I spent this afternoon at Brooklyn Artists Gym, a shared studio space that's usually empty - and I have 4000 sq ft to myself (there were two other woman painting today).

The picture I took of my large acrylic sketch/painting is "My Segmented Life" and is about 4 feet x 2.5 feet - my 1.3 mega-pixel camara is not able to get much better than this- I did the work in about 4 hours.   It's a self portait but I decided not to focus too much on detail.

I have been thinking of merging my web analytics work with painting (or maybe it's a bad idea - I don't know).  My idea was to take traffic segmentation to pages of a web site as it shown in packages like ClickTracks and do the same thing in my painting - except the segmentation is the parts of my life (I did not represent all the parts of my life - I just painted in a couple of segments as an after thought).

Was thinking of this idea for a couple of weeks - right after the artist Olan drew a map of me, describing my life (while we were talking about life) - decided to see if I could paint my life as visitor segmentation map - yet still hold it together as a painting (and avoid being too illustrative).

I don't take any of these works that seriously, but I do find that I'm liking my work more, the less I try to "finish" it.  I used to spend so much effort trying to finish paintings and lately I don't have time - it has to work the first time - I don't know what my mood will be next time I come in to paint on something - don't want to mix moods - would rather just do the painting in one sitting if I can.

So, incase you can't make it out, I painted the words "web analytics" in red in the lower left, "work" in the mid, upper left, "blogging" in the mid-upper right and "Seo" in the bottom right.

Went to the DADA show at the MOMA this afternoon.  I put a bit of work into my post then my blog ate the post - and so I'm just writing a short description. To me DADA is more an anti-movement than a real art movement - the attempt to take everyday objects and make them into Art seems as artificial as the art it was meant to replace. I can say this now, 80 years later - but at the time, the DADA artists thought they were doing everyone a favor - and maybe they were.  Except for a couple of works, most of the show is pretty much everyday objects that are made into Anti - Art (like Anti-Matter) by the artist. But just because a Duchamp pissing pot is symetrical, it does not mean it should be put into a museum - as the DADAist would have it.  The DADA movement was more important, historically, than for what it produced. I also looked briefly at Douglas Gordon's Timeline exhibition which was also at the MOMA. From the exhibition notes:

In his most well-known works, Scottish artist Douglas Gordon (b. 1966) addresses the familiarity and popularity of moving pictures by manipulating, reframing, and superimposing them to alter viewers’ perceptions. His works provoke feelings of anxiety, recognition, and amnesia with respect to the circumstances of the reception of media today. This retrospective of Gordon’s work presents thirteen significant works by the artist, including 24 Hour Psycho (1993), Between Darkness and Light (After William Blake) (1997), and Play Dead; Real Time (2003). By forcing new encounters with the familiar and confrontations with the willfully forgotten, Gordon exposes the distance between our dimmed, distorted memories and, perhaps, the truth—emphatically demonstrating that what he sculpts is not only media but time itself.

My take, the show seemed stupid to me - it was trying to take what looked like the 1930's mimialist paintings and illustrate a relationship that really happens much better in my mind than in film. I have been to many art openings recently, and with the proliferation of Computer Generated Films, many artists are trying to be deep filmmakers - but more often than not, what I see is noise - something I feel I should look at but really don't want to. But why force myself to look at something that's not attractive or interesting to look at at the first place?    The modern filmmaker can have the same problem as DADA tried to solve - taking the ordinary and making it into art.  In the case of DADA, they took garbage and said it was sublime.  Modern filmmakers like Douglas Gordon are taking the ordinary and trying to super-impose some fake meaning - a meaning that looks artificial - the same way the DADA stuff looked to me.  Give me something real - and natural and interesting to look at - not these Pseudo Movies.

Spent about 30 minutes really studying the Rebmrandt drawings and etchings in the following show (see below):

Rembrandt and His Circle: Drawings and Prints July 11, 2006–October 15, 2006 Robert Wood Johnson Jr. Gallery for Drawings and Prints, 2nd floor  

 From the Exhibition notes:

This exhibition celebrates the 400th anniversary of the birth of Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (1606–1669). Selected from the Museum's world-class collection, these 58 graphic works by the great 17th-century Dutch master and his pupils illustrate the range of Rembrandt's creative genius—his spontaneity, originality, and innovative approach to traditional media.

What I noticed was how much Rembrandt's drawings are poetical - as a natural extension of himself.   I see many of the drawings as "pre-paintings" and while I don't go into the strong light/dark thing that was popular at the time - I do appreciate the poetry of his drawings. Sometimes, there's touches of pigment to promote depth - something I would not have thought that Rembrandt needed to do - since his drawings are so strong, as they are.  But then I realized, there really is not limitation on what an artist can or should do, save the limitations they put on themselves.   If Rembrandt need some pigment to pull out a face or a Tiger's mane, who I am say it's not the right thing to do?

Spent a couple of hours at the Metropolitan Museum of Art this evening and discovered that I overlooked the Girodet Exhibition on my recent visits because I did not know about it.

Girodet: Romantic Rebel May 24, 2006–August 27, 2006 Special Exhibition Galleries, 2nd floor  

From the Exhibition Notes:

This is the first American retrospective devoted to A. L. Girodet-Trioson (1767–1824), a favored but rebellious pupil of Jacques-Louis David. Girodet’s idiosyncratic style fuses David’s Neoclassical ideal with his own prescient Romantic vision. A selection of approximately 100 paintings and works on paper reflects his originality and the diversity of his works, from mythological subjects to portraits and representations of Napoleon’s military triumphs.  

Here's the paintings I responded to the most . The Oath of the Horatii, 1786 Jacques-Louis David (French, 1748–1825) Toledo Museum of Art. I thought The Oath of the Horatii was a David painting - but this "copy" was also sorta an original and surpassed David, I'm told, in the transparancies in the background.  While David ran a tight ship, and made his students compete with each other - Girodet began to develop a dislike of David and decided to move away from his former master as soon as began to mature as an artist.  I think David's studio was probably a good place to be during the late 1780's - 1790's but if you wanted to develop your own individuality - you needed to break away from David, and that's what Girodet did. The Sleep of Endymion, 1791 Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson (French, 1767–1824) Musée du Louvre, Paris. It was hard to believe the same artist that painted in under David would also paint something so different than anything that David would have done, or approved of.  Of course, by the time Girodet painted The Sleep of Endymion, he was living in Rome, having won the Prix De Rome in 1789 (it was a good time to get away from Paris anyway - right?). Burial of Atala (répétition of 1808 original), 1813 Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson (French, 1767–1824) Musée Girodet, Montargis. The masterpiece in the show - the one painting that would cement Girodet's place in Art History.  One thing I noticed - there are artists that are important in their time, and go on to be famous for "all time" - like Velasquez, Titian, Michaelangelo, Raphael, Rubens, Constable, Rembrandt, etc.   Then there are no less deserving artists who are important for their time, but don't transend into universality - Girodet is one of these types of artists - though at moments he almost touches pure greatness. François-René de Chateaubriand, 1808 Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson (French, 1767–1824) Musée d'Histoire et d'Ethnographie, Saint-Malo   What can I say; I never read Chateaubriand but the image is very familar to me - and therefore I can say this painting is one of the more important one's in the show, to me, for that reason. Burial of Atala was probably my favorite painting in the show; everyone in NYC who is into art should go and see the Girodet: Romantic Rebel show - there's only three weeks left.  I'll probably go once more before the show closes.