Utopia Giordano takes paintings from the past and re-imagines what they’d look like if they conformed to 21st-century beauty ideals.
The Wu-Note Project – Wu-Tang Clan album covers re-imagined in Blue Note Records style.
Redo your iTunes album artwork. You’ll be glad you did.
Related viewing: Project Thirty-Three
One of Flannery O’Connor’s early drawings:
“Do you have any books the faculty doesn’t particularly recommend?”
(Via Wesley Hill.)
Gerald Murphy (American, 1888–1964). Razor, 1924. Oil on canvas, 32 1/16 x 36 1/2 in.
With its almost “pre-Pop” billboard-style oversizing and graphic boldness, Gerald Murphy’s Razor suggests the heraldic crest of a modern American man, whose necessary tools are a Gillette safety razor, a Parker Big Red pen, and Three Stars matches. As the son of the head of the Mark Cross company, known for fine leather goods, Murphy was attuned to product design, as well as to style and status. After taking up painting in Paris in 1921, he borrowed from the new, reductive decorative aesthetic of Purism to celebrate American machine-age design for an enthusiastic postwar French audience. The painting also resonates in the context of Murphy’s obsessive self-fashioning as ultramodern and unconventional—an expression, in part, of his own bisexuality.
Part of Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties, now playing at the Brooklyn Museum.
Posted in art
From Andy Warhol’s Tuesday, 9 October 1984 diary entry. It’s Sean Lennon’s 9th birthday party.
We went into Sean’s bedroom – and there was a kid there setting up an Apple computer that Sean had gotten as a present, the Macintosh model. I said that once some man had been calling me a lot wanting to give me one, but that I’d never called him back or something, and then the kid looked up and said, “Yeah, that was me. I’m Steve Jobs.” And he looked so young, like a college guy. And he told me that he would still send me one now. And then he gave me a lesson on drawing with it. It only comes in black and white now, but they’ll make it soon in color. And then Keith and Kenny used it. Keith had already used it once to make a T-shirt, but Kenny was using it for the first time, and I felt so old and out of it with this young whiz guy right there who’d helped invent it.
(Via.)
After seeing a couple different people on Twitter link to a short video wherein Jim Jarmusch asks Martin Scorsese about the scene in Goodfellas with Scorsese’s mom, I couldn’t resist sharing an image of the painting her character is supposed to have painted in the film.
Actually, as http://www.goodfellaspainting.com/ (perhaps my favorite single-serving site ever) points out, it’s a painting by Nicholas Pileggi’s mom based on a photograph from the November 1978 issue of National Geographic.
I am, of course, not the first person to point this out, but this strikes me as one of those things that’s so utterly delightful it can’t be pointed out too many times.
Tommy’s (Joe Pesci’s) analysis of the painting is particularly delicious:
“One dog goes one way and the other dog goes the other way. And this guy’s saying, ‘Whaddya want from me?’”
Indeed.
From Olly Moss’s clever and charming “Paper Cuts” series.
Previously: Olly Moss’s Movie Poster Remakes.
Tom Waits in Coffee and Cigarettes (2003)
From Elizabeth Gilbert’s June 2002 GQ profile of Tom Waits:
“‘Children make up the best songs, anyway,’ he says. ‘Better than grown-ups. Kids are always working on songs and throwing them away, like little origami things or paper airplanes. They don’t care if they lose it; they’ll just make another one.’ This openness is what every artist needs. Be ready to receive the inspiration when it comes; be ready to let it go when it vanishes. He believes that if a song ‘really wants to be written down, it’ll stick in my head. If it wasn’t interesting enough for me to remember it, well, it can just move along and go get in someone else’s song.’ ‘Some songs,’ he has learned, ‘don’t want to be recorded.’ You can’t wrestle with them or you’ll only scare them off more. Trying to capture them sometimes ‘is trying to trap birds.’ Fortunately, he says, other songs come easy, like ‘digging potatoes out of the ground.’ Others are sticky and weird, like ‘gum found under an old table.’ Clumsy and uncooperative songs may only be useful ‘to cut up as bait and use ’em to catch other songs.’ Of course, the best songs of all are those that enter you ‘like dreams taken through a straw.’ In those moments, all you can be, Waits says, is grateful.”
(Article via Austin Kleon.)
Further listening: Radiolab’s “Help!”
Austin Kleon’s simple list of 10 things he wishes he’d heard when he was in college.
Required reading.
Posted in art, endorsements, inspiration, work
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