Northern South America: Latin American Art in the 20th Century: High/Newlights 4

A few weeks (OK, now it's months) back I finished reading Phaidon's coffee-table book Latin American Art in the Twentieth Century, edited by Edward J. Sullivan, and with country-by-country essays by various specialists. Since it was (apart from, say, the most famous of Mexican painters) pretty much new territory for me, at the end I flipped back through and noted the works and artists that I'd liked. I thought I might spin a few blog posts out of that list, using what images I can track down ... here's part 4, Northern South America, to the tip of the Southern Cone:

Venezuela
Manuel Cabré - Laguna de Boleíta: El Avila desde el Marquéz nope, but here's La Silla, also, I believe, of the hills surrounding Caracas:


Alejandro Otero - Colorritmo 39, nope, but here's an apparent work on paper by him:

Colombia
The book, of course, had works by the great and well-known Fernando Botero, who I like a lot, but I didn't note any specific works as stand-outs for this list...

Alejandro Obregón - Bodegón en Azules, no, but here's his Bodegón de flores con caracol:


Ecuador
Oswaldo Guayasamín - Fusilamiento, no but here's this one, from from a series of hands called Las Manos de Oración:

Enrique Tábara - Rojo Superstancial - nope.

Peru
Jorge Eduardo Eielson - Quipus, nope, but here's the similar, if I recall right, Nudo: both involve using knotted fabric/string, a reference to the Inca technique of encoding messages on knotted strings.


Brazil
Alfredo Volpi - Casas:

Waldemar Cordeiro - Movimento:


Lygia Clark - Bicho (one a long series of cute little abstract critters by the artist)
Rubem Valentim - Compsição - nope
Lygia Pape - Tercelares - nope
Mira Schendel - Desenho 2, nope, but here's an untitled from her series of graphic-design-derived works:

The Caribbean: Latin American Art in the 20th Century: High/Newlights 3

A few weeks back I finished reading Phaidon's coffee-table book Latin American Art in the Twentieth Century, edited by Edward J. Sullivan, and with country-by-country essays by various specialists. Since it was (apart from, say, the most famous of Mexican painters) pretty much new territory for me, at the end I flipped back through and noted the works and artists that I'd liked. I thought I might spin a few blog posts out of that list, using what images I can track down ... here's part 2, Central America:

Cuba
Victor Manuel Garía - Muchacha con Manzana Roja - Nope.
Wilfredo Lam - La Jungla I think of this as a sort of alternate, happy tropical version of Picasso's Guenerca.

Cundo Bermúdez - Romeo y Julieta - nope, but here's an untitled piece that I like. I think Bermúdez he gives his women these wonderful, long, sonorous-looking noses.
Manuel Mendive - Barco Negrero - nope.
Tomás Sánchez - Buscador de Bosques - nope, but here's Indecsion.


Dominican Republic
Celeste Woss y Gil - Mujer en Reposo
Yoryi Morel - A la Fiesta - nope, but here's La calle de las chancletas:

Jaime Colson - Meringue - I especially like the visual echo between the fan and the accordion:

Gilberto Hernández Ortega - Sin Título (1976) - nope.
Antonio Prats-Ventós - Familia - nope
Domingo Liz - Ciclista - nope, but here's an untitled:



Puerto Rico
Miguel Pou - La Promesa

Lorenzo Homar - Homenaje a julie de burgos - a silkscreen I couldn't find. One suprise from the book was learning about the prevalence of silkscreen art in PR — a number of workshops were set up that did some great nurturing of talent. Here's another poster by Homar:

Rafael Tufiño - couldn't find La Botella Jazz but here are his Cortoadores de Caña

Francisco Rodón - I couldn't find a large version of his wonderful portrait of governor Luis Muñoz Marín, which manages to be both cubist and realist. Here's La Maga Duende:

Luis Hernández Cruz - alas, couldn't locate Gran Mangle, which is a beautiful mangrove island landscape done entirely in solid-colored vertical lines. Here's Cruz:

Marcos Irizarry - no Asilah, but here's an untitled postor:

Central America: Latin American Art in the 20th Century: High/Newlights 2

A few weeks back I finished reading Phaidon's coffee-table book Latin American Art in the Twentieth Century, edited by Edward J. Sullivan, and with country-by-country essays by various specialists. Since it was (apart from, say, the most famous of Mexican painters) pretty much new territory for me, at the end I flipped back through and noted the works and artists that I'd liked. I thought I might spin a few blog posts out of that list, using what images I can track down ... here's part 2, Central America:

Guatemala
Efraín Recinos - Música Grande / Marimba

Logo for Music and Youth foundation, Guatemala. Note the similar profile to above.

... and, for that matter, his design for Guatemala's Teatro National / Centro Cultural Miguel Angel Asturias:


Moisés Barrios - Antes de Conocerte I couldn't find, but here's Familia en una piscina:



Honduras
Mario Castillo - Familia —nope.

