The Inventive Artwork of Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett

in Art, Music | August 1st, 2022

We’ve had fun at the expense of the multi-hyphenate: i.e. “I’m an actor-slash-drummer-slash-makeup-artist-slash-brand-ambassador,” etc…. And, fair enough. Few people are good enough at their one job to reasonably excel at two or three, right? But then again, we live in the kind of hyperspecialized world Henry Ford could only dream of, and consider ourselves highly favored if we’re allowed to be just the one thing long enough to retire and do nothing.

What if we could have multiple identities without being thought of as unserious, eccentric, or mentally ill?

Discussions of Syd Barrett, Pink Floyd’s founding singer and guitarist, never pass without reference to his mental illness and abrupt disappearance from the stage. But they also rarely engage with Barrett as an artist post-Pink Floyd: namely, his two underrated solo albums; and his output as a painter, the medium in which he began his career and to which he returned for the last thirty years of his life.

If Barrett were allowed a role other than crazy diamond (a role, we must allow, assigned to him by his former bandmates), we might see more of his work in gallery collections and exhibitions. One cannot say this about every famous musician who paints. For Barrett, art was not a hobby, and it called to him before music. It was in his student days at Cambridgeshire College of Arts and Technology that he met David Gilmour. From Cambridge he moved to Camberwell College of Arts in London and began to produce and exhibit mature student work (see here).

Barrett’s work “shows some of the advantages of an art school training,” wrote a reviewer of a 1964 exhibition. “He is already showing himself a sensitive handler of oil paint who wisely limits his palette to gain richness and density.” (Barrett had displayed a prodigious early talent for achieving these qualities in watercolor — see, for example, an impressive, impressionistic still-life of orange dahlias, auctioned off in 2021, made when the artist was only 15.)

His training gave him the confidence to break away from formal exercises during this period and experiment with different styles and subjects, from the disturbing, primitivist Lions to the hollow-eyed, Munch-like Portrait of a Girl. Barrett’s first student period ended in the mid-sixties, as Pink Floyd began to take off and Barrett “turned into a songwriter” (then-manager Andrew King later wrote) “it seemed like overnight.”

After his spell with Pink Floyd and brief solo recording career came to an end, Barrett moved back to Cambridge with his mother in 1978, dropped the nickname “Syd” and began painting again as Roger Barrett, avoiding any mention of life in music. From that year until he died, he worked in several styles and different media, painting striking abstractions and landscapes and even making his own furniture designs.

While he burned many canvases, many from this time survive. See a selected chronology of his work in the video above and in the photos here. Try to put aside the story of Syd Barrett the tragic Pink Floyd frontman, and let the work of Roger Barrett the artist inspire you.

via BoingBoing

Understanding Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here, Their Tribute to Departed Bandmate Syd Barrett

Watch David Gilmour Play the Songs of Syd Barrett, with the Help of David Bowie & Richard Wright

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness.

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Behold! A Medieval Graphic Novel Carved on an 14th Century Ivory Box

in Art, History, Literature, Museums, Video - Arts & Culture | July 27th, 2022

The Châtelaine de Vergy, a courtly romance that was wildly popular in the mid-13th century, would’ve made a crowd pleasing graphic novel adaptation. It’s got sex, treachery, a trio of violent deaths, and a cute pup in a supporting role.

Seeing as how the form had yet to be invented, medieval audiences got the next best thing — a Gothic ivory casket on which the story is rendered as a series of carved pictures that start on the lid and wrap around the sides.

In an earlier video for the British Museum’s Curator’s Corner series, Late Medieval Collections Curator Naomi Speakman admitted that the purpose of such deluxe caskets is difficult to pin down. Were they tokens from one lover to another? Wedding gifts? Jewelry boxes? Document cases?

Unclear, but the intricate carvings’ narrative has definitely been identified as that of The Châtelaine de Vergy, a steamy secular alternative to the religious scenes whose depiction consumed a fair number of medieval elephant tusks.

In addition to the early-14th century example in the British Museum’s collection, the Courtauld Institute of Art’s Gothic Ivories database catalogues a number of other medieval caskets and casket fragments depicting The Châtelaine de Vergi, currently housed in museums in Milan, Florence, Paris, Vienna, New York City and Kansas.

A very graphic novelesque conceit Speakman points to in the British Museum’s casket finds the Duke of Burgundy breaking the frame (to use comics terminology), reaching behind the gutter to help himself to the sword the Châtelaine’s knightly lover has just plunged into his own breast.

