Machines

Posted on August 16, 2013 by Elizabeth Cook

The thing about machines versus technology is that machines are tools. With technology, I’m the tool. (Still, when you need to hook up your new t.v. to your cable, satellite dish, game system, surround sound, AppleTV, and photo album, I’m the one to call. Trust me, your old cables won’t work.)

Blog in Progress

I spent the summer playing with machines. I took a letterpress class, in which I learned to typeset and use printing presses. I made little books and lots of stationery. It was SO fun. I got a knitting loom (good for afghans), and when that palled, I got a knitting machine (good for sweaters!).

VanderCook Printing Press in the SVA Print Shop

My letterpress stationery says, “Words are for people who cannot draw.” It’s meant to be ironic (stationery!), not insulting.

This knitting machine is completely manual. And fast!

I played with a manual typewriter and am still considering using it to type my Master’s thesis next year. Why? Because it requires skill, and typewritten documents show the weight of the hands that typed them. Basically, they emboss the letters. I love all of my Apple products, but they can’t emboss. Why isn’t that in the commercials?

Manual typewriter from the 70s. Courier font. It does not get better than this.

If a love of machines can be genetic, I’m pretty sure it runs in my family of engineers, wannabe engineers, shouldabeen engineers (like me), and teachers. We all love tools. I have an electric drill of which I’m particularly fond (doubles as a screwdriver) and a glue gun that comes in handy a little more often than one would expect.

I love all kinds of paper cutters – from scissors and hand-held die cuts to rolling blade cutters, mat cutters, cleaver cutters, and guillotine cutters. I miss my power miter and table saws which still live in Connecticut because somehow they don’t quite fit into my apartment. But I brought my sewing machine, which makes buttonholes!

The guillotine paper cutter can take hundreds of sheets at once and won’t skew.

The first computer that my high school ever bought had its own room and was the size of a small bear. A bear cub. In order to program it, we had to write our code then type-punch it into paper tape which could be fed into the computer. Some of those programs were pretty long, and one mistake ruined the tape. Luckily I love to type. And play the piano. And do almost anything creative with my hands.

Maybe the reason I love machines better than current computers is because I understand how they work. I mean, I can convert numbers into binary code, but I really have no idea how the computer reads binary or makes sense of it. But give me an old-fashioned internal combustion engine and I can change the spark plugs, the air filter, the oil filter, and the brake fluid. How do I know? Because I used to do it all the time. Nowadays I’m not sure that cars have any of those parts. Fan belts? I don’t know. Everything is electronic.

What fun is that? (aside from power windows, power seats, and butt warmers). I like to know how things work inside. Except people. Too gooey!

Take that, laser level!

Art is full of tools – especially arcane hand tools. Artists get to make stretcher bars, and weld sculptures, and cut glass. We use staple guns and lost-wax casting and linen book-binding thread. I don’t know why everyone isn’t an artist, but it’s okay if you’re not. That just means more art (and more tools) for me.

Picasso Quiz

Posted on August 4, 2013 by Elizabeth Cook

I was at MoMA yesterday with some out-of-town guests and every other New Yorker with his out-of town guests, when suddenly I found myself on a Picasso hunt. It was right after I enjoyed a wonderful cheese-based lunch in the 5th floor cafe, which came right after I visited Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World and Balthus’ The Street while waiting for our table to be called.

I may have mentioned before that I get lost in museums. You can hand me a map, but unless I walk around with my nose in it, using a highlighter, I’m still going to get lost. So it was that at last I found myself facing Picasso’s Three Musicians on one side of a doorway, and his Three Women at the Spring on the other side.

Three Musicians

Three Women at the Spring

Most artists are lucky and talented if they can do one thing well. My best thing is actually traditional sculpture, but it exacerbates arthritis in my right thumb to work in clay, so I mostly do my second best thing, which is draw. Looking at Picasso’s two works I was stunned by his range and his bravery at trying new forms of expression. The important thing to remember is that no matter how arrogant he seemed, he couldn’t know that these paintings would work while he was making them. That’s the bravery part. And his limitless imagination encouraged him to start new phases over and over again during his long life.

Girl Before a Mirror

The next Picasso I found is one of my favorites (because of the color): Girl Before a Mirror. Then quickly I ran into Seated Bather, one of the scariest. I started to hunt Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, perhaps his most famous painting, but never did find it. Remember: lost!

Seated Bather

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon

I used to say that I admired Picasso but wouldn’t want to live with most of his paintings. After yesterday I think I would like to live with all of his paintings. I could admire the genius and forget the misogyny. And I haven’t even mentioned Guernica. It is one of my mantras that no one can make anyone else’s art. It is too personal. There will never be another Picasso.

