Art and Family

In this 1866 cartoon by George Du Maurier from Punch, the caption says, "Mrs. Fred doesn't care how long she sits for her 'dear Fred,' so long as her 'darling Freddy' is in some safe place where he can't get into mischief."

A cartoon by Charles Dana Gibson shows the artist painting away while his wife or girlfriend waits nearby.

Balancing art with family can be a challenge. We artists owe a lot to those around us for their long-suffering patience. I understand how some artists need a separate studio, but I've always had my studio in the house, and I feel lucky that I could have my family around when I was working. Before we had kids, Jeanette would often read to me while I was painting. 

Jeanette Reading, 1985, Oil on panel, 8 x 10 inches

When my kids were little I set up a play space in the studio near the painting table. We always had toys and art supplies for them, and they built forts in the attic storage spaces. 

We brought along sketchbooks for them when we traveled as a family. One time in Venice the kids from the neighborhood invited them to join into their soccer game. 

In the studio, when I was occasionally in "concentration-mode," and my wife or kids asked me a question that I couldn't focus on, I tried to explain that it was OK for them to talk, but that I couldn't respond. 

It was pretty rare that I had to banish them from the studio, and that was usually when I was writing or concept-sketching or doing a radio interview. One time while I was talking to a paleontologist on the phone, I had to explain why there was a squeak toy going in the background.

Do you have a story of how you have reconciled the pull of your artwork with the needs of your family? Please share it in the comments!

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Previously on GJ: The Muse and the Marriage

World Beneath Podcast, Episode 3

It's Tuesday, time for the newest episode of the serialized audio dramatization of Dinotopia: The World Beneath. 

Sorry, the the episode is only up for a week, so it's no longer available on Soundcloud.

Arthur, Will, and Bix weigh the dangers of inviting Oriana on the expedition to explore the World Beneath.

Once the expedition team is assembled, they head down the Cargo Chute on a raft.

The route takes them through the bowels of Waterfall City and they emerge below the cascade.

They arrive at Black Fish Tavern, hangout of the shipwreck scavengers.

The Podcast Series
This acoustic adventure was produced by Tom Lopez, mastermind of the ZBS Foundation, with an original music track by composer Tim Clark.

The Christian Science Monitor called this production "A dazzling soundscape that does full justice to Gurney’s wondrous lost world… perfect family listening.”

Episode 4 arrives in a week. Each short episode will only be live online for one week, and then it will disappear.

If you'd like to purchase the full two-hour World Beneath podcast right now and hear all fifteen episodes back to back in a feature-length production, check out The World Beneath at ZBS Foundation website for the MP3 download. It's also available as a CD.

The Book
You can also order the original printed book from my web store and I'll sign it for you. (It ships via Media Mail within 24 hours of your order. US orders only for the book, please). The book is also available from Amazon in a 20th Anniversary Edition with lots of extras.

The Museum Exhibition is now on view
Many of these paintings are now on view at the Dinotopia exhibition at the Stamford Art Museum and Nature Center through May 25. I'll be in attendance at events on Feb. 28 and March 1. Read more about the events here on this blog.

Ten Principles of Fair Use

The College Art Association has just released a guidebook about the special circumstances when it's OK to use someone else's copyrighted artwork.

Called the "Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts," the short, free, PDF is the result of years of work from the Association's legal experts.

Here's a quick summary of 10 main principles that are covered in the document.

1. You don't need to worry about Fair Use if permission is already granted, such as work designated by a Creative Commons license, or work in the public domain, such as images published before 1923.

2. If you're writing a review or an analysis of a given work, you can show the work or quote necessary parts from it, as long as you give appropriate credit. Generally speaking, this kind of use is permissible if it involves "criticism, comment, teaching, or scholarship."

3. If you're a teacher, you can display a copyrighted work as part of a specific curriculum for a specific group of students.

4. If you make art, you can adapt or reference copyrighted material if you use only what you need, and alter it into a new medium, generating new artistic meaning.

5. It's generally OK to use copyrighted work if the use is transformative, meaning that it "adds something new, with a further purpose or different character."

6. Museums can show copyrighted works as part of their curatorial mission, as long as it's credited, and not downloadable in high resolution form.

7. Academic libraries and art schools can preserve digital copies for purposes of study, again as long as they're properly credited, and not released in high resolution form.

8. If you deliberately repurpose the work of others, you should be prepared to explain the artistic objective, and you should not claim to be the creator of those derivative elements.

