2 comments about Jess: To and From the Printed Page.

1. ...next time you stroll through a museum. You might make a discovery. I did, this morning. The De Young Museum of San Francisco has three paintings by "Jess", two of which I think are staggeringly good, figurative paintings built with almost bas-relief impasto. I bought this book at the museum store, and I've just begun to live with it.
   
   Much to my surprise, I knew this guy Jess years ago in San Francisco. He was the marriage-partner of the poet Robert Duncan. I didn't enjoy Duncan's poetry, and I suppose I let it show. In any case, we were civil but no more, and I completely ignored the partner's art openings.
   
   My loss.
   
   Jess was born in 1923. His birth name was Burgess Collins. He was a brilliant chemist and worked on the Manhatten Project in the production of plutonium. After 1945, he continued in plutonium science with the Hanford Atomic Energy Project. In 1949, he had an epiphany; he found himself conscience-stricken over the destructive powers of nuclear weapons. He abandoned science entirely and turned to art.
   
   Our gain.



2. I came across one small work by Jess while visiting a small museum recently, and was utterly taken by its mysterious quality, both erotic & ominous, achieved through collage of kitschy figures with more subtle, understated images. I'd never seen anything quite like it & immediately wanted to know more about the man & his work. This volume is the perfect introduction to both.
   
   The longtime companion of poet Robert Duncan, Jess dropped his last name when he cut ties with his disapproving family. Openly gay long before it was common or safe, his art reflects his life -- although sexuality is just one of his subjects. He was clearly a student of surrealism, incorporating it into his art, sometimes for individual pieces, sometimes to illustrate small magazines.
   
   And his interests are definitely wide-ranging! For example, he recreates text in several Dick Tracy comic strips, creating the satiric & thought-provoking new comic strip, "Tricky Cad." Many of his magazine covers & illustrations have an eerie, otherworldly atmosphere drawing upon alchemical & occult sources. All of his work is infused with intelligence & vision.
   
   Some may believe that anyone can create collage, that it requires no real talent. Well, anyone can create bad or inept collage, and all too many do -- formulaic Victorian fluff & dunce caps, alas! But this is collage at its finest, truly raising the bar, demonstrating that it's art. Highly recommended!

5 comments about Stripped Naked.

1. There's no doubt that Mr. Gorman is a talented photographer. I liked the sponteinity with which he used the camera and the concept. However, many of the models are a turn off. They are so skinny that you can see their ribs. Not the kind of book that I would recommend.



2. If you're a Peter Gorman fan, I recommend getting this book. I enjoyed his two previous books, but with this one you get a larger format and more intimate feel. The photos are candid and the girls are natural looking and not overly made up (which I very much like). From the cover shot it looks like it could be called "Messy Rooms"!



3. Very bad.... Nothing good inside. All are below average photos. Don't waste your money.



4. Received book expecting "david hamilton-others" material-- instead found "Hustler etc" typical approach--very dissapointed-returned book same day--(would be great if ALL photo books this subject could show some example of material,including whether bw or color)-have returned several others since trying amazon for similar/same reason. great service,tho--thanks,hondaspl.



5. This book is about one of the most beautiful subjects for a photography essay - pretty naked young women. Gorman's work is very natural as all of the women were photographed in their own homes where they could feel the most relaxed and comfortable. Another plus for the work is that the women are not professional models. They are all comfortable with their sexuality and the work is a gift to all persons.

2 comments about Girl Crazy: The Art of Michal Dutkiewicz.

1. ¿Que mas se puede decir? El trabajo de Dutkiewicz es toda una obra de arte de lo mas puro y moderno sin dejar de combinar lo clasico (nos recuerda mucho al maestro Alberto Vargas), al combinar perfectamente el desnudo femenino con la creatividad, la picardia, la sensualidad y la ingenuidad, y todo con una coleccion de tecnicas de pintura y colores que nadie que vea esta gran obra se queda sin suspirar; ¡que gran libro!! Para todo amante del arte y que disfruta contemplando la hermosura de la mujer, este libro exalta al ser mas precioso de la creacion!! Yo nunca me canso de verlo y admirar tan magnifico trabajo. Por lo demas, hay de todo: rostros sonrientes, chicas juguetonas, guerreras y soñadoras, escenas de romanticismo, dramatismo y comicidad; y que decir de la figura femenina, ojos expresivos, bocas perfectas, caras angelicales (y picaras), senos bonitos, piernas soberbias, caderas pefectas y unos fondos de paisajes que van desde galaxias lejanas hasta bosques verdes y paisajes fantasticos... UN LIBRO QUE LLEGARA A SER CLASICO!!



