Urban art brushes back vandalism

Savvy businesses employ talented graffiti specialists to block untidy tagging 

 

This building was painted with permission by several graffiti artists during the Hopscotch Festival earlier this. Tags used to cover the building, but not anymore.

 

AN ANGRY CARTOON SUN glares at pedestrians walking past Nauss Bike Shop on Agricola Street. Nearly illegible bubble letters claim an entire exterior wall. A desert landscape runs along the bottom. Thought has been given to filling the entire space with graffiti-style art.
For years, taggers targeted Nauss, costing the small business hundreds of dollars a year in paint to cover it up.

“We weren’t getting artists writing on our shop — we were getting kids who were making a mess,” Nauss manager Brent Halverson says. “You clean it off and it just gets tagged again.”
It became obvious to the long-time bike shop employee that a new strategy was needed.

Over the summer, Halverson put the call out to six local graffiti artists (also known as graffiti writers) to paint murals on the bike shop.

“I knew that it would at least be an improvement to cover it up with something more colourful, more attractive, and hopefully get locals artists and the community involved in the project.”
He pitched the project to the shop owner, who didn’t like the idea at first, but eventually came around.

Nauss hasn’t been tagged since the murals went up.
The shop is one of several small businesses on the Halifax peninsula that are using an unwritten code to their advantage.
In general, graffiti writers across North America follow a series of unwritten rules. They don’t tag houses, religious structures, memorials or tombstones. And they won’t tag over another tag. It’s called “crossing out,” and it’s considered disrespectful.

Following that logic, graffiti artists won’t paint over a mural unless they can improve on what was there before.
There’s also a rule that writers should respect mom and pop businesses, Halverson adds. But not everyone does.

After the Nauss murals went up, an unsolicited fat-lettered tag known as a “throw up” appeared on the bakery next door.

Murals can prevent tagging, but they may also attract attention to a space, giving the impression that graffiti is welcome on blank surfaces nearby. Nothing is guaranteed.

Just over a year ago, George Kapsalis, owner of the Paper Chase Newsstand and Cafe on Blowers Street, tried the same strategy as Halverson, with mixed results.

For as long as Kapsalis can remember, one wall of his cafe, located in an alley, has been a tag magnet. Pressure washing the wall didn’t help.

The tags always came back.

So when a young graffiti artist approached Kapsalis with a portfolio of his work, the owner decided to give him a shot. The artist painted a series of graffiti-style murals on the wall. Kapsalis paid for his materials and gave him “a little something for his trouble.”

“Instead of somebody doing it that I have no control over, at least I’ll allow someone that has some type of artistic value to put something there that might dissuade other people from tagging it,” the cafe owner says.
“Doing something like that is not going to stop everybody from tagging — people who have no sense of honour or code or whatever. But I weighed it out and thought that was my best option.

“There’s some kind of code. I don’t really know. But so far, so good, you know?”

His business partner and wife isn’t so quick to agree. She points to a tag on the wall at the end of the alley. “This is new,” she says.

The artist left empty space above and below the murals. The new tag appeared in the empty space below. Still, one tag in one year is certainly an improvement.

According to one local graffiti writer, people will tag any empty space. He didn’t want his name or alias used, so we’ll call him John.

“Clean surfaces invite tags,” John says. “Had the mural filled the space fully, it is less likely that third party tags would appear there.”

“Writers by and large respect murals. To tag a mural is a sign of disrespect within the writers circle and rarely happens.”

Another local graffiti artist — one of those who painted Nauss — concurs with John. He didn’t want his name used, but his alias is Bike More.

“There is a good chance that the mural won't get touched, but that still leaves the rest of the building open,” Bike More says.

“If the space is not entirely filled, it will be,” he adds. “If a business commissions or grants permission, it is wise to ensure that all of the negative space is filled. This is even true for graffiti writers practicing on legal walls. If you do not ‘take out the spot,’ it will catch tags.”

The unwritten rules in the subculture stem from the New York City graffiti scene in the 1970s and 1980s, which was popularized by movies like Wild Style and documentaries like Style Wars, John explains. “The rules are somewhat outlined in those films and still remain gospel for the most part,” he says. Both artists emphasize no graffiti rules are universal, however.

“Tagging can never be stopped completely as long as humans are being taught the written word,” John says. “But maybe society can impact the nature of the output through tolerance rather than opposition.”

Halverson gave Bike More and his friends the freedom to paint what they wanted as long as they did it well. Down the road, the Nauss manager hopes to build removable plywood panels on the exterior of the building so artists can paint murals and later sell their work.

The idea of businesses commissioning or permitting murals in order to prevent tagging resonates with John and Bike More.

“A good way to help establish respect is by allowing people to paint (a wall) as they want, setting rules such as ‘if you tag my building, the wall will be taken away from you’ or something similar,” Bike More says. “It is all about working together here.”

“I feel like it's beneficial to all,” John says. “For the business owner, it allows their business to become a landmark and visually unique. For the artist, it showcases their abilities and legitimizes their credibility as an artist. For the community, it brings character to the area and facilitates acceptance and appreciation of public art.”

Tattoos form missing ink between dying art and the art of dyeing

Time lines … Lauren Winzer and her handwritten tattoos. Photo: Tamara Dean

IS HANDWRITING set to ''vanish from our lives altogether?'' Are emails and texts robbing us of ''the most powerful sign of our individuality?'' So asks Philip Hensher, author of the new book The Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting.

But Lauren Winzer would beg to differ. A tattoo artist with Sydney's Hunter and Fox, she says a growing number of people over the past year have requested their loved ones' handwriting be permanently marked on their bodies.

''It's definitely more popular, it's always something meaningful that they want to get tattooed in handwriting,'' Winzer says. For instance, she has had mothers request their own names, as written by their kindergarten-aged children, be inked on them.

Pure appeal ... handwritten tattoos by children and friends are all the rage.

''And two weeks ago, a guy came in; his friends know him specifically for having really horrible handwriting. He drew the stencil of the phrase, 'I've had a gutful' … in his own handwriting, and I just traced on top of it. It's [the writing] shocking. There's two 'a's in there, and they're completely different from each other. He was like, 'This is kind of what I'm known for; I'm going to kind of embrace it.''

 

The chief executive of Bondi Ink, Wendy Tadrosse, has witnessed the same trend. She says, in the case of children's handwritten tattoos it is the ''purity'' inherent in the frequently wonky scrawls that account for their appeal. ''You just look at it and … 'Yeah, that's just pure. It's just innocence'.''

Tadrosse has also had several sailors recently come in to have love letters written decades ago by their grandmothers, to their grandfathers, tattooed on their ribs.

Personal touch ... a man known among his friends for his terrible handwriting decided to have it tattoed on him.

''They've had their grandparents pass away, and it's love quotes and sonnets and things like that,'' she says. ''I would never think to do something like that. Usually you'd have a symbol of the grandmother, not actually her handwriting.''

According to Winzer, these tattoos do, indeed, fulfil what Hensher says is one of the most meaningful functions of handwriting - to show how ''distinctively human'' we are.

As an example, she gives the two tattoos she has of her best friend JJ's handwriting; the phrases ''Sick as hell'' and ''Pretty wise'' - which are inside jokes - on the front of her ankles.

''Because it's a boy's handwriting, it's just overly shitty looking. I think it's kind of harder for boys to write, so when they actually put the effort to try and write something out, it's kind of cute.''

Art: Wealth of works, all by women

The Alter collection - 500 pieces - debuts at the Academy of the Fine Arts.

"Sea Shells, Gold Fish and Rain" (1993), oil on canvas by Janet Fish. It mixes still life and landscape. 
Linda Lee Alter's collection of art by women, 25 years in the making, makes its public debut at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts under the title "The Female Gaze." 

At the entrance to the show, visitors are greeted by a monumental ceramic "grandmother" figure by Viola Frey that unequivocally announces not only that one has entered the domain of female art, but that this art easily holds its own with any other. As one quickly comes to realize, the "gaze" in question refers not only to women expressing how they experience daily life and the world, it embodies the intelligence that shaped the collection.
Alter isn't an art historian or exclusively a connoisseur; she's also an artist. Yet her vision goes beyond even a female artist's perspective.

The nearly 500 works in a variety of media, which she gave to the academy two years ago, incorporate an emphatically humanist point of view.

Aesthetic judgments played a role in her acquisitions, but the unifying thread is a concern for how people, especially women, get on in life. This, not just the desire to give female artists more visibility, is what gives her collection special appeal.

Curator Robert Cozzolino had the not-so-enviable task of figuring out how to shape this mass of art into a workable show. The collection itself offered only one hint: It's mostly representational, strong on narration and symbolism. Abstraction isn't much of a presence.

