Soap opera

Pursuing Snoop Dogg's inspiration for Shane Cotton reminded us of how often these sorts of connections are repeated in art writing without us getting to see pictures of the sources. One very famous example relates to how Colin McCahon got the idea of using voice bubbles for paintings like The King of the Jews and Crucifixion according to St Mark from the back of a Rinso soap flakes packet. 

The source of this brilliant connection is, as is so often the case, McCahon himself this time in a letter to collector and friend Rodney Kennedy. “The inspiration – the legend from a Rinso packet… the use of legend with space composition could be very telling,” McCahon wrote to him in 1947.

And telling is the word when you find the Rinso packet in question (thanks Google). But you should also check out McCahon's Crucifixion according to St Mark of the same year. Here the idea of arranging voice panels around the image appears to have come even more directly from the Rinso design. 

You can see images of Colin McCahon’s King of the Jews here here and his Crucifixion according to St Mark here

Finders keepers

Today on its very entertaining blog Bunker Notes the Christchurch Art Gallery put up a quiz. Showing details of works that feature smoking (cigarette variety), you're asked to identify the complete art work. Most art savvy people could easily identify three, even four, of the works but the two drawings are pretty mysterious. Now there's a solution. Thanks to Google image recognition all you need to do to win competitions like this is to pop the image into the Google Image search box. All the details came back with pics of the full image, although one of them needed the words Christchurch as a kicker. This is going to revolutionise (maybe it already has) art history research.
LATER (08-03-03): Since posting this the Christchurch Art Gallery has taken their quiz post down for copyright reasons. Kind of ironic given that all the images are out there on the internet anyway, but there you go.

Images: the Christchurch details, even when significantly further reduced still picked up their originals via Google image