provides a treasure trove of practical techniques and ingenious approaches. In this captivating guide, noted artist
Jane Freeman shows readers, step by step, how to use modified kit components, and found and handmade objects to create intensely detailed miniature constructions.
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June 13, 2008
The Artful Dodger
"Improvement makes straight roads; but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius."-- William Blake
Went to an art opening the other night in Soho, a respectable show of tasteful paintings, pleasant, well crafted, glib. The kind of art that does brilliantly over a leather couch in a magazine spread. I left and walked east, to Elizabeth Street where north of Prince is a storefront with a miniature of itself in the window.
I went on to the Lower East Side, to the next opening, at the Cake Shop on Ludlow. In that window, a plastic lawn-deer (wearing a black wig) basked on a collection of superannuated cassette tapes arranged like floor tiles. Inside, paintings of interiors, by my young friend Sophie, hung across a long wall from front to back. Her palette was disciplined, quirkily somber, the perspectives experimental. No easy solutions here, no glibness; the work caught you unawares, like a shivery glance askance. I admire such authenticity, poetry versus product, like a twist in a ribbon, a skip in a song, a chip in china or a rhyme got wrong.
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From a dour guy in black glasses I bought some cold green tea. I hung out in the back near a large window with a view into an empty courtyard. The crowd, two generations younger than me, was not looking at the art. Some of the boys emoted lonely uncertainty. The confident ones with dates all had a hand on a female knee. Two oblivious fellows typed on laptops side-by-side. Their faces glowed like luminous dials in the glare of their screens. At a teensy table an obese girl exuberantly nibbled the point of a triangular slice. I put in my earplugs and mentally critiqued the paintings. Half an hour passed and no Sophie. The din trumped my earplugs. I left this spectacle for the jammed streets.
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A chalkboard sign at a bar on the Bowery beckoned: “Happy Hour. Have a Night You’re Sure Not to Remember.” Soon I came to the New Museum, open tonight late and free. The chartreuse-green elevator was enormous, as most museum elevators are. Its two stainless steel doors mirrored and multiplied the occupants like Alex Katz cutouts at a cocktail party. The art in the white spacious galleries was largely multimedia, irreverent and coy–but nothing I hadn’t seen before. Less interesting, I thought, than the incidental rooftop views beyond the strangely narrow corridors and stairs.
Posted by Jane on June 13, 2008 9:07 PM