Here’s the quiz. Can you look at the five paintings shown here and tell in which order they were painted? Answers are below, but don’t peek yet.

Don’t peek.

Okay:

1907 Les Demoiselles d’Avignon

1921 Three Musicians and Three Women at the Spring (the same year!)

1930 Seated Bather

1932 Girl Before a Mirror

Unless you already memorized these facts for a test, I bet you got them wrong. I know I did. What an amazing brain Picasso must have had to not only paint these pictures, but in this order. He was ahead of his own time, and I think must still be ahead of mine as well.

Jack the Ripper: Artist?

Posted on July 28, 2013 by Elizabeth Cook

Walter Sickert,
The Camden Town Murder

One of my favorite British painters is Walter Sickert, whose life spanned the period from the Impressionists to World War II. The son and grandson of artists, as a young man he studied with James McNeill Whistler and learned to paint alla prima. For the rest of his life he painted only what he could look at, or see in photos. Later, one of his students was Lucian Freud.

Study for The Camden Town Affair

I was a little surprised, ten years ago, when mystery writer Patricia Cornwell accused Sickert in her book Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper – Case Closed. After years of admiring his work in the British Art Center at Yale, it took me awhile to get my head around the idea. Then out of the blue Steven Sheehan, one of my painting teachers, said that “artists have always known” that Sickert was the Ripper.

Rose Shoe

The evidence is circumstantial. Sickert was one of the Camden Town Painters – Camden Town being the location of the Ripper’s murders. As he travelled back and forth to France, murders seemed to follow in his wake. And most importantly, he established a strong connection to the police so that he was often the first person they called when a Ripper victim was found. He was allowed into the crime scenes to draw the victims before the scenes were examined or cleaned.

La Hollandaise

Whether or not Sickert was the actual Ripper or just obsessed with his crimes, he spent most of his life outside of conventional norms. Would his paintings still be so well-known without the added frisson of murderous possibilities? They are wonderful paintings, but most wonderful paintings are lost or forgotten 100 years later.

I have to admit that, based on nothing, I now think of Sickert as a murderer. But does that indict all of us who are addicted to criminal trials, detective movies, and violent video games? We may not be killers, but we enjoy the results of violent crime – perhaps too much.

Walter Sickert in 1911

I also have to admit that, when pushed, I try to access the blackest side of myself to put into my work. We need light in order to see the dark, but it is the dark that fascinates us. So maybe Walter Sickert wasn’t a killer. Maybe he was. The possibility creates an edge of evil in paintings that might otherwise seem innocent. Did having the soul of a killer improve his art? If so, count me in.

I like happy books and happy music. But I like brutal art. And I’m working my way toward making my own art more sinister.

Light… Is the Revelation

Posted on July 20, 2013 by Elizabeth Cook

James Turrell's Aten Reign in the Guggenheim Rotunda

James Turrell’s Aten Reigns in the Guggenheim Rotunda

“My art deals with light itself. It’s not the bearer of the revelation – it is the revelation.” James Turrell

Even people who have never visited the Guggenheim (we call them Muggles) know its trademark shape. Frank Lloyd Wright changed art museums forever when he designed the center rotunda and surrounding ramps, which are reflected in the exterior shape of the building. You can buy Lego Guggenheims, Guggenheim-shaped lamps, and kits to build tiny paper Guggenheims. The Guggenheim even features in the video game Happy Street (free at the app store – highly recommended because it’s HAPPY).

James Turrell has altered everything you know about the Guggenheim. His Aten Reigns installation walls off the ramps (which are shorn of their art anyway). Sitting in the first floor rotunda, visitors stare straight up at the changing light show, or lie on the floor to see the ceiling oculus. Is this a Pantheon? It feels like a tribute to the gods – or maybe a gift from them. Aten, after all, is the name the ancient Egyptians gave to the sun and to their first monotheistic god.

The huge crowd tries to photograph Aten Reigns, which defies capture.

There are also several smaller light installations, plus a collection of Turrell’s aquatints that glow with light. You may have to stand in line, but it moves quickly and is worth it.

Turrell Aquatints
(photo by Youri Choi)

Wassily Kandinsky
Courbe dominante, 1936
(Dominant Curve)

While you’re at the museum, do yourself a favor and look at the excellent collection of Kandinskys from his Paris period. I’m a big Kandinsky fan and especially enjoy tracing his travel from figurative to abstract work. These paintings from the ’30s and ’40s fall on the abstract side, but just barely, which means that you can see space and identify shapes in them – just as in the best abstract art. Kandinsky has a magical touch when it comes to combining the whimsical with the substantial. I especially enjoy his Petits accents (below) in which small birds, other creatures, houses, and random shapes perch on what might be electrical lines, and just as well might be a musical score or lined paper. Where do you think it belongs on the Kandinsky continuum between representational and abstract? Does the label matter? It is delightful.

