Laura's Art Blog, Exploring the Material World

Oh, man. I inhaled The American Painter Emma Dial this weekend. It’s a fantastic novel about a NYC artist’s assistant who paints the paintings dictated by her famous boss. It’s the best, most real depiction of painting I’ve had the pleasure of reading or seeing on film and it’s deliciously quotable, too…

There is nothing sexier than a well-drawn line…

I was trying to build my world around being a painter. I worked tirelessly, fantasizing about the picture I was making. all the pictures to come, and what it would be like when they took on another life out in the world, apart from me. I never doubted that painting was my future…

When we got stir-crazy we went to the bar. Irene and I spoke contemptuously of some of the bar’s denizens who wore painter’s clothes and had not made a thing in years, or the ones who hid out in graduate school rather than face the difficulty of earning a living and figuring out hot to build a life as an artist. There used to be loads of people like us around, young and old, artists working without much thought for the business side or the academic side… But I did not know them anymore and I felt, thinking of Michael’s studio where I painted five days a week, that I was missing out…

Cannot think of a better summer read for an artist.

Scott Macaulay of Filmmaker magazine has written a bit about film marketing that’s worth a read. His thoughts apply to all largish creative endeavors, not just films. Here are a few excerpts from his current Editor’s Note:

“We are all telling you that you must define your audience, aggregate them, get their email addresses, build a marketing plan and conform to a new orthodoxy that believes that it’s up to the filmmaker to drive the new model that will see a film arrive to audiences’ home screens, desktops and cell phones.

As the Labs progressed throughout the week, I found myself resisting a ‘one size fits all’ pattern of advice, urging each filmmaker to discover what might make their film stand-out in the marketplace and hone a strategy that was unique to them. There was one film, a beautifully executed, small relationship drama, that probably shouldn’t be hyping themselves through endless email blasts; the film will get into a great festival and audiences should feel like they’ve discovered it on their own… On the other hand, there was a powerful social-issue film that needs to target and reach out to audiences who will debate the movie’s topical concerns after the credits roll. Each of these filmmakers shouldn’t try to shoehorn their film into some new conventional wisdom. In other words, nobody knows anything – except, if he or she is very lucky, the filmmaker…”

You can read the whole thing here.

Something eerily beautiful. Asperatus clouds! Apparently, they’re new. You can read more at MailOnline.

“It is a bit like looking at the surface of a choppy sea from below.”

- Gavin Pretor-Pinney, founder of the Cloud Appreciation Society and namer of asperatus clouds.

How do bees construct wax comb so perfectly?

They use their bodies as measuring tools, sometimes holding hands, making great chains of bees.

The process is called “festooning” and it’s wonderful to see. In the picture below, you can see a small festoon has formed to measure the distance from bottom of comb to the edge of the frame.

Here it is again, close up.

I took this next picture by looking down into a hive after disturbing the measuring process by removing a frame.

The broken chain reformed immediately, taking into account the new distance between combs.

Though it’s easy to see them in action here, their way of thinking, their way of processing the information they get from festooning, is a mystery to me.