2. Michal Dutkiewicz is a unique artist that creates fantay and pinup images that sometimes almost look real. His imagination and detail bring the drawings to life. This is a must book to add to any artist collection. At the end of the book, each photo has a description of the art that is very informative.

5 comments about Paint Radiant Realism in Watercolor, Ink & Colored Pencil.

1. Fabulous painting book.Have yet to try the lessons but the instructions are set out clearly and will be easily followed.The quality of the paper in the book make it a must for art students.



2. I had never used watercolor before picking up this book, and now I used the techniques in the book almost exclusively. It's wonderful to be able to combine my favorite mediums and now I'm able to get the look that I was going for in my paintings. The instructions are very thorough and there are also some really nice palette suggestions.



3. I have admired Sueellen Ross's beautiful cat paintings for some time, and was delighted when this book was published. I am a cat artist myself, and good instruction books on how to paint cats are almost impossible to come by. Sueellen Ross has a very unique style which combines layers of ink, watercolour and coloured crayon, and builds a realistic and dramatic finished painting. The book shows step by step, not only how to paint cats, but also other animals, plants and furnishings. I tried using her techniques for a painting of my ginger cat in the washing basket, and was very pleased with the result. However, I feel that it was not quite as easy as Ms Ross claimed, and is most definitely not for beginners! This book will probably inspire you to give her techniques a go, and will therefore help to develop your art skills and knowledge. For those who are not painters, but enjoy good animal and feline art, this book will also serve as a good introduction to the work of Sueellen Ross and is a delight to look at.



4. The artwork is amazing. The best part for most I'm sure is her step by step instructions to create this work. She gives you instruction on her techniques that you could use on not just the work in the book but for your own work, based on your own reference material. It is realism at its best.
   
   It is not for the beginner, you should be confident in your drawing skills, not just tracing or linework. You should know tonal value and be able to create the illusion of 3D...the better your drawings the better chance you have at succeeding with the techniques in the book.



5. Sueellen Ross has presented an excellent demonstration book on her special techniques in painting animals. As a watercolorist I learned quickly to ignore watercolor books that exhibit paintings I don't care for or am not inspired by. So it is my perception that Paint Radiant Realism in Watercolor, Ink & Colored Pencil, did inspire me to experiment using her techniques so that I could approach her desirable style.

No comments about The Penny Bank Book (Schiffer Book for Collectors).

3 comments about Shunga: The Essence of Japanese Pillow-Book Eroticism (Essence of Erotica series).

1. As an artist researching this subject, the art is quite good, and numerous examples of different styles are included in this book. What is confusing is that the text does not fit the art. Although enjoyable in their own right, if I wanted written Japanese erotica I would have sought that exclusively.



