Hunger Games

[!!!!!!!V E R Y    M I L D    S P O I L E R   A L E R T!!!!!!!!] 

I saw Hunger Games with my friend who is involved in both Twilight and HG fandom. So when he invited me I guess I was expecting another Twilight. I knew next to nothing about the books except that middle-schoolers liked them a lot and it took place in an imaginary world and somehow involved gladiator-children. I don't like horror movies (mostly), I don't like sci-fi or fantasy genres (unless Harrison Ford, Andre the Giant or Stanley Kubrick is involved) and I'd like to see nothing less than children fighting each other to the death. Basically I wasn't expecting much.

The posters for Hunger Games. I loved how the advertising was so in sync with the film, not working against the idea like that stupid topless Dragon Tattoo poster. The characters are presented just as the kids are presented to the wealthy crowds in the movie: as fighters with a score rather than people. [Image: a collection of 8 similar posters, each with a black background featuring a character's head and shoulders in profile, lit from the side so you only see a sliver of them, like a waning moon. In the black space where their ear would be is the movie logo. Each faces left with the exception of the main character.]

OMG y'all, it was AWESOME. It's a Hollywood movie, to be sure. It's got all that good stuff like action, romance, classic hero plot and production value that makes a movie... easy and dazzling, I guess. But it was unabashedly political too-- and not in a remotely hidden or apologetic way. I left the movie feeling revolted with consumer culture, angry with the rich/poor divide, with a visceral aversion to luxury goods and lifestyles that has lingered, so far, two days after leaving the theater. It is the perfect time for this movie, with Occupy Wall Street, the rising popularity of the derogatory term, "the 1%," the recent spotlight on poverty and labor abuses in the production of luxury Apple products, and rioting from London to Egypt.

An official event where tributes (kids age 12-18) are chosen to participate in the Hunger Games. They're being shown a patriotic film while they wait to see who among them will be sentenced to battle for their life and probably die. The glamorous hostess is so breathlessly pleased, her attitude reminded me of the headmistress at my old school whenever we had groundbreaking type ceremonies honoring a wealthy donor. Only this woman is surrounded by the collective dread of children yet is completely unaffected, coming off as clueless and cruelly indifferent. The attitudes of the rich regarding the poor were so. well. done. [Image: view from about 50 feet above and behind the audience showing the stage flanked by guards and a humongous monitor to the right, with a big grey deco building as backdrop and a red official flag hanging above the stage while the audience stands. It looks like Walker Evans' Appalachian poor showed up in their Sunday best to a Nazi rally.]

It addressed so clearly and simply so many things: how marginalized people instinctively understand that when those in charge say citizens, peace, freedom, our country, they are implicitly excluded, and that their exclusion simply does not occur to the dominant class (what people in social justice call being aware of "privilege." It doesn't mean being a spoiled brat, it refers to the advantages one has because of belonging to any dominant class [white, male, straight, rich, able-bodied, etc] even though one never asked for those advantages and one is usually completely unaware that they have those advantages at all. For example, having access to a computer. Or walking through a parking lot without the thought occurring to take precautions against rape. Or Hollywood always catering to your demographic. It's one of the most difficult social justice issues to explain, point out and accept, and Hunger Games did it effortlessly.) Husband remarked that when we left the theater the movie made real life seem more real.

Stanley Tucci as talk show personality Caesar Flickerman who hosts the pre-Hunger Games fanfare, sort of a cross between Regis Philbin and Oprah. Here he is in a fake ad for Smile Away toothpaste. If you think you're never seen this actor you're wrong. He's been in everything and is so amazing you don't even know it's him. The film used his character's TV show (or whatever it is in the future) to explore the way celebrity and glamor is used to distract, oppress and tell lies. It's a simulacrum in full sail (only MORE SO!!) and something that makes this movie much more modern and relatable than, say, 1984 or other classic socio-political dystopian sci-fi. [Image: a glamorous slick advertisement featuring the head and shoulders of a white man with blue pompadour in a frilly cravat and suit smiling a cheesy bright-white smile in front of a sparkling blue background that suggests flashbulbs or stage lights. Beside his head text reads, DAZZLING! DAZZLING! DAZZLING! and underneath is the photo of a toothbrush with the words Smile Away: Caesar Flickerman. There's more text but it's too small to read.]