It isn't a collection of stunning masterpieces, either, though overall quality is consistently high. Judging by the catalog, which includes all 185 artists Alter acquired, the art that was left out would have made an equally satisfying show.

Cozzolino decided to organize the 244 works into three sections - Selfhood and Community, Politics, and Nature and Ecology. The first could easily be two categories, while the other two are broadly elastic.
Nevertheless, they serve the intended purpose, to impose structure and make the show comfortable to navigate. Alter began to collect about 1985, by which time the feminist movement had proved the argument that female artists were woefully underrepresented in museums and galleries and in the art market.

She says she was guided by several principles - to form a collection she eventually would place in a museum, to buy art she wanted to live with, and to patronize artists in the Philadelphia region as well as those known nationally.

She also decided to concentrate on the last four decades, which gives the exhibition a contemporary flavor.
Both the show and the catalog suggest that over 25 years she bought art by just about every prominent woman who exhibited solo in Philadelphia. Off the top of my head, I couldn't think of anyone she missed.
While local artists are strongly represented, there are enough national figures to preclude provincialism. Besides Frey, they include Louise Bourgeois, Joan Brown, Kiki Smith, Gladys Nilsson, Alice Neel, Judy Chicago, Miriam Shapiro, Beatrice Wood, and Faith Ringgold.

The collection's humanist dimension emerges in several ways. One is the generous percentage of minority artists, especially African Americans and Asian Americans. Another is the large number of works that address motherhood and female self-image, particularly nudes and self-portraits.

Two examples: As a declaration of pride and self-assurance, Diane Edison's semi-nude self-portrait is the most assertive, even combative, image of its kind I've ever encountered. And Neel's full-body nude portrait of a pregnant friend, Claudia Bach, posed as an odalisque, defines a genre no male painter could hope to equal, even in the unlikely event one was drawn to the subject and brave enough to attempt it.

Alter's collection oozes empathy both for female artists and for women's lives. It gives the expected attention to traditional "women's media," particularly fiber art, in just the right proportion.

In fiber, Alter chose examples - such as Ringgold's painted story quilt and Shapiro's collage image of a dress - that combine fabric and painted elements in a way that de-stigmatizes the dominant medium.

Yet the collection doesn't go overboard on explicitly feminist polemics, with two prominent exceptions: a plate from Judy Chicago's Dinner Party and Elaine Reichek's embroidered sampler that caustically decries female "bondage" dating back to Adam and Eve.

The Nature and Ecology section is perhaps the most amorphous of the three themes and also the least manifestly "female."

It includes landscapes and still lifes, and an effusively colored painting by Janet Fish that mixes both. An exquisitely detailed pencil drawing of trees by Emily Brown and another of coastal rocks by Edna Andrade, both of which represent intense scrutiny of nature, also stand out as exemplars of female sensibility.

The Alter gift has been integrated into the academy's full collection, not segregated as an autonomous entity; some pieces from it will always be on view, the museum says.

This approach is not only sensible, it responds constructively to the nagging question of whether regarding "art by women" as a genre has become a patronizing anachronism.

Female artists haven't yet achieved full parity with men, in museums or in the marketplace, and, as the Alter gift demonstrates, art by women does deal with themes that men avoid. Yet the gift also confirms that, in aesthetic terms, female artists no longer should be judged by a standard peculiar to them.

Keepsakes await at Berea's Velvet Box Art Glass Studio

One of the Jennifer Pitts' creations that has won several awards.

BEREA - The Velvet Box Art Glass Studio in Berea came by its name quite viably.

"I wanted to create jewelry that you don’t hang on a bathroom door, but pieces that you keep to pass on to your children and grandchildren. I want the purchaser to keep them in a velvet box."

Jennifer and John Pitts own the hidden gem that is tucked in with industrial-looking buildings on West Bagley Road. The studio, located at 794 W. Bagley Road, has a mini-open house from 3-9 p.m. Dec. 7. The studio will offer a "buy two, get one free" bead special at the event.

The two create sparkling and unusual European "add-a-bead" glass beads that can be worn on bracelets and necklaces as well as specially made sculptured glass jewelry. The gallery also has artwork from local photographers, sculptors, potters and blacksmiths.

Jennifer makes beads that will fit any type of bracelet or necklace. Some the designs have raised swirls and sculptured beads. Her Tree of Life piece is a wearable glass sculpture with a highly detailed, multi-dimensional tree.

"The raised swirl design is technically very challenging. It changes the way light hits the glass and really shows off your bracelet," she said. "We also have silver inside our beads. They are truly different."

John is the silversmith. He places a solid sterling silver core in the beads. He also does fused glass work, which is done in a very strong flame. He cools and then heats layers of glass, which fuse together creating distinctive patterns.

"He hand paints designs on them, which almost no one does," Jennifer said. "He then coats them with a clear covering. They are extremely durable."

Some of John’s favorite hand-painted pieces include a light house and windmill.

These are some of the handmade beads available at the studio.

 An out-of-the-ordinary creation they offer is the memory gem. The glasswork mingles ashes from a loved one or pet into a molten-glass design. Jennifer created the first piece after her father died. She avoided the original vial that contained his ashes. As she was creating some glasswork, she thought of what her father would tell her when they looked at the sky years ago.

"The brightest stars in the sky were loved ones we lost watching over us," she said. "I created a heart as dark as the night sky with thousands of glittering silver stars and gorgeous aurora borealis streaks. Into those layers I incorporated Dad’s ashes and a diamond he gave Mom. When I wear it, I feel him close to my heart and I know he’s there watching over me."

The studio also offers classes for individuals and groups. The Glass Experience class includes an instructor, a torch that anyone can use during the class, refreshments and appetizers — giving you a first-hand experience working with glass. Other classes are available, or customers can rent a torch during the day.

Store hours are 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday-Friday. It is open on weekends when the couple is not at an art show. Sundays are by appointments.

Harper art heart of Todd Oldham book

This image is from designer Todd Oldham's new book, 'Charley Harper's Animal Kingdom' (Ammo Books, $100). / Provided 

When the famed designer Todd Oldham published “Charley Harper: An Illustrated Life” in 2007, he created an international interest that continues to grow for the late Cincinnati nature-oriented artist/illustrator. In fact, helped by that book’s success, Harper artwork and products have become a million-dollar business.

The book helped new generations recognize Harper as a visionary midcentury modernist, because of the stylized, uncluttered, colorful and geometric-shaped precision of his work. This happened at a fortuitous time, just as modernist art, design and architecture was being rediscovered.

Oldham, a Texan whose studio is in New York City, will be in Cincinnati Saturday to introduce and sign copies of his brand-new publication, “Charley Harper’s Animal Kingdom,” at Cincinnati Art Museum and Joseph-Beth Booksellers.

Like the trend-setting first book, this is a large-size monograph. The images have largely been unseen or little seen by the general public, drawn from the Charley Harper Art Studio archives in Cincinnati or from collectors of Harper paintings.

Animal Kingdom, which has more than 300 reproductions of artwork, differs from “An Illustrated Life” in an important way. It assumes the readership is now familiar enough with Harper to not need much introduction into his life and background. Other than a short foreword by Oldham, it lets the illustrations speak for themselves.

In conjunction, the art studio, run by son Brett Harper, is releasing a related, limited-edition portfolio of four prints. “This is really Charley as an art star,” Oldham said in a phone interview of the new book.

“When we did the first book, he was very much an art star to me, but a lot of the world wasn’t familiar with his name at that point. That book showed his process and a lot of other things. This book just shows Charley as an art star.”

Oldham, 51, has designed successful fashion, furniture and accessories lines for major corporations as well as working on hotels and nightclubs. He became a Harper fan as a child, seeing his illustrations for 1961’s “Giant Golden Book of Biology.”

He met Harper after coming here in 2002, and developed a friendship and working relationship that lasted until Harper’s death in 2007 at age 84.

Working on the first book, Oldham got to know Harper, his late artist/wife Edie and Brett. And he knew animals would be a perfect theme for a follow-up publication.

“It was fun to be at dinner with them, hear a bird call, and have them examine it for good chunk of time to determine what bird it was,” he recalled. In those last years, Oldham became a veritable family member.
Charley Harper Art Studio has licensed Oldham to contract with companies to produce Harper-related design objects. Next year, Designtex will produce Harper textiles and wall coverings, Birch Organic Fabrics will make cotton fabrics for quilts, and Gold Leaf Design Group will offer 3-D figurines.