2. Shunga scrolls from the 12th to the 18th centuries are the famous Japanese erotic pillow books and were comprised of illustrations as well as erotic poems, stories and legends, but the most important function of Shunga was to provide sex advice. The Japanese adopted the idea of the books from the Chinese. The nobles and moneyed classes used the pillow books as sex manuals and carefully followed the advice they contained for increasing sexual pleasure and for increasing over-all longevity.
   Most people familiar with Shunga are primarily thinking of the beautiful erotic, some westerners would say pornographic, wood block prints by the most famous artists of Japanese history. Modern painters, such as Pablo Picasso were so impressed with Shunga art that his infamous 347 Series of etchings was inspired by the Japanese art form. It's helpful to understanding Shunga if the reader realizes that the Japanese culture never associated "guilt" with sex and throughout the country's history, sex and sexual experimentation has been s normal and important part of everyday life. Shunga books were often given as wedding gifts to new brides. They were the marriage and sex manuals of the era.
   Bret Norton, the book's author spent forty years working in the Far East. He was an avid scholar of the various countries languages and cultures. This lavishly illustrated book is one of a series of four that Norton released including "The Kama Sutra," "The Golden Lotus," and "Eastern Erotica."
   What makes this book different than many other books about Shunga is that it includes a selection of the ancient stories; legends and diary entries that accompanied the illustrations included in the scrolls and later, actual books. Many of the stories are filled with "Dosojin" or gods of the roadways and pathways. Demons, often in the form of animals, embellished stories with names such as "The Cold Fish," "Like a Bamboo Shoot," "The Bonze Ferryman," " The Doll Festival," and "Death by Perfume" provides a wealth of different and sometimes humorous peeks into the Japanese society of the time. The stories are filled with lessons about the need to please your sexual partner, how to behave in polite society, jealous women taking revenge for unforgivable chauvinistic behavior, but most importantly, the books were read and studied and followed religiously for their health and longevity advice. This collection of various samples of Shunga stories is like an anthology of the "best of the art form." The material is charming, straightforward and amazing. It wets the appetite for more.
   The author also includes an interesting segment from the "Diary of Lady Muraski" which really isn't Shunga, but does show how the culture of that historical era functioned. It provides an important clue as to why Shunga art and writing would be so important in the formal, educated, stratified society of the period. One of the few weaknesses in the book is that most of the beautiful color reproductions seem unrelated to the "Lady Muraski's Diary" part of the book. That's not a big drawback however, because the segment wonderfully illustrates the highly refined culture of the Japanese royal court.
   It's amazing how something as openly sexual as Shunga could be such a common part of Japanese culture for centuries. The sheer volume of surviving examples of Shunga bears witness to its almost universal distribution throughout all corners of Japan.



3. - so let's start there. Every page has at least one full-color reproduction of, well, reproduction or something related. The colors and printing are good. The author has also presented some notes of cultural explanation, and a few bawdy stories. The pictures don't seem to be hand-picked for their aptness to the story they embellish, but keep up the enjoyable mood of the book.
   
   For all that, I found parts of this book disappointing. None of the pictures is labelled with artist or even era. I can't hunt down more of the work that I liked, or see if stylistic similarities point to some artist or time. Also, some of the pictures are quite small, as if the shunga itself was of secondary interest to the text. The stories, too, are cut loose from attribution - the author could have made them up for all I know. That's not a possibility I take seriously, but it was disappointing to lose all trace of historical context for the stories, too. For some odd reason, the last section of the book is quite unrelated to shunga. It's nice material, from lady Murasaki's diary, and nicely illustrated. It's just not shunga, though - remember what this book was called?
   
   The pictures are enjoyable, and show some variety in practices and poses. I was hoping for more, though, more information about the images and their creators, and more about the history shown. As much as I like the pictures, I'm still looking for real information about these lovely prints, the people who made them, and the times in which they arose.
   
   //wiredweird

2 comments about Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972.

1. I lived through this era and my original 1972 copy is well used and full of loose pages. If you want to find out how the tracking of turtles is art, or how Lawrence Weiner came to write phrases on walls as his art work or simply how the synergy of people working with ideas about process as an artmaking technique came to rule this is an valuable piece of first hand reporting. Looking to explain Sol Le Witt to my college students on his recent death this book gave me samples of his interactive drawings they could try.



2. I first read this book about twenty years ago. I am glad to see that there is a new edition. It had a major impact on my development as an artist. The author discusses the trend called "conceptual art" which flowered in the time period mentioned in the title (late 60's through early 70's). These artists rejected the craft of art and the creation of objects themselves seeking instead something more fundamental. Ms. Lippard calls this "resonance" and uses descriptions of various pieces to explore this concept. Though "conceptual art" has long since passed by, the analysis in this book is still current and applies more than ever in our "post-modernist" period.

1 comments about Conceptualism in Latin American Art: Didactics of Liberation (Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Series in Latin American and Latino Art and Culture).

