I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
The genius of Shakespeare is his subtle explorations of the human condition. His insights are so universal that his works have been adapted and presented to take place throughout history, from ancient Egypt to outer space.
Now a researcher has gathered together an online collection of Victorian illustrations of the Bard’s classic scenes and characters.
While reading Shakespeare’s works is still a thrilling experience for literary fiends, illustrations can help bring a little of the stage’s magic to the page. Michael John Goodman—who describes himself as an “independent researcher, writer, educator, curator and image-maker”—has made this magic easy no matter what edition you have. His Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare Archive collects over 3,000 illustrations from 19th-century British editions of Shakespeare’s Complete Works.
I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
The continuation of a new series of Remodern America videos. These videos are possible due to the technical skills of my wife: I am the director, and she makes my vision come to life. It’s another fun part of our creative collaborations.
Video Number Six: Masculinity and Art
A video on art and masculinity. Art is not an American male priority. With our focus on responsibility and practicality, art might seem frivolous. It’s considered a hobby, therapy, good for the kids. We have little sense of its potential power.
I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
I love the dark and powerful music Australian singer Nick Cave made through 1980s to the early 2000s. Starting off with the nightmare postpunk band the Birthday Party, then forming his own epic Old Testament/Southern Gothic flavored anthem group Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Cave survived addiction, angst and personal tragedies to become one of the elder statemen of alternative music.
Now Cave has intensifed his visionary explorations into another field, visual art.
“One can tell from viewing his work that Cave is serious about making art. In ‘The Devil — A Life,’ a honed and aesthetic sensibility is apparent in well-executed ceramics, which cleverly reference Victorian porcelain but which feature Lucifer as the main subject. The works relay a tempestuous tale that oscillates between good and evil and stirs corners of empathy in a strange sort of way, a way we might have felt before from his music. Cave loads in a lot of symbolism and draws on topics around death and violence, but also love and religion. Darkness is always paired with light…
These larger standalone pieces evolved out of so-called spill vases that he had initially started out making—Cave’s interpretations of Victorian vases that would hold a roll of paper or a twig, used to transfer a flame from one place to another in the house. ‘I wanted to make these because I wanted my work to be well and truly craft, so that it would not put me into the art world,’ Cave says. ‘On some level, it is the last place I wanted to end up as a musician—the track record is disastrous. I went to art school [and so] I had a lot of artist friends and making art was a serious thing; they put their lives into this. This idea that you can knock out some paintings between tours felt like a kind of a vanity. That’s why I wanted to make craft things.’”
Their folkloric style and craftiness, however, is exactly what makes them appealing. In an art world where so much work is just about a clever elevator pitch, the works Cave has made are sincere, clearly the result of an inner world percolating outwards, and products of an interest in process and curiosity. Maybe that is the irony—Cave’s attempts to avoid being read as an artist as such landed him in an art gallery. And that in-between state of Staffordshire ceramics (which he actually collects himself) as neither high or low art is what makes them so interesting to the art world, but also to Cave. ‘They are a bridge between craft and art, essentially made to bring a little joy into people’s lives,’ he says. ‘There is a naive innocence about them—no pretension.’”
I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
My wife writes about a pilgramge to visit a sacred painting.
It’s hard to believe there is no velvet rope
separating me from this magnificent work of art.
This was the second time I saw The Annunciation by Jan van Eyck
up close and personal.
I could have stood there for hours..
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I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
Marc Chagall (1887-1985), Jewish artist from Russia who immigrated to France
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I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
Eric Fischl (b 1948) has been making his mysterious, somewhat sordid figurative pantings since the 1970s. His latest series uses the theme of hotel rooms as stages for ongoing pyschodramas.
This month, the artist has mounted a fascinating new exhibition at Skarstedt Gallery in New York titled “Hotel Stories”, which is on view through May 4th. It evokes a backdrop that many painters, filmmakers, writers, musicians, and storytellers in general have explored in their narratives. Do these rented spaces, separate from from everyday life give license to bigger feelings; do they contain secrets? Perhaps the loneliness sinks in deeper, or upsetting news seems more profound. Perhaps we’re more anonymous, for better or for worse. Or perhaps it’s just business as usual. Fischl’s first full series exploring this theme provokes this questioning and it does not disappoint.
I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
Ellie Iron’s Book “Feral Hues: A Guide to Painting with Weeds”
Contemporary artists are spoiled by the abundent supplies of pre-made art materials. In earlier eras, the creation of paints using pigments and binders was a laborious process.
One artist has taken on a project to create her own colors again, using plants and weeds. Although I have not seen many images of the art she applies her creations to, and her interview quotes are full of progressive proselytizing, it’s an interesting exploration.
“Ellie Irons: There are many joys, which is why I’ve been entranced by the process for so many years: an ever-deepening and shifting connection to urban ecosystems and the land that supports them that emerges through careful, considered harvesting practices; the smells, colors, and textures that reveal themselves when plant parts are processed by hand in the studio; the joy of sharing the process with other humans who also become entranced by the relatively simple act of lovingly harvesting often overlooked weedy plants and creating paint with them; the process of attuning to the cycles of vegetal life sprouting, growing, blossoming, fruiting, senescing across the seasons and years — there is always something to delight in and harvest, in any habitat, even in deep winter, which I find comforting and reassuring in this age of climate chaos and instability.”
I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
Like most people, cultural commentator Matt Walsh does not understand so called “Modern” art died out in the 1960s. The junk he is describing is pretty much peak Postmodern art, with all its low acheivements and politics as a substitute for quality on display.
Still, Walsh provides some dry analysis which exposes the sham that our cultural insitutions serve up instead of art.
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I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
THE REMODERN REVIEW 