Peer around to the far side of the casket to find out what the Duke intends to do with that sword. It’s a shocker that silences the trumpets, quiets the dancing ladies, and might even have laid ground for a sequel: Chatelaine: The Duke’s Wrath.

Read Eugene Mason’s early 20th century translation of The Chatelaine of Vergi here.

Watch more episodes of the British Museum’s Curator’s Corner here.

A Medieval Book That Opens Six Different Ways, Revealing Six Different Books in One

Behold Medieval Snowball Fights: A Timeless Way of Having Fun

- Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Never-Seen Vincent Van Gogh Self-Portrait Discovered Behind an Earlier Painting

in Art, History | July 18th, 2022

The name of Vincent Van Gogh is one of the very best known in the history of painting, and indeed the history of art. But that doesn’t mean the man himself enjoyed any success in his short lifetime. Though he was convinced that he was creating “the art of the future,” and seemingly right to believe it, the buyers of nineteenth-century European art didn’t see it quite that way. Consequently impoverished, Van Gogh had to resort to unconventional strategies to maintain his artistic productivity. Instead of professional models, for example, he hired peasants and people from the streets. And when he couldn’t paint them, he painted himself.

Van Gogh would also economize by re-using his canvases, a practice not unknown in his day. “However, instead of painting over earlier works,” writes Jordan Ogg at National Galleries Scotland, “he would turn the canvas around and work on the reverse.”

It seems he did this with the National Galleries Scotland’s own Head of a Peasant Woman, whose back side turns out to bear a hitherto unknown self-portrait hidden by “layers of glue and cardboard” for well over a century. X‑ray analysis has revealed “a bearded sitter in a brimmed hat with a neckerchief loosely tied at the throat. He fixes the viewer with an intense stare, the right side of his face in shadow and his left ear clearly visible.”

Even in its ghostly lack of detail, this face seems to be unmistakable. If it belongs to who we think it does, it will become the 36th known Van Gogh self-portrait. It would have been painted before 1884’s Head of a Peasant Woman, “during a key moment in Van Gogh’s career, when he was exposed to the work of the French impressionists after moving to Paris.” You can learn about the ongoing process of this lost self-portrait’s rediscovery in the video at the top of the post. Van Gogh expressed conviction that he was painting for later generations, but surely even he would be astounded at the excitement of twenty-first century curators about finding another of his self portraits — and one he saw fit to give the cardboard treatment at that.

Behold the Newly Discovered Sketch by Vincent van Gogh Sketch, “Study for Worn Out” (1882)

Watch as Van Gogh’s Famous Self-Portrait Morphs Into a Photograph

Discovered: The Only Known Picture of Vincent Van Gogh as an Adult Artist? (Maybe, Maybe Not)

AI & X‑Rays Recover Lost Artworks Underneath Paintings by Picasso & Modigliani

A Restored Vermeer Painting Reveals a Portrait of a Cupid Hidden for Over 350 Years

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Metropolitan Museum of Art Restores the Original Colors to Ancient Statues

in Art, History | July 14th, 2022

The idea that the human species can be neatly bracketed into racial groups based on superficial characteristics like skin, hair, and eye color only developed in the 18th century, and mainly took root as a pseudo-scientific justification for slavery and colonialism. Central to that idea was the Classical Ideal of Beauty, a standard supposedly set by Greek and Roman statuary from antiquity. As beliefs in regional supremacy in Western Europe transformed in the modern era into “White” supremacy, the stark whiteness of antique statuary became a specific point of pride. But ancient people did not think in terms of race, and ancient sculptors never intended their creations to stand around in public without color. “For the ancient Greeks and Romans,” Elaine Velie writes at Hyperallergic, “white marble was not considered the final product, but rather a blank canvas.”

As Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Seán Hemingway says, “White supremacists have latched onto this idea of white sculpture — it’s not true but it serves their purposes.” Art historians and conservators have known for decades that statues from antiquity were once covered in paint, silver and gilding, a process known as polychromy. Over time, the colors dulled, faded, then disappeared, leaving behind only the faintest traces.

Husband-and-wife research team Vinzenz Brinkmann and Ulrich Koch-Brinkmann have spent over 40 years studying polychromy and reconstructing ancient sculptures as they would have appeared to their first viewers. “Their Gods in Color exhibition has been touring since 2003,” Velie writes, “and their replicas have been included in museums around the world.”