1. Luis Camnitzer's "Conceptualism in Latin American Art: Didactics of Liberation"' is an essential book for anyone interested in understanding the differences in the currents which nourished Conceptual Art in Latin America and in mainstream Conceptual Art in the United States. In it's scope it should take it's place next to "The Dada Painters and Poets", Motherwell's magnificent introduction to early European radicalism. Both books open for us broad areas where writers, artists and poets opened new venues for expression.
   Discovering for us the work of Simon Rodriguez (1769-1854) alone is worth the price of admission. By allowing Rodriguez's work to resonate with examples, Camnitzer establishes in my view the most important theme of this book. Conceptualism in Latin America arises out of the immense wealth inherent in language and literature. From Simon Rodriguez to Max Aub, Jorge Luis Borges, Vicente Huidobro to a long list of artists who have enriched this legacy, right up to Leon Ferrari working at maximum intensity in Argentina.
   A meticulous analysis of North American conceptualism reveals it's inextricable relation to Capitalism. This raises the question: Up to what point can Democracy and Capitalism coexist. What possibilities are left for art when a booming market swallows anything and everything thus neutering any possibility for subversion. Thus La Monte Youg's chilling phrase: "I am not interested in good: I am interested in new- even if this includes the possibility of it's being evil." To this the author juxtaposes Superbarrio's statement: "One day I left home to go to work and I saw two flashes of lightning, one yellow, one red. I closed my eyes after I was caught in a whirlwind. When the wind passed, I opened my eyes and I was dressed like a wrestler! Exactly as you are seeing me today!"
   ARTFORHUM-2008

5 comments about Evidence: The Art of Candy Jernigan.

1. This is a great book. Not only is it well-organized, it also shows a great deal of love and empathy for the artist. Candy's work grabs the viewer's attention like the work of few other artists.



2. This book has become one of my bedside companions, and certainly will make you reflect upon the world in a manner that is foriegn. It is nothing like you will have ever seen, and it is more wonderful than you can imagine.

   In Candy's world, everything; the smears of sauces, the crusts of bread, the crack vials found in New York, a crushed saucepan, a dead rat and the bottletop nearby Jim Morrison's grave, become worthy of attention and transformed into art.

   She will make you peer at the sidewalk, wondering about the origins of that dust, make you pocket that docket in the desire to transform into a collage of your day's events.

   While much of this book is her collected items, there is life to be found in her minute drawings of bugs and sausages, her tiny print and evidence of her personality is found within her dream based art.

   Contrary to the previous reviewer, I find this book marvellously and wonderfully beautiful. In the tiny collections and wry but subtle observations of Candy, her life is documented and her personality radiates to the reader.

   This book, seemingly a collection of food scraps and other tidbits, is evidence of her life, yes, but evidence of the beauty we can find within the seemingly mundane, the tiny, if only we give that bread crust, the leaves in the Pere La-Chaise and that dust a chance to be noteworthy.




3. This weekend I read and looked through "Evidence: The Art of Candy Jernigan." It's a fast biography with lots of pictures from Candy Jernigan's journals. It's an amazing and inspiring book.

   Jernigan's journals aren't pretty but they are witty and wry and artistic. Candy included smears of food from her meals, dust collected from the steps of the Parthenon, and crack vials collected from the streets of New York. Toward the end of her life, she chronicled lists of the medications and treatments she took to fight liver cancer. (She died in 1991 at the ripe old age of 39.)

   Candy's journals show that she LIVED and lived big. It's a pity she's gone but we're lucky she was here and left her wonderful journals behind.




4. How well do you remember your last vacation? Or a great meal? What do you do to record the beauty around you? Do you notice the horrors of everyday life to which so many people are oblivious? Ms. Jernigan was a consumate story teller. Her stories are not of the obvious, but of the things most of us overlook, ignore and wish we could remember. Absorb this book and you'll never take a trip again without thinking of her work. This book is a true delight. The visual content is wonderful, the text informative and reserved, and the book's design and construction is almost as unique as the subject matter. If you are an artist, traveller - if you are alive - this book should be in you library. More importantly, in you life.



