NEWS - FACEBOOK GRAFFITI ARTIST DAVID CHOE FROM HOMELESS TO MILLIONS

Facebook graffiti artist David Choe, from homeless to millions

By Chenda Ngak

 

 

Choe was hired by then Facebook president Sean Parker to paint a mural at Facebook's first office in Palo Alto in 2005. When the mural was finished, Parker gave Choe the option of taking cash or stock options. At the time, Facebook was only a year old and only open to college and high school students. There was no "like" button, no revenue from advertising and no hype of a $5 billion dollar IPO.
Instead of taking cash, Choe took a chance and opted for the stock options. If you're not familiar with the Silicon Valley culture, gambling on a dot com has either failed miserably or made millionaires out of receptionists.
According to a Facebook employee, Choe was added on as an "adviser" and received 0.1 to 0.25 percent of the company. After you do the math, Choe's share could be worth $200 million. That's a mind-blowing figure, if you also consider that Choe has been homeless since painting that fateful mural.
In the aftermath of Facebook's filing and the value of his share of the social network, Choe took to his blog to express his disbelief.
"Have you had the dream where you ARE this guy?!? And then some kind of happy accident happens, and as you're in the middle of this glorious car crash, you stop to realize, that there is actually no such thing as an accident, and no chance encounters, and that everything has a direct purpose?"
Choe embodies a true tale of an artist's transformation from rags-to-riches in the most dramatic fashion. If Wednesday was a historic day for Facebook, it was also a momentous occasion for the American dream.

NEWS - SOUTH CAROLINA NATIVE, LEGENDARY MOTOWN ARRTIST DIES

S.C. native, legendary Motown artist dead

 

By OTIS R. TAYLOR JR. 

Nick Ashford, half of Ashford & Simpson, one of the most successful songwriting partnerships in popular music history, died Monday at a hospital in New York City. The South Carolina native was 70.
Ashford had throat cancer and was undergoing treatment, The New York Times reported.
The success of Motown Records in the ’60s can be attributed, in part, to the songs written by Ashford & Simpson who later sang hits as performers.

In 1966, Ray Charles scored a hit with Ashford & Simpson’s “Let’s Go Get Stoned.” That led to a deal with Motown and working with Tammi Terrell and Marvin Gaye before Gaye found his songwriting voice on the 1971 album “What’s Going On.” Ashford & Simpson penned indelible hits such as “Your Precious Love,” “You’re All I Need to Get By” and “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing” for the duo.
When Diana Ross broke from The Supremes in 1970 to establish a solo career, Motown contracted with Ashford & Simpson to assure a smooth transition. The first single of Ross’ self-titled debut was the memorable “Reach Out and Touch (Somebody’s Hand),” which was followed by a remake of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.” The latter reached No. 1.
Ashford & Simpson headlined the 2010 “Legends Of ...” concert, the annual fundraiser for the Auntie Karen Foundation, a charitable corporation that seeks to educate through the arts. They were able to write hits, including Chaka Khan’s breakout “I’m Every Woman,” with what seemed like ease. but who were they writing for? For the singers, themselves or just for art’s sake?
“All three ways,” Ashford told The State in an interview. “Most of the time we write for the love of writing and hope someone (likes it).”
Nickolas Ashford was born in Fairfield County and raised in Willow Run, Mich. He met Valerie Simpson at White Rock Baptist Church in Harlem. They married in 1974, a year after leaving Motown.
As performers, Ashford & Simpson scored their biggest hit in 1984 with “Solid,” a song that reached No. 1 on the R&B chart and No. 12 on the pop charts.

NEWS - DUPONT CRAFTSMAN CREATES ART BY MOUNTING SPIDER WEBS ON GLASS

Dumont craftsman creates art by mounting spider webs on glass

July 27, 2011,

By Julia Terruso/The Star-Ledger 

 