*Can't wait to see what other ppl write about re: Hunger Games and racism, sexism, etc.

Edited a week later to add: Other people have, of course, written awesome stuff about Hunger Games. Here's some of what I couldn't wait to read about: s.e. smith's take at TigerBeatDown and Arturo R. García at Racialicious. 
I'm a little surprised that these writers who highlighted race and disability--and many other bloggers-- ignored the military implications of the movie. Sacrificing our teenagers to keep the entrenched hierarchies secure and treating war like entertainment we can all rally behind seems an obvious parallel. It made me think back to the Liz Miller piece I wrote and my ultimate conclusion about her Picturesque Evacuation Ploy installation (if you can make it that far into the post). Maybe everyone's just sick of writing about war?

Portrait March 20

This portrait is for a client so I'm only posting a detail. [Image: realistic black & white charcoal drawing of a dog showing only its eyes and pointed, perky ears].

Not A Gallery: #OccupyMuseums

For those unfamiliar with my other posts pointing out alternatives to the gallery system and generally griping about the art market, this guy will fill you in. His granddaughter recently found his lecture notes in a suitcase and published them, and Murdock Pemberton's complaints from the 1920s sound depressingly contemporary.

Because of the art market capitalism on display last week in NY, the Occupy Museums people decided to protest the New York Armory Show by inviting all NY artists to show up outside the Armory and exchange artwork with other artists, the Armory visitors and the public. They requested that artists eschew profit in order to trade or give away artworks. They posted a few videos of the embarrassing public nuisance event on their site [note to Trumpet Guy: you are not helping!]. I do enjoy an equitable artistic trade but it's often not worth the social risk, in terms of rejecting an offer of my own piece for a, frankly, far inferior piece of someone else's. Also bartering is still treating art as a physical commodity. Why not simply exhibit the work?

Mierle Laderman Ukeles performs "maintenance art" at a museum, 1973. [Image: black & white photo of a young white woman cleaning a glass case with a cloth.]

GAH.... I really want to be excited about #OccupyMuseums but they need to get their shit together and provide, or at least propose, some real alternatives to the for-profit gallery system. I mean really, they want me-- a broke artist-- to produce art at my own expense (time and money, no matter how you slice it), then show up on a cold street-corner and hawk it to strangers who don't appear to want it anyway? I can do basically the same thing at a gallery, plus indoor heating and personal safety.

I think the thing that really irks me about the #OccupyMuseums people is that they don't pay their respects to the decades of art activists, cooperative galleries, critics, scholars and communities that have already been exploring this issue, the institutional critiques of feminist performance artists like Mierle Laderman Ukeles or curatorial artists such as Fred Wilson (Mining the Museum, 1992). No acknowledgement or building upon what has already been tried and suggested in terms of critiquing the gallery system. No only that but no critical, art historical recognition of art movements such as conceptual art that re-interpreted art as something other than a physical object to be traded or sold, or media such as video and computer-based or web-based art that are poised to operate completely outside the market of physical art objects. In fact the contemporary art world is bursting with artists, cooperatives, organizations and even gangs seeking to subvert, critique, re-invent, or obliterate the world of galleries, museums and the art market.

Detail of Fred Wilson's Mining the Museum (1992), showing "Metalwork: 1723--1880." [Image: photograph of a display of an ornate silver tea service with a pair of iron slave handcuffs.]

So after many of the greatest talents of the contemporary art world have devoted entire careers to the issue, why is #OccupyMuseums trying to reinvent the wheel? Because they are ignoring and dismissing the work already done, or because they never bothered to look into it in the first place before swooping in to rescue us all? Additionally, as Murdock Pemberton pointed out a century ago, artists tend to act individually while bristling at collective action, which makes the Occupy movement a particularly bad fit for the role of art intervention.

I would love to see #OccupyMuseums join with artists, connect the financial critiques of OWS with institutional critique, use their networks to educate and excite ordinary people and protesters about what artists are already doing today in this realm.

Nude Debate

I received my invitation to the 2012 Re-Nude show benefiting Planned Parenthood, which will be Wednesday, March 21 6:00pm -10:30pm at REDUX. I wrote about it last year here, here and here, and I can't wait!

