Malled

McCahon wouldn’t be much use. Nor would Mrkusich. Albrecht, nah, and you can forget Walters. But an early Binney or a Dashper work on velvet? Now you’re talking. Welcome to the world of 3D printing and, in this case, printing paintings. 

The Observer points out this is now a reality and in Amsterdam poor old Van Gogh, always a market leader when it comes to art museums trying to shill money out of art, is one of the first on the block. For $44,000 you can take your pick. Want a 3D reproduction of Van Gogh’s Almond Blossom or a late 1880s Sunflowers? Perhaps The Harvest or even Wheatfield under Thunderclouds is the one for you. Then there is always Boulevard de Clichy (they even reproduce the frame) waiting for your cash on the nail. If you are a VG expert it might pay not to peer too closely, but for anyone who is likely to pony up that sort of cash for a 3D repro these will probably pass muster.

But please, don’t go into the Van Gogh Museum expecting to buy one of the masterpieces from their collection in three dimensions. They are far too classy (#strategic) for that. Even though each of the 260 edition ‘art works’ are numbered and approved by a VG museum curator, when the series was put to market in Hong Kong recently the curators wisely chose to flog them in a shopping mall. 

Other museums are said to be panting at the thought of getting works in their collections out into this lucrative market.  Don McLean got it “But I could have told you Vincent / This world was never meant for one as beautiful as you.”
Image: showing Walters  (left) and Binney (right) as 3D reproductions. (simulation only)

Googling on

So you have a yen to know what art works the public finds most interesting. As is so often the case, try Google. Drifting through some searches the other day a band of images appeared on the top of the screen with the header “Artworks frequently mentioned on the web”. OK, not the most sophisticated way to track public taste but there were some surprises. For instance were they all pictures of cows or cottages by that Kinkaid guy? No, they were not. 

For a start Marcel Duchamp topped the list coming in with three of the 20 selected images (Fountain, Bicycle wheel and Nude descending a staircase). Of the rest over 50 per cent (11) were from the twentieth century though none from the twenty-first. Predictably just one was by a woman (Judy Chicago’s The dinner party) and only one by a non-European (Hokusai’s The great wave off Kanagawa). Painting as usual ruled the roost but Shepard Fairey provided a nice graphic touch. As for the Southern Hemisphere, it didn't feature.

We stumbled on this heuristic by simply putting the word 'art' into the Google search box. Now the trick will be to see if tastes change over time.
Images: Google's top twenty

Great Scott!!

Three years ago we could only turn up four comic book covers that featured the Mona Lisa. Now not only does this one make it five, but we are also throwing in an artist’s palette, another of OTN’s minor obsessions. (Thanks F)

The best art is business art

Just to show we mean business too here is the second in our series  featuring business people posing in front of art. This time it's high flying business women from Wellington in front of a Nigel Brown
Image: from the left Susan Hornsby-Geluk, Charlotte Vaughan, and Deborah Lee Marlow (Photo: CHRIS SKELTON/Fairfax NZ )

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

And now for something completely different

Te Papa plans to keep changing its new look art display but already you'd have to ask when works from the National art collection ever looked this good. It's probably not been since Te Papa opened 11 years ago. Not much sculpture this time round (apart from Michael Parekowhai’s red piano Story of a New Zealand river which has achieved Te Papa icon status) but the works on the walls look impressive and are juxtaposed to suggest intelligent connections and differences.

Te Papa's CE Michael Houlihan said recently that museums never lose their original culture. Te Papa has always had a 'make-it-simple-and-tell-'em-and-tell-'em-again mantra that still echoes through its galleries (absurdly large labels, signage everywhere). This spirit-of-the-schoolroom is exaggerated in the current presentation by a literal DIY ‘classroom’ (frame your own drawing, match bits of the collection in a Killeen lookalike, create fridge magnet poems, trace drawings) in the middle of the two main gallery set-ups.

The idea that art can’t really speak for itself was firmly implanted into the Te Papa way of thinking by Ian Wedde. He was the institution’s first Concept leader for art and later Head of art and visual culture. His influence remains in Te Papa's tendency to over-explain, over-simplify and in the process confuse themselves and us into the bargain. 