It’s a muggy morning and Emil "Rocky" Fiore is hiking deep and high into the woods, surveying nature’s nooks for hanging treasures. Suddenly he stops and points to what, at first, appears to be nothing. But strewn between a jagged tree branch and a dew-dampened boulder, a silvery spider web is taking shape.
"She’s about halfway done," Fiore says, reaching for his glasses to take a closer look. Now the glistening web comes into focus. "What a beauty."
Fiore carefully leans into the web and exhales onto the black spider in the center of the orb until she flees, seeking refuge on a neighboring silky strand.
"The trick is to get her to leave in a fluid motion so she doesn’t destroy the work of art she’s made," Fiore explains.
Fiore is a webmaster. He’s been seeking out spider webs in Palisades Interstate Park in Alpine for 35 years and turning nature’s art into his own strangely captivating craft. Fiore mounts the webs, of varying sizes, on glass and sells them in stores around the United States. He estimates he has 15,000 webs in circulation, which makes him the most prolific craftsman of his kind, though a handful of similar artists exist across the country.
"The web is a thing of beauty. It’s all about what they do, but there is an art or sophisticated craft to what I do," the 59-year-old Dumont resident says. He first got the idea from a craft book he owned when he was 10 and living in Englewood.
Armed with a plastic box filled with glass plates, a bottle of varnish and silver spray paint, he’ll spend about four hours a day climbing in the woods he has frequented for more than 50 years.
"I know where they live," he says of the spiders. "It’s almost as if I have names for them."
Fiore’s so familiar with the weaving sites that the absence of a spined micrathena spider last week puzzles him.
"Maybe a wasp or a bird got to her," he says, disappointed.
When he spots a web he likes — not too damaged or with an interesting story behind it — Fiore breathes onto the spider. The carbon dioxide he exhales scares the arachnid away because it perceives a predator. Then in slow spurts he sprays the web with the silver paint before carefully aligning a piece of glass with it. He then sprays an even coating of the varnish on the web. Once home he paints the reverse side black to provide contrast.
"People don’t know that there’s a difference at all from one web to another," Fiore says. "They have no idea the diversity."
Emil "Rocky" Fiore has been exploring the woods and caves along the eastern slopes of the Palisades in search of spider webs for more than 30 years. Fiore has perfected a process of mounting the orb weaver webs using spray paint, varnish and glass. His work is marketed through more than a dozen retailers in the United States including Evolution in New York City and the Bone Room in Berkeley California. Fiore estimates that he has captured and preserved more than 15,000 webs. (Video by Andre Malok / The Star-Ledger) Watch video

The webmaster’s self-imposed rules include never disturbing a feeding spider. He also tries not to overharvest any spider’s webs.
"I consider them my friends, so I don’t want to mess with them," he says.
While more than 20 stores sell Fiore’s webs in the U.S. and overseas, not everyone has supported his craft.
Fiore was spray-painting a large web in a Florida state park last year, when he heard the disapproving voice of a woman calling "Stop that! You’re ruining their home."
But Fiore says webs only last for two to three hours before spiders consume them for protein to create more webs. On average, he says, a spider will cast five webs a day.
"I’m preserving what they do," Fiore says. "I am their ambassador to humans."
While the spiders themselves are not dangerous — web weavers don’t rely on venom to catch prey — Fiore has had scares of other sorts.
On "a webbing trip" in Florida, Fiore was methodically spraying a web with silver paint when he heard a hissing sound respond.
"It sounded like a threatening exhale, and then I saw her," he says. Beneath the debris hid an alligator and her young. "She was telling me I was getting too close. I was shaking, I never knew terror like that."
Fiore’s wife, Cynda, has been supportive of his work, mostly. Once Fiore’s brother sent him a pregnant black widow spider that laid hundreds of eggs in a glass milk jug.
"All these tiny, extremely dangerous spiders started hatching," Cynda Fiore says. "I said ‘Absolutely not. She goes or I go.’ "
To some it might seem dull to hike the same stretch of woods every morning, but Fiore is always making fresh discoveries. As he climbs upward toward a web he’s caught almost daily for the past three decades, he trips on a root, looks down and sees a tiny teal and silver spider who has just woven a near-perfect orb close to the forest floor.
"I must have stepped on her web dozens of times on my way up to that one," Fiore says, pointing upward. He’s mesmerized. "Will you look at how it shimmers in the sun."

NEWS - GILBERT "MAGU" LUJAN, INFLUENTIAL CHICANO ARTIST, DIES AT 70

Gilbert “Magu” Lujan, influential Chicano artist, dies at 70

July 25, 2011

Gilbert “Magú” Luján, a painter, muralist and sculptor whose whimsical, slyly humorous artworks, which frequently evoked a rollicking, mythical view of Mexican American life, graced museum walls, the Hollywood & Vine subway station and other public places, died Sunday, according to a Facebook posting by his family. He was 70.
The Pomona resident had been battling cancer for several years, according to a number of friends and colleagues who confirmed the news of his death.
A pioneer of the Chicano art movement that took root in the social and cultural upheavals of the 1960s and '70s, Magú, as he was universally known, was among the first U.S. artists of Mexican descent to establish an international career.
He also was an enthusiastic facilitator of gatherings and exhibitions of Chicano artists and art collectives, most prominently the Chicano collective known as Los Four, and a catalytic figure in bringing their work to the wider art-viewing public, as well as art scholars and critics.
“One only has to examine the barrio to see that the elements to choose from are as infinite as any culture allows,” Magú once remarked.
In an interview on Monday, Chon Noriega, director of the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, described Magú as a “change agent” who drew inspiration not only from his deep knowledge of art history but from the various communities where he made his home in greater Los Angeles and the Fresno area.
Magú also was instrumental, Noriega said, in expanding the framework of Chicano art beyond mainly political concerns to aesthetic ones as well.
“He really defined a very unique role,” Noriega said. “Rather than seeing the art as merely a kind of instrument for social change,” Magú insisted that art “had to have integrity in order to have that impact.”