[Image: flier for Re/Nude event. Reads, "Re/Nude: Celebrate the Body / Support Charleston Planned Parenthood." To the right and underneath the text are the silhouettes of a thin woman with longer hair showing outlines of her head, upper arms, hips and calves, in purple/pink. Resting in front of her shins is a reclining thin male silhouette showing outlines of his feet and legs, torso, arms and head, in coral pink/orange.]

Around the time I received my invite I read this post by Twisty Faster. To sum up, a young Egyptian woman named Aliaa Magda Elmahdy posted nude photos of herself on her blog as a big old Fuck You to the Salafis, who are a strict fundamentalist Islamic party that seems to have come out on top following the Arab Spring. Her actions, and the considerable risk she's taking, have sparked attention and controversy a few months ago in Egypt, the Western media and feminist blogs internationally. To support Elmahdy a group of Canadian feminists assembled a nude calendar featuring a "nude revolutionary" each month with the proceeds benefiting something-or-other related to Elmahdy's cause.

Twisty compares and contrasts the contexts of Egyptian and Canadian female nudity and questions the efficacy of a feminist nude calendar within the Patriarchy. To those unfamiliar with Twisty's blog she advocates a hard-line radical feminist rejection of Patriarchy-- that is, the system of dominance, objectification and hierarchy embedded in every element of our global society: misogyny, racism, classism, and so on. (Spoiler: she finds the Canadian nude revolutionaries ineffective at challenging Patriarchy).

Drawing of Aliaa Magda Elmahdy by The Corpse Debutante.

So when I go see the artistic representations of nudity at Re-Nude this March they will be on display in the context of the Patriarchy.  I will be viewing them as a feminist and an individual person but I will also be taking into account the context of the Patriarchy. And here is where I'm torn.

Being realistic about the limitations of empowerment through nudity in a Patriarchy, refusing to gloss over capitulation to the Patriarchy, refusing to pretend a nude portrayal of a woman exists outside our tradition of oppression, pornification and objectification, is a feminist act. However valuing my own experience and POV as a woman, learning to think outside the confines of Patriarchy, and really listening to other women is also profoundly feminist. In the context of nude art created with at least some input from women and shown in a gallery for the general public, I am stuck. Ambivalent. 

Not-A-Gallery, Continued...

A while back I wrote some posts that named several alternatives to galleries as a result of my frustration with the limited parameters of the traditional art market. At Bad At Sports, a down-to-Earth hipsto-blog about art, Nicholas O'Brien wrote about online galleries and what they are like, who they show and why, and how the spaces could be used. The comments are worth reading (!) at this google+ thread.

Portrait, Jan. 26

Yo Yo Guy. I saw this man in the park messing with a yo yo. He's a red-head so the amazing hair and mustache you see were bright pale orange. I considered asking him if I could draw his portrait but as usual I was chicken-shit, so I sat a few benches down and he immediately prepared to leave. I got a good look at him before he scooter-ed off and this is him, to the best of my recollection, finished with his yo-yo-ing business and pausing to squint into the sunset before revving the scooter engine. [Image: head and neck of a white man with curly hair and large handlebar mustache wearing glasses and squinting into the distance, lit from the side. He's drawn in black & white charcoal, realistic.]

The Female Voice

 Flavia Dzodan at TigerBeatDown posted an essay about Lana Del Ray and how she embodies the phase in most girls' lives when they yearn to be that pretty cool girl. Dzodan argues that despite criticism Del Ray has garnered from male music writers about her gender performance, there is nothing anti-feminist about expressing those feelings. I enjoyed the post as I always enjoy Dzodan's writing but I'm not wild about the trend of young feminist bloggers who go pour over pop music videos to extract potentially feminist "messages" for analysis. I'm all for analyzing pop culture but bloggers seem afraid to admit that when big producers pluck a youth from obscurity and spend thousands on a video of her writhing angrily in a couture onesie mouthing sexy lyrics to a song produced by men, there is no feminist message. "But her onesie has punk spikes on it! Her hair is in a faux-hawk! But now it's pin-up retro! She was just writhing around on a cross! What does it mean?" Nothing. It means some rich guy said to some other rich guy, "this will make us money." The feminist analysis could be better spent on how the public receives the video, on changing trends, industry shakeups, who gets ignored and why, that sort of thing.

