Friday, June 27, 2014

Brian Calvin

"The slender young people Brian Calvin paints look as if they were lifted from a teenage cartoonist's sketchbook. They have comically long faces, oversize heads, huge lips, stringy hair, big eyes with reflections carefully noted, and vacant, vaguely depressed expressions.

Because of the cartoon style and the disaffected moods of his subjects, this Los Angeles-based artist has been called a slacker. The label is wrong, though, because he pays assiduous attention to the formal dimensions of his medium. The way he flattens, simplifies and crops his figures and their Southern California backgrounds and his use of richly saturated colors has earned him comparison with Alex Katz and David Hockney. It does appear that he is at once emulating and parodying those painters, and the effect is amusing."NYT

Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Not Vital

"Not Vital
Makaranta School
Agadez, Niger

Not Vital had been working in Niger, building himself a home there (beginning his project to build a home on every continent from which to watch the stars). The home/tower he built there, at four stories tall was the tallest adobe structure in the area. So as he spent time there, he wanted to give back to the community. But 'the Tuaregs - the nomadic people of the region, were very much against a school because they believed if children learned to read and do mathematics, they would not be able to read the stars anymore.' So a school house became reinvented as a staircase/pyramid structure by Not Vital in which the students could continue to learn outdoors, as their nomadic culture called for, but still have a centralized place to encourage education." SoftPyramid

Pass it on

Sometimes the simplest ideas are the more beautiful.

Gnarly in Pink