Drawing on indigenous Mesoamerican art and iconography, as well as the Chicano popular culture that surrounded him ever since his East L.A. youth, Magú populated his canvases and murals with Aztec-accessorized lowrider cars, plumed gods zipping by on serpentine skateboards, candy-striped pre-Columbian pyramids, human-like animals and other flamboyantly colorful anthropomorphic creatures. As a founding member of Los Four, which also included artists Carlos Almaraz, Beto de la Rocha and Frank Romero, Magú participated in a seminal four-man show at UC Irvine, and subsequently in an expanded version of the show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in the early 1970s. Eventually, other artists, notably Judithe Hernández, joined the group and exhibited their work under the Los Four moniker.
According to a posting on the website magulandia.com, the dA Center for the Arts will host a benefit to promote the artist’s legacy, “Cruisin’ Magulandia,” next month in Pomona.
Information on survivors was unavailable Monday. A complete obituary will follow at latimes.com/obits.
-- Reed Johnson

NEWS- PAINTER LUCIAN FREUD DIES AT AGE 88

  I blogged this for 2 reasons. 1-My mother would have been interested in this story to a small degree. she was a Sigmund Freud Follower, so much so, that we named one of my 1st pets (a woods turtle) Freud, in his honor. and 2-because i never knew that Sigmund Freud even had a grandson who was an artist. to me, any great artist that passes is a tragedy. one of my won, passes and we lose that special gift they gave and shared so much of. RIP Lucian! May you paint among angels!
MICHELLE

22 July 2011

Painter Lucian Freud dies aged 88

Lucian Freud, self portrait.

Realist painter Lucian Freud, one of Britain's most distinguished and highly regarded artists, has died aged 88.

New York dealer William Acquavella said Freud had died at his London home on Wednesday after an unspecified illness.
Freud, a grandson of the psycho-analyst Sigmund Freud, was born in Berlin in 1922 and fled to Britain with his Jewish family in 1933, when he was 10.
Freud - particularly known for his paintings of nudes - became a British citizen in 1939.

Boy on a Sofa fetched £1.49m last year, a record price for a work on paper by Freud

His works have been increasingly sought after at recent auctions and his portrayal of an overweight nude woman sleeping on a couch sold in 2008 for $33.6m (£20.6m) - a world record for a work by a living artist.
'Lived to paint' Mr Acquavella described Freud "as one of the great painters of the 20th Century".
"In company he was exciting, humble, warm and witty. He lived to paint and painted until the day he died, far removed from the noise of the art world."
Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate gallery, said: "The vitality of [Freud's] nudes, the intensity of the still life paintings and the presence of his portraits of family and friends guarantee Lucian Freud a unique place in the pantheon of late 20th Century art.
"His early paintings redefined British art and his later works stand comparison with the great figurative painters of any period."
Former Observer art critic William Feaver, who knew Freud for more than 40 years, said Freud was someone who had "restored portraiture to its proper place", by focusing on all types of people, not just successful businessmen and their wives.

Lucian Freud muse Sue Tilley talks to BBC Breakfast about her experiences with the artist

"He said everything he did was autobiographical and a self portrait. He was a witty, impulsive artist but generous with it."

Mr Feaver said Freud had left several unfinished paintings.
He said: "He always liked to keep a couple of paintings on the go in case he dropped off the twig and I know he's done that."
Former muse Sue Tilley, who sat for the nude Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, said she had "fantastic experiences" while posing for the portrait.
"I found out last night on Twitter, bizarrely, and I did start crying," she told BBC Breakfast.
"I haven't seen him for a long time and he's not really a close friend now but it's a part of my life that's kind of gone."
Order of Merit Freud, the son of an architect and older brother of the late broadcaster Clement Freud, went to the Central School of Art, in London and then to the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing and London's Goldsmiths College.
At first he confined himself to drawing, but when he was 17 had a self-portrait accepted for reproduction in the magazine, Horizon.
Freud was recognised early on and after a spell in the Merchant Navy in 1942, had his first one-man show in 1944, when he was 21.