But I digress.

What Flavia's post made me think is that people all have the same complaint about new pop singers on the scene: "She can't even sing." I seem to be squarely in the minority (as always) in enjoying unusual or raw female voices like Bjork, Missy Eliot, and Kim Deal while unable to appreciate Celine Dion, whose voice is like nails on a chalkboard. I don't usually hear this complaint about male singers, particularly with rock and hip-hop (Kanye West? can't sing. Jack White? can't sing. Not like American Idols, anyway. But I've never heard any complaints.). By the time the full weight of The Industry instructs the public to like a certain singer, they will like her. But the public isn't comfortable with that awkward in-between time when the rookie singer herself is saying, "like me." But that's not my main point either:

A male singer's voice symbolizes his expression, his intentions, his words. A woman's voice symbolizes her appearance. That's why a woman's voice must fit in the narrow box of pretty-sounding performance. She must be "a natural." She must preserve The Voice as she ages and not sound gravelly. The Voice must have a showy feminine range and look good naked sound perfect in a live acoustic performance. If she can't belt it out with the voluptuous strength of Christina Aguilera she may opt to emulate a pre-adolescent voice like Britney Spears (kinky!) or a lithe slender whisper like... well, Brandy is the most recent one to come to mind.

Portrait, Jan. 24

Husband driving at night. This was drawn in the dark in a moving vehicle. [Image: pen drawing, mostly contour, of the head ad shoulders of a man driving in profile on the left half of the page; on the right side is the steering wheel and dash board.]

Portrait, Jan. 23

My friend's cat, Jazz. Drawn while he was 'hunting.' [image: black & white pen drawing of the head and shoulders of a crouching cat sniffing a toy mouse. Somewhat realistic, thin dense lines.]

Oh yeah, I have a blog.

Sorry for the dearth of posts lately. I don't intend for this blog to become a diary of my daily feelings-- thank God-- but I'm feeling kind of down lately. Nothing bad happened, I just feel like something bad happened. Anyway, there's a backlog of daily portraits to post-- even though, not even halfway through the first month, I failed at my daily portrait resolution for 2012, I still did them most days and am working on making up those I missed. I'm drinking plenty of water and leaving the house at least once per day (the backyard counts right?), so I should be better and back blogging again soon.

Portrait, Jan. 22

Jean Dujardin as OSS 117, drawn while watching OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies. I'm a little disappointed with this one. [Image: black & white charcoal drawing of man showing his thighs upward, wearing a 1960's suit and tie and smoking. He has one hand in his pocket and turns to look back over his shoulder with one eyebrow raised. It is as cheesy as it sounds.]

It's a pretty fun movie. I remarked that the actor moves like a silent film comedian; turns out he just starred in a different film, The Artist, as a silent film actor. I wanted to see it in theaters but... this is Charleston. I'll just have to wait and Netflix it. Here's a clip from OSS 117.

Portrait, Jan. 21 Fran Lebowitz

Fran Lebowitz, by Ciana Pullen. Charcoal, 2012. You may reproduce this but only for noncommercial purposes and you must include easily visible accreditation (i.e. "Ciana Pullen") and a link to this blog. [Image: black & white charcoal drawing of middle aged white woman with short brown hair in a shoulder length bob wearing a winter scarf. She's viewed from the side and turns her head to look sidelong at the viewer. She looks inquisitive yet unimpressed.]

Look at these awesome photos of writer Fran Lebowitz:

Photo of Fran Lebowitz. I couldn't find the photographer or publisher, so let me know if you know who took this.

Fran Lebowitz for BBC2 "Building Sights." Couldn't find the photographer for this either, though it might be a film still.

Fran Lebowitz, photographed by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, 1996.

Fran Lebowitz, by Jonathan Twingley. [Image: caricature of Lebowitz in black & white pen with a blue jacket. The proportions of her mouth are really exaggerated.]

The last is an illustration by Jonathan Twingley. I'll be checking his site daily now, as he as lots of awesome stuff up.

Holy crap.

This might be the dumbest link I have EVER posted. It also might be my favorite.

Just one example of what awaits you at the link. [Image: Claude Monet's "Haystack," a painting of a haystack in an empty field. Underneath the painting is shown again but a Photoshop artist has replaced the haystack with an orange cat licking its own butt in precisely the same shape as a haystack.]