Kandinsky’s Petits accents, 1940 (Small Accents)

Just Blue

Posted on July 9, 2013 by Elizabeth Cook

I will throw pill bottles at the next person who tells me that artists have always been depressed outsiders.

Is it art if I hang something I found in the trash inside a frame that my studio-mate was throwing away?

That said, I’ve been feeling a little depressed and left out lately. I should be painting. Every day I tell myself to go to the studio and paint. But I rarely do. I go to the studio and clean. I stay home and knit. I crochet bowls and organize the tee-shirts I will need for typesetting class on Thursday (it is awesome!). I make origami of a manageable size. I get supplies for my sculpture (working title: self-portrait in the asylum) and wonder what colors I should paint my walls now that I’ve stripped the wallpaper. I talk to my friend Rachel about starting a new religion; first step: magic wands. What I don’t do is paint.

My current painting, entitled, It Should Have Been Finished Last Month

Am I not a painter any longer? Or do I just need a break? What do you sad, disenfranchised painters out there think?

Just a peek: Self-Portrait in the Asylum – underway

R.I.P. Big Blue Box

Posted on June 29, 2013 by Elizabeth Cook

Say goodbye.

I remember visiting the Rhode Island School of Design when I applied to graduate school there (may they forever rue their shortsightedness). The Chairman of the Fine Arts program said that they taught their students to fail, and try again, and fail, and try again. And Milton Glaser, famous graphic designer and founder of my school, SVA, has said, “You must embrace failure. You must admit what is. You must find out what you’re capable of doing, and what you’re not capable of doing.” I would add to this that sometimes the failure is in the idea, not the execution. Each failure teaches us something, so that if we continue to take risks, we fail up.

Airless unworkable studio. Can’t breathe!

Hence the end of the big blue box. I got it to work, my concept was sound, I could imagine the stack of ever-smaller boxes reaching to the ceiling. But then I realized that I was avoiding my studio. I couldn’t make work. That damn blue box was sucking all the air out of my space. Aaah. Space. That was the problem. That studio wasn’t big enough for the both of us. And it wasn’t fun anymore. It was a chore. Art made without passion cannot communicate passion to the viewer. Even giant origami.

Rachel and Nadia ignore the elephant in the room while I destroy it.

I tentatively approached my friend Rachel, who had toiled so hard with me to make the enormous albatross, and told her I was thinking of getting rid of it. She laughed and said she had wondered how long it would take me to figure out that it had to go. She generously helped me lift the lid, fold it carefully and take it to HER studio. She will no doubt find something incredibly meaningful to do with it. Then I cut all the supports out of the bottom of the box and crumpled the 225 square feet of heavy ocean-blue paper into the world’s largest paperweight. It now sits in an empty studio around the corner. One of my classmates will want it. There is very little waste in communal studio space.

Free to good home.

I feel much lighter now, and ready to go back to work. How about some teeny-tiny origami?

Big Blue Box, Part 2

Posted on June 21, 2013 by Elizabeth Cook

Big Blue Box Bottom with no will to live

When we last left our big blue box, it had slumped over like a murder victim on a park bench. It was crushed and so was I.

But hope springs eternal in the human breast (thank you Alexander Pope) and the minute I stopped thinking about how to solve my problem, the answer came to me. I built an infrastructure for the box, using foam-core and mat boards, and then folded the beautiful ocean-blue paper around the cardboard playpen. No tape required – I had already cheated enough.

Reinforcing the base

Yay! Box standing up! My invaluable friend Rachel helped me move it into my studio after I cleaned and swept and pushed everything to the side, leaving enough free room only for the box and two admirers to enter the space at a time.

Yay! Box standing up!

Then we made the lid – which is exactly the same process as making the bottom, except the folds are made slightly further from the center point so that the ensuing box (which turns over to become lid) has dimensions just a little bigger than the base. We were so much better at doing this the second time that I really feel we should hire ourselves out as a gigantic origami team. Surely demand is peaking right now!

Rachel after the big move into the studio

Carefully carrying our lid to my studio, we placed it over our now sturdy base and then stood back to watch what disaster would befall us next. Hold our breath… don’t move… and nothing happened. That was the best nothing I had seen in a long time. The lid sat firmly on the reinforced side panels of our big blue box. Perfect. Long periods of appreciating our handiwork ensued.

