My mom hooked me up with the amazing Women in Art video compilation. Thanks, mom! Gorgeous women, all. Here’s Women in Film. Even though the gorgeous women in this film — and the women in art, too — are all unique, their features and their proportions are not. Their lips are all full, their eyes are all wide-set, their cheekbones are all striking. They have mostly the same “beauty ideal” and there is no doubt in it. I mean, it is shocking, really.

Always listen to your mother. My mom has been asking me incessantly if I have watched this video. And I hadn’t until now. But, I watched it and it is breathtaking. All of these subject are gorgeous. The greatest painters have had amazing taste in women, that’s for sure. Thanks, mom.

12/01/2008, originally uploaded by Chris Abraham.

I forgot to write down the name of this painting or the name of the artist. Would someone use their $100,000 liberal education and help me with the ID? Pretty please? I am besotted. Note: I learned more about the above-mentioned painting that I loved so much when I visited the NGA last Saturday!

Hans Hofmann
American, 1880 – 1966
Autumn Gold, 1957
oil on canvas, 132.7 x 153.4 cm (52 1/4 x 60 3/8 in.)
Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Collection
1996.81.4

Art for the Nation Exhibition Catalogue

Autumn Gold is an important example of Hofmann’s most familiar body of work. These images are distinguished by heavy rectangular slabs of intense, unmodulated colors that hover or superimpose themselves on the surface of the picture and are, in certain places, secured by thick, vigorous passages in a lower key. In Autumn Gold, incipient rectangles of color have been formed from the smaller dabs that Hofmann used in previous works, but here greatly enlarged. The rectangular forms first materialized in 1957, the year in which Hofmann created Autumn Gold; the following year, they would become more sharply defined, although painterly edges would continue to appear. In the words of the New York critic Clement Greenberg, Hofmann’s commanding idiom was composed of a “fat, heavy, and eloquent surface” on which color is “saturated corporeally as well as optically.” In his paintings, “presence” is related to “the picture’s concentrated radiance, its effulgence and plenitude as an identity.”1

Hofmann had been teaching art since 1915 (when he opened an art school in Munich), and, throughout his life, formal principles in his work were rigorously applied. The slabs–some created with a palette knife–possess a flat, aggressive opacity that is unique to the artist, while an impression of shallow pictorial space is created by subtle and deliberately calibrated adjustments of scale, by the relationship between colors, and by variations in tint and tone. Hofmann’s work from this period is governed by a dynamic interaction of form, color, and material that he characterized as one of “push and pull.”2 The premise, which Hofmann explained in numerous notes, is that the compositions represent a tension between mere flatness (which is “passive”) and illusive depth (which is “sterile”). This tension was achieved by using purely pictorial means in order to approximate the perceptual and psychological experience of depth in nature. The result, for Hofmann, is a pictorial space that is “alive, dynamic, fluctuating and ambiguously dominated by forces and counter-forces, by movement and counter-movement, all of which summarize into rhythm and counter-rhythm as the quintessence of life experience.”3 Hofmann shared his quasi-utopian faith in the emotional or spiritual resonance of abstract form with the early pioneers of nonobjective art. His strict formal principles were, in turn, a significant model for many abstract painters in New York, where Hofmann had settled in 1934.

(Text by Jeffrey Weiss, published in the National Gallery of Art exhibition catalogue, Art for the Nation, 2000)

Notes

1. Clement Greenberg, Hofmann (Paris, 1961), 28-34.

2. Hans Hofmann, “The Resurrection of the Plastic Arts,” originally published in the catalogue for Hofmann’s 1954 exhibition at the Samuel M. Kootz Gallery, New York; reprinted in Sam Hunter, Hans Hofmann (New York, 1963), 44.

3. Hunter 1963, 44.

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I really find this female form and this figure study beautiful, ideal, womanly, feminine, alluring, and sensual. As Mary Magdalene in the Grotto was painted in 1876, my taste in what is beautiful a beautiful woman’s body is surely well over a century out of date. I consider this figure study to be both gorgeous and ideal in both shape and proportion. Lovely.

Jules Joseph Lefebvre From Wikipedia

Jules Joseph Lefebvre (Tournan 1836 – Paris 1911) was a French figure painter.