Review: Lee's 'Life of Pi' is inspiring 3-D art

This film image released by 20th Century Fox shows Suraj Sharma as Pi Patel in a scene from "Life of Pi."

"Life of Pi" is one of those lyrical, internalized novels that should have no business working on the screen. Quite possibly, it wouldn't have worked if anyone but Ang Lee had adapted it.

The filmmaker who turned martial arts into a poetic blockbuster for Western audiences with "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and made gay cowboys mainstream fare with "Brokeback Mountain" has crafted one of the finest entries in his eclectic resume in "Life of Pi," a gorgeous, ruminative film that is soulfully, provocatively entertaining.

Lee combines a lifetime of storytelling finesse with arguably the most artful use of digital 3-D technology yet seen to bring to life Yann Martel's saga of an Indian youth lost at sea with a ravenous Bengal tiger aboard his small lifeboat. It's a delicate narrative with visceral impact, told with an innovative style that's beguiling to watch and a philosophical voice that compassionately explores how and why we tell stories.

Our playful, not-always-reliable narrator here is Pi Patel, played by newcomer Suraj Sharma as a teen and as a grown man reflecting back on his adventure by Irrfan Khan. As a youth, Pi, his parents and brother set out from India, where the family runs a zoo in a botanical garden, to Canada. Pi's father brings along some of his menagerie on their voyage, including a tiger named Richard Parker with which Pi had a terrifying encounter as a boy.

Their ship sinks in a storm, with Pi the only human survivor aboard a lifeboat with an orangutan, a hyena, a zebra with a broken leg and Richard Parker. Survival of the fittest thins their numbers into a life-and-death duel, and eventually an uneasy truce of companionship, between Richard Parker and Pi.

This could be a one-note story — please Mister Tiger, don't eat me. Yet Lee and screenwriter David Magee find rich and clever ways to translate even Pi's stillest moments, the film unfolding through intricate flashbacks, whimsical voice-overs, harrowing sea hazards and exquisite flashes of fantasy and hallucination.
Lee used real tigers for a handful of scenes, but Richard Parker mostly is a digital creation, a remarkably realistic piece of computer animation seamlessly blended into the live action. The digital detail may be responsible for most of Richard Parker's fearful presence, though no small part of the tiger's impact is due to the nimble engagement of Sharma with a predator that wasn't actually there during production, a task hard enough for experienced performers, let alone a youth with no acting experience.

Digital 3-D usually is an unnecessary distraction not worth the extra admission price. In "Life of Pi," like Martin Scorsese's "Hugo," the 3-D images are tantalizing and immersive, pulling viewers deeper into Pi's world so that the illusion of depth becomes essential to the story.

Not all of the images live up to Lee's digital tiger or 3-D wizardry. Water is notoriously hard to simulate through computer animation, and the waves crashing down around the sinking ship or tossing Pi's lifeboat about have an unfinished, cartoony look. Still, Lee more than compensates with a world of visual wonders, from the simple image of a swimmer framed from below as though he's stroking his way across the sky to a mysterious island populated by a seemingly infinite number of meerkats.

The rest of the cast is mostly inconsequential, including Gerard Depardieu in a fleeting role as a cruel ship's cook. The other people in Pi's life are filtered through this unusual youth's eyes, each of them catalysts in the development of his deep spirituality, which blends Hinduism, Christianity, Islam and other contradictory influences into a weirdly cohesive form of humanism.

Like Martel's novel, the film disdains our inclination to anthropomorphize wild animals by ascribing human traits to them, and then turns around and subtly does just that. Friendship cannot possibly exist between a hungry tiger and a scrawny kid alone on the open water, yet for that boy, if not the cat, the need for togetherness, some commune of spirits, is almost as strong as the need for food and water. The ways in which Lee examines the strange bond between Pi and Richard Parker are wondrous, hilarious, unnerving, sometimes joyous, often melancholy.

Pi's story may not, as one character states, make you believe in God. But you may leave the theater more open to the possibilities of higher things in the life of Pi, and in your own.

"Life of Pi," a 20th Century Fox release, is rated PG for emotional thematic content throughout, and some scary action sequences and peril. Running time: 126 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.

Smithsonian gathers best art of Civil War era

This undated handout image provided by the Smithsonian American Art Museum shows Frederic Edwin Church's 1861 oil on paper, "Our Banner in the Sky," part of a major exhibition on how artists represented the Civil War and how the war changed art. The piece is on view in Washington now through April and then moves to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Paintings and photographs depicting the raw reality of the Civil War marked a major change in American art that tossed out romantic notions of war.

Some of the finest artists of the day, including Winslow Homer, Eastman Johnson, Frederic Church and Sanford Gifford, painted landscapes and scenes of everyday life to show how the war transformed the nation. Their best works, along with some of the first photographs of soldiers killed on the battlefield, have been gathered by the Smithsonian American Art Museum for a major exhibition on how artists represented the war and how the war changed art. “The Civil War and American Art” is on view in Washington through April and then moves to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Curator Eleanor Jones Harvey spent years researching the project and borrowing many of the 75 works featured in the show. It features Civil War scenes from Washington, Baltimore, New York, and points south at Fort Sumter, Charleston, S.C., Georgia and Virginia.

Rather than make portraits of war generals and heroes, however, artists of the day focused on the common man. There was a realization that “art that presents normal human beings, rather than celebrities and luminaries, carries more lasting weight.”

One painting in the show, Gifford’s 1862 painting “Preaching to the Troops,” depicting a scene near Washington, was displayed in the Oval Office for 13 years.

Photographs had perhaps the greatest impact on art of the era. Battlefield photographs by Alexander Gardner showing piles of dead soldiers and images by George Barnard showing Charleston in ruins destroyed any romantic notions of war being a heroic adventure. Such images were shown in art galleries in the Northeast during the war and made people realize “this is not what I signed up for,” Harvey said.

“Photographs from Antietam make it stunningly impossible for anyone associated with the New York art world to make romantic pictures of the war because they look like lies,” Harvey said.

Art also changed the rhetoric about war by depicting gruesome reality. Raw imagery shown to President Abraham Lincoln likely influenced the words he drafted for his Gettysburg Address, Harvey said.

“There’s a realization that this is a war that left nobody unscathed,” she said. “As a result, as rich as you are, there is no insulation from the impact of the war.”

Landscape paintings reflected the mood of the nation. Artists depicted scenes of nature and weather to represent the war’s destruction and impact. There are layers of coding in such paintings, Harvey said, as with Church’s depiction of ice as Northern fortitude, an erupting volcano to represent slavery and the tropics to represent the South.

At the same time, Homer and Johnson addressed slavery and emancipation with scenes of ordinary people, including a slave family escaping to freedom on horseback and a slave man reading from the Bible.

In postwar America, Homer painted a scene of former slaves meeting with their former mistress, renegotiating their relationship to involve wages. “Homer is saying, ‘until this gets fixed, we’re not done,’” Harvey said.

Parrish Art Museum: Herzog & de Meuron's new gallery opens

Designed by Herzog & de Meuron, the new Parrish Art Museum is an appropriately sleek and low-key addition to the Hamptons cultural landscape. The exterior of the Herzog de Meuron-designed Parrish Art Museum Although

New York state's Parrish Art Museum dates from 1898, it was given a new lease of life this month with the opening of its new site in the small village of Water Mill. The relocation means the gallery now has 12,200 square feet of exhibition space at its disposal - three times the space that was available to it at its former home iin Jobs Lane in Southampton.
This time round, however, the buidling itself is as much a draw as the artworks within it. Designed by Herzog & de Meuron, the 615ft-long single-storey building is a sweeping, simple barn-like structure far more restrained in style than many of the architects' previous undertakings (including Beijing's Bird's Nest Olympics Stadium).

Initial plans for the museum were more architecturally extravagant but had to be scaled back when sufficient funding couldn't be raised. Now open to the public, the building's ten separate gallery spaces will house works from the Parrish Art Museum's collection of 2,600 paintings, sculptures and works on paper by many of America's most influential artists, as well as a series of temporary exhibitions. Running until January 13, the main current exhibition is dedicated to the London-born, US-based artist Malcolm Morley. More generally, the gallery devotes part of its permanent collection to showcasing the story of America's influential artists' colony Eastern Long Island.

The Hamptons has this month enhanced its cultural appeal with the opening of the new Parrish Art Museum. Although the museum was founded in 1898, it has relocated from its former home in Southampton in New York to the small village of Water Mill, also in New York. It is now housed in a 34,400sq-foot, Herzog & de Meuron-designed building. Resembling an extended barn, it contains seven galleries and its permanent collection is dedicated to telling the story of the artists’ colony at Eastern Long Island.

