Our very own Professor Esra Akin’s new book, entitled “Mustafa Ali’s Epic Deeds of Artists“, provides a critical translation and commentary of the earliest known Ottoman literary source about the lives and works of calligraphers, painters, limners, and book-binders of the Ottoman and Persianate worlds. Mustafa ʿÂli’s (1541-1600) Epic Deeds of Artists (1587) was considered to be primarily a biographic dictionary.
Read more and order a copy at the publisher’s website.
“Re-Imagining the Book” is a blog that features 
a compilation of student-made created in the
Oberlin College Studio Art class
Re-Imagining the Book, taught by Nanette Yannuzzi-Macias.
Before the trois-couleurs, before the Eiffel Tower, before the Larousse Gastronomique, a 15th-century artist named Jean Fouquet was at work creating images that were utterly and exclusively French – though, at that time, saying “That is so… French!” might not have been very meaningful to many people. In a new book entitled Jean Fouquet and the Invention of France: Art and Nation after the Hundred Years War. Erik Inglis shows us that Fouquet was, in fact, shaping a national identity through his court painting for Charles VII and Louis XI. Inglis explains both how Fouquet contributed to nascent nationalism, and how this nationalism affected the court’s appreciation of him as a great French artist. French national identity was defined in terms as various as the country’s patron saints and its wine, its buildings and its artists.
One of the ways that Fouquet put his imprimatur on French national identity was by illustrating a 1450s edition of a book entitled the Grandes Chroniques de France – the authoritative history of France. Fouquet’s 15th-century scenes were crucial in re-emphasizing the subordination of the English kings, grandly illustrating the victory of France over its longtime rival.
To read more go to Yale’s Blog http://yalepress.wordpress.com/2011/07/14/the-invention-of-france-happy-bastille-day/
“Colleagues:
Please be aware that convicted fraudster and thief John Gilkey is operating once again, likely out of northern California. A comic book dealer in New York state is his latest victim. Besides defrauding book dealers, Gilkey has also left his dubious mark in the print, stamp, and comics trades. He was arrested late last year in San Francisco following a parole violation, but was released after he (or someone) posted $75,000.00 bail. He then disappeared, but is active once again.
He is a serious criminal who continually looks for new opportunities and deceptions. An investigation by the SFPD is ongoing; there is an outstanding warrant for his arrest. Please do your friends the favor of re-posting this note to any and all lists of allied trades and organizations. Thank you very much.
John Waite
Security Committee, ABAA
Create your own.. drop your cursor on the “jackson pollock” widget at this website….
Imaginawesome arose out of a Reddit thread several months ago. A high-quality painting by a 6-year-old prompted commenters to post their own kids’ art. Miller killed some time one night enhancing one of the pieces. The reaction provided just enough fuel to try it again, eventually leading to a website.
Miller, who doesn’t have kids of his own, has relied on extended networks and the Internet to find new material. “Kids have the ability to come up with some pretty amazing things, but not always the ability to draw exactly what they were imagining. I’m here to help make those drawings come a little bit closer to reality.” Garrett Miller, a Washington, D.C. software engineer, is not a professional artist by trade, although he is one by training. He graduated from Oberlin College in 2006 as a studio art major before wending his way into a programming job further east.
Thus far, only a handful of artwork has been published. Each picture takes an hour or two, typically drawn on an old Wacom tablet.
If you have a drawing you’d like to share, please pass it along. He would love to make it awesome.
Today two narrative vessels, one teapot, four small plates and three small bowls are on their way to Artseen Gallery in Vermilion. The show title dnoc members exhibition 2009 will be on view from September 5th – 20th.
Artseen Gallery: September 5-20, 2009
5591 Liberty Ave, Vermilion,OH. 44089.
An exhibition showcasing the ceramic artwork of Northern Ohio Clay artists
Opening reception date: Saturday September 5, 4-8 pm. http://theartseengallery.com/
Concept to Creation
Callendar/Vaccher
Two-Man Exhibition
photography + sculpture
Kennth Paul Lesko Gallery
July 15-September 10, 2011
Although they are separated by over 50 years, Marco Vaccher and Casey Callender seem to walk the same corridors in their dreams, each channeling a dark whimsy into their work that spans a surrealist line between humor and melancholy; the absurd and the divine. Casey Callender [Big Sandy, TX] has had his photography featured in numerous magazines, including INKED, B&W and Photographer’s Forum (featured cover). Marco Vaccher [Seven Hills, OH] has won a multitude of regional art prizes throughout his long and successful career as a sculptor. At 88 years old, he is still actively producing work and exhibiting.
Gallery hours Wednesday-Saturday, 12-5p or by appointment.
1300 W. 78th St to 1305 W. 80th St
(one block north of Lake Ave)
Cleveland OH 44102 map
“Even today,” says curator Barbara Haskell, “people are befuddled — how can the Whitney be showing Lyonel Feininger?” With his German name, years of teaching at the Bauhaus, and branding by the Nazis as a degenerate artist, Feininger, who is being celebrated with a retrospective, organized by Haskell, at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art from the 30th of June through October 16, is often overlooked as a native son.
The New York-born artist has defied stylistic as well as national labeling. Although he is best known for prismatic renderings of village churches and Baltic seascapes that combine the symbolism of the German Romantics with the fractured planes of the Cubists, his influences are broad — from newspaper comics to Der Blaue Reiter, from the Bauhaus to Black Mountain College. “Feininger is hard to classify, and I think this has impeded a proper understanding of his achievement,” says Jane Kallir, of New York’s Galerie St. Etienne, which specializes in artists active in Germany and Austria during the early part of the 20th century. “He wore so many hats.”
This multifarious approach is one reason for the attention his work is getting now. “Feininger is the perfect model of the postmodern artist,” Haskell explains. “While the paintings are the spine of his output, he predicted a much freer attitude toward media.” Indeed, Feininger worked in a wide range of media: oils, watercolors, sketches, photographs, woodcuts — even hand-carved playthings that exhibit his signature humor, borrowing from childhood with both nostalgia and irony while pushing the envelope in formal experimentation. The gamut is on display in the comprehensive Whitney show and a pair of traveling exhibitions of works on paper and photographs from Harvard University’s art museums, at Munich’s Pinakothek der Moderne through July 17, and then at the Getty in Los Angeles before returning to Cambridge in March 2012.
Feininger is drawing notice in the saleroom too. At Sotheby’s New York in May 2007, his 1915 oil “Jesuiten III,” depicting three Jesuits eyeing a streetwalker, raced past its $9 million high estimate to $23.3 million, and at the house’s sale in London this February, the 1912 steamboat picture “Raddampfer an Landungssteg” (“Side-Wheel Steamer at the Landing”) more than doubled expectations when it brought $5.1 million. “His market was for a long time undervalued and overlooked,” says David Norman, worldwide cochair of Impressionist and modern art at Sotheby’s, adding that Feininger has benefited from a general change in buyers’ tastes over the past decade, from favoring “delicate, retiring pictures” to preferring those with greater visual impact. “People are drawn to strong compositions and brilliant color. They want something that goes bam! off the wall.”
Clarence Ward Art Library News 