Link to Life

“PUBLIC PHONE BOOTH IN ISTANBUL” by Martin Brown

“How are you? Okay. I’m good. Don’t worry about me. I just wanted to hear you. Get some sleep. Have a safe trip. And… and be careful.”

Hormone Monster

Michel Balasis - Insecure (2004)

Pop Art has had its moment in the sixties I think. Nowadays, everyone can make their own graphic image and claim the Lichtenstien-Warhol throne (Julian Opie is the one exception, I am a big fan). Its easy, it reminds us of comic strips, its pleasing to the eye and its not deep. You are not challenged by pop art, not anymore at least. If I were a piece of pop art I would be feeling insecure.

Fashion Weak

 

Linda Contello at Giorgio Armani - Photo: AP News

Like G man's latest collezione, lotsa fashion folks will tell you they take their inspiration from art. Indeed they will insist that fashion, and the clothes it inspires, is the highest form of art; readily accessible, user friendly, form fits function etc.

Flower Child

 Georgia O'Keefe - Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. IV (1930)

This woman lived 99 years, many of them spent portraying the delicate petals of a flower up close and personal, with echoes of... Well, its pretty obvious, the most female part of the female anatomy. This cat has a brand new purrrrrr cause I'm feeling a new kinda love. Its not angsty. It still reminds me of the being out at sea, but this time it feels like I've got all the right equipment; a tank, goggles, a boat nearby to swim to. Its great to be in this. So great my friend is on standby for the "how I messed this up' story. I'm still cynical, my goggles aren't rose tinted, this is a few miles off of my purrfect story, and I'm in danger of erupting in a rage at any moment (my baggage, his baggage, I plain old don't trust men). I am however Christopher Columbus, out looking for India, washed up on America, slam bang in Okeefe's petal country, and its all so soft. 

Creeper

This movie reminds me of you. All build up and going nowhere. So you like slinking in the shadows, hovering in the margins of my life, not quite solid enough to be held accountable for anything, but never banished all together, murky, lurking somewhere in the periphery of my consciousness, ready to squirm your way back at any sign of weakness, whenever the urge to make an appearance overtakes you. I hate your Batman streak. It's creepy. You're creepy. And though I get your dark side, acknowledge it, admire it, can see the romantic potential in it, I have no patience for your cowardly shit. Come into the light or disappear into the darkness forever, and thanks for returning my scarf, sexy creeper.

Selfish Love

PACHA Club logo

Its Summer Time. All I want to do is dance. Suspend me in slow motion, empty my mind from all thought and just, sway. Beach, burn, play, return. The iconography of super clubs above my head, art and music, symbols of hedonism here, refinement elsewhere. How does one image capture so many coded messages. If you get the pun, you are one of us, you understand the rituals of abandonment; sea, sand and dance floor... Just say no to the chemical stuff and feel the buzz in your bones... And double the cherry.

Ode to Cancer

Adrian Bugariu - Dancing through water

So you're "in love"... And you expect a reaction. I am so mad at you. I have nothing to offer but an internal shrug. Six months later you come up with this feeling that I needed to hear back then. It is an irritatingly male trait, this penchant for (what they would like to think are) astounding revelations.

Desire

Lorilyn Froerer - Boomerang Art

I want you. 

Summer Honey

St Tropez - ~vincentze

I am broke. Tan, deeply content like the fat cat that I am, but broke as broke can be. Summer does that to me. I get seduced by the waves, the sun, the far flung locations and I over-live my life. I go deep into my devil may care mode and pile up bills and very expensive pounds in the process. I will start to care soon, I can already smell the panic creeping into the corners of my luxe existence, I've already started the recriminations and the regrets. This is an homage to every penniless artist there is out there, all those who fought on and made it, dreaming champagne dreams on their beer budgets, all those who infused their lives, and ours with color and fantasy. May your life, and mine, be summer every single day (don't be stupid, anyone who looks this good in chocolate brown cannot get bored).

The Pursuit of Harpiness

Dark Side of the Moon album cover - Pink Floyd

The problem with the men in my life is that they want me to care. I do care of course, sometimes a great deal, sometimes more than I would care to admit, and about the most trivial of matters, but I just don't care about the things I am supposed to care about in their estimation.

Mommy Issues

Hugo Robus - Maternity (1936)

You are probably more familiar with this piece cast in bronze, if not, you'd probably be familiar with one of his many, by now generic, commercially successful pieces, unless you live under a rock, or are a philistine, in which case you probably wouldn't be reading an art blog, or if you are, deserve the description. Bad mood, moi, ya think? The so called love of my life, monumental idiot that he is, and that I am for persisting to like him despite his many, many flaws, has a complicated and turbulent relationship with his mother. 

Headbutt me, Please

Zinédine Zidane’s head butt, seen around the world, on Marco Materazzi in the World Cup final.

As football fever descends upon us, and many of us become TV widows for a week, lets just go back and revisit that most beautiful of moments in the history of recent sports, the Zidane headbutt some
World Cups ago.

Know Where to Run

Alberto Giacometti - Woman with Her Throat Cut 1932 (cast 1949)

Giacometti is best known for his chiseled, elongated, stick thin figures, to my mind, they look like what Nuclear holocaust victims would look like, right before they disintegrated. But this, his piece by piece deconstruction of what the title says " a woman with her throat cut" seems to speak out to me, in it's bronze starkness, of the issue of violence against women.

Dating Hades

Sandro Botticelli - The Birth of Venus (1486)

The obsession with figures from classical mythology, especially those yummy Olympians, and their complicated incestuous and convoluted relations with each others and the humans has featured heavily in art and literature through the ages.

Save Me

 Jenny Holzer - "Protect me from myself"

We are bombarded by imagery to the extent that it loses its visual impact on us, advertisements and those wicked geniuses behind them have to try exponentially harder as time goes by to attract and capture our attention. Danger hazard as they are, I confess to being excessively fond of billboards.

Jealousy

 Mark Rothko

In my dreams, I have a go at him with a nail gun, its very satisfying (nothing oozes out cause I'm squeamish). I have struggled with this territorial dichotomy in my nature, not jealous in the conventional sense but very conscious of what's mine, and the boundaries that come with that.

I Love You/I'm in Love with You

Pre-Raphaelite artist John Collier - Lady Godiva, 1897.

As an impressionable teenager I fell in love with the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, their art, their poetry, their complicated and incestuous relationships, and the dreamy way they portrayed women from literature and history.

Boys ARE Stupid

Todd Harris Goldman

So besides being adorable, what's the artistic value in Señor Goldman's little stick drawings that were all the rage a few years ago when the David and Goliath t-shirt line first emerged?

The Phoenix

Pheonix by ~HomeSkillet87

I have a particular thing for comic book heroines. The genre says more about the post modern male psyche than volumes of psycho-anthropology can possibly articulate.

Ephemeral Pleasures

Ephemeral by ~Undefined-skeleton

I take my mission to edjumacate through this pulpit very seriously so let me explain this much abused word. Ephemeral comes from the greek (and I am deeply suspicious of things that come from greeks, especially gifts) word meaning, quite literally "for a day".