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.