Heh.
People keep tweeting this image at me. I don’t mind; it never fails to crack me up.
Sadly, it’s prescient. The good news is, I have a four day weekend, starting tomorrow (no ‘separation of church and state’ here — Easter is a biggie). The bad news is, I brought home a ton of work with a deadline of Monday.
A deadline? You say. But Weasel, you work in an office! I do, but once they figure out you can do artwork on short notice, you’re doooooomed. We’ve got the opportunity for some good free publicity — but only if I can cobble together a bunch of layouts in a hurry.
Oh well. I could use the money.
At first glance, I thought this artwork might have come from this lady. She’s an illustrator who sometimes lets her four-year-old finish Mom’s drawings. The result it pretty awesome.
I almost said ‘have a good weekend’ — but it isn’t really yet. See yez tomorrow.
March 29, 2018 — 9:46 pm
Comments: 4
Feh.
Well. That’s not how I had planned spending tonight.
I monitor the work account from home and got a message that someone had pinched a photo to use on our company website. A message from the photographer we pinched it from, alas.
These things can get nasty. I mean, I don’t blame photographers for being upset — the internet is still the Wild West, and people steal like the wind. I’m sure it’s frustrating trying to make a penny off your intellectual property and having to chase it all over cyberspace.
I borrow stuff all the time for the blog and I can only recall receiving a takedown once. On the other hand, the mutilations I inflict on other people’s work may well (ironically) count as transformative. In other words, by pissing all over them, I may succeed in making them legally mine.
But anyway, I’m just a weasel and a company is a company. I heard a horror story last year about a historic society similar to ours who paid a few thousand to get rid of an angry photog.
Not me. I just did my best grovel and made it go away. I grovel real good. It’s that Southern bullshit thing.
I like the pic. I did an images search of “weasel cringe” and got this. And yes, it is mine — from 2011. It still feels weird when I turn up my own stuff on a search.
March 28, 2018 — 9:17 pm
Comments: 8
A heroin habit would be cheaper
I still buy bits and pieces from my local art store. It’s more expensive than the online, naturally, but I don’t want him going out of business so I prop him up when I can.
I dropped by for some stuff this afternoon, and he’s hosting a watercolor competition. The prizes are selections of Daniel Smith watercolor tubes. You won’t laugh when you see what this stuff costs!
It’s handmade and they use a lot of genuine minerals, like lapis and turquoise. A little 15ml tube of the lapis will set you back, like, £25. The sets aren’t much better. They also sell sheets of paper with little dots of paint on, so you can try them out, and even those aren’t cheap.
I said to the guy, it’s come to something when Winsor and Newton is the cheapest brand you stock. And it’s true — other than the student grade sets, everybody seems to be going in for fancy hand-made fru-fru colors. Me, I’ve always been a Winsor and Newton kindofa gal, but hey. Free paint.
Anyhoo, the deal is they give you a card with, like, a dozen paint dots and you paint something using that. I didn’t hear about it until today and I have to get it done by Thursday and I picked a subject with a lot of fiddly background (foreground: chicken). So, if you’ll excuse me…
Have a good weekend watching planes and boats and stuff!
March 23, 2018 — 10:55 pm
Comments: 16
I didn’t know we had one of those…
Isaac Newton’s death mask. And by “we” I mean the Royal Society.
Several were made at the time of his death. You have to be careful about that, as sculptors regularly touched them up.
Like the famous l’Inconnue de la Seine, which has been (I suspect) heavily recarved. Nobody simpers in death.
I have been fascinated with death masks ever since I had a life mask made of myself in plaster of Paris when I was about twelve. By my mother’s entire special education class.
This went about as badly as you imagine, but it’s a story that needs telling with a lot of hand gestures and mime. And sound effects.
Anyway, I escaped with my life. Not sure what happened to the mask, though.
Today is the anniversary of Newton’s death, March 20, 1726 (or 1727 in the newfangled Gregorian calendar that was coming into use in his lifetime). If you look closely, you can just make out the dent in his head left by that apple.
That’s Uncle B’s joke.
March 20, 2018 — 9:50 pm
Comments: 12
Do I even need to say anything?
Rejoice! Our 44th president got himself put on a shower curtain this week!
No, seriously, that’s some tacky ugly shit. I tried to find a “contact sheet” of all the presidential portraits so you could see how badly this one stands out, but Wikipedia won’t list the last four in their article. The artists were privately employed so the images are not in the public domain. Who knew?
The best bit is watching snooty snoots like the New York Times try to pass this off as a work of…something other than tasteless eye rape. The cringe!
I know about his two different mock recreations of Judith Beheading Holofernes, substituting black women for Judith and white women for Holofernes. Meh. I went to art school. Nay, thou canst not shock me with irreverence. You’da thunk that would take somebody out of the reckoning for a presidential portrait, though, but oh well.