9. Judges consider whether the derivative work is commercial or educational in nature, and whether the derivative work undermines the market for the copyrighted work.

10. None of these are absolute rules. Like principles of freedom of expression, there are plenty of gray areas, and judges may rule one way or another, depending on many factors. My personal disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer; these ten basic principles I've summarized here are necessarily oversimplified; they're not the last word on my personal opinion; and I recommend you read the whole document.

In an appendix to the publication, Peter Jaszi puts the principles of the Copyright Code in context by explaining how the rights of the creator are balanced against the needs of the culture at large:

"The goal of US copyright law is to promote the progress of knowledge and culture. Its best-known feature is protection of owners’ rights. But copying, quoting, recontextualizing, and reusing existing cultural material can be critically important to creating and spreading knowledge and culture. That is why there is a social bargain at the heart of copyright law. That bargain is: Our society offers creators some exclusive rights in copyrighted works, to encourage them to produce culture. The compensation that creators receive from exploiting their copyrights is important as an incentive to this ultimate end; it is not an end in itself."

Free PDF: Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts
Wikipedia on Fair Use
Thanks, Animation World Network

Benjamin Constant and Orientalism

Benjamin-Constant

The Montreal Art Museum has opened an exhibition of Orientalist painters, focusing on Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant (1845-1902). A journey to Morocco when he was a young man inspired him to paint exotic scenes of harems and desert soldiers.

José Villegas Cordero, The Slipper Merchant, 1872. Oil on canvas. 19 x 25.6 in. (48.2 x 65 cm)

The exhibition includes works by other Orientalists, including José Villegas Cordero (above), Henri Regnault, Mariano Fortuny, Delacroix, Georges Clairin, Jean-Paul Laurens, and.... 

.... a watercolor portrait by José Tapiró y Baró, who was featured on GurneyJourney last year.

Benjamin Constant, The Favorite of the Emir, (Washington, National Gallery of Art)

The sexual and cultural politics give contemporary art historians plenty to write about. The show is arranged thematically, with such topics as: "Colonial Diplomacy in Morocco" and "The Harem, Fantasies and Lies."

Leaving all that aside, the works have a lot to offer in purely painterly terms for artists attending the exhibition. Benjamin Constant's paintings are mostly large-scale works, often staged from a low eye level, with bold colors and patterns.

A 1902 article in Brush and Pencil about Benjamin Constant gives an example of how art historians a century ago were more attuned to subtleties of the picture-maker's art:

"His skill was devoid of trickery, which may not be truthfully said of the skill of such men as Fortuny and Madrazo of the Spanish school, Boldini of the Italian, or Makart of the Austrian. His methods were always 'legitimate,' but there were few subtleties of brush work which were not revealed to him. While he received most of his art instruction in the Atelier Cabanel at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, he was the pupil of Rembrandt more than of any other master. His painting of flesh had often the 'fatness' and firmness noticeable in most of the work of the great van Ryn. The peculiar technique obtained by dragging one tone of a color over another, or one color over another, is identical in many instances in the painting of both. The modern artist, however, seemed to strive to obtain brilliancy of effect through variety of color and through the contrast of varied textures more often than his seventeenth-century master. In this he was signally successful."

Links
Museum website Marvels and Mirages of Orientalism: From Spain to Morocco, Benjamin-Constant in His Time January 31 to May 31, 2015
The Globe and Mail describes the show as a "spectacular must-see."


Catalog: Benjamin-Constant: Marvels and Mirages of Orientalism

Touching the Art at the Prado

Diego Velazquez, Forge of Vulcan, Photo Daily Mail

The Prado Museum in Madrid has recreated several classic paintings so that visually impaired people can touch them. Sighted visitors can don blindfolds to experience them that way too.

The images were enhanced with a low bas relief using a 3D printing technique called Didú.

Museum site: Touching the Prado
Daily Mail: Gallery unveils specially created versions of classic paintings that blind people can 'see' by touching them
Related GJ Posts:
"Seeing with the Hands"
"Can Blind People Draw?"

Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends

Sargent, Dr. Pozzi at Home (detail), 1881. Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

A new exhibition of John Singer Sargent's paintings of friends and fellow artists just opened at the National Portrait Gallery in London, where it will continue through May 25.