The BSP’s New Art Collections

The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) has partnered with the Metropolitan Museum of Manila in showcasing its latest collection of newly acquired artworks.

Its latest exhibit, “Enduring Commitment: New Acquisitions (2009-2012), the BSP Art Collection,” presents 38 of its new paintings and works of sculpture.

“Representing established and emerging local artists, the exhibition is an engaging visual feast of the various expressions that may have come out in the last decade of the 20th century, and in recent years,” the Metropolitan Museum (MET) explained.

The exhibit will run until December 15, 2012 at the MET’s Galeriya Bangko Sentral.

“Enduring Commitment” showcases some of the works of Filipino National Artists, including Arturo Luz, Jerry Elizalde Navarro and Benedicto Cabrera.

The exhibit also presents the winners of the first Tanaw BSP Art Competition held in 2010 — Gary Custodio (“The Rebuilders”), Melvin Culaba (“Unresolved”), and Brave Singh (“Pagsabay sa Paghakbang ng Ating Mga Pangarap”).

Women artists are likewise represented in the exhibit through the works of Phyllis Zaballero, Yasmin Sison, Geraldine Javier, Isa Lorenzo and Maxine Syjuco.

Zaballero’s “Handaan” (2011) elaborates on fellow artist Nunelucio Alvarado’s take on the Filipino eating culture. While Alvarado’s “Carinderia” (2009) features an intensely vibrant scene at a local eatery, Zaballero’s work shows a sumptuous display of festive treats and local celebratory dishes such as pancit and lechon.

An artwork by Rodel Tapaya, CCP Artist Awardee for 2012, is likewise included in the exhibit. Tapaya’s painting, “The Miracles of Lumawig,” is an earth-toned interpretation of the works of Lumawig of Bontoc, one of the more enduring characters in indigenous creation myths.

According to the BSP’s monthly newsletter, The Central Banker: “Comprising of conceptual, figurative, abstract, and hyper-realist art, (the paintings) are a fascinating exposition of the mental workings and motivation of the Filipino artist.”

The BSP art collection is a rich source of inspiration and pride for present and future generations of Filipinos, according to the Metropolitan Museum.

“Consisting of over a thousand artworks, the collection remains one of the most significant institutional collections of Philippine art today,” the Museum added.

Here are some more facts about the BSP art collection that enthusiasts may be interested to know:
* Some of the first groups of paintings acquired by the Bangko Sentral in the late 1950s to be displayed in its offices were of the so-called “Mabini art.” These paintings were bought along Mabini Street in the Ermita district, where many of Manila’s art galleries were concentrated during that time.

* The biggest painting in the BSP art collection is “Pagdiriwang” (oil, 1956) by National Artist Jose Joya. It measures 515 X 700 centimeters and currently hangs at the main lobby of the Philippine International Convention Center.

* The BSP Painting Collection is among a few public collections in the country that hold representative works of all the National Artists of the Philippines in the field of painting.

* The BSP holds a number of 19th century religious paintings in its art collection. For example, the works of a master painter from Bohol is well represented in the collection, with “14 Stations of the Cross” and other portraits of saints such as those of “Saint Anthony Abbot” (circa 1840) and “St. Joseph” (1830). It would be interesting to know that despite his anonymity (being only referred to as the “Bohol Master”), the master painter from the Visayan province is indeed very prolific. His “14 Stations of the Cross” is presently on display at the 4th Floor of the Bangko Sentral’s 5-Story Building.

America's art cities

Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum is an artwork in itself.

 

Pay a visit to Washington DC's Smithsonian American Art Museum, and you can gaze at the bright splendour of 'Cape Cod Morning', a watercolour of light and hope crafted in 1950 by the iconic New York painter Edward Hopper. In some ways, this happy vision where a woman peers through her window at the arrival of a New England day is a neat encapsulation of the USA as a whole: prone to optimism, ever looking for the next dawn.

But it is also a reminder that, though it is rarely the first of its facets to be celebrated, America has long produced great artists and glorious art. True, these titans of the canvas are often lost behind a crowd scene of other US legends gleam-toothed actors; hoop-holing sportsmen and podium-posing politicians. But they are there all the same: Georgia O'Keeffe with her floral close-ups, Big Apple vistas and New Mexico landscapes; Jackson Pollock with his intense swirls; Andy Warhol and his celebrity-inflected pop art.
And with them comes a whispered secret: should you choose, you can indulge a passion for painting and sculpture for the staunchly traditional or the belligerently modern; for home-spun works or international masterpieces in just about every city in the country.

You can do this in the cultural temples of Washington DC, New York and Chicago - or in less-known galleries from Seattle to Birmingham via Boise and Wichita. You will find high concepts and bluntly provocative daubings, sharp slices of insight and bleak, impenetrable nightmares. But if visual culture is your thing, America has much to offer. The only question, perhaps, is where to start

HIDDEN GEMS
The idea of America as a country infused with art is brought home by the numerous kernels of culture located in cities that do not sit immediately in the holidaymaker's path.

Providence, for example, has the Museum of Art at the Rhode Island School of Design. Here the latest exhibition, America in View: Landscape Photography 1865 to Now (work above until 13 January) throws out myriad raw vistas and tree-swathed snapshots.

A few states south along the East Coast, the Delaware Art Museum in Wilmington pins itself to another fine cache of American art, including Edward Hopper's soft Summertime (1943).

Hopper is present in darker form via his 1921 etching 'Night Shadows' at the excellent Des Moines Art Center in Iowa, as is Georgia O'Keeffe, whose superb 'From The Lake No 1' (1924) has waves rising in layers of paint.

The Boise Art Museum in Idaho's capital, gazes out at the American north-west that surrounds it. Next up is Left Unsaid (24 November-3 March), examining stark creations by local artist Troy Passey.

And America's geographical heartland has its artistic exclamation marks. The Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha surveys the fields of Nebraska from a pristine 1931 Art Deco structure, combining Renoir and Monet with Native American painting and sculpture.

Elsewhere, the Wichita Art Museum, the largest gallery in Kansas, has 7000 works, including pieces by "cowboy artist'' Charles Russell all dusty plains and open horizons.

GRAND EASTERN ESTABLISHMENTS
America's north-east is home to a cluster of what might be deemed some of the planet's finest galleries. New York alone is an art aficionado's dream. The Metropolitan Museum of Art ranks as the largest art museum in the country, home to two million works. It runs the gamut of European masters, but also has space for American moments such as Pollock's 'Autumn Rhythm (Number 30)' (1950).

Similarly revered, the Museum of Modern Art does outbursts of dashing and daring, covering architecture, design and film as well as art. Warhol's seismic 'Campbell's Soup Cans' (1962) the canvas equivalent of an arched eyebrow is one of the venue's main attractions.

You'll find further dabs of the modern at the Guggenheim Museum, which parades the best of the 20th century including Picasso's 'Landscape At Cret' (1911) in a cylindrical Frank Lloyd Wright building that's an artwork in itself.

Boston's Museum of Fine Arts has a strong domestic emphasis. Its Art of the Americas Wing focuses on North, South and Central America, which takes in everything from Mayan ceramics to striking works of Native American genius.

A weighty rival to the Met, the Art Institute of Chicago is the second-largest art museum in the USA. Particularly good on Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, offerings include Van Gogh's melancholy 'Self Portrait' (1887).

Washington DC also has its say. Part of the Smithsonian Institution, the American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery co-exist as two galleries in one building. The former dispenses US brushstrokes such as O'Keeffe's 'Manhattan' (1932) while the latter is noted for presidential portraits.The National Gallery of Art reverts to Europe via Rembrandt, Da Vinci and Matisse.

At the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven the Socit Anonyme exhibition opens on 12 December to celebrate early 20th-century European and American art.

SPECIAL SUBJECTS
If you want to look at the artist as much as the art, you can also find institutions that are dedicated solely to the name above the door. The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum eulogises this female art pioneer in Santa Fe - the dry contours of New Mexico having hugely informed her work. And the blondest art star of the 1960s is remembered at the Andy Warhol Museum in his native Pittsburgh - a treasure trove of photos, film, paintings and sculptures including 'Self Portrait In Drag' (1981).

Tucked away in Nyack, New York State, the Edward Hopper House Art Center treads a rather more traditional line, showing examples of Hopper's oeuvre in his childhood home.

Jackson Pollock is similarly recalled at the Pollock-Krasner House, the property in East Hampton on Long Island, east of New York City, that he shared with his artist wife Lee Krasner.