Big Blue Box complete!

So you’re thinking: okay, great job, amazing artists. But don’t forget that this is just the first box of a stack that is intended to reach the ceiling. Total of 8 or 10 or 12 – just high enough not to hit the duct work that we ARE ABSOLUTELY FORBIDDEN to touch. The next box is supposed to be about 4 feet across. That means a piece of paper 12 feet square for the base and another for the lid. The piecing and creasing continue.

A 2-inch box. No construction issues here! Could this be our pinnacle?

And will we need to reinforce our next creation? Or will that extra weight crush the fragile base box? Will the blue lid we just installed sag under the weight? If we were engineers we would know that in advance. After all, engineers don’t build bridges and then wait to see if cars will fall through them. But we are not engineers, we are dreamers.

Stay tuned!

Color AND Line

Posted on June 16, 2013 by Elizabeth Cook

Wolf Kahn
July in Vermont

I get excited when I see art made by skilled hands instead of assistants and technicians. And I especially get excited by the able use of color and line. After all, I spent years as an undergraduate trying to master these tools. On Saturday I was again touring galleries with a friend and was happy to see that Chelsea was full of paintings. I love paintings – that’s why I make them.

Wolf Kahn
Blue Red Green

Our first stop was Wolf Kahn’s show at Ameringer/McEnery/Yohe Gallery (www.amy-nyc.com). Mr. Kahn is now 85 and receiving the respect he has always deserved but not always received. His brave and idiosyncratic use of color pushes the limits of what we can see and like, and this new work shows that he is still evolving as an artist. Scribbling with oil crayon on top of oil paint – I love that! – and paintings full of complimentary colors: violet with yellow, blue with orange, and red with green. But he goes further and makes the red into magenta and the green into lime, until the colors are vibrating on the canvas. It’s like spicy food for your eyes. Spicy food releases endorphins in your brain and makes you feel better. I don’t think anyone will dismiss him anymore.

Wolf Kahn
All Gray Trees

Zak Smith
Samuel Beckett

My other favorite among the artists we viewed was Zak Smith, showing at Fredericks & Freiser (www.fredericksfreisergallery.com). His drawings are amazing. And the gallery assistant, Molly, was kind enough not to stop me when I stuck my nose right up to them to look at the lines and marks which made up his graphic-novel style works. According to Molly, the show was a huge success and had almost sold out. Congratulations Zak Smith. I didn’t know anything was selling these days. I could try to describe his work further, but really, wouldn’t you rather look at the pictures?

Zak Smith
Girls in the Naked Girl Business: Ulorin Vex
(detail)

Zak Smith
Izzy and Mandy in Their Wheelchairs

Big Blue Box, Part 1

Posted on June 13, 2013 by Elizabeth Cook

After one of our Magical-Return-to-Childhood Craft Nights at school I got a little hooked on origami. We were making paper cranes, which I continued to do on my own, even though I pretty much suck at them. I also learned to make little lidded boxes. Adorable! And if you make them in descending sizes, they stack like ziggurat temples. Even more adorable!

Origami (which I made for Rachel) behaving as it should

Origami behaving as it should

And then I got the idea, which because it is summer vacation no one discouraged me from pursuing, of making stacking origami boxes bigger. Much much bigger. How cool would that be? I wondered. I did a little math on my $5 Staples calculator (do not tell me my phone has a calculator. I know this. I prefer the bigger buttons). If I wanted to make an origami box that was six feet across, I would need to start with paper about eighteen feet square. Okay. That sounded pretty doable.

Where were the critical voices then? Where were the professors telling me that it was a stupid idea? That it was meaningless art? That I am not Japanese and therefore cannot use origami to express myself and my culture? Well, they were on summer vacation, too. And I was left with my studio mates who also thought it was a pretty cool idea. Tunnel vision. Groupthink!

Big Blue Box Bottom (in process) (Photo by Wei Xiaoguang.)

The biggest floor in our studios is in the crit space where we have our workshop classes. I carved out a large empty area and swept up the dirt. I ordered a roll of paper nine feet wide by 36 feet long. It was the biggest paper I could find. Then I measured the crit space, only to discover that it was 12 feet wide. Did this discourage me? No. But I adjusted my project to start with a five-foot box, which would require paper only 15 feet square. I know. I know. 15 is still larger than 12. I could have started with a four-foot box, which would have needed a sheet of paper 11.5 feet square, but NO. That was not big enough for me. I decided to go with the 15 x 15, which I already KNEW wouldn’t fit in my workspace.

