Cool New Artist: Erik Otto

I especially like his installations.

He's got prints and other things available for sale, too, and 2 books (here and here) via Blurb. Maybe they'll go on my Christmas list.

Birmingham Museum of Art

I like this new thing the BMA has going on: they created "cool picks," a curator-selected group of art that changes monthly. The slogan is "It's Cool. It's Free." I saw the billboard last Friday going to work, and the composition is green and blue rectangles arranged on white to suggest paintings hung gallery-style on a wall. I think it's a cool look.

This is what I pulled from their website.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh & Margaret MacDonald Mackintosh

Sticking to 20th century art, I've moving now to the Glasgow School. I've loved the work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, a Scottish architect, designer and watercolor artist, and his wife Margaret MacDonald Mackintosh since school: the flat color, geometry, curving lines. They were both involved in the Arts and Crafts movement and Art Nouveau. Tonight I discovered that CRM designed a House for an Art Lover! 

From rampantscotland.com:
Designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh in 1901, House for an Art Lover was not built until 90 years later. The origin of the design was an ideas competition for the design of a large country house where the art was to consist of the house itself. The drawings were published afterwards and it was these that prompted Glasgow architects to propose creating the building in the city at Bellahouston Park in the 1980s.

The Mackintosh design for a large country house has been modified to create an international graduate study and conference centre for the Glasgow School of Art. There is also a high quality cafe and design shop and displays of Mackintosh drawings.

The exterior of the building is faced in harling, a traditional Scottish material. Of course, Mackintosh's unique embellishments are clearly visible both on the exterior and the interior of the building. Nobody else could design a building such as this. Based on meticulous research, his ideas for fireplace, furniture, lights and decorative panels have all been incorporated into this impressive, "modern" building. The illustration above is of the "music room" in the house - that's a piano on the far wall.

Here are some images of the house.

A few things by CRM

...and a few by MMM

Klimt

For my birthday this year, mom got me Gustav Klimt: life and work by Susanna Partsch. It is a beautiful, thorough book. I've always loved Klimt and he has inspired much of my own research and media exploration, and the other night I was so moved by his work, I almost started crying: what extreme compositions! What expressive ornamentation & brushwork and unexpected color! What proximity to the artist's mind and hand, especially in his many unfinished pieces, with canvas showing through quickly rendered faces! Of course everyone is familiar with The Kiss, but I wanted to include some of his other pieces that I really love. I so wish that you could see very close crops and detail as I can in this book.