WEST COAST WONDERS
As a city renowned for glitz and glamour, it should be no great shock that Los Angeles embraces art with relish. The J Paul Getty Museum proffers two sites, one in Malibu, one in Brentwood with the latter, the Getty Center, splitting its attention between European stalwarts (Turner, Manet, Renoir, Titian) and a outdoor sculpture area that features Henry Moore's 1985 human study 'Bronze Form'.

The Museum of Contemporary Art, meanwhile, serves up three cutting-edge LA locations. At the main Grand Center location, a feast of post-war creativity is on display includes Roy Lichtenstein's 'Navajo, Seated' (1957).

The age-old competition between California's two largest cities ensures fertile art turf in San Francisco.

The de Young Museum delivers a glut of American art from the 17th century onwards, with spotlights directed at Bay Area artists.

The Asian Art Museum of San Francisco was formerly part of the de Young Museum. But it has proved so successful that it now operates from its own premises. Across some 17,000 exhibits, the museum takes in inspired and inspiration pieces from Iran, Korea, China and Japan.

A defiantly creative city, Seattle is also a west coast art hotspot. The Seattle Art Museum covers many bases, its main building playing host to early American watercolours, while the attached Olympic Sculpture Park is home to giant al fresco works, including Alexander Calder's metal 'Eagle' (1971).

SOUTHERN SOPHISTICATION
The sheer size of Houston demands an art institution of suitable stature. So it proves with the Museum of Fine Arts, which tempers the urban sprawl of the Texas metropolis with 63,000 exhibits. A wealth of Impressionism includes one of Monet's timeless 1907 'Water Lilies'.

Smaller of scale, but no less intriguing, the Birmingham Museum of Art fits in with the jazz and civil rights history of this burgeoning Alabama city. Current exhibition Norman Rockwell's America (to 6 January) holds a mirror to the New York illustrator whose populist portrayals captured the US of the 20th century.

To see one of Rockwell's classics, the wartime heroine 'Rosie the Riveter' (1943), head to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. Here, the story of the USA is also told via pieces like Charles Willson Peale's 1780 portrait of George Washington.

Further glimpses of the American soul are available at West Virginia's Huntington Museum of Art, which includes John Singer Sargent's 'Near June Street, Worcester, Massachusetts' (1890).

The Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, Virginia sees Rubens and Czanne rub shoulders with Hopper's 'New York Pavements' (1924).

Art exhibition to foster unity in NE

GUWAHATI: To foster a spirit of brotherhood and integrity among artists and people of the northeast, four artists have come together to organize an art exhibition at the State Art Gallery here.

Artists R K Somorjit Singh, H Kependra Singh and Debendra Singh from Manipur and Siva Prasad Marar from Assam have come together to display their works on canvas and wood at the exhibition titled "Unity" that was inaugurated by noted sculptor and artist Benu Mishra.

About 19 paintings and some sculptures were put on display at the State Art Gallery. The paintings were mostly abstract.

"Most of the paintings are new and are based on nature and landscape made in an abstract form. The aim of the exhibition is to foster and spread a spirit of unity not only amongst the artist fraternity but also amongst the people. Art and culture are the two aspects that can usher this spirit," said Manipur artist Somorjit Singh.
When asked what the artists would like to say to the people of the region, they said, "The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things but their inward significance as well, and art makes life more enjoyable. Life without art is valueless. Through 'Unity' we want to usher the sense of peace and integrity and our desire is to bring emotional integrity amongst the people in the northeast."

"Unity" will be open for public till November 24.

Art market news: exhibition for surrealist artist Catherine Yarrow attracts collectors

Half the works have already sold at an exhibition in London for the neglected British surrealist artist, Catherine Yarrow, writes Colin Gleadell.

Long Eared Creature (1935) by surrealist artist Catherine Yarrow.

Charles Saatchi has chosen to open his twin Russian art exhibitions (non-conformist art from the 1960s and 1970s, and 21st-century contemporary art) this week to coincide with London’s major Russian art sales. However, there is little crossover in content between the two events. Apart from a few non-conformists, the auctions have steered clear of contemporary art because it has not been performing well. Significantly, Sotheby’s, which used to end its main evening sale with contemporary art, now has early examples of Soviet Socialist Realism, glorifying the communist worker, in its place. Clearly an area of the market to watch.

Sotheby’s and Bonhams held sales of modern British art last week which fetched a respectable £9.7 million in all. Perhaps the most interesting aspect was the sale of works from the collection of architect Colin St John Wilson, the best of which have been left to the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester. The sale achieved a record price for a work on paper by Richard Hamilton, who died before his impressive retrospective exhibition, currently at the National Gallery. Hommage à Chrysler Corp, 1957, sold for a treble-estimate £325,250. Another collage, the art work for an insert to the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper album by Peter Blake, did not attract pop collectors and sold to Blake’s dealer, Leslie Waddington, below estimate for £55,250.

Waddington is opening a retrospective exhibition of Blake’s works on paper this week. More noteworthy results were achieved for small sculptures by Sir Anthony Caro, which regularly exceeded estimates. The top lot, a small, early amber-lacquered Table Piece from 1970, was estimated at £10,000 but sold to the London dealer Daniel Katz for £73,250.


An exhibition for the neglected and almost entirely forgotten British surrealist artist, Catherine Yarrow, who died in 1990, is at the Austin Desmond Gallery, close to the British Museum. Mostly drawings, watercolours and prints from the artist’s estate above), it has attracted serious interest from collectors, and at least two major British institutions, and half the works have sold, priced reasonably at between £1,000 and £5,000 each.


British collector David Roberts had a sneak preview last week of an exhibition by the young Swedish Somali artist, Ayan Farah, which opens at the Vigo gallery off Bond Street today, and bought the lot. Farah graduated from the Royal College of Art this year, and makes ephemeral, translucent, abstract paintings on fabrics – clothing and bedding bleached by sunlight or an old UV light from a sunbed the artist bought on eBay. Priced at between £800 and £2,900 plus VAT each, further works not in the exhibition were also bought by the collector Richard Devereux, who chairs the African Art Acquisitions Committee at Tate. They will be shown in a forthcoming exhibition of African art from his collection at Pallant House.

Art foundations offer monetary aid following Hurricane Sandy

A dumpster outside New York's Dia Art Foundation is filled with flood-damaged items. Like many arts organizations in the Chelsea section of the city, Dia was hard hit by Hurricane Sandy.

Arts organizations in New York that have sustained damage from Hurricane Sandy are getting a helping hand from foundations and other groups that have agreed to donate money to the relief effort.

The Andy Warhol Foundation recently announced that it has allocated $2 million that will go to help artists and nonprofit arts organizations that have experienced serious damage from the storm. The foundation said the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation and the Lambent Foundation will add to the money.

All three foundations said they will pool their assets to assist individual artists through the New York Foundation for the Arts. The NYFA Relief Fund is scheduled to launch Wednesday. Artists can seek assistance via a formal application that will be posted soon on the fund's website.

Nonprofit arts organizations may apply for assistance by sending an email, including a detailed description of damage sustained from the storm as well as a description of the organization, to info@emergencygrants.org. The inquiry should also mention if the organization has applied for other grants to cover losses.

Separately, the Art Dealers Assn. of America has said that it has raised $500,000 to help aid galleries and nonprofit groups. The association is a nonprofit group made up of gallery owners and art dealers across the country.

Groups interested in seeking aid from the ADAA Relief Fund can fill out an online application.
Many galleries in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York sustained damage from flooding following the hurricane in late October.

Art’s perfect theft: Flemish Renaissance masterpiece missing for 7 decades

GHENT, Belgium — The main suspect in the legendary art heist is said to have whispered with his dying breath: “Only I know where the ‘Adoration’ is...”

More than seven decades later, the whereabouts of a panel belonging to one of Western art’s defining works, the “Adoration of the Mystic Lamb,” also known as the “Ghent Altarpiece,” remains a mystery.

If the stunning heist of Picasso, Monet and Matisse paintings in Rotterdam, Netherlands, last month focused attention on the murky world of art theft, the gothic Saint Bavo cathedral in Ghent has been at the center of a crime that has bedeviled the art world for decades.

“The Just Judges” panel of the Van Eyck brothers’ multi-panel Gothic masterpiece hasn’t been seen since 1934, when chief suspect Arsene Goedertier suffered a stroke at a political rally and died after murmuring those fateful words to a confidant.

The theft has kept the country enthralled ever since, with its heady mix of priceless art and scintillating detective story.
  Ghent was hit by two thefts on the night of April 10, 1934: “One was a wheel of cheese,” said detective Jan De Kesel. “The other was the panel.”
That slowed up the investigation of the art theft, in which a minor panel of the “Adoration of the Mystic Lamb” representing St. John the Baptist, was also lifted.