Now fourteen of those reconstructions, as well as a couple dozen more created by Met conservators, scientists, and curators, are scattered throughout the Met’s sculpture halls, with a small upstairs gallery dedicated to an exhibit. The exhibition explains how researchers determined the statues’ colors, “the result of a wide array of analytical techniques, including 3D imaging and rigorous art historical research,” writes the Met. As Artnet notes, the “richly colored version of the Met’s Archaic-period Sphinx finial,” which you can see at the top of the post, “serves as the centerpiece of the show” – one of the only pieces placed adjacent to its original so that visitors can compare the two (using an Augmented Reality app to do so; see video above).

Chroma: Ancient Sculpture in Color, which opened on July 5th, disabuses us of old ideas about the blank whiteness of antiquity, but that’s hardly its only intent. As it does today, color “helped convey meaning in antiquity.” The colors of ancient statues were not simply decorative surfaces – they were integral to the presentation of these works. Now, color can again be part of how we understand and appreciate classical statuary. And the full acceptance of polychromy in major collections like the Met can begin to put to rest false notions about a classical devotion to whiteness as some ideal of perfection. Learn more about the 40 reconstructions in the exhibition at the Met here, and learn more about polychromy and ancient uses of color at the links below.

via Hyperallergic

How Ancient Greek Statues Really Looked: Research Reveals Their Bold, Bright Colors and Patterns

The Met Digitally Restores the Colors of an Ancient Egyptian Temple, Using Projection Mapping Technology

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 9 ) |

John Waters’ Comical & Inspiring Commencement Speech: “You Too Can Fail Upwards” (2022)

in Art, Film | July 13th, 2022

John Waters hasn’t made a movie in quite some time, but that doesn’t mean he’s gone quiet. In fact he’s remained as visible a cultural figure as ever by working in other forms: writing a new novel, acting on television, delivering commencement addresses. His dedication to that last pursuit is such that he even kept it up in 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. That year he delivered his commencement speech for New York’s School of Visual Arts not at Radio City Music Hall, as scheduled, but in front of a green screen in Baltimore — which, of course, only enriched the Watersesque sensibility of the proceedings.

Having been forced into the role of “virtual keynote speaker,” Waters made up for it this year by delivering, in person, a make-up commencement address for the SVA classes of both 2020 and 2021. And he did it onstage at Radio City, a venue “known for family movies and the Rockettes. What the hell am I doing here?” As usual in this phase of his career, Waters expresses surprise to find himself in the role of elder statesman.

“In 2020, the School of Visual Arts gave me an honorary degree for, I guess, causing trouble,” he says. “This year, the National Film Registry — yes, that’s part of the Library of Congress, the U.S. Government, for god’s sake — selected my film Pink Flamingos, which New York magazine once called ‘beyond pornography,’ to its annual list of 25 culturally historic films.”

Safe to say that, half a century after its release, Waters’ most notorious motion picture doesn’t repel the establishment as it once did. And indeed, here in the 2020s, how can an artist get transgressive at all? Waters has much encouragement and advice for young people in search of new boundaries to violate. “Outsider old master paintings, narrative abstract expressionism, impenetrable pop, decorative minimalism, non-conceptualism, video folk art, appropriated NFT”: these are just a few of the artistic ventures not yet attempted that could turn their popularizers into cultural phenomena. “You too can fail upwards, if you try,” Waters insists, but you’ve got to do it with a sense of humor. “Mock yourself first. Then you can be as crazily righteous as you want.”

David Byrne’s Graduation Speech Offers Troubling and Encouraging Advice for Students in the Arts

An Anti, Anti-Smoking Announcement from John Waters

David Lynch Gives Unconventional Advice to Graduates in an Unusual Commencement Address

John Waters Talks About His Books and Role Models in a Whimsical Animated Video

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

What Makes Vermeer’s The Milkmaid a Masterpiece?: A Video Introduction

in Art | June 29th, 2022

Johannes (or Jan) Vermeer’s tranquil domestic scenes draw larger crowds than nearly any other European painter; he, like Rembrandt, is synonymous with the phrase “Dutch Master.” But for much of its existence, his work lay in near-obscurity. After his death, some of his most-renowned paintings passed through the hands of patrons and collectors for next to nothing. In 1881, for example, Girl with a Pearl Earring sold for two guilders, thirty cents, or about $26.