Nicaragua
Roberto Galícia - Bandera — a twisted image of the country's flag:

Costa Rica
Juan Manuel Sánchez - Los Amantes - Nope
Teodorico Quirós - Caserío - no, but El portón rojo:


Panama
Manuel de la Cruz González - Amarillo Contínuo
Roberto Lewis - Tamarindos

Mexico: Latin American Art in the 20th Century: High/Newlights 1

A few weeks back I finished reading Phaidon's coffee-table book Latin American Art in the Twentieth Century, edited by Edward J. Sullivan, and with country-by-country essays by various specialists. Since it was (apart from, say, the most famous of Mexican painters) pretty much new territory for me, at the end I flipped back through and noted the works and artists that I'd liked. I thought I might spin a few blog posts out of that list, using what images I can track down ...

From the Preface

Juan Sánchez - Confused Paradice [sic]. What's not to like abut such a provocative yet fun set of images. If I recall (and view) right, the artist is of a Mexican-American background.

Mexico

Carlos Mérida - Retrato de mi Nieta, Ana Luna, la Niña del Triángulo couldn't be found, but here's his Tzel y el Brujo, which has a nice abstract alphabetic-populist look to it. The book had him in the Mexico chapter, since he did major work there, but he was born in Guatemala. I guess people can move:

Alfredo Castañeda - Diálogo de dos Poetas Disfrazdos de Aves (again, not there). But I may like this one, Hombre, even more, as a meditation on painting/viewing (and cool-patterned hair!).

Fernando García Ponce - Manchas Azules sobre Ocre y Gris, nope, but see Al Pie de la Letra:

Vicente Rojo - México bajo la Lluvia
theis is one of a whole series (the one in the book, subtitled Homenaje a Orosco, had I think a handwriting motif going through it. This one looks more like those crazy multicolor Bolivian patterns (Aymara?) that Evo Morales has on those jackets he wears.

Gunther Gerzso - Naranja-azul-verde wasn't there, but I do like Personaje en Rojo y Azul. His shaded/layered color blocks look great, the more so for being from before the era of Photoshop drop shadows.

Francisco Castro Leñero - Blanco y Negro

Man/Woman/Boy/Girl

Last fall I set myself the goal to draw a quick sketch of a person from each and every of the 244 Wikipedia-sanctioned countries in the world, in alphabetical order and alternating between men, women, boys, and girls (hence the name of the project). I started with "Abkhazia Man" in October, 2006 and finished "Zimbabwe Girl" in August, 2007. The source images were found using flickr or Google searches. All the photos were drawn with a Bic ballpoint pen in a nice black notebook I had left over from my dot-com days. Here's an embedded flickr slideshow:



The next order of business, of course, will be to figure out how to present these images in map form.

Till then, some notes on the project: throughout, I was aware of the problematic notion of selecting a de facto "representative" portrait for every country—and the equally-problematic notion of pretending that I wasn't. This problem is obvious for widely multiracial countries like the USA or Malaysia (who gets to be "the" American face?), but perhaps more insidious for presumably "less-diverse" countries like Sweden or Zambia, where choices between "traditional" or "modern" faces might bear their cultural baggage more subtly. So part of my way-out was to leave it up to the search results, picking the first striking and sketchable-by-me face that came up in the returns. But even the fact that I simply tried to dismiss people who seemed to be obvious tourists in favor of those who looked to me like locals, undermines that algorithm.

Well, whatever. My goal for the project was to give myself the chance to explore and rejoice in the variety of the world's faces, and I think I achieved at least a bit of that in my compilation. As for the artwork itself: it is nearly universally safe to assume that my sketches don't do the source images, let alone the people behind them, justice. Usually I was pleased if my portraits looked like a plausible person, if not the one I was trying to draw.

In general I think the younger women and girls bore the worst of my artistic lapses: an ill-plotted jawline on a guy could usually be turned into a five-o'clock shadow, but finer features proved less forgiving of my misdrawn lines. And I don't think I came near depicting the wonderful variety of my subjects' skin tones (dulled though they were by photography). Often as not, folks I was trying to draw darker just got scruffier.

The project has certainly been much more of an exercise than a finished artwork—hence the occasional experiments with widely varying techniques of line and shade. I'd hoped, from A to Z, that I'd get better and better at drawing ballpoint portraits. In the end, though, I think I mainly got faster.

Sabbath Poem: Praise

"Praise", by R.S. Thomas.

Flamingo Bones

Wandering around Google Books this week I found this great engraving of a flamingo's skeleton, from On the Anatomy of Vertebrates, by Richard Owen (London: 1866). I should flip through the rest ... I'm sure there are plenty of other great engravings. But this composition I liked how the long neck inscribes a near-perfect quarter-circle, which looks wrong and stilted but still graceful.