An example? Close by a classic Gordon Walters painting there's a cartoon think bubble (it feels more like a public programmes intervention than curatorial) telling us that Walters “liked to create optical illusions with paint” while on the other side of the room a label quotes Walters specifically telling how he added grey to his work to stop the image “jumping around too much.” The idea that people would see his works as optical illusions like those by British artist Bridget Riley always concerned Walters. His intention was to refine and balance the components of his paintings rather than agitate them. Besides why not let people think about what Walters was about for themselves rather than sum him up ... and get it wrong?

Still this culture of over-explanation, whatever the intended audience, is the going price for the chance to see a whole heap of interesting work intelligently displayed. And as a bonus in a section called Gifted there's the chance to see a donated collection of Aboriginal art given the space and respect it deserves for the first time. Even if that had been the only thing on display it would still be well worth the trip to the fifth floor.

Snooping

In the larger than life catalogue (40 x 30 cm and weighing in at 2.75 kilos) published for Shane Cotton’s Christchurch Art Gallery /IMA exhibition, curator Justin Paton mentions that the artist got his idea for using a spray gun from a Snoop Dogg album cover. “The key too here is a small model-maker’s spray gun …. For an artist whose usual way of lettering his canvases was more akin to woodwork or complex inlay…the appeal of the spray gun was vivid. …It gave Cotton a way to literally write in the air.”

We were up for it and after a bit of a hunt found a site that had every cover version of every album and single Snoop Dogg ever made. Sure enough there it was From tha Chuuuch to da Palace, a single made in 2002. You can get a copy of it over here on Music stack.

Hold onto those cleaning rags everyone, don’t throw out that gas axe and polish up the Rolleiflex. It turns out there’s gold in used artist equipment. Well some artists, Francis Bacon to be exact. A butter bean can bristling with eight of Bacon’s brushes is going up for auction at Christie's. 

The Bacon brushes will be fighting it out with other oddities including a bear skeleton, a large bell used in the Titanic movie A night to remember, a stuffed ostrich and a couple of chairs carved with buffalo heads. Christie's are estimating a hammer price of $47,000 for the brush-can combo although that’s peanuts compared to what it might achieve if it were an artwork. 

Jasper Johns himself owns his 1960 sculpture Painted bronze depicting 14 brushes in a Savarin coffee can so its market value probably won't be tested anytime soon. However, if it ever is, you can forget about tens of thousands, we'll be talking millions. Hmmm… maybe those cleaning rags are best left for cleaning after all.
Images: left, the Bacon bushes on the block and right Jasper Johns Painted bronze

Ian Scott 1945-2013

One engrossing development over the seventies was watching Ian Scott and Richard Killeen take on abstraction one-uppping each other exhibition by exhibition. There they were two well-known figurative painters going hard at the abstract as though it had just been discovered. It was always worth the visit to Peter McLeavey’s gallery to see what they had come up with. Then when they both turned up an exhibition of spray-canned abstracts - the paint often dribbling down to the bottom of the canvas - well what could you say? Scott went on to develop his lattice series and Killeen his cut outs but it was always a serious enterprise and Ian Scott was above all a very serious painter. 

Back then any talk of painting you had with Ian would always circle back to Gordon Walters. Scott (and Killeen too) was a huge admirer and many of his techniques, like the beautiful preparatory collages, the immaculate surfaces and even the regular studio hours were all straight out of the Walters’s handbook. But of course Scott was also very much his own man. Often out of step with the trends of the day he was always a courageous - if not sometimes a quixotic - figure. With many artists now feeding the market by looking over their shoulders it’s hard not to feel a twinge of nostalgic for Ian’s take-it-or-leave-it stance. It’s a sad business that he wasn’t given more time to take it.

Its own reward

One of the great things about art is, that no matter how tired your feet, no matter how many gentlemen's portraits you have seen, or how many miles of corridors you have tramped down there is always the chance that you will round a corner and see a picture of dancing rats.
Image: The dance of the rats by Ferdinand Van Kessell c.1690, Stadel Museum Frankfurt

Art in the movies: on the matte

Although you’d never convince an art auctioneer that painting was dead, some say it's so. One form of the art though that has indisputably flourished for the last century or so is matte painting. This is the painting on glass that has added dimension and magic to the movies. So now, as it goes into freefall at the hands of CGI, let’s hear it for matte painting - that extraordinary combination of film and paint that has pimped up indifferent locations, created impossible ones and given us a whole genre of how-the-hell-did-they-do-thats? 
 