“Don’t laugh,” said De Kesel, one of a long line of detectives searching for the lost work: “It was 1934, there was an economic depression — and the wheel of cheese had priority.”

The probe went nowhere until the St. John the Baptist panel was found that year in the luggage claim of a Brussels train station wrapped in brown paper. It wasn’t the sign of a guilty criminal conscience — just an extortion ploy proving that the thief, or thieves, had “The Just Judges.” A note demanded a million Belgian francs, a massive sum at the time, for the panel’s return.

The local bishop produced only a fraction of the ransom demand and more extortion letters followed.
Then Goedertier died, yielding another clue in his apparent confession: “In my office ... drawer ... closet.” There, copies of the old extortion letters and the draft of a new one were found.

Adding to the theft’s mystique, this last one read: “’The Just Judges’ are in a place where neither I nor anyone else can take it without drawing the public’s attention.” Police also found indecipherable drawings possibly pointing to a hiding place.

Ever since, Belgium has been in the grip of a decades-long treasure hunt, one that has drawn detectives of every ilk: cab drivers, computer scientists, lawyers, retired police inspectors, among others.

From divining rods to endoscopes to SS Nazi search parties, it has all been to no avail. Overanxious amateur sleuths have even drilled holes in important monuments on the hunch the panel might be there.

One of the more popular theories is that Goedertier, a stockbroker, may never have taken the panel out of the cathedral, but hidden it somewhere inside. But lifting every pane or tile in the massive St. Bavo would carry a prohibitive cost and risk damaging the historic edifice.

“There are not even indications as to what part of the church it might be in,” said De Kesel. “And I tell you, there are an awful lot of nooks and crannies.”

Perhaps closest to the mystery these days is art restorer Bart Devolder, at Ghent’s Museum of Fine Arts. He is working on the most ambitious restoration yet of the 15th-century painting. Devolder hopes the five-year restoration will raise interest in the theft of “The Just Judges,” which was replaced in 1941 by a much-lauded copy by art restorer Jozef Vander Veken.

The ongoing restoration “offers the opportunity for a new boost to look for it,” Devolder said in an interview while taking a break from work. “It really bothers me that the work is not complete.”

“The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb” was finished in 1432 as medieval times gave way to the Renaissance, and the work’s stunning detail and sense of light were at the time unsurpassed.

Much as the restoration of Rome’s Sistine Chapel a dozen years ago wiped the grime off Michelangelo’s multicolored glories, there is hope the same will happen to the “Ghent Altarpiece” under Devolder’s efforts.
“If we remove the yellowing varnish, people will see the genius of Van Eyck even more,” Devolder said.

He maintains hope that he will one day get his hands on “The Just Judges”— for restoration only of course. “I am sure it will take a great deal of work,” he said, “depending where it was kept.”

He made an appeal to whoever might have possession of the panel.

“We have an extra easel here,” said Devolder. “They can quietly bring it in here. “No questions asked.”

Art sales

Art sales: a billion dollar bonanza for post-war and contemporary art 

A series of post-war and contemporary art auctions featuring work by Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko fetched over one billion dollars in New York last week, writes Colin Gleadell.

Roy Lichtenstein’s 'Nude with Red Shirt’ fetched $28.1m. 

History was made in New York last week when, against a gloomy economic backdrop, a series of post-war and contemporary art auctions fetched over one billion dollars ($1.079 billion or £680 million to be precise) for the first time. Who would have guessed that, when the equivalent sales in the spring of 2009 plunged to $213 million, such a peak would have been reached within three and a half years? As the economist Clare McAndrew told The Daily Telegraph, the world’s super-rich may have decided to put their excess cash into art because they have nowhere else to invest it. But this doesn’t explain last week on its own.

With prices for the world’s top living artist, Gerhard Richter, finally levelling out, it was the earlier generations of post-war American artists that were in the driving seat. Abstract Expressionist and Pop have always been the rock on which the New York contemporary sales are based, but this time there was a greater supply than usual – much straight from collections that had been formed 40 or 50 years ago.

This could be described as the generation factor, as collectors with foresight reach a certain age and decide to sell. A small drip painting by Jackson Pollock, which sold for a record $40.4 million, was part of a collection of works by Abstract Expressionist artists that were bought in the early Seventies by Sidney and Dorothy Kohl, American collectors who are now in their eighties. The collection realised more than $100 million bringing further records for Hans Hoffman ($4.6 million) and Arshile Gorky ($6.8 million).

Over the long term, works by major post-war artists have seen huge increases in value – the enticement-to-sell factor. Mark Rothko’s No1 (Royal Red and Blue) had reportedly been bought for less than $500,000 in 1982 and sold last week for $75 million. A small wire sculpture of a policeman, made in 1928 by Alexander Calder, had been bought in 1995 for $107,000 and sold for $4.2 million.

As prices have gone up for some artists, others have followed in their slipstream. Until last week, the black-and-white, gestural calligraphic paintings by the Abstract Expressionist Franz Kline had lagged behind his peers with a top price of $6.4 million. But that benchmark has now been surpassed twice, reaching $40.4 million for a sprawling 10ft canvas.

Although there were fewer record prices for Pop art, the Warhol market was in rude health. His somewhat morbid photographic silkscreen, Suicide, which had been acquired 20 years ago when considered of marginal importance for $132,000, set a record for a Warhol work on paper by selling for $16.3 million.
And then there was the sheer unexpected. Paintings by Roy Lichtenstein after his classic Sixties period had never sold for more than $11 million before, but one buyer defied all logic by paying $28.1 million for a 1995 painting, Nude with Red Shirt.

Time and again, the auctioneers fielded multiple bids on lots. They came from Europe, South America, Asia and the Middle East, say the auctioneers, to illustrate global involvement, but the market was driven by American demand. “Here, there has been a new shift in taste,” says Sotheby’s head of contemporary art, Tobias Meyer. “Wealthy American collectors who used to buy more traditional American painting have moved into post-war American art. In addition, the old contemporary art buyers have been priced out and replaced by new money. It has come in over the last four years unhampered by the memory of old price structures and wishing to be associated with cultural genius.”

And it’s the proven genius of yesterday that is proving the main attraction. Of the 45 artists’ records set last week, the majority were for American artists who are no longer alive. “There was less hunger for the younger generation,” says Meyer.

Notwithstanding, there was a string of record prices for living artists – Jeff Koons, Mark Grotjahn, and Wade Guyton among them – all, with one or two exceptions, like the Brazilian, Beatriz Milhazes, North American.

But the show belonged ultimately to the post-war Americans, seen not, as McAndrew suggests, as “the Old Masters of the future” (as this might imply a far more selective market in waiting for them) but as contemporary art, now.

How to Master the Art of Falling Apart

"Sometimes things fall apart so that better things can fall together." -- Marilyn Monroe

Over the course of my life, I've mastered the art of falling apart.

You see, there's this point at the deepest depths of our hurt and sadness that's truly magical. It's the point at which we see things clearer than we ever thought possible. It's where miracles happen -- after all, "a miracle is simply a shift in perception" (A Course in Miracles).

First off, I'm in no way suggesting that hurt and depression are good places to hang out. They're not. I'm all about happiness, joy and fulfillment! However, when things in your life aren't working or you're feeling down and overwhelmed, sometimes you have to fall apart. The longer you resist this necessary mess of emotions, the longer you'll suffer and the sooner you'll lose yourself completely.

When you allow yourself to feel what you feel, you give yourself permission to say that something isn't right. Something has to change, you deserve more or better, or you desire something new and different. When you give yourself permission to speak your truth, you take the first step toward making positive shifts.
How to Master the Art of Falling Apart:

Know that there is only joy and fulfillment on the other side.
Falling apart doesn't mean that you're going to break down and life as you know it will end... It means that you're willing to face the reality of your situation and to feel, speak and honor your truth. The reason I've become a master at falling apart is that I've come to see what's on the other side is far more amazing than I could ever imagine.

Falling apart simply means you're surrendering to that intuitive voice that says, "Things have to change." You're saying okay... you're feeling the hurt, frustration, overwhelm or sadness... and then you're moving through it to something better.

Remember, these feelings will pass.
Start to look at your emotions like passing clouds in the sky. If you allow yourself to be open to just feeling your feelings rather than resisting them, they will pass. If you choose to resist them, however, the opposite happens.

