimes in thick globs and other times with an almost translucent lightness. Additional materials, such as hydraulic cement or holographic cellophane, amplify the works physicality or further confound the viewers visual perception.
In the shows titular work, a rough-edged triangle sits askew in a bed of tall green grasses. The digital image of a clouded sky fills the triangle, transforming it into a portal to another dimension, while a pixelated camouflage pattern at the bottom edge suggests an encroaching military presence or, perhaps, the potential for digital images to become corrupted into unreadable grids of color.
I had assumed Bickel had created the illusion using Photoshop, but the triangular area is actually a piece of reflective fabric that the artist had placed in the grass and then photographed. The clouds were not digital manipulations at all, but rather the sky reflected in the fabric. (The camouflage pattern appeared on the fabrics reverse.) That I was so ready to accept the image as a fake felt unsettling to me.
Bickels painterly interventions in Orgonon are minimal a line of green tracing a long blade of grass, some curves around the perimeter. But she also paints on the sides of the panel, which indicates a desire to draw the viewer back into the material realm, to remind us that this is, indeed, a physical object.
A much bolder application of paint features in I write because I cannot paint (2024), with its pronounced stripes of dark brown, tan, and green, and thick ribbons of Pepto Bismol pink dancing across a pastoral inkjet background. Small sections of yellow appear at first to be paint, but could also be fabric placed in the field. The work, with its playful abstractions floating across a photographed landscape, conjures notions of augmented reality.
Other works, however, resist such easy associations. Once I saw a war comic and the guns went budda budda budda and wham. My rifle was actually more like krang (2024) gently evokes the sea through sequined fabric that shimmers like the scales of a fish, as well as hundreds of small, iridescent pink brushstrokes that seem to move like a school in the ocean, and graceful arcs of deep green paint. But a smooth golden form and daubs of electric pink paint around the edges of the canvas prevent the work from becoming a mere oceanscape. Is the golden rock talisman or trash? Does the shocking pink represent toxic slime?
Similarly, in Fishbrain, what do you think about, when your kitchens on fire (2024), muted sequins glimmer inside an area thats been masked off to resemble a Zen-like stack of rocks. Peaceful, except that after enough time the aqueous layer of micaceous iron oxide starts to recall an oil spill slowly coating the ocean life with its slick, malevolent sheen.
According to the gallery statement, Bickels research assesses how Google Vision API [] would impact the fate of climate reporting due to current labeling production design. If a computer doesnt recognize that an image represents an effect of climate change, then is it even happening? What if our perception becomes so distorted that we no longer see the extent to which a digital hegemony is shaping our physical world? While Bickels research may attempt to answer the first question, her art responds to the second with a mesmerizing and uneasy open-endedness.
Megan Bickel: Orgonon continues at Institute 193 (193 North Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky) through July 27. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
Here is the original post:
Theres Something Toxic About Megan Bickels Landscapes - Hyperallergic
Todays toast of Pittsburgh sports is about to be immortalized in art.
Paul Skenes, the rookie who is the first Pirates pitcher in 49 years to start a Major League Baseball All-Star Game, will be the subject of a live acrylic painting by Baldwin Township artist Kait Schoeb at a July 26 prelude to the Pittsburgh Vintage Grand Prix.
Her work during the Black Tie & Tailpipes Gala at Downtowns PPG Wintergarden is based on a photo of Skenes, who will be with his team in Arizona that evening. After its completion, the portrait will be put up for auction to benefit Grand Prix charity partners.
Originally, I was just going to do the skyline, because we wanted to have something broad to appeal to everybody, Schoeb said about the oft-captured Pittsburgh panorama.
But with Skenes performing historically significant feats on the mound for the Pirates, the gala organizing committee decided hed be an eminently suitable subject.
Then when I saw he got the All-Star game, I was like, sweet! the artist said. And then when I saw that they had him starting, I was like, oh, this is perfect. This is perfect.
As a full-time artist with her a business called Paints By Kait, Schoeb has produced portraits of plenty of prominent Pittsburgh athletes, including Sidney Crosby, Troy Polamalu, Andrew McCutchen, Hines Ward and Jaromir Jagr.
Painting people is definitely my favorite subject, and I really love realism and painting in oils, so thats kind of my bread and butter, she said.
She uses acrylics for live paintings because they allow her to finish a painting much more quickly than her preferred medium.