Entered the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts en 1852, and was a pupil of Léon Cogniet. Lefebvre won the prestigious Prix de Rome in 1861. Between 1855 and 1898, he exhibited 72 portraits in the Paris Salon. In 1891, he became a memeber of the French Académie des Beaux-Arts

He was an instructor at the Académie Julian in Paris. He is chiefly important as an excellent and sympathetic teacher who numbered many Americans among his 1500 or more pupils. One of his famous students was the Scottish born landscape painter William Hart. Georges Rochegrosse and John Noble Barlow were also his pupils. He was long a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts.

His paintings are usually single figures of beautiful women.

Among his best portraits were those of M. L. Reynaud and the Prince Imperial (1874). Among his many decorations were a first-class medal at the Paris Exhibition of 1878 and the medal of honor in 1886. He was a Commander of the Legion of Honor and a member of the Institute.

I have endless admiration and awe when it comes to the 1976 romantic ASS

September 15, 2002 – Unlike the International Spy Museum, the Hirshhorn was almost bereft of people. It was cool and modern and cylindrical.

Nicole Wilson and I were there to attend the exhibit, Open City: Street Photographs since 1950.

I have been a shooter since I was a VWL (Very Wee Lad) and as my father was Bob Abraham, I grew up with a camera in my Formerly Little Hands. My first camera was a Nikkormat, as a child. Then I had a wonderful Nikon FA. I now use Nikon N90s bodies, Speedlight flashes, and fast Nikkor Lenses. God is my gaffer, I always say. There is very little lighting better than available.

Anyway, Nicole and I enjoyed the works. I am a slide photographer and so it was hard for me to consider the number of images that I have thrown away. Its mind-boggling, really: I must, over time and after editing, throw away well over 2/3rd of my slides. And that is after a quick once-over with my loupe.

Some of the images looked like some of the images I have not hesitated to trash. Oh, the humanity! I had been looking at the slides through the filter of my Agencies, so I was not exploring them as an artist.

Although I never through it would be true, I agree whole-heartedly with Miss Nicole when she commented that the only street photographs she liked were the archival, historical, images in black and white without modern cars.

I have the same prejeduce and adore modern editorial people photography (which cannot really sell in the stock world without a model release) but I prefer to do this sort of photography in black and while, removing the subject from any historical reference. I like to shoot weddings in this timeless way as well. Its very important to me. I hate much of the photography I see from the 70s and 80s. They seem to me to be heavy-handedly aware of its ephemeral timeliness.

When we finished, as the rent-a-cop spoke of the closing, lovely Nicole and I descended, exited, and then sat together in the Hirshhorn’s sculpture garden. We sat and looked at pretty little children. One gorgeous child in particular. Hapa. And androgenously beautiful with short curly dark hair and eyes welling with an odd and self-aware serenity and wisdom.

I love that child.

It was time for us to eat. We planned to go back to Dupont to Chinese.

Sarah Fina Connerley called. I called her. She told us she would like to join us for dinner. Nicole and I waited a while at corner of Seventh Street SW and Independence Avenue. Nicole and I were talking about Kylie Manogue. She danced. It was hot. Nicole never looks like she ever feels the heat, although she is always hot. I always feel the heat. She sang, “nah nah nah, nah nah nah-nah-nah” and the day passed.

The phone rang. The phone was head. Nicole spoke loudly and clearly into the handset of her phone, “we are at the corner of Independence and 7th!” A moment later, Sarah drove up, and we were off like a shot.

In The difference between art and obesity, Di asks why “in the era of Rubens (1577-1640), fat women were revered. Today, they are despised for being obese. What caused this change in cultural attitude?” Short answer, fat is fun to paint. Long answer to follow.

Artists paint zaftig women because the effects of gravity on muscle, sinew, flesh, breasts, bellies, buttocks, and thighs are fun to render.

Also, as an artist, one’s mastery of the flesh, the folds, the dimples, and the weight from the unrelenting pull of the earth can make you as an artist even more readily than being able to render fabrics and brocade.

As simple as that.

That is also why painters like capturing the old, the muscular, or the immaciated.

These are interesting things to paint. Downright fun, actually.

Gravity has its way with corpulence.

Photography is different, because skinny girls are more fun to shoot.

As simple as that.

I don’t know if I have shared that before my dad, Bob Abraham, was a photographer he was a painter.

“Google has unleashed SketchUp, a tool for creating, viewing, and modifying 3D images.” Via Silicon Beat

Although I got a late start, I enjoyed visiting The Writer’s Center Open House last Saturday from 12-3 as an instructor.