As I STAND under the paper I have my first inklings of disaster. (Photo by Wei Xiaoguang.)

My friend Rachel announced that I couldn’t possibly handle this project all by myself. She was completely right and generously volunteered to help me wrangle paper. It took all afternoon to make the box bottom, during which process the paper got crinkled and torn as we pieced it, taped parts of it to the wall, folded it back and forth, and had to check the directions on making boxes. When it was finally folded perfectly, it looked gorgeous – WHILE WE HELD IT UP.

Success! (Photo by Wei Xiaoguang.)

As soon as we let go, it completely collapsed: an ocean-blue origami soufflé. Not sure what to do next, we dragged it through the hallways (more damage) and deposited it in an empty studio, as I tried to convince myself and Rachel that putting a lid on it was going to give it structure. Neither of us believed me.

Big Blue Box Bottom shows its true colors

So much hard work. Not sure what to do next. Warning: a five-foot origami box does not behave like a five-inch origami box. Just saying.

Buying time

Coming soon: Big Blue Box Part 2.

Other People Are Artists, Too

Posted on June 9, 2013 by Elizabeth Cook

I know I live in an art bubble. Most of the time I’m thinking about art, or making art, or talking about art. But lately I have lifted my head from the microscope, looked at the world around me, and realized why the word “arts” is plural. There are SO many ways to create.

Terrence Mann as Charlemagne, and Matthew James Thomas as his son Pippin

Like: the Dramatic Arts. A couple of weeks ago I saw the current version of MacBeth that is playing on Broadway starring Alan Cumming. He plays 95% of the parts himself, and it all takes place in an insane asylum. It’s an amazing tour de force, frightening, mesmerizing, and often quite funny. I also saw the new revival of Pippin, a musical that I loved (twice) as a teenager. This is the first time the show has been reintroduced on Broadway, and if Terrence Mann weren’t reason enough to go (which he is) it is a wonderful production with dazzling dancing, singing, and circus acts. Some people think the story is a little thin, but either I’m very shallow or they’re missing the real universal appeal and poignancy of Pippin’s search for his identity amid the spectacle and laughter. The story has stuck with me for decades, and I was not disappointed with the new iteration. (Tony Awards on t.v. tonight at 8. Hope what I like wins!)

Alan Cumming as MacBeth…

and signing autographs after a performance

The Musical Arts: my nephew Troy is enrolled at the Clive Davis School of Music at NYU, studying music production. But he is also in a great band, Cheap Blue Yonder that you can often catch playing venues in Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn. I love their song Picnic, and love that kids (young men!) whom I know can create such energy and pleasure out of thin air – and years of practice. Listen to the song on their website: http://cheapblueyonder.bandcamp.com.

Cheap Blue Yonder

I think that’s what makes the arts so miraculous to me. Humans create brand new experiences, objects, and spectacles with their brains and hands. No one can make someone else’s art. Each person, each artist, is unique. What he makes carries a little piece of his soul, even if he’s reading from another artist’s script. My day job is in finance. And I certainly don’t mean to say that business, the sciences, or other fields are without creativity. But I’m not sure that they create joy or reward it.

Arts and Crafts: Last week I went to my usual yarn store to get what I needed for my current project (hint: it’s orange, so you’ll recognize it when I wear it). And for once I walked past the front doors of Lion Brand Yarn on West 15th Street and looked in their front window. The window display of an undersea kingdom is absolutely stunning. I can’t imagine how long it must have taken for the Lion Brand employees to knit it and put it together. If you look at their website or Google Images, you can see lots of their window displays. What’s amazing is that they are created entirely from yarn. But they are still art.

The window display from March 2012 at Lion Brand Yarn on 15th Street, west of Fifth

Yesterday I took a walking tour of the Flatiron District and Gramercy Park to look at the architecture and especially the gargoyles that decorate so many of the buildings. Those are carved gargoyles, not cast. They reminded me of the tradition of European Cathedral builders, taking centuries and generations of craftsmen to finish their work – just like St. John the Divine, here in Manhattan, which was started in 1892 and is still under construction. They also reminded me of a wonderful drawing course I took as an undergraduate at Lyme Academy, in which I learned to draw gargoyles and lions’ heads and acanthus leaves and egg and dart moldings. It was taught by the amazing Randy Melick. Thanks to him I can do justice to the stone carvings which surround me here in Chelsea.

Thanks, Randy, for teaching me how to draw.

And with that, my head is back in the art cloud.

the least untrue / elizabeth cook

"Of all lies, art is the least untrue." -Gustave Flaubert