While other Vermeer masterpieces languished, one painting never lost its value. The Milkmaid – “probably purchased from the artist by his Delft patron Pieter van Ruijven,” who owned twenty-one of the artist’s works, notes the Met — was described at its 1696 auction as “exceptionally good.” It fetched the second highest price of Vermeer’s works (next to View of Delft). In 1719, “The famous milkmaid, by Vermeer of Delft” (described as “artful”) began its journey through a series of significant Amsterdam collections.

The Milkmaid eventually landed in the hands of “one of the great woman collectors of Dutch art, Lucretia Johanna van Winter,” who married into the wealthy Six family of art collectors. Finally, in 1908, the Rijksmuseum purchased the painting from her sons with help from the Dutch government. The Milkmaid, that is to say, has remained part of the cultural heritage of the Netherlands from its beginnings. In the Great Art Explained video above, you can learn what makes this early work, painted between 1657–58, so special.

The Baroque art that preceded Vermeer’s generation “came from conflict,” namely the religious wars of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. “The art being produced in Catholic countries had become a powerful tool of propaganda, characterized by a heightened sense of drama, movement and theatricality that had never been seen before.” We see the dramatic transition in Dutch art in the movement from Peter Paul Rubens to Vermeer, as “simple domestic interiors of middle-class life” became dominant: “secular works that contain stories of real human relationships.” Those works arose in a Calvinist culture that banned religious imagery and stressed “simplicity in both worship and decorative style.”

The Dutch break with Catholic tradition meant a total reinvention of Dutch art; thus came the realist tradition, produced not for the church but the wealthy merchant class, with Vermeer as one of its early masters because of his near-photographic rendering of natural light and naturalistic composition. Vermeer epitomized the new Dutch art, despite the fact that he was a Catholic convert through marriage. After his marriage, he spent his life “in the same town, the same house, slowly producing paintings in the same room… at a rate of two or three a year.” His output, perhaps 60 paintings — 36 of which survive — pales in comparison to that of his peers. But of all the artists producing domestic scenes, “there were none quite like Vermeer.”

These scenes hardly seem radical to viewers today. They are prized for everything they are not — they are not Rubens: wild, fleshy, passionate, lascivious, exuberant… but that does not mean they are devoid of eroticism. There are obvious signifiers, such as a tile showing Cupid “brandishing his bow.” (Reminding us of a once-hidden Cupid in another famous Vermeer.) There are signs much less obvious to us, such as the foot warmer, employed to “frequently suggest feminine desire in Dutch genre paintings,” the Met writes. And then there is the resemblance of Vermeer’s “milkmaid” — with her downcast eyes, white bonnet, and yellow blouse — to a figure in The Procuress, painted the year previous, a work composed almost entirely of leers and gropes (and said to feature the only self-portrait of the artist himself.)

Vermeer’s Milkmaid “exudes a very earthy appeal,” a quality that comes through not only in its sexual undertones but also in its ideal depiction of Dutch “domestic virtue.” Both are suggested at once by the pitcher and the milk, common symbols of female sexuality. But it is a painting that transcends the genre, which often enough shaped itself for the gaze of male employers in a society that “acknowledged and accepted that maids engaged in love affairs with their masters,” Giordana Goretti writes,” with consent or without it.” The “earthiness” of Vermeer’s middle-class domestic paintings — perhaps most profoundly in The Milkmaid as you’ll learn above — comes from a triumph of painterly technique and perspective, creating scenes so seemingly real that they resist objectification.

Download All 36 of Jan Vermeer’s Beautifully Rare Paintings (Most in Brilliant High Resolution)

A Restored Vermeer Painting Reveals a Portrait of a Cupid Hidden for Over 350 Years

See the Complete Works of Vermeer in Augmented Reality: Google Makes Them Available on Your Smartphone

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Otherworldly Art of William Blake: An Introduction to the Visionary Poet and Painter

in Art, History, Poetry, Religion | June 22nd, 2022

Given his achievements in the realms of both poetry and painting, to say nothing of his compulsions to religious and philosophical inquiry, it’s tempting to call William Blake a “Renaissance man.” But he lived in the England of the mid-eighteenth century to the near mid-nineteenth, making him a Romantic Age man — and in fact, according to the current historical view, one of that era’s defining figures. “Today he is recognized as the most spiritual of artists,” say the narrator of the video introduction above, “and an important poet in English literature.” And whether realized on canvas or in verse, his visions have retained their power over the centuries.

That power, however, went practically unacknowledged in Blake’s lifetime. Most who knew him regarded him as something between an eccentric and a madman, a perception his grandly mystical ideas and vigorous rejection of both institutions and conventions did little to dispel.

