Laura's Art Blog, Exploring the Material World

Have you noticed? Honeybee and beekeeping imagery is popping up everywhere these days. Most of the bee images I see are cliches. There’s the bee covered beekeeper – quirky and alarming. The ubiquitous vintage skep – representative of honeybees in a friendly, nostalgic way. Good old-fashioned scientific illustration – elegant and mysterious. And of course – cartoon honeybees.

It’s rare to find honeybee imagery in art or graphic design that falls outside those four categories. But every now and then something looks different. Congratulations to the talented folks at the New York Times Magazine for getting the shapes and textures of the hive just so in last week’s fashion spread, Killer Bees. I love the way the photos evoke clusters and comb and the sensual luxury of honey without resorting to visual cliches.

Thanks to my dear and thoughtful friend Carmel Zucker for knowing me well enough to guess correctly that I’d LOVE this.

There’s a neat little slide show about Philip Guston on Slate. Can you guess which one’s my favorite?

Love this.

Yay! Basel pics (plus a good story) at WashingtonPost.com. There’s some festive inspiration to be had here. Enjoy!

For all you art lovers on the East Coast… There’s a GREAT show of encaustic paintings by Gail Gregg at the Luise Ross Gallery in NYC. Check it out if you have a chance. The show runs through December 21, 2007.

My favorites from the show are made of paperboard packaging material, unfolded, laid flat and coated with encaustic. They’re still and powerful with a tribal, mask-like quality. Enchanting.

Check out Roberta Smith’s take on this summer’s Chelsea scene in the New York Times. The article comes with a slide show. Medium shots of gallery walls. Always nice to see what’s happening in Manhattan.

Here’s a picture of Richard Serra’s “Intersection II” as viewed from Terrace 5.

If you’re anything like me, once you enter a space like MoMA, you don’t want to leave. There’s too much to see! Leaving the building for lunch is a non-option. Thank goodness they’ve got not one, not two, but THREE restaurants to choose from.

The Modern, as elegant as it appears, was easy to rule out. It’s closed for lunch on weekends. (“Phew!” My pocketbook breathed an audible sigh of relief.)

So we trekked up to the second floor to check out Cafe 2. A waft of cafeteria air hit hard as we approached the cave-like entrance. Ugh. But hungry museum-goers that we were, we suspended judgment ’til peeking at the menu. Cafe 2 serves up a mix of fancy-schmancy, Italian-style cafeteria food. Although many items seemed appealing on their own, as a whole, the menu came off heavy. Cured meats and cheeses; garlic laden antipasti; cheese filled panini; that sort of thing. Although Cafe 2 would have sufficed fine in a pinch, we decided to pass and put our appetites in the hands of the chefs at Terrace 5.

Terrace 5 is a light-drenched space with an outdoor balcony that overlooks the Sculpture Garden. Score! The menu is seasonal and limited (a handful of special entrees complemented by a fresh mix of soups, salads and appetizers). We cobbled together a meal of salads and seasoned almonds topped off by a chocolate-hazelnut sundae with salted caramelized peanuts and caramel milk chocolate glaze. Just my kind of thing. The only drawback was waiting time… We’d have squeezed in an extra half an hour of museum time if we’d skipped table service and gone the cafeteria route. Alas, what’s a hungry girl to do? Overall a spendy lunch with a beautiful view. Worth every penny.

The Richard Serra exhibit at MoMA runs through September 10th, 2007. It’s spectacular. Since it’s already been thoroughly reviewed in the NYTimes, the New Yorker, Slate, etc. I won’t compete by adding mine. But here are a few impressions from the show.

MASS
These pieces are massive! Awe inspiring. They inspire many questions like how were they made? How were they carried to the museum? Installed? Are they dangerous? And how the heck can the museum’s floor sustain all that weight? Not many answers to be found in the museum’s literature. But a cashier in the bookstore tipped me off to a YouTube video of the installation you may find interesting. Curiously, first hand accounts were hard to come by. None of the museum’s staff we spoke with were around on installation day.

THE PASSING OF TIME
Like a film or a piece of music, these pieces require the passing of time in order to be perceived. The larger pieces are simply too large to take in from a single angle. You literally need to walk around or through them to understand them. Even then, they kind of bend the mind. More like landscapes than any other sculpture I’ve seen.

MANUFACTURED AGE
Serra’s rusted steel reminds me of a genre of painting that’s been popular here in Boulder for the last five years or so. Very much about surface and texture. Manufactured age.

BIRD POO
The bird poo on Torqued Ellipse IV in the Sculpture Garden made me laugh. I wish I could have viewed everything outside. Serra’s massive new works on the second floor seemed constrained by the space. I wanted blue sky overhead. A picnic. And distance to view them from.

LOVE
Minimalism. Yum.

Ooh! I had the exquisite pleasure of checking out the Martin Ramirez exhibit at the Folk Art Museum in New York a couple of weeks ago and I’ve been feasting on memories of the show ever since.

Ramirez (who’s work was unfamiliar to me before I saw it in New York) was an outsider artist, a schizophrenic who produced nearly 300 drawings during a fifteen year confinement at the DeWitt State Hospital in California.

Seeing the show gave me the feeling of peering at a map of the human mind. Ramirez’s drawings have an urban quality. They’re dominated by tunnels and orderly processions of trains, cars, iconic cowboys and deer nibbling at the edges of suburban gardens.

Ramirez’s use of strong black lines to define man made spaces brought to mind the sketches an inspired engineer might make in the early stages of planning a city or highway. Precise. Lines and stripes. Light and dark. Flat and deep. Paper bags patched together to make a beautifully layered surface just right for each drawing.

What is a tunnel to an engineer? A city? A garden? Are the human environments we build for ourselves the inevitable conseqence of our human minds? Or a freak accident based on a long forgotten circumstance a long time ago?

I love this stuff. If you’re in the neighborhood consider checking it out. The exhibit runs through April 29th.