Lucian Freud

• Grandson of Sigmund Freud
• Born 1922, his family moved to Britain from Germany in 1933 to escape persecution
• Spent most of working life in London's Paddington as its sleaziness appealed
• Works in public ownership include Bananas at Southampton City Art Gallery and portrait of Sir Cedric Morris in National Museum of Wales

• The Freud paintings we all own
• 

  

  this one makes me think of mary hahn. only because its a chicken head. and her last name is german for cock(or something to that effect)

  

  these were just a few of the many many pieces he did. he preferred nudes , but because this blog is open, i chose to NOT share any of those.

After the war he went to France and Greece, and having taken up painting by then, returned to the UK in 1948 to teach for 10 years at the Slade School of Art.

Freud was married twice, first to sculptor Jacob Epstein's daughter, Kitty, the subject of his celebrated Girl With a White Dog. His second wife was the daughter of the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava.
Freud's other key works include Naked Girl Asleep and Reflection (self portrait). The Queen and supermodel Kate Moss are among those to have sat for the artist.
Freud was a member of the Order of Merit, one of Britain's most prestigious chivalry honours presented to individuals by the Queen for great achievement in the fields of the arts, learning, literature and science.
The honour is restricted to 24 members at any one time, plus additional foreign recipients and past recipients include Florence Nightingale, Sir Winston Churchill, Sir Edward Elgar and Mother Teresa.

NEWS - SUN SETTING ON 'BLUE SKY' GALLERY

Tuesday, Jun. 21, 2011

Muralist closing up shop

Sun setting on Blue Sky gallery

World-known Columbia artist to focus on Europe, other markets

By OTIS R. TAYLOR JR. 

The message, printed on white computer paper and taped to windows, is clear and hard to miss: Blue Sky Gallery is closing.

After 22 years in Five Points, the gallery, which sells work made by its namesake, will shut down in the coming weeks.

“I want to make sure everyone gets the message,” Lynn Sky, Blue Sky’s wife, said.

On Friday and Saturday afternoon, the gallery buzzed with curious sidewalk strollers attracted by the sign in the window. Lynn Sky, who had already pulled out rare sketches and watercolor paintings by the artist, also introduced large canvases to the gallery floor. Hanging prominently on the wall, two pieces from “Truck Butts,” the re-imaging of tractor-trailer doors that was part of a two-show exhibition at City Art in September.
Blue Sky, 72, an internationally known muralist, created the giant fire hydrant sculpture “Busted Plug Plaza” on Taylor Street and “Neverbust,” a 25-foot chain connecting the old Kress and Sylvan Brothers buildings. “Tunnelvision,” a 50-by-75-foot mural on the AgFirst Farm Credit Bank building at Taylor and Marion streets, turned 35 last year.

In October, Blue Sky told The State that the gallery was on the verge of closing.

“I said two years ago, ‘Let’s end it,’” he said Saturday afternoon as a glass of wine rested on his paint-stained jeans. “The gallery’s dragging us down. We’re more interested in the international market now. That’s where my future is.”

The sometimes elusive figure, who wears his fringe status like a well-worn but trusted leather jacket, said he will miss the Saluda Avenue space across the street from Gourmet Shop.

“The gallery means a lot to me. I love coming here. I love meeting the people who come in,” the Columbia native added. “I love being connected to Five Points. I just look forward to coming down here.”
Cindi Boiter, who profiled Blue Sky in a spring issue of undefined magazine, said the gallery closing won’t diminish the value of the artist’s work. In fact, she said it might enhance it.

“Too often, the ready accessibility of art, like anything, inversely affects the degree to which we value it,” she said. “Let’s face it, we sometimes take our natural resources for granted — be they artists or whatever. I’m sure we’ll miss the daily viewing of Blue’s paintings when we walk down the street in Five Points, but I suspect that we’ll be even more pleased to see Blue’s work when it crops up in gallery showings.”

Lynn Sky, who opened her first Columbia art gallery on Holly Street in 1981, vacillated between relief and terror on a recent visit as she said several questions need answers. Where will she store the work that doesn’t sell? Will she and Blue spend more time in California where they have an apartment? How long, realistically, will it take to clear out the gallery? What does this mean for Blue Sky’s legacy?

“I would like for him to get credit, historically, for some of the ideas he’s generated,” she said. “It would be nice if he were recognized.”

There’s a year left on the current lease, and Lynn said someone wants the space, though she declined to reveal the next occupant. Blue Sky was recently named a trompe l’oeil master by an Italian magazine, and he said Lynn has discussed moving to Europe.

But he’s not done painting on this city. Last week he was negotiating for space on a downtown wall.
“If I can just get people to cooperate with me and let me do them. I can’t get a clear approval from the owner of the wall,” he said. “You would think with my track record, you know, being one of the top muralists in the world, that people would be begging me to paint on their walls.

“No, no, no. They’re very suspicious. Because I want to do it my way. I hate compromise.”