Not only do the feelings linger, they intensify within you. They do this because you're putting so much focus, energy and resistance on them that it begins to overwhelm you. Don't fight what you're feeling -- allow it to bubble up and be what it is. Don't make it into something more by over-thinking dwelling or fighting against it. If you're sad, be sad. If you're angry, be angry. Don't act on it or indulge in it -- it's nothing more than a simple feeling or emotion.

Be kind to yourself.
Don't beat yourself up about this! There is nothing wrong with how you feel and whatever is happening for you right now is what's supposed to be happening. Don't "should" on yourself... "I should be happy," "I should be more grateful," "I should be more put together than this," etc.

Do something that makes you feel cared for. Talk to a best friend, go to the spa and get a massage, or take a mental health day and hit the beach or your happy place. Sleep in, stay in your jammy pants and make yourself a nice green smoothie. Don't put any stress or pressure on yourself to feel anything other than what you feel right now.

Gently push through to something better.
Always, always be sure to move forward at a pace that feels good to you. Yes, allow yourself to fall apart and feel all the feelings that come with it. To process and release negative emotions and energy. Write out your feelings and get a solid understanding of what you're experiencing and what needs to change.
Take your time with this part... But always keep gently pushing forward.

It can be very easy to fall into a funk or deep depression, but if every day you do one little thing to move yourself in a better direction, you'll begin to feel better, slowly but surely. Get some fresh air every day, read a little bit of a book on the subject or get out and do something that you know you love to do. It's not about force, more of a gentle forward movement. Don't add any more stress to the situation, but do work to stretch yourself just enough.

Take action now!
Get out a notebook or journal and answer the following questions:

• Where am I feeling overwhelmed, sad or frustrated?
• What would it feel like to be honest about what I want or need?
• If it could go perfectly, how would this situation change?
• Where am I blocking myself from feeling what I need to feel or expressing what I need to express in order to create this shift?

Stephenie Zamora is the founder of www.stepheniezamora.com, a full-service, life-purpose development, design and branding boutique. Here she merges the worlds of personal development and branding to help young women build passion-based businesses. Click here to download her free guide, "The Unexpected Trick to Transforming Your Life With ONE Single Question."

To promote a budding art form, called sand art

The Birla Academy of Art and Culture offered art lovers in Kolkata, the rare opportunity of seeing the work of Odisha’s famous sand sculptor, Sudarsan Pattnaik. The exhibition which opened on November 3, offered an insight into the technique and the expertise that Pattnaik has mastered in his creations.

Born in Puri on 15 April 1977, Pattnaik is often referred to as ‘the inventor of sand art in India’. Totally self-taught, the artist has been sculpting images on sand from the age of seven, without any guidance. The unique images that he sculpts on sand are thus, the result of practice and a creative mind.

For Sudarsan Patnaik, “the ultimate objective is to create awareness and enthusiasm among the people and make it a popular professional art form.” To further this aim, he has been travelling to various places in the country and demonstrating this art form by holding workshops and training those interested in this style of art. Having designed hundreds of sand sculptures, he has also inspired many and has a number of students, eager to learn the technique of creating sand art at his Golden Sand Art Institute which is the first of its kind in India.

Pattnaik has won many national and international awards for his creative work. Sudarshan Pattnaik also won the People’s Choice Prize at the 1st Moscow International Sand Sculpture Championship. By creating a 15 feet tall image of Ganesha, Pattnaik sought to create awareness on the potential dangers of global warming at the International Sand Championship. The top of the sculpture depicted the melting of glaciers in the Himalayas and in the flowing water Lord Ganesh is shown travelling on a boat with a sign “Divine Concern on Global Warming”. This was to educate people through his art about the effects global warming.

Pattnaik has so far participated in more than 50 international sand sculpture championships across the world and has been winning awards since 1998, bringing prestige for India through this new and unique art form. Among the latest awards won by him are the 1st Prize at the USF Championships 2008 in Berlin; he won the Korea Sand Sculpture Award at the 4th Busan in 2009; he received the Odisha Living Legend Award in 2011 and in June 2012, he won the first prize in the International Sand Sculpture Championship. In particular, his creation in sand of the Black Taj Mahal has won accolades from all over the world.

As expected, Pattnaik’s exhibition has been drawing large crowds of people. Some of the visitors may have seen the work of this creative genius on the beaches of Odisha. Open till November 18, anyone who is in Kolkata in that period and has the opportunity should try to see this unique exhibition to applaud the effort required to create art on the shifting sands of a beach.

Art exhibition: Philippe Shangti – Saint-Tropez to London

Grasping the knife between her cuffed hands, her face turned away, she thrusts the blade into her victim. Deep and hard, her weapon penetrates the flesh of the… gigantic pink dildo. Yes, the gigantic pink dildo. Titled The End of Sex and costing a mere £6,000, this is just one in a series of pornographic shots in upcoming French photographer Philippe Shangti’s exhibition – Saint Tropez to London.

On display at the Imitate Modern, a small gallery just off of Marylebone Highstreet, Shangti’s new collection is a visionary assault. Driven by sex, drugs, fetishism, anarchy and death come 28 boldly bright images that shock, disturb, and at times disgust.

Set against the sparse white walls of the gallery, on entry the fluorescent, technicolour photos overpower your eyes; a spiral of audacity where each image seems to contain something more shocking than the next one – a challenge for your gaze. It’s like a celebrity showdown between Lady Gaga and Nicky Minaj.

Nipples and vaginas, dildos and penises, sexual tit-bits are peppered throughout the room and phallic symbolism even infiltrates a trainer (The End World Saint Tropez). A sexual feast, Shangti has taken the taboos and plastered them in plain view.

A Tulisa lookalike stares out nonchalantly from a khaki canvass, her long dark hair covering her breasts. Emblazoned on her arms and stomach read the words “Cash for liquid.” Her right hand clutches a wad of Euros and dollars and dribbling out of her left comes a white, gloopy mass of… That’s where the ellipsis would normally be positioned – is it?, isn’t it? – the power of suggestion, but here there isn’t one. Dribbling out of her hand is semen.

Tulisa isn’t the only boundary-breaker. Minnie is My Bitch features the behind of a woman on all fours about to have sex with a Mickey Mouse toy. There’s also a girl chewing on a condom, another about to inject herself with heroin and, of course, the dildo stabber.

The objective of Shangti’s collection is to “shock and stir the emotions of the viewer with a boldness that demands attention.” There is no denying that the display shocks and demands attention, and indeed, stirs the emotions of the viewer. Emotions are stirred, but not in a good way. The beauty of the erotic is that it is forbidden, it is secretive and there is an element of danger. Sex toys don’t sit on the sink; filthy magazines don’t line coffee tables – if it’s all on show then where’s the fun?

Shangti’s images have broken the rules; they’ve opened the door to the hidden; they’ve turned the unacceptable into the acceptable – and once accepted, the erotic loses its eroticism.

Some things are better left hidden. Some things are better left to the imagination. Shangti’s collection is as powerful now as it’s fresh, but his photos won’t remain powerful – shock is fleeting, soon they will become the norm and once they cross over to this, they will become boring. Great works of art are timeless; Philippe Shangti’s have a sell-by-date.

Libyans discover video art after four-decade cultural vacuum

U.S. veterans preserve memories of war with their own art

In this Thursday, Nov. 8, 2012 photo, artist Marcus Eriksen, a Gulf War veteran, works on a mold of his mentor, Capt. Charles Moore, a fellow scientist, at his home studio in Los Angeles.

CHICAGO -- The fallen Iraqi soldier's face is frozen in agony, his eyes and mouth wide open, his arms spread in surrender, his death in the Kuwaiti desert captured for posterity.

The sculpture's title: "Angel in the Desert."

Marcus Eriksen was a young Marine sergeant during the Gulf War, riding with a convoy to Kuwait City, when he encountered the Iraqi soldier. It was the first dead body he'd seen. The image was haunting, the experience unforgettable. But it took more than a decade before he started welding the memory into art.
Using a mannequin, an old uniform and plaster cast of his face and hands, Eriksen produced a mold and lined it with 70,000 steel ball bearings. He meticulously recreated the scene: the soldier on his back, knees bent. His insides exposed beneath his shirt. And swooping curves in the sand that suggested he'd moved his arms like a kid making snow angels.

This, says Eriksen, is not "an anti-war message. It's a reality of war message."

Every November, America honors its veterans with grand parades, speeches and tributes. But more than 350 veterans of Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, Iraq and Afghanistan have turned to art to preserve more intimate and enduring memories of war, and more than 2,500 of their works have found a home at Chicago's National Veterans Art Museum.