Blake didn’t believe that the world is as we see it. Rather, he sought to access much stranger underlying truths using his formidable imagination, exercised both in his art and in his dreams. Cultivating this capacity allows us to “see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour.”

Those words come from one of Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence.” Despite being one of his best-known poems, it merely hints at the depth and breadth of his worldview — indeed, his view of all existence. His entire corpus, written, painted, and printed, constitutes a kind of atlas of this richly imagined territory to which “The Otherworldly Art of William Blake” provides an overview. Though very much a product of the time and place in which he lived, Blake clearly drew less inspiration from the world around him than from the world inside him. Reality, for him, was to be cultivated — and richly — within his own being. Still today, the chimerical conviction of his work dares us to cultivate the reality within ourselves.

William Blake’s Paintings Come to Life in Two Animations

William Blake’s Masterpiece Illustrations of the Book of Job (1793–1827)

William Blake’s Hallucinatory Illustrations of John Milton’s Paradise Lost

William Blake Illustrates Mary Wollstonecraft’s Work of Children’s Literature, Original Stories from Real Life (1791)

William Blake: The Remarkable Printing Process of the English Poet, Artist & Visionary

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

The Biology of Bonsai Trees: The Science Behind the Traditional Japanese Art Form

in Art, Biology | June 21st, 2022

The art of bonsai originated in China. As subsequently refined in Japan, its techniques produce miniature trees that give aesthetic pleasure to people all around Asia and the wider world beyond. This appreciation is reflected in the couple-on-the-street interview footage incorporated into “The Biology Behind Bonsai Trees,” the video above from Youtuber Jonny Lim, better known as The Backpacking Biologist. Not only does Lim gather positive views on bonsai around Los Angeles, he also finds in that same city a bonsai nursery run by Bob Pressler, who has spent more than half a century mastering the art.

Even Pressler admits that he doesn’t fully understand the biology of bonsai. Lim’s search for scientific answers sends him to “something called the apical meristem.” That’s the part of the tree made of “stem cells found at the tips of the shoots and roots.” Stem cells, as you may remember from their long moment in the news a few years ago, have the potential to turn into any kind of cell.

The cells of bonsai are the same size as those of regular trees, research has revealed, but thanks to the deliberate cutting of roots and resultant restriction of nutrients to the apical meristem, their leaves are made up of fewer cells in total. Lim draws an analogy with baking cookies of different sizes: “The components are exactly the same. The only difference is that bonsais have less starting material.”

Having gained his own appreciation for bonsai, Lim also waxes poetic on how these miniature trees “still grow on the face of adversity, and they do so perfectly.” But as one commenter replies, “Why recreate adversity?” Claiming that the process is “crippling trees for just aesthetics,” this individual presents one of the known cases against bonsai. But that case, according to the experts Lim consults, is based on certain common misconceptions about the processes involved: that the wires used to position limbs “torture” the trees, for example. But as others point out, do those who make these anti-bonsai arguments feel just as pained about the many lawns that get mown down each and every week?

Related content:

The Art & Philosophy of Bonsai

This 392-Year-Old Bonsai Tree Survived the Hiroshima Atomic Blast & Still Flourishes Today: The Power of Resilience

What Makes the Art of Bonsai So Expensive?: $1 Million for a Bonsai Tree, and $32,000 for Bonsai Scissors

The Art of Creating a Bonsai: One Year Condensed Condensed Into 22 Mesmerizing Minutes

Daisugi, the 600-Year-Old Japanese Technique of Growing Trees Out of Other Trees, Creating Perfectly Straight Lumber

A Digital Animation Compares the Size of Trees: From the 3‑Inch Bonsai, to the 300-Foot Sequoia

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( Comments Off on The Biology of Bonsai Trees: The Science Behind the Traditional Japanese Art Form ) |

The Inventive Artwork of Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett

Behold! A Medieval Graphic Novel Carved on an 14th Century Ivory Box

Never-Seen Vincent Van Gogh Self-Portrait Discovered Behind an Earlier Painting

The Metropolitan Museum of Art Restores the Original Colors to Ancient Statues

John Waters’ Comical & Inspiring Commencement Speech: “You Too Can Fail Upwards” (2022)

What Makes Vermeer’s The Milkmaid a Masterpiece?: A Video Introduction

The Otherworldly Art of William Blake: An Introduction to the Visionary Poet and Painter

The Biology of Bonsai Trees: The Science Behind the Traditional Japanese Art Form

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