Portrait, Jan. 20

Husband Watching Walking Dead. [Image: black & white charcoal drawing of head & shoulders of white man nearly in profile. He's lit from the front and slightly below, looking tense.]

A Month Without Mirrors

I absolutely loved this essay on The Beheld by beauty blogger Autumn Whitefield-Madrano, who recently went a month without looking at her own reflection.

Not only is she starkly honest about the experience of the mirror and about what femininity feels like, Whitefield-Madrano is also incredibly perceptive to how socialization, psychology and abstract philosophy play out in everyday life. Even if you don't give a crap about makeup or the beauty industry, read the essay if you're interested in human consciousness, "The Gaze" in psychology and feminist theory, or portraiture.

[Image: a screenshot from Disney's Snow White showing the evil Queen's reflection in her magic mirror].

Portrait, Jan. 19

Portrait of my cat sitting under an arrangement of white Asian chrysanthemums and baby's breath in a spaghetti sauce jar. She hears my husband in the kitchen and suspects he might be doling out soft food but is not so sure that she's willing to give up her warm spot. She also cannot quite see over her own fat belly into the kitchen. She eventually got up and investigated, making this an extremely quick sketch. [Image: black & white pen sketch of a cat curled up under a flower arrangement, looking at something to the right out of frame. She sits partially behind a glass jar  full of flowers that are very quickly sketched.]

A photo of Kitty after she returned, disappointed, to her warm spot, sitting next to the drawing.

Portrait, Jan. 18

Tuppence, from Agatha Christie's Tommy & Tuppence. I'm actually pretty proud of this one. Caricatures are way harder than realistic portraits, IMO. I pressed "play" preparing to draw twenty or so cartoons till one looked passable, but shockingly I was happy with the first try. Of course, as soon as I realized I liked the face I overworked it. The other thing that made me happy is that her entire head and upper body fit comfortably on the page. I have a major problem with fitting everything I want onto the page, even if the page is five feet tall. I have to constantly remind myself, "keep it small." I have a drawer full of figure drawings where the head is cut off by the top of the page because I didn't leave room. Lessons learned: 1. When you've got a good cartoon line, leave it alone! Opposite of painting, where if you fall in love with something you've made, you must destroy it and re-work it. 2. Booze is an excellent preparation for loose drawing. [Image: black & white pen drawing of a white woman in a flowery dress, net lace gloves and a Sunday hat looking demure with her hands clasped and neck craned. The lines are quickly drawn and simple. Not very realistic.]

Portrait, Jan. 17

Portrait of my husband while he tells a story. [image: ink drawing of a white man's head with is forehead resting on his fist looking downward, viewed from slightly above. The lines are somewhat cartoony, made with a brush pen, but still somewhat realistic.

Welcome to the "Dark Side."

Scheming evil genius Brain (of Pinky & The Brain) spoofs Orson Welles' charismatic but deadly dishonest villain in The Third Man.*

 I asked for researchers to take a frank look at creativity and art a few months ago and it seems some "creativity researchers" have granted my wish. Please go read "The Dark Side of Creativity" by Scott Barry Kaufman, PhD over at Huffington Post.

These researchers found a correlation between creativity and dishonesty, so they designed a few more types of studies that would test the two in different ways and they continued to find the same correlation. I can point out what I think are some flaws in each of their studies but I thought they did a decent job of approaching the problem from a few different angles. Kaufman, reporting on the studies, names Bernie Madoff as an example of a creative and dishonest person. Commenter 'Bibulus' writes, "Newt Gingrich must be some sort of da Vinci," while commenter 'Pogo Bock' quips, "Well, that explains advertisin­g."

Jafar and Iago from Disney's Aladdin. Nearly everyone in the movie was wildly creative-- and dishonest. Except the sultan, a remarkably uncreative thinker who was actively trying to force his daughter into marriage and ignoring the seething masses of his starving subjects while living in a palace, who was portrayed by Disney as an honest man.