Sargent, The Fountain, Villa Torlonia, Frascati, Italy, 1907,
Art Institute of Chicago

Curated by Sargent expert Richard Ormond, the show includes Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose and many other landmark paintings.

"John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) was the greatest portrait painter of his generation. Acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic, he was closely connected to many of the other leading artists, writers, actors and musicians of the time. His portraits of these friends and contemporaries, including Auguste Rodin, Claude Monet and Robert Louis Stevenson, were rarely commissioned and allowed him to create more intimate and experimental works than was possible in his formal portraiture. 

"This major exhibition of over seventy portraits spans Sargent’s time in London, Paris, Boston and New York as well as his travels in the Italian and English countryside. Important loans from galleries and private collections in Europe and America make this an unmissable opportunity to discover the artist’s most daring, personal and distinctive portraits." 

Good news, Statesiders! It will expand to 90 works when it continues at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, June 30-October 4. 

And yes, there's a catalog: Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends

Visualizing Sound Waves

In the music video "CYMATICS: Science Vs. Music," Nigel Stanford and his band perform a song on drums and keyboards. The sound waves of the instruments are visualized through a series of analog physics experiments. Although the effects look digital, they're not. Everything is captured in camera.

The experiments include a Chladni Plate, Speaker Dish, a Hose Pipe, Ferro Fluid, a Ruben's Tube. In the climactic shot, a stunt double dons a heavy Faraday suit next to a Tesla Coil. He safely attracts a high voltage arc, and jumps to make the arc skip to the ground. Those foregoing links take you to a series of behind-the-scenes videos that show how it's done, or you can read about it here.

Stanford says the video was inspired by the idea of synesthesia. "This got me thinking that it would be cool to make a music video where every time a sound plays, you see a corresponding visual element, " he says. "Many years later, I saw some videos about Cymatics - the science of visualizing audio frequencies, and the idea for the video was born."

Director Shahir Daud and cinematographer Timur Civan restrict the video to a limited palette of grays, and they alternate real time with slow motion.
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Link to the video on Vimeo and YouTube
Cymatics on Wikipedia
Nigel Stanford's new album: Solar Echoes

The Sleeping Dogs of Cecil Aldin

Cecil Aldin (1870-1935) was a British illustrator who loved to draw dogs.

He illustrated a book called Sleeping Partners featuring his dogs "Cracker," a white bull terrier, and "Micky," a dark Irish wolfhound. 

Micky was the tolerant type who would let his buddy walk all over him.

One of Aldin's teachers was Frank Calderon, who wrote one of the best books on animal anatomy. 

Aldin drew for the Illustrated London News, where he developed a following that later translated into print sales.

He used his own dogs and those of his friends for models. 

He called his own dogs "The Professionals" and visiting dogs "The Amateurs."

He would let them run loose in his big studio and wait patiently for them to settle into a sleeping position. He often did a quick outline from life and then elaborated it from memory later.

Aldin's dogs became so famous from his drawings that they received their own fan mail. When at last the bull terrier died, The Times wrote an obituary:

Cracker, the bull terrier, for many years the beloved companion and favourite model of the late Cecil Aldin, died July 31st, Mallorca. Deeply mourned.

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On the Web

The Life and Sleeping Partners of Cecil Aldin

Books

Animal Anatomy by Frank Calderon

Sleeping Partners: Cracker and Micky: Two Dogs with a Tale

The Rascal: Episodes in the Life of a Bulldog Pup

A Dog Day by Cecil Aldin

Dogs of Character by Aldin

Sleeping Dogs on GurneyJourney

Painting a Husky in Casein

Sketching a Sleeping Basset Hound

Embassy in Yemen Closes

Sad to see that the USA removed its ambassadors from Sanaa, Yemen today. It was just a few years ago that they had one of my paintings there as part of the Art in Embassies Program.

Here's my page on their website

Dinotopia museum exhibition opens this weekend

"Birthday Pageant" from Dinotopia: The World Beneath, Oil on canvas mounted to panel

A Connecticut newspaper has released a feature article about the upcoming Dinotopia exhibition at the Stamford Art Museum and Nature Center. I'll be attending for subscription events on Feb 28 (farm to table dinner) and March 1 (drawing workshop), and a public book signing event on Sunday afternoon at 3:30. 

The show consists of over 50 major paintings, plus sketches, maquettes, and fossil material. It runs from February 14 through May 25.

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Greenwich Time: "Stamford museum presents the world of 'Dinotopia'"

Museum website