Core Dump

Artist Robert McCall has died. His art pretty much defined the space age for many of us. LifeHacker has a gallery of some of his work.

Labels: art, space

Rose and I went into Toronto yesterday evening to check out the much hyped Nuit Blanche art event. We weren't terribly impressed. I mean, hanging a 30-foot-high silver bunny balloon in the Eaton Centre is cool, but I didn't quite get the point, if there was one.

City Hall had giant letters spelling FATE hung between the two towers with eerie ambient music playing below. The Old City Hall courtyard (impressive in itself, and not something you normally see unless you're in the back of a cruiser), had an ambient sound/image installation as did Union Station's Great Hall. That one was truly impressive and made excellent use of the space. I wanted to see the event at Massey Hall in which they turned the hall into a giant musical instrument, but the lineup was too long. Bay Street had a small midway set up, staffed by laid off financial district workers. I can see the symbolism in that, but I've seen better midways in Pickering.

I'd probably enjoyed it more if they'd done it in the summer, one nice warm summer night, with more street events like buskers and live music. Or if I'd had the stamina to stay up all night and check out some of the events outside of the downtown core.

Labels: art, places

The New York Times profiles Alan Bean, one of the dozen men to have walked on the moon, and an accomplished artist.

“One weekend I didn’t have any flowers to paint, and I said I think I will paint this photo of Pete Conrad on the Moon,” he recalled. “So I just started painting it and after about two hours, I said, you know, I care about all this stuff. I love spacesuits. I like the lunar modules. And I didn’t really like plants that much.”

So he started to paint missions to the Moon, drawing from photographs, videotapes, the stories of other astronauts and his own experience in November 1969, when he and Mr. Conrad spent seven hours and 45 minutes on the Moon’s surface.

He has an online gallery, and although it's a bit clunky in its design, unlike many such sites you can view large scale images of his paintings.

Labels: art, space

Writers looking for free, public domain clip art, should check out the Open Clip Art Library, which contains over 11,000 items, most in PNG or SVG format. The site is searchable, or you can use the tag page to select categories.

Labels: art, technical communication

Novelist John Updike, who died recently, gave the 2008 Jefferson Lecture on the Humanities. The lecture was established by the U.S. federal government in 1972. The subject of Updike's lecture was "What is American about American Art?". In the lecture he discusses 40 works of art (thumbnails are provided beside the lecture text). It's an interesting lecture, and shows a side of Updike (a writer whose talent I appreciated but whose books generally bored me silly) that I wasn't aware of.

Charles Sheeler’s 1930 American Landscape [47] portrays, in muted cool colors, an actual industrial site—the Ford Motor Company’s huge River Rouge plant near Detroit—but ideally cleaned-up, with none of the grime, litter, and air pollution that actually attend industry. And—talk about “the clarity of things”—here are some locomotive wheels that Sheeler painted in 1939, entitled Rolling Power. [48] With a passionate closeness the details of piston and lever and fuel line are rendered to an effect of purity and silence, a reduction of machinery to its spiritual, Newtonian essence. In Walker Evans’ 1919 photograph of the Brooklyn Bridge, [49] the lines do not regulate the distribution of power but gracefully resist the downward pull of gravity, as the pointed arches of a Gothic cathedral do; Joseph Stella’s painting ten years earlier [50] uses those same lines to fragment a somewhat hectic native version of Cubism, an epochal European invention. In both Europe and America pictorial art was permeated by the intuition that machinery constituted Man’s future; Futurism, an Italian movement in a wide spectrum of arts, was launched in 1909, espousing a rejection of the past and its sentimental humanism, and by the 1920s had involved its founder, the writer Filippo Marinetti, in support of Benito Mussolini and fascism, a totalitarian political creed prolific of romanticized, mechanized images of mass force.

Labels: art

Some of the covers for pulp SF novels could be truly weird in a demented trashy way. As IO9 puts it: "The greatest pulp science fiction book covers aren't just trashy, they're lurid: filled with half-naked squirming and misplaced eyes, with Prince's man/woman glyph bursting out." Here's a gallery of some ones they like.

Labels: art, SF

Here's a collection of 40 paintings about lunar exploration - a few of the Apollao program, the rest are of what might have been and what should be.

Labels: art, SF, space

Deviant Art is a community art site. They've selected their best SF art of the year, featuring one artist per month. Although the names may be unfamiliar, don't let that put you off viewing - there's some spectacular SF art here.

Labels: art, SF

I try not to let comments made by politicians get to me, but I was both upset and appalled by Stephen Harper's comments about rich artists at taxpayer subsidized galas comlaining about their subidies. I do have more than a passing familiarity with the arts - I was treasurer for an art gallery in Alberta for several years and I worked for a small Canadian publisher after I moved from back to Ontario from Alberta. Trust me on this one. Most artists and authors aren't rich. And despite Harper's claim, government arts funding is not going up.

As this article from the Toronto Star points out, he's importing the same techniques used by Bush and the Republicans in the last few of elections. Let's hope that Canadian voters have more common sense than American voters have shown inthe last few elections.

Marc Ouellette caught Stephen Harper talking about Canadians turning on their TVs to see privileged people at rich galas and knew his prediction had come true: American-style cultural wars have landed with a thud on the Canadian federal scene.