It was a relief to read something that doesn't glorify creativity. Usually it's portrayed as magical and fairy-like, an "inner child" of a liberated few, illustrated with multicolored hand-prints and "joyous" abstracted dancing figures. My guess is this happens because the Arts are always pandering for money. This imagery and narrative apparently appeals to the wealthy, so there you have it. Some people really don't get that the arts are worthwhile until you inundate them those sorts of commercials shown on National Public Television with the leaping multiracial children and bounding classical music. Apparently this is what we look like to those outside of the Art World.

But the commenters on HuffPo were not so pleased. Besides the two I quoted above (and with the exception of one or two high-strung religious wackos), most everyone was a writer, graphic designer, or some other creative type who was outraged that this sort of attack on creativity would be funded, studied and reported upon.

Heath Ledger as The Joker. I never really understood the character until Heath Ledger played him. In the cartoon and Jack Nicholson iterations he never did seem very funny, he just did humor-themed things, and he usually just tried to poison people over and over. His special villain-trait seemed to be creativity plus a clown fetish, basically. Heath Ledger's Joker's evocation of the chaotic nihilist nature of the Joke was ingenious.

Creativity, as I see it, is a neutral human trait, not an inherently positive one. You can apply creativity toward dishonesty or toward perfectly honest endeavors. You can also be a very inside-the-box thinker when it comes to both honesty and dishonesty.

This brings me to the definition of "dishonesty." Honesty, in terms of being a moral person, is mostly defined as acting in accordance with the common morals that one's society deems acceptable. But much of the dishonesty practiced by inside-the-box lock-step thinkers (or creative thinkers during uncreative moments) actually passes as "common sense," though not all common sense is dishonest. I believe credit card companies and collections agencies are dishonest, at least the more egregious ways they behave in recent years. Yet U.S. society more or less accepts that they are an ok part of an ok economic system. So one could put in an "honest" day's work as CEO of a credit card company that basically steals people's money.

This would be an example of uncreative dishonesty that would not stand out as dishonesty to many observers because it's not outside-the-box behavior. I think this lock-step uncreative mentality allows this society to get away with collectively telling some whoppers like, "racism and sexism were terrible, but they no longer exist today!" or "poor people just don't understand hard work or they'd be richer," or "abstinence education works" or "we're fighting for freedom-- money has nothing to do with it," or "it's ok to kill people in these circumstances," or everyone's adamant belief that their parents have never had sex, ever. A solid majority of people engage in at least some of these dishonest ideas and practices and do not stand out as particularly dishonest people because they're not creatively dishonest.

*You may have noticed I've illustrated this post using only fictional characters who are creative and dishonest. That's because they were all invented by artists. Even though creative types turned out in droves to whine in the comments about the study casting creativity in a bad light, clearly the "creative evildoer" is beloved by artists.

Portrait, Jan. 16

Melissa Harris-Perry on the Colbert Report. Drawn from the video clip below. I watched the clip over and over because it took me a while to get the pose, especially her hand. I'd never noticed how much Stephen Colbert talks with his hands. And as they sit with each other longer and longer, their hand gestures and posture mimic each other more and more. I also got to see Colbert do his "strong black woman" thing about 25 times. Win. [Image: youngish black woman drawn in black & white charcoal, realistic and detailed. She sits at a table and is shown from the front, her head and upper torso showing. She's got medium-long braids and a black cowl-neck shirt. She looks slightly up and to the side, mid-speech with some tension in the barrel of her mouth, smiling slightly. One hand is sitting just out-of-frame on the table; the other is up making a hand-cone-type gesture with her fingertips pointing downward.]

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

Transcript, copied from Shakesville, after the jump.

Portrait, Jan. 15

Lily Tomlin as Violet in 9 to 5. This was drawn from a movie still (I edited out Dolly and Jane, unfortunately. Too much for this drawing). [Image: black & white charcoal sketch, somewhat realistic, of a white woman's head and torso. She sits at a bar with a margarita, slumped over with her elbows on the bar and her head in her hands looking non-plussed. She wears a dark suit and has kind of a mullet. Lit from the side, sort of noir feeling.]

Portrait, Jan. 14

Carmen Tisch. Drawn from a photo in a press release, either a mugshot or similar. [Image: black & white realistic charcoal drawing of the head and shoulders of a white woman with long messy dark brown hair pulled to one side. She wears a sheepish grimace and looks slightly defiant. She's got a dark hoodie on and has mystical or geometric tattoos on her neck and chest.]