Since I am a new instructor, I got to wear the official name tag.

People walked up and asked me questions. The name tag is awesome because you know how shy I am. A conversation starter.

There was wine and a table full of snacks. Also lots of writing course instructors, all of whom I don’t know and didn’t have the opportunity to meet; although, when I perused the list of instructors, I was very impressed…

I am really looking forward to my series of one-day workshops on blogging and the blogosphere:

Schedule of Classes for Blogging Workshops

A Blog of Your Own: How to Write Your World
Start Date: 2/28/2006
Meeting Day: Tuesday
Time: 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM
Instructor: CHRISTOPHER J ABRAHAM
Level: Intermediate
Venue: Arlington Arts Center
Description: Okay, you have a blog and consider yourself a blogger. The next step is how to build your prestige, your readership, and your reputation. This class will demystify process of taking your humble personal blog and developing it into a respected voice, an influential opinion leader, and a popular resource. Being brilliant, funny, insightful, and inspired is just the beginning, learn how to help your hungry audience find you.…more

Blogs, Blogging, and the Blogosphere: Influence World Culture from the Comfort of Your Writing Room
Start Date: 4/11/2006
Meeting Day: Tuesday
Time: 7:00 PM to 9:30 PM
Instructor: CHRISTOPHER J ABRAHAM
Level: All Levels
Venue: Arlington Arts Center
Description: Blogs are no longer just online personal diaries. Blogs and bloggers have become powerful influences in world culture. Blogs have uniquely been able to jump the rails into traditional media and bloggers are now routinely being quoted in the news and on television. This one-day class will explain why blogs have changed the balance of media power and how you can cheaply, easily, and powerfully take advantage of it. There has never been a time when it is so easy and possible to become part of a global conversation.…more

Starting a Blog of One’s Own
Start Date: 2/21/2006
Meeting Day: Tuesday
Time: 12:00 PM to 2:00 PM
Instructor: CHRISTOPHER J ABRAHAM
Level: Beginner
Venue: Arlington Arts Center
Description: Writing for online consumption is much different from writing for the page. Learn how to write for the Internet and the blogosphere in this one-day class focused on the unique and powerful way the blogosphere communicated and how you can best leverage your own personal passion, your own personal artistic voice, and your unique perception of the world into an online organ that very well could change the world.…more

Thank you to the New York Times for the Ten Best Books of 2005. I am ashamed that I have yet to read Murakami’s latest, Kafka on the Shore. He’s amazing.

Kafka on the Shore By Haruki Murakami.
This graceful and dreamily cerebral novel, translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel, tells two stories – that of a boy fleeing an Oedipal prophecy, and that of a witless old man who can talk to cats – and is the work of a powerfully confident writer.

On Beauty By Zadie Smith
In her vibrant new book, a cultural-politics novel set in a place like Harvard, the author of ”White Teeth” brings everything to the table: a crisp intellect, a lovely wit and enormous sympathy for the men, women and children who populate her story.

Prep By Curtis Sittenfeld
This calm and memorably incisive first novel, about a scholarship girl who heads east to attend an elite prep school, casts an unshakable spell and has plenty to say about class, sex and character.

Saturday By Ian McEwan
As bracing and as carefully constructed as anything McEwan has written, this astringent novel traces a day in the life of an English neurosurgeon who comes face to face with senseless violence.

VeronicaBy Mary Gaitskill
This mesmerizingly dark novel from the author of ”Bad Behavior” and ”Two Girls, Fat and Thin” is narrated by a former Paris model who is now sick and poor; her ruminations on beauty and cruelty have clarity and an uncanny bite.

The Assassins’ Gate : America in Iraq By George Packer
A comprehensive look at the largest foreign policy gamble in a generation, by a New Yorker reporter who traces the full arc of the war, from the pre-invasion debate through the action on the ground.

De Kooning : An American Master By Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan.
A sweeping biography, impressively researched and absorbingly written, of the charismatic immigrant who stood at the vortex of mid-20th-century American art.

The Lost Painting: The Search for a Caravaggio Masterpiece By Jonathan Harr
This gripping narrative, populated by a beguiling cast of scholars, historians, art restorers and aging nobles, records the search for Caravaggio’s ”Taking of Christ,” painted in 1602 and rediscovered in 1990.