He's not thrilled about it, and perhaps it's hit the national political stage a little sooner than the McMaster University English and cultural studies professor anticipated. But he's been observing what he considers politics of division for years in the U.S., seen signs of it here and knew the real onslaught was on its way.

"It's American-style anti-intellectualism," says Ouellette, noting the former Michael Harris Conservative government used it effectively (for a time) in Ontario, when they harped about teachers not having to work as hard as ordinary people.

It's no accident, he says, that a string of Harper ministers – John Baird, Jim Flaherty, Tony Clement – apprenticed at the Harris school.

Harper's comments came during this week's controversy over cuts to the federal arts budget. His opponents argue he's slashed the budget by $45 million, while the Prime Minister counters there's been an annual increase in arts funding of 8 per cent, albeit with a wider definition of "arts" to include, for example, sports funding.

Labels: art, politics

PSDTUTS describes itself as "a blog/Photoshop site made to house and showcase some of the best Photoshop tutorials around". If the most recent tutorial on drawing a glass of beer, complete with bubbles is any indication, they're definitely on to something. And if you don't have Photoshop, the tutorials are detailed enough you might be able to translate the techniques to other programs like Paint Shop Pro.

Labels: art, software

Here's yet another gallery of space art - this from the 1950s.

Labels: art, space

From Vanity Fair, the real face of George Bush - the Joker.javascript:void(0)

Labels: art, politics

The American Society of Magazine Editors has picked the top 40 magazine covers of the last 40 years. If you read magazines much, you'll probably recognize some of these covers - some were quite controversial and there are many striking images.

Labels: art, society

Photographer Brad Emerson uses some custom Python code to stitch his time lapse photographs into animated, impressionist videos. I've played around with the "art" filters available in programs like Paint Shop Pro and Photoshop, but this goes way beyond that.

Labels: art, photography

Here's a collection of futuristic Soviet SF art. Many of the illustrations could easily have appeared in US pulps.

This extremely rare series of illustrations to various books by Alexander Kazantsev (one of the first Soviet science fiction writers) shows very clearly what kind of future the communist dreamers preferred. Think cool robots, intrepid explorers, brainy scientists, eerily Star Wars-like aliens and a huge doze of humanitarian optimism.

These government sponsored (and approved) images (most are by Yury Markov) were published by Detskaya Literatura Publishing House from 1950s to 1970s - DETGIZ, geared toward Soviet Komsomol Youth - and were recently brought back from oblivion by M. Moshkov's online library.

Labels: art, SF

Here's a cute cartoon of some of science fiction's greatest authors. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to identify them - there are some pretty obvious clues in the cartoon in case you can't pick them out from their likenesses. The cartoonist just identifies herself as Becca.

Labels: art, SF

Here's a gallery of some excellent space art. The pictures were entered in the National Space Society's Space Settlement 2009 Calendar Art Contest.

Labels: art, space

Here's a wonderful collection of delightfully retro Russian space art. Although the Russian space (and science fictional) art isn't that well known in the West, some of their cosmonauts (Alexei Leonov, in particular) were accomplished artists.

Labels: art, SF

What can you do with an old typewriter? Well, if you're an artist like Jeremy Mayer, quite a lot.

Labels: art

Da Vinci's masterpiece, The Last Supper, has been photographed, digitized, and put online as a 16 billion pixel image, which you can view and zoom in on. Wired has an article about how it was done.

Leonardo used oil and tempera paints on dry plaster, an experimental technique, and as a result, the Last Supper is now so faded and cracked it can't withstand exposure to bright light. To protect the painting, HAL9000 worked with restoration specialists at Rome's Istituto Centrale per il Restauro to develop a lighting system without the ultraviolet emissions and high thermal impact so hazardous to works of art. Shot with a Nikon D2X digital SLR in just nine hours, the total impact of the digitization process was equal to just a few minutes of the soft lighting that normally illuminates the painting.

Back in their office, technical supervisor Mauro Gavinelli and his team stitched together 1,677 panoramic images of the 15-foot-by-29-foot painting using two quad-core AMD Opteron processors, 16 GB of memory and a 2-terabyte hard disk.

Labels: art

Now, this is a car. In this case, I doubt that the paint job cost more than the car, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was close.

Labels: art

Fan artist Taral Wayne has been a fixture on the Toronto SF scene ever since I got involved in Toronto fandom in the 1980s. I published some of his art in my fanzine, Torus, many years ago. He's now put some of his art is now up on the web. In Trufen.net he writes: "But be warned -- the range of material is wide, and will include some stuff that might strike the average fan as odd or definitely not to his taste. Aside from that dozen or so pieces, the rest includes comic pages published in the past, nametags, cartoons, and even a small number of photos." Click the Gallery link to view the art.

Labels: art, SF

Women in art is a truly mesmerizing video of 500 years of women's faces in paintings, morphing from one to another. It's one of the coolest videos I've seen in some time.

Labels: art, video

Cover Browser is a site for browsing the scanned covers for hundreds of comics. There's some great art here. The scans are good quality and big enough to have some impact.

Labels: art, comics