The modest museum, which focused at first on Vietnam vets but has since expanded, includes paintings, prints, drawings, poetry, photos, sculpture, collages and video. Most of the vets are trained artists who've used their skills to illustrate harrowing life-and-death experiences, explore personal demons and celebrate fallen comrades. This is art that dredges up nightmares for some, and healing for others -- Eriksen, among them.

Now 45, he vividly remembers Feb. 24, 1991, when he and about a dozen other Marines stood around staring silently at the dead soldier sprawled 30 feet from his incinerated truck. "No one would cry," he says. "As a Marine, you just suck it up."

"Seeing him put a face on the suffering," Eriksen recalls. "I knew he was dead but his family didn't. ... All that death and destruction - was it worth it? If you're going to commit young people to kill and be killed, you have to have a solid reason for it. And I don't think we had that."

Eriksen, now an environmental activist in California, began creating his sculpture shortly after the first bodies of U.S. troops started coming home from Iraq in 2003. It stirred up emotions of his days in uniform.
"It allowed me to remove the burden of my memories of Kuwait, of all the bodies, of the stench. ... Just making the sculpture ... would bring tons of sadness," Eriksen says. "I would think about that person and what happened every day. At some point, I thought, `Do I want to feel that way the rest of the day?'
Eventually you tell yourself, as I did, no, I'm not going to beat myself up a millionth time. I'm done with that."
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A man with a mustache, a fringe of brown hair and almost cartoon-like huge brown eyes looks out from the canvas. His lips are a barely defined pink oval. His expression is blank.
Title: Thousand Mile Stare.
More than 30 years passed before Helen White painted the picture of the officer she saw at the 67th Evacuation Hospital in Qui Nhon, where she served as an orthopedic nurse. She doesn't remember his name, his face or much else beyond the fact that he'd arrived there after surviving a firefight that had killed almost everyone else. His eyes telegraphed his trauma.

"They were wide open, they were scanning, looking for safety and looking for danger," White says. "If you see the stare, it's not something you forget. ... The memories stay in my mind, even if I don't focus on them. And, of course, there's the mystery -- what happened, how did he recover, what impact did it have on his life."

Some people, she says, are disturbed by her painting; others think the raw image isn't even art.
White, who turns 65 on Tuesday, is retired from nursing and grappling with service-related PTSD, which she says has grown so intense that she has become agoraphobic. "Just going to the grocery store is a challenge," she says. "Sometimes I just stay in my house."

Painting has brought some solace, and also puts her in contact with a world beyond her Missouri home; she follows the works of artists who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and sees a commonality in their creations. "It gets back to the same song, just another verse," she says. "War is war."

"I don't regret being there," White says of Vietnam. "There's a lot I wish I could have done. I got off the plane, did what I could. I got back on the plane and came home. Some people didn't. So this artwork is like leaving a sign behind that I was here. It's like a cave painting. I never intended it to be that, but in a way it's a legacy."
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A toy soldier is trapped in an orange pill bottle, the lid screwed on top. His arms are raised over his head, his rifle is held high in one hand, his right knee is bent as if he's trying to climb out.
Title: Trapped.

This print -- created on paper made from an old Army uniform -- hints of Malachi Muncy's two life-changing tours with the Texas National Guard in Iraq.

He was just 18 when he first deployed, and once in the combat zone, Muncy says he began taking sleeping pills to shut out the world. The constant dangers he faced on truck-driving convoys were overwhelming.

"So much bad stuff happened," he recalls. "Watching IEDs explode, and mortars hit. Being pinned down on bridges, you wonder where the fire is coming from. You just sit and wait to get shot at and you have no control over whether you're going to live or die ... I was having nightmares. I really felt I was going to do stupid things and hurt the wrong people. I was having thoughts I couldn't expel."

Muncy got into trouble, he says, pointing a weapon at a superior after a mission in which he went 36 hours without sleep.

When he returned home, life unraveled. He slept all day, he says, started hanging around with the wrong crowd, got hooked on methamphetamines, amassed a pile of speeding tickets and was arrested for shoplifting. He took an overdose of pills -- he's not sure if it was a suicide attempt.

And yet, almost inexplicably, he returned for a second tour in 2006. Muncy, who later was diagnosed with PTSD, says he wanted to get away from "the mess" and all the pills.

That second stint went far more smoothly and Muncy, now 27, began keeping a journal. When he returned to Texas - he works at a coffee house in Killeen, outside Fort Hood - he attended college and became interested in poetry, photography and other arts.

"It's about sharing the experience," he says. "It's not just something that haunts you."

Using a toy soldier and a pill bottle he'd kept on his key chain, Muncy produced one print showing the trapped soldier. A second one shows the bottle tipped over, the soldier crawling out on his belly. That one is appropriately called Escape.

"They're both me," Muncy says. "It's not then and now. It's a back and forth. Sometimes I still feel like the guy trapped in the bottle."
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A desperate Vietnamese mother clutches her starving baby on her chest as she flees her village. Looking back, she sees the chaos of her hamlet under attack. A Viet Cong soldier has his rifle pointed at the head of a villager on his knees, praying before he's executed.

Title: The Refugee.

Richard Olsen created the yellow-and-black linocut after returning home following a year's tour as an Army helicopter pilot with the 33rd Transportation Company in Vietnam. He came back in 1963, and the war in faraway Southeast Asia was not yet fully on America's radar, so producing these images was his way of sounding an alarm.

"It was like, `Hey, you guys, there's a war going on,'" Olsen says. "Why make pictures of flowers? Why not make pictures of war?"

Olsen had always wanted to be an artist growing up in Wisconsin - he earned a master of fine arts degree - and Vietnam allowed him to create works that he says reveal a "little man swept into a world beyond his control."

"I had to tell the story ... the valiance, the heroism, the sacrifices, the personal giving for causes bigger than yourself," says Olsen, now a 76-year-old professional artist living in Georgia. "It occurs on both sides."
Olsen's work -- paintings, drawing and prints -- is ripe with pain, sacrifice and patriotism.
There's a POW, viewed from behind, on his knees, his hands bound behind his back with his shoe laces, waiting to be killed; an eerie bluish outpost at 4 a.m., illuminated by a searchlight; a tender portrait of his bunk mate, a lieutenant who didn't make it home. And then there's Hill 881, site of one of the bloodiest Marine battles in Vietnam.

The hill painting was created by copying stencil shapes onto a canvas. It repeats the same scene of three soldiers: one climbing a hill, one higher up, tumbling down after being hit, and the third at the top falling backward as he's shot. That final image was inspired by the famous Robert Capa photo of the fallen soldier in the Spanish Civil War.

"I wanted to make it an endless plight ... of the Marines trying to take the hill over and over and over," Olsen says. "There's just an absurd twist to it."

Olsen moved beyond Vietnam to an artistic career that has spanned more than 50 years; he's produced more than 1,000 paintings, many of them abstract. His work has been shown in galleries around the country.
Yet those days when he flew his chopper over the dense thicket of jungle maintain a deep hold on him.
"War is the depth of the human experience," he says. "It's the most meaningful part of anyone's life."
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A stately building in Kabul is consumed by a bomb. Gray clouds of smoke and red bursts of fire billow from the windows. Splashes of red, blue and yellow tents on clotheslines frame the bottom of a degraded print.
Title: Transfer's of War (triptych 1, part 2).

Ash Kyrie wasn't an artist before he went to Iraq with the Wisconsin Army National Guard. But after his return in 2004, the former debate champ no longer wanted to follow family tradition and become a lawyer. "I was a different person," he says. "I wasn't interested in the same things. I threw away my TV. I wanted to express feelings and emotions."

He enrolled in art classes at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, read the newspapers religiously and became mesmerized by photos of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. They seemed remote from his experiences, not reflecting the brutality he'd seen.

Over two years, Kyrie, now 31, collected about 1,500 photos from major newspapers and categorized them in three groups: benign intervention, showing U.S., troops following local customs or mingling with villagers; abstract explosions, images that are too far away to show the grisly consequences; and something he called sacrifice - Iraqis and Afghans, killed by each other, not coalition forces.

Kyrie took some of the photos, blew them up into enormous prints and, using a transfer process, altered the images. From a distance, the harsh scene scenes are recognizable, but up close they look like a collection of beautiful crystals.

There is no political message here, Kyrie says, just a way of illustrating the gap between war as it is and the way it is portrayed in the media.

Art, says Kyrie, has helped him come closer to understanding his tour in Iraq.

"I think about the war every day," he says. "I think about my experience. Every soldier tries to quantify or organize it in some way. I got back in 2004 and I still haven't come to a conclusion. I don't know if I ever will. Every emotion you went through goes through your head. You relive it. You remember it. It's a very intense time being at war. Every moment is memorable.