Oh man. From the files of ArtFagCity: Woman Pees On, About, or Around Clyfford Still Painting. Whitney Kimball reports that while the woman apparently succeeded only in peeing her pants, she punched and scratched the abstract expressionist work then gave the painting a good rub-down with her butt, such that it will need a $10,000 repair. The incident elicited this from gallery owner Ivar Zeile, who is apparently a living incarnation of Niles from Frasier:

Something as ridiculous as a woman coming in, who’s probably unknown to anybody, being able to touch the piece is kind of a slap in the face to the authority of the museum.

 The original reporting from NBC stated that the woman was drunk, "the only explanation offered for such behavior." But judging from Tisch's expression I think she certainly has her reasons.

Portrait, Jan. 13

Gina from the Agatha Christie/ Miss Marple movie, They Do It With Mirrors. Again, I drew her while the movie was playing, so it's a composite from moving images. SPOILER: I totally thought Gina was going to be the murderer, so that's why she has that classic "apprehended by Miss Marple" expression. [Image: black & white charcoal sketch, somewhat realistic and detailed, of a white woman's head and shoulders. Her shoulders face forward and her face is looking up and to the side, in profile. She looks desperate and pleading. Dressed in a collared shirt, wearing her brown hair in a bun.]

Portrait, Jan. 12

Joan Hickson as Miss Marple. Drawn over the course of a film as the action unfolded, so it's really more of a Marple composite. [Image: black & white charcoal sketch of elderly white woman with a straw hat, showing head and shoulders. She leans rightward into the image area while peering slightly up and to the left out of frame, looking alert.]

Portrait, Jan. 11

Portrait of My Husband While He Falls Asleep Watching Cartoons In Bed. [Image: a collage made of magazine pages in a square format. Horizontally across the bottom third is a man lying in bed with his back to the viewer and the covers pulled up to his armpits, made of solid teal blue for the bed, a white crossword puzzle cut out in the shape of the blanket, and his body cut from a blackish image. In the right half above him a blue skeleton or X-ray image of a man with his joints lit up in red runs away and to the right out of the composition, on a black background. On the left is a reddish-orange swirly abstract area, an ecru blocky image of some interior architicture and a black and grey slice of grainy photograph with red vertical words. Between the two halves is the profile of a head and shirt collar facing left and looking slightly downward. The head is made of diagonal blueish black skyscrapers at dusk with yellow lights on inside, while the collar is made of small text on a white background that is turned at the same angle as the buildings.]

Portrait, Jan. 10

Detail of a portrait for a client. [Image: close-up crop of a white man's face smiling and wearing classes, looking up and to the right, shown from slightly below. Drawn realistically, somewhat detailed, in black & white charcoal.]

Portrait, Jan. 9

Portrait of a Woman Inhaling. Drawn from a photo, an extra reference pic that my client sent me. [Image: Black & white charcoal drawing, very sketchy, almost like a comic book sketch. Woman standing with her hands at her sides, shown from hips up.]

Portrait, Jan. 8

My God, what an awful portrait. The friend, in real life, looks much less like a pirate, nothing like a cone-headed Burt Reynolds, nor does his appearance scream, "porn star!" (to me, anyway). He actually reminds me a lot of the young "Woody" from "Cheers." And yet this portrait occurred. To be fair, though, I didn't ask if I could draw him, and he was trying to eat Thai food rather than hold still. And pen doesn't erase. [Image: small black & white pen sketch of a man's head and shoulders, looking down.]

Portrait, Jan. 7

Detail of a portrait for a client. [Image: close-up crop of a woman's smiling face in black & white charcoal, realistic and somewhat detailed.]

Moving Toward the Ugly

I loved this post up at Leaving Evidence. The author asks, what happens if we stop chasing beauty and start embracing our own ugliness as "magnificent?"

Commenter "naa" writes:

I was surrounded by a community of femmes of color, reclaiming and celebrating beauty as a thing of liberation, and yet there wasn’t space to ask what happens when we can’t live up to our own ideals? Or who we’re leaving out?
Moving towards the ugly feels like a real risk: a risk to be real, a risk to lose the privilege/power of beauty, and a risk to be valued for ONLY what we are- glorious and many-layered freaks.

Go check it out!