The first matte painting was created for Mission of California by Norman Dawn in 1907. A mansion was 'aged' via a painting on glass and the camera rather than the art department having to take an axe to it. Famous matte paintings include the Emerald City and Yellow Brick Road in The Wizard of Oz, just about everything apart from the horses and actors in Ben Hur, the Statue of Liberty in Planet of the Apes, a shattered LA in Earthquake, the landing bay in Star Wars, and stuff you wouldn’t see on an average day in Lord of the Rings and Avatar. You can see fifty great examples from the history of film at Shadowlocked.com here.
Images: top to bottom left to right matte painting hard at work in The Wizard of Oz, Ben Hur,  Planet of the Apes, Earthquake, Star Wars and Lord of the Rings 

Top of Top of the lake

A surprise cast member in Jane Campion’s much-anticipated crime series Top of the lake is a terrific set of opening credits based on a painting by Seraphine Pick. Apparently the original concept was to use images showing the painting evolving as Pick made it, but in the end the final work was filmed along with details of some of Pick’s signature elements and then animated by Leonie Savvides. 

Pressured no doubt by trying to fit a handful of sub-plots into a TV 'hour', the credits run very fast. After getting over the intrigue of working out whether you're watching the real thing, a photograph or a painting, they come to an end before you can catch your breath. This is definitely not Tony Soprano chomping on a cigar cruising through New Jersey in his own goddamn sweet time. But they are definitely worth viewing in their own right. 

You can see the complete sequence of individual frames from the credits here

Goners

In the story of gold frames there's probably none sadder than those hanging in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. New Zealanders might be forgiven for thinking they've stumbled on a Julian Dashper installation but this image is in fact a reminder of the day in 1990 when thieves stole $US500 million worth of artworks from the museum. You can see them here on the FBI’s stolen art site. Now the Gardner is offering a $US5 million reward for information leading to the return of the works and today the FBI has announced it knows who stole the works, but doesn't know where they are. You can read this amazing true art-crime story here.

Image: once were paintings at the Stewart Gardner Museum

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

Before Avatar there was Tretchikoff

Who knows how many reproductions there are of the famous Chinese girl in New Zealand? We had a bunch of them back in the 1980s which hung in Cubewell House and least one other is on the back of a Derek Cowie painting The white one.

There's been doubt over the model for the original painting but now it's official: Monika Sing-Lee. She claims the painting was done over a month with sittings twice a week. For her troubles she was paid around twelve bucks. You can read an interview with Sing-Lee and watcha short video about the painting or buy your own copy of the print.

Images: Left, Tretchikoff’s Chinese girl and right, Monika Sing-Lee

China painting

You’re OTN, you’re in Hong Kong, what do you do? Head out to the copy painting capital of China that’s what.

Da Fen is a couple of short train rides and a border crossing into China from Hong Kong. It's packed with small studios pumping out lookalike paintings for the world as well as framers and art supply stores. If you know Heather Straka’s smoking girl paintings you've already seen some of the product of China’s seemingly inexhaustible copying business.

So what is China painting, ok, copying, for the world? Van Gogh is huge. We saw sunflowers, starry nights, cafes and many, many self portraits. Monet waterlilies made a major appearance as did images by Rothko and Lichtenstein, Warhol and Rembrandt alongside Mona Lisas and Maos, landscapes and still lives, herds of wild horses and the cutest of cute animals.

Having expected to be subjected to hard-core sales pitches we were surprised to find an atmosphere of calm studiousness pervading the entire four or five blocks of the painting village. In each studio open to the street was an artist hard at work barely pausing to look up when we asked to take photographs. While the level of skill varies hugely most of the artists are art school trained. Didn’t see much drawing going on and some of the larger more complex works (say Raphael’s The school of Athens) were being painted over faintly printed digital reproductions. The selection of subjects is crucial to this international art industry so the artists tend to work off postcards that have proved popular. It's a smart way to ensure their product will find a home somewhere.

You can see more of our copypainter pics here and here.

One day in the bedroom

Woman: Darling....

Man: Yes darling?

W: We need to plan the wedding. It’s only four months away now.

M: (looking for remote control) Right, absolutely, yesss (finds it).

W: I was thinking we might have a wedding artist as well as a photographer.

M: (Brightens) A wedding artist? Well, why not. We could go conceptual, have Marina in to do the severed head thing as table decorations … she might even throw in a couple of nude bridesmaids lying on the head table.

W: I was thinking more…

M: Or…or…we could have Tino Sehgal come and do a touchy feeley thingy in the dark with the guests.