Postwar : A History of Europe Since 1945 By Tony Judt.
Judt’s massive, learned, brilliantly detailed account of Europe’s recovery from the wreckage of World War II presents a whole continent in panorama even as it sets off detonations of insight on almost every page.

The Year of Magical Thinking By Joan Didion.
A prose master’s harrowing yet exhilarating memoir of a year riven by sudden death (her husband’s) and mortal illness (their only child’s).

Check out this gorgeously-done process-driven sketch of a woman in flash. Do not miss. Safe for work unless your boss is a prig.

While you were learning about sports from your dad, my dad was teaching me how to sketch. I am an okay artist with a pencil (or chalk) as a couple of you know. Some of you don’t understand how its done. There are loads of things to consider such as gravity, shape, light, dark, perspective, the underlying physiology, and of course the way flesh lies, stands, and moves, especially on the nude.

This is a fascinating exploration of process in the sketch of a reclining nude woman, who starts life as tabula rasa, moves through the skeletal system, and then into the nude, and finally gets her kit on.

My friend Caitlin Phillips just got Boing Boinged and I just found out! Her company, Rebound Designs, was featured.

She makes amazing handbags made of book covers and also saucy, pervy, little pins that have a naughty lines from trashy romance novels such as, “eliciting a soft moan,” “coming, again and again,”
“shrieks of ecstasy” “God, he was perfect,” “part of their foreplay,” and “eliciting a strangled moan.”

Kurt Vonnegut write books I cherish and a sculpture I covet.

We have the exact same taste in women, apparently.

Figures.

I cannot agree with Kit Robinson’s belabored point, “the medium by which the content is delivered or exchanged directly influences the nature of that content and how it is processed.”

His belabored “duh” point may have been true as recently as five-years-ago, before aggregation, syndication, and the blogosphere, but I argue that his point has been untrue for much longer.

In much the same way that sampling has changed music and co-opting has always influenced the art world, the high-static anonymous confluence that occurs in the blogosphere, especially when consuming content through an aggregator or RSS reader, almost gurarantees a certain level of source- and data-corruption.

According to the Marshall McLuhan web site, what the “medium is the message” does not mean, “the channel supersedes the content in importance.”

To quote Mark Federman, Chief Strategist of the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology:

“Marshall McLuhan was concerned with the observation that we tend to focus on the obvious. In doing so, we largely miss the structural changes in our affairs that are introduced subtly, or over long periods of time. Whenever we create a new innovation – be it an invention or a new idea – many of its properties are fairly obvious to us. We generally know what it will nominally do, or at least what it is intended to do, and what it might replace. We often know what its advantages and disadvantages might be. But it is also often the case that, after a long period of time and experience with the new innovation, we look backward and realize that there were some effects of which we were entirely unaware at the outset. We sometimes call these effects ‘unintended consequences,’ although ‘unanticipated consequences’ might be a more accurate description.”

In other words, Kit, please try to work past the duh moments because there are no duh moments.

I chose my tagline, “Because the Medium is the Message,” because my blog’s purpose is to use my capacity as pattern recognizer to look and think ahead to anticipate consequences and render as few unintended consequences as possible.

Again, Federman succinctly defines “the medium is the message,” “We can know the nature and characteristics of anything we conceive or create (medium) by virtue of the changes – often unnoticed and non-obvious changes – that they effect (message.)”

I accept this definition much more readily than I do Kit Robinson’s, which is more along the lines of, “the blogger and the blog are limited by the perception of the blog as an unrespected conversational medium for delivering message.”

There is no duh there because this has not panned out in the blogosphere as blogs have been tremendously influential and subversive in politics, style, entertainment, news, and culture. Oftentimes directly (and often invisibly) influencing the influencers.

I hate it when writers use the word duh. If you are writing the inane, you shouldn’t be writing. That said, I don’t agree with Kit Robinon at all. None of his duhs are duhs and cannot be assumed nor may one assume that any of his background knowledge is common-knowledge. To introduce other “obscure post-modern words,” “there is nothing beyond the text,” by Jacques Derrida.

If you rewrite this, please be less conversational and try to assume that your reader knows very little if nothing of the topic.

At the end of the day, I tend to wonder if Kit Robinson might just be a frustrated, pissed off liberal. Of course, it might just be because Kit believes that “blogs are a medium that is much more a conversation than a lecture.”