5. This book is an absolute treasure! Evidence: The Art of Candy Jernigan, is an illustrated and collaged journal of her travels--around the world, as well as around the city. One feels almost like a voyeur--the book is that intimate.

   The book is FILLED with pictures; photocopies of her travel journal, as well as assemblages and paintings from her daily travels around the city. It is beautifully put together--so much so that it evokes a great deal of emotion. I wish I'd had a chance to meet her!

   This book came from Jernigan's wish to have "proof that I had been there." There is some irony in this statement, because she died in 1991 at the age of thirty-nine, and the book was published eight years after her death.

   As much as I DON'T like to compare artists, Candy Jernigan probably isn't a familiar name to many people. Having said that, I'll add that her art is reminescent of Joseph Cornell, Robert Rauschenburg, and Jasper Johns--but from a woman's point of view.

2 comments about Eroticism and Art (Oxford History of Art).

1. Good overview of a frequently overlooked and more often misconstrued subject, which has nonetheless been a part of every human society since before writing was invented.



2. "What I like is erotica," goes the old joke. "What you like is pornography." There is probably never going to be agreement on how to separate one from the other, and besides, the same people who object to one are often going to object as well to the other. In _Eroticism & Art_ (Oxford University Press), Alyce Mahon draws a distinction. "Pornography's sole intent is to stimulate sexually; it is an aid to sex or masturbation." It is, in her view, more strictly concerned with power rather than mere sex. Erotic art, however, "is about equality between members of the opposite and same sexes." Even so, within erotic art is always another intent, "a shocking means to express social, religious and political criticism or defy bourgeois taste." Not all of the art discussed and depicted here is shocking, but this is closely related to how long we have been looking at it. Manet's _Olympia_ of 1863 shows an alluring nude, a high-class prostitute, staring frankly at the viewer. It was controversial at the time, but it is hard to imagine anyone getting worked up over it now. But Manet borrowed the woman's classical pose from an even more respectable Titian, and has in turn been borrowed by Mel Ramos in 1973 to show a California blonde complete with tanning lines along the _Playboy_ archetype, and in 1988 by Yasumasa Morimura, a male homosexual Japanese artist who assaults the viewer by posing both as the courtesan and the black servant in the original. Mahon, a lecturer at the University of Cambridge, has drawn upon extensive sources (this is a book of mostly intellectual rather than sexual stimulation), and has concentrated upon Western art from the mid-nineteenth century to current times. She demonstrates that emphasis on the erotic in art is a constant and that it has profoundly affected not just art movements but also how humans understand themselves sexually.
   
   One picture reproduced here is Courbet's _The Origin of the World_ of 1866. It is an audacious work that is still thrilling; it is simply a finely-rendered "lower portrait" of a woman, legs spread, dramatically foreshortened without showing arms or face. This was a decidedly male point of view, defiant and calling attention to "the dynamics and politics of desire" between artist, model, and viewer. Its dynamics and politics have been updated; two Yugoslav artists in 1997 made a video version. Instead of being a passive female exciting the male artist and viewer, the model stimulates herself in a feminist rendering of the same pose. Both artworks were shocking for their times, and certainly some would put the 1997 version in the category of pornography, but its deliberate intent to modify the message of the original clearly imbues it with the kind of political and social edge that Mahon finds as a universal characteristic of erotic works. Mahon examines the use of the erotic by the surrealists and even by the Nazis and fascists leading up to World War II. She has several chapters covering recent decades, including erotic, bizarre, or dangerous performance art.
   
   Mahon maintains a detached "What can we learn from this?" tone throughout, appreciative of even the strangest sexual displays, and she analyzes them with elegance and sympathy. The subject is literally vital; one chapter after another shows images that might be titillating for some while simultaneously emetic for others. There are over a hundred, mostly color, pictures, all well-keyed to the text, although Mahon has discussed plenty of other unreproduced works that make it handy to have access to the Web to see what she is talking about. It is a handsome and glossy volume, with many pictures and ideas to provoke, uh, thought.