No, the REAL best bit? Kehinde Wiley — the ‘highest paid artist of his generation’ — may not even have painted it himself. He maintains a studio in China, where four to ten ‘assistants’ do the grunt work. Like paint the pictures.
There’s nothing new about artists using assistants—everyone from Michelangelo to Jeff Koons has employed teams of helpers, with varying degrees of irony and pride—but Wiley gets uncomfortable discussing the subject. “I’m sensitive to it,” he says. When I first arrived at his Beijing studio, the assistants had left, and he made me delete the iPhone snapshots I’d taken of the empty space. It’s not that he wants people to believe every brushstroke is his, he says. That they aren’t is public knowledge. It’s just a question of boundaries. “I don’t want you to know every aspect of where my hand starts and ends, or how many layers go underneath the skin, or how I got that glow to happen,” he says. “It’s the secret sauce! Get out of my kitchen!”
I assume he once painted his own pictures, in their entirety, in a similar kind of style. For some reason.
Oh, hey, Michelle’s is a corker, too. Not as aggressively tacky, but the likeness is awful.
February 13, 2018 — 9:00 pm
Comments: 31
It ain’t art
…but I sure am having fun!
I really like this thing as a monitor, just for tootling around the web. I’d like it even better if it was touch screen, but I suspect that’s what the expensive ones are for.
Have a good weekend, y’all!
January 26, 2018 — 10:03 pm
Comments: 7
I am now officially cooler than all y’all
Oh my god, you guys — I have wanted one of these since…since it was invented. That’s maybe 20 years ago now. It’s a monitor, but you draw directly on it.
Maybe that doesn’t sound all that keen, but it solves the big problem with computer tablet: you can look at your hand, or you can look at the monitor, but you can’t look at both at once. That makes it extremely hard to draw. Or write legibly.
As with other tablets, the main brand is Wacom and their monitor version is the Cintiq. And that sucker, in its 20″ form, is almost £2,000.
Enter the Chinese. I’ve bought a cheap knockoff — for all I know, made in the same factory as the Cintiq — for less than a quarter of the price. And it came with a snazzy glove. Well, part of one.
It came this morning. I was going to use it as a second monitor, but I’m awfully tempted to use it as my only monitor. It is Just That Good.
My main concern is going blind. No, really…I’m sitting with my nose practically pressed against the screen. And I’m loving it. My optomowotsit told me that my eyes weren’t deteriorating, they were just…stuck in the peasant lace-makers position from all the close work I do.
p.s. That is not my computer. It is not my hand. I stole them from here, and added my chicken. Because that’s the kind of thing you can do really fast WHEN YOU HAVE AN AWESOME MONITOR TABLET!!!
January 25, 2018 — 7:23 pm
Comments: 18
Rosa Bonheur, animalière
Yesterday, I mentioned Rosa Bonheur’s paint box. Perhaps I should say a word about Rosa Bonheur.
She’s been a favorite of mine since I found a little book of her work in a junk shop. She was a 19th C (1822-1899) French painter of animals, or animalière (I love that word and now I own it, FYI). Her father and all three of her brothers painted, but Rosa was a genuine superstar in her day.
She carried a license to wear men’s clothing, issued by the Paris police. Because she hung out in abbatoirs and stockyards (also, she was a committed old dyke). I don’t know what happened to women in Paris who were caught with trousers and no trouser license.
She left an enormous body of very competent work, but she’s been all but forgotten since her death. The main reason: her work was very popular in England, and the French press took to describing her and her work in English. As an insult. Yes, that shit is still going on.
Go check her out. And have a lovely weekend, everyone!
January 19, 2018 — 8:58 pm
Comments: 9
Oh yes, please!
Probably too late for this year, but here’s one for your aspirational shopping needs: Miss Havisham’s Curiosities. They do gift cards.
It’s an LA based artist/shop. Lots of genuinely vintage items, but the best are these custom teacups and saucers. Very nice bone china, lovely antique patterns and inspirational slogans like “please, go die” and “we hate your baby.”
Not cheap, naturally, but worth it.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I too got the Windows 10 Fall Creators’ Update yesterday and my computer is a mess *sad face*.
December 13, 2017 — 9:35 pm
Comments: 3
Holy krep!
This van appeared in a village near me this week. Nope, not a Photoshop job. There’s this guy who…does this on the back of dirty white vans. Here’s his FaceBook page if you want to see more.
Britain is lousy with white vans. It is the subject of many jokes. So he will never run out of canvas.
One of my earliest impressions of the difference between Britain and America? You know how we write “wash me” in the dirt on the back of a dirty car? I saw a filthy white van here with “also comes in white” written across the back.
November 22, 2017 — 10:03 pm
Comments: 15