September 2015

a. bill miller daily drawing remix

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Another wrinkle (pun intended) on the idea of "digital painting." A. Bill Miller has been making physical drawings with oil stick and other media, scanning them, and texture-mapping them onto 3D-simulated folds of cloth. An archive of these is here.
Taking liberties I shopped (GIMPed) several of these into the "Magritte version" above.
Thinking back to studio days, painting cloth with a pattern was always hard because you had to simultaneously keep the logic or gestalt of the printed design in mind while reproducing the topological contortions of the fabric that you saw right before you. To get the folds right you were in constant danger of skewing the pattern. A 3D program allows so-called machine intelligence to do the problem-solving, freeing you the artist, up to do...what, exactly? What is the purpose of labor saving in a non-Taylorist context? In this case, I guess, it's to make a cloth-fetishist dreamscape.

The Art Guys, Situation Sculpture #18.46 (The Flying Stump)

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"The Flying Stump" is the latest in a series of Situation Sculptures [Internet Archive] by The Art Guys.
As shown in the documentation video, the stump doesn't fly along its guyline a la Peter Pan, but rather just sort of hangs there, halfway up the side of a wooden telephone pole. Also, it's not really a stump per se but a cross section of another pole, with some rusted metal cleats still attached. This work of situational art will not be noticed by 99% of the people walking or speeding through this forlorn intersection north of Houston's Interstate 610 Loop, and that's part of the beauty of this simple, absurdist gesture.
It's not known if permits had to be obtained for this work. It appears the support wire for the stump had to be strung to a pole across the street -- the hoisting activity might have attracted some attention while it was going on. Otherwise, this is about as understated as it gets. You have some documentation telling what and where this is.

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modern sculpture

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Homer-sculpture2

Hat tip D_MAGIK for the basic shape in this drawing. This was a failed experiment to see if treating the shape as a David Smith-like sculpture on a hillside would blunt its instant recognizability. Perhaps someone in the world has never seen Matt Groening's apelike character but then that person would have no referent of a "David Smith-like sculpture" either, and would simply see a curving line and a circle against a blue sky, casting an unexplained shadow.

about that new logo

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goo

Google recently switched their logo from a serif font to a creepily infantile sans-serif. They have kept their vaunted "minimal" search page design so the kindergarten logo really stands out now. It's as if the more monopolistic and world-straddling the company becomes, the more innocent-looking they want their "facing forward" page to be. At one point, as they gobbled up smaller companies, these subsidiary functions added more typography to the top of the search page. Then, a year or two ago, they scaled this verbiage back, as seen in the screen shot above.