One of her early works in oil is of a bus driver named Kletus. Her Baldwin High School art teacher, Jane Riccardi, suggested that a photo of him would make for a good project for Schoeb to work on between 11th and 12th grades.
I didnt want to paint over my summer. Thats the last thing you want to do when youre 17 years old, she admitted. I wound up doing it, but the whole time I didnt have my teacher behind me saying, Change this. Do this. So I didnt know how people were going to react to it.
It wasnt until I came in my first day of senior year that Mrs. Riccardi almost fell off her chair.
With the portrait making such a positive impression on the teacher, She entered me into everything that she possibly could, and I wound up either winning first place or taking the entire show and getting best in show, Schoeb recalled. So thats when it hit me that I was like, oh. Im really good at this. But it still wasnt something that I thought could be a career path.
Further encouragement and recommendations came from pastel artist Linda Barnicott, best known for her paintings of Pittsburgh landmarks, including this years The Place for Smiles to help celebrate the 75th anniversary of Eatn Park.
Linda was the first person I saw who was doing artwork as an actual career and succeeding at it, Schoeb said. Ive met A-list celebrities, and thats fine. But meeting Linda, I was shaking in my boots, because Im such a huge fan of hers.
Schoeb relocated to Seattle for a while, but she returned to her hometown because of health issues within her family.
Im over the moon that Im back, over the moon in every aspect of my life, she said. Its so much better that Im here.
Through networking, she met Black Tie & Tailpipes Gala volunteer Jessie Tait, who recommended Schoeb for this years event.
And despite their subpar record for the majority of her lifetime, shes happy that her subject turned out to be a player for the Pittsburgh Pirates.
Im a Buccos fan, through and through.
For more information about Paints By Kait, visit paintsbykait.com.
Harry Funk is a TribLive news editor, specifically serving as editor of the Hampton, North Allegheny, North Hills, Pine Creek and Bethel Park journals. A professional journalist since 1985, he joined TribLive in 2022. You can contact Harry at hfunk@triblive.com.
Link:
Baldwin Township artist helps launch Vintage Grand Prix with painting of Paul Skenes - TribLIVE
Since a very young age, Robert E. Bear has been interested in wildlife and nature, in what could be a case of nominative determinism, which theorizes that one's name can have an impact on their career, personality, or character. This was further reinforced by his experience exploring the woods and rivers with his cousins, who are of Native American descent, at the Lower Sioux Indian Community in Minnesota. At the age of 12, Bear took up painting, primarily focusing on wildlife, as a way to immortalize the beautiful creatures he saw.
Bear also credits his father, who was a silhouette artist, for awakening his interest in art and becoming his first art teacher. Despite his father tragically dying when Bear was eight years old, his interest in art never waned.
"I would get in trouble in school because I spent most of my time drawing instead of studying," Bear says. "Even before I graduated from high school, my mother signed me up for a correspondence course in commercial art and illustration. I completed that course before I went to the Army. After my military service, I went to college to study for a bachelor's and master's in art, then became an art teacher."
With a teaching career spanning more than three decades, most of which was spent teaching art, Bear has received multiple awards, including Who's Who In American Education (1994/95), Who's Who In America (2000), and National Honor Society Outstanding Teacher (2005).
Bear also worked as a museum exhibit specialist, and it led to him receiving a scholarship to study under Robert Bateman, who is one of the most famous wildlife painters in the world. Over the years, Bear created an impressive collection of wildlife paintings, featuring subjects such as mammals, birds, and insects in their natural habitats. The paintings range in size from 6"x9" to 52"x84". These paintings were done in a variety of mediums: oil, acrylic, gouache, and acrylic with gouache, and painted on mounted rag paper, canvas, or gessoed masonite. Most of these paintings are for sale, and Bear is open to inquiries from interested buyers.
Bear shares that he named his business Cave Bear LLC after a DNA test revealed that he had a significant amount of Neanderthal genes. Neanderthals were responsible for some of the earliest cave art, and Bear is continuing their legacy by creating depictions of nature. According to Bear, he is inspired to paint by the beauty of God's creations, so he loves spending time outdoors in nature, soaking in the scenery, and envisioning his next project. He also came up with an acronym for art, which stands for "Aesthetic Rendering of Thought".
"This definition of art applies to an extremely wide range of pursuits, such as painting, photography, cooking, music, and many more," he says. "If you can come up with an idea (thought), put it in a form (rendering) that can be appreciated in a pleasing way (aesthetic) by one or more of the five senses, then that's art."
See the original post here: