Quirks & Foibles

Rozemarijn Westerink is only 28 years old and already quite succesful as a fine artist.

She hails from the small town of Ede and did her BA of Fine Arts at Artez in Arnhem, and her MA at St. Joost Academy in Den Bosch.

I don’t really know how to best describe her work, but if I had to do it I’d say it’s sweet, fantastical with a hint (sometimes more than a hint) of darkness. I’m fascinated by the intricacy and details of her drawings and paintings, they evoke a slightly messed up, beautiful but hurt and broken world. 

You know that time at dusk, when it’s just dark enough for people to turn on their lights but not quite dark enough to pull down the blinds & curtains? That precious space of time when you can walk around a residential neighbourhood and look at hundreds of little paintings of every day life, someone preparing dinner, someone doing homework at the living room table, hunched over and concentrating and trying not to think of that wonderful smell coming from the kitchen that announces an imminent lovely home-cooked meal.

I love these little glimpses into people’s life, and apparently so does the Selby. It’s a website (and now also a book !) dedicated to sharing the homes and personal spaces of various creative individuals (think artists, designers, photographers, chefs, tailors—even a chocolate factory ! )

A lot of the spaces are wonderfully inspirational. I love Shannan Click & Dan Martensen’s home (model/artist & photographer) in upstate New York. It’s so damn beautiful, that garden, the huge barn studio, the whole country meets young urban artist vibe.

I desperately wanted to go to Art Rotterdam, but things got in the way. Things like time (it’s a 2,5 hour train ride) and money (a 2,5 hour return train ride costs a fortune) and snow (even expensive train rides are powerless against the weather).

Had I gone, I would have been able to see an installation by British artist Fiona Shaw . Fiona loves language and has an MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art—combine these two and you get tragicomic, kind of but not really romantic installations that express human vulnerability and the omnipresent bitter and sarcastic attitude of the twentysomething-year old perfectly.

In Fiona’s own words:

Do you get worried? I worry. There are many things that can go wrong. At least we can talk about them… that helps keep things working. Just don’t talk too much; stand within the blast radius but close your eyes.

An ’80s power ballad to sooth a broken heart; full of hubristic rebellion, ultimately it doesn’t really mean anything. Words will make us all feel better… but you can’t trust ‘em: while you’re singing into your hairbrush all defiant they’re off making sentences with somebody else.

Ever picked up a Decemberists album and thought wow, they really know their way around album art? I know I have.

I recently discovered that the lovely Carson Ellis is the brain behind this album art (and, quite possibly, the brain behind the Decemberists, as she is married to Colin Meloy and you know what they say, zzze man iz zze head of zze family, but zze voman izz zze neck and she can turn zze head anyway way she vants).

Either way, both the work she does for the band (which, besides album art, includes website illustrations, merchandise design, posters, stage set designs, etc) and other things, like cover art for The Best American Non-Required Reading , is just fantastic. I love the intricate simplicity of her drawings, how some of them are merely outlines yet say so much, whilst other are wonderfully complicated and communicate an equal amount of feeling.

Alina Rudya is a photographer from Kiev, Ukraine. She is a) incredibly talented, b) absolutely beautiful and c) seems to be able to capture the quiet beauty of my hometown perfectly.

I also really enjoy her little video, which my horribly rusty Russian tells me is people talking about love. Kiev is a city of love. Literally, there’s people kissing and hugging and canoodling on every street corner. But also figuratively. Alina shows this in a dreamy, affectionate and artistic way. Thank you, Alina !

I think Stasys Eidrigevicius is pretty well-known, but I didn’t know him before so I decided he fits into my ‘new discoveries’ box.

Statys, whose last name I have tried but cannot seem to properly pronounce, is a Lithuanian artist who now lives in Poland. He studied painting at the Institute of Fine Arts in Vilnius and discovered his love for miniature painting while serving in the Red Army (he’s had a varied life).

He’s most renowned for his posters, which isn’t surprising since when he first went to Poland, Polish poster art was on the rise and he must have been influenced but what he saw in the streets. But he also illustrates books, does sculpture, performance art, photography, etching—I would say, name an art form and Stasys knows how to do it. He also really likes working with pastels and crayons, a technique he first saw a woman named Lucja work with on one of his first visits to Warsaw. He married her later on.

But no matter what art form he uses, there’s always a recurring character. That of the puppet with the big potato nose and big, googly eyes. He stares out at you with a sense of disbelief, innocence, loss. He seems both sad and calm at the same time. The little fellow reminds me you, and me, and the rest of us poor suckers trying to make sense of the world but still remaining infinitely stupefied

The One Minutes is a gigantic project of hundreds of one minute video clips. This year is it’s 10-year anniversary, which is being celebrated by exhibitions of the videos at various galleries and museums.

The idea behind the project is that (according to research) the average museum visitor spends only 10 seconds looking at a painting. The one-minute video clips force people to spend more time looking, they have to be there for at least 60 seconds, after all, if they want to see the whole clip. The goal is to slow people down, ask them to give art the time and consideration it deserves.

You can watch a lot of the videos on their website. I personally really like the train ones; the train windows give the clips a natural frame, it’s like looking through a hundred little windows into the world.

Milton Glaser on the importance of drawing.

Someone once showed a bunch of Laura Levine’s music photography, and I liked it a lot. Laura has worked with, well, everyone (from Bjork to the Beastie Boys, Aimee Mann, James Brown, R.E.M, Prince, the Clash, like I said, everyone). I remember thinking to myself man, what a way to make a living, taking photos of awesome people !

It turns out that that’s not the only way Laura makes a living. She’s also a wicked (and very successful)  painter, illustrator, set designer, film maker, writer, and thrift store owner. And have I mentioned I kind of want to be her?

If I still lived in Canada, I would hop on a bus to Phoenicia, New York immediately to go visit Homer & Langley’s Mystery Spot , which is Laura’s store and pretty much what I think heaven might look like. The store’s motto is ‘Clutter My World’.  Just looking at the photos makes me drool.