W: No, I thought more of a…

M: You’re right. We need to think of something more aspirational. How about huge Barbara Kruger banners?  Your body is a battleground or The meaning of life is that it stops or…

W: … or, You are not yourself…

M: What?

W: Nothing.

M: Ok. How about this. We slip Vito Acconci under the floor boards as a bit of a surprise … hmmm, perhaps not. I know. Five giant screens with videos of elephants sitting down, guys knocking their heads against cars or for later in the evening that Martin Creed one where everyone vomits…. er… (noticing)… but what did youhave in mind?

W: I was thinking about having a wedding painter.

M: A wedding painter! I DON’T  THINK  SO.

But that is what they did.

Image: You can meet your own wedding painting needs here.

The wrong stuff

More jokes than sales at last night’s Dunbar Sloane auction in Wellington. Even a big push by local media when they came down from planet WTF to up-talk the saleability of Hammonds and Sydneys didn’t help. Stuff/Dominion Post even hauled out one of the owners giving him free range to promote works he had in the sale as “bullet-proof investments” (not for him as it transpired) and to claim that one of his Sydneys was “one of his most significant works”(not really) and that “All the rest are owned by institutions now” (unlikely). The reporter seemed too stunned by this boosterism to bother with questioning whether it’s “rare for significant Sydney and Hammond works to come up for auction” (no).

So how did all this enthusiasm and spruiking pan out at the rostrum? Not so good. Contemporary art took a beating to the sound of Dunbar Sloane’s good-natured-stroke-weird commentary: Hotere “It’s not totally black, it’s got some little red lines there… but you’d need the light on.” The eponymous auctioneer even paused to ask the audience whether or not he should write a book and then called out for a ghost-writer. But one by one the big-ticket items fell under their low estimates (Hammond, Hanly, Hotere and Sydney) often by yawning margins.

Of 26 contemporary lots the bidding reached a total of $544,000 against low estimates totalling $768,000 with 16 of the 26 lots being hammered down, often hopefully, as ‘subject’. A few bargains in Peryer and Fomison but if Dunbar Sloane was to get a smile out of the evening it was going have to be from the long line of traditional landscapes that followed.

Image: Hammond and Maddox wait their turn

A clash of symbols

We’ve mentioned before how hard it is to find out what’s being included in the big art exhibition supporting NZ’s participation in the Frankfurt Book Fair, but a Twitpic in the stream from Frankfurt let in a chink of light.  It shows a Peter Robinson triptych that features (among other elements) a version of the swastika. 

Although the swastika Robinson has chosen is the reverse of the Nazi one and shown on its side, its standing in as a symbol of Nazism and the far right is self-evident. Not surprisingly Germany has specific laws prohibiting the use or display of the swastika even when done satirically or in opposition to Nazism although this prohibition is usually limited to the specific swastika design used during the Nazi era. 

Robinson in his use of the symbol is of course addressing the continuing and disruptive power of the far right internationally as well as in New Zealand and pointing out how far we are from reaching some level of real equality.

Still, you’d have to say including this work in an exhibition in Germany is certainly a stand-up provocative act of curation. After all the curators will be aware of the conflict that surrounded Jenny Harper hanging a similar Robinson swastika work in her Victoria University office back in 1998. Presumably, having taken the work into Germany, the curators, CNZ and the Ministry for Culture and Heritage are all prepared to stand behind it should there be any similar objections from a public somewhat more sensitive to these issues than we are. 

Image: Top, Peter Robinson’s work being readied for exhibition in Frankfurt. Bottom, the modification of a swastika to a less offensive form the Olympic stadium built in Berlin in 1936

LATER: You can now see a few images from the opening here on Barbara Walzer's photostream and more installation images on the St Paul’s Facebook page. 

Don Binney 1940-2012

Don Binney died on Friday. His paintings of the mid-sixties with large native birds dominating New Zealand landscapes developed a great pictorial concept and rightly made him famous. Along with Robin White he helped establish a fresh way of looking at the New Zealand landscape that had for so long been dominated by Colin McCahon and Toss Woollaston. 

By the time we interviewed him for Contemporary New Zealand painters in the late 1970s, Binney was still trying to reconcile the public’s unwillingness to see him as anything other than the bird painter and this reluctance hurt. Don Binney was highly intelligent and strongly opinionated as well as articulate. It was a powerful mix that could be both stimulating and at times a challenge. The fact is he could just as easily have talked those birds down out of the trees. 

Image: Binney country, Bethell's Beach