Draw Along with Beloved Cartoonist & Educator Lynda Barry: Free Drawing Exercises Online

in Art, Comics/Cartoons, Creativity, How to Learn for Free, K-12 | April 19th, 2022

How do you rescue a day that’s gone pear shaped?

Stopping to drink a glass of water is one of our longtime go tos.

If there’s a box of matches handy, we might perform Yoko Ono’s Lightning Piece.

Most recently, we’ve taken to grabbing some paper and a trusty black felt tip to spend a few minutes doing one of beloved cartoonist and educator Lynda Barry’s all-ages draw-alongs.

Barry began uploading these videos early in the pandemic, for “friends at home who are about to turn four or five or six or seven or any age really.”

Each demonstration begins with an oval. There’s no prologue. Just dive on in and copy the motions of Barry’s slow moving, refreshingly unmanicured hands, captured in a DIY god shot.

Less than four minutes later, voila! A smiling crocodile! (It’s magical how a facial expression can be changed with one simple line.)

The soundtracks to these little narration-free exercises are an extra treat. We’ve always admired Barry’s musical taste. It’s a real mood booster to cover a cheetah in spots to the tune of a marimba orchestra.

Barry’s also a big cumbia fan, conjuring a kitty to Lito Barrientos’ Cumbia En Do Menor, a lion to Los Mirlos’ Cumbia de los Pajaritos, and a Stegosaurus to Romulo Caicedo’s Cumbia Cavela.

Now that you’ve got a cheetah under your belt, you’re ready to progress to a ScorpionLeopard, one of Draw Along with Lynda B’s “strange animals.”

Barry does offer some commentary as these cryptids take shape.

We suspect her pioneering work with a group of four-year-olds in the University of Wisconsin’s Draw Bridge program leads her to anticipate the sorts of burning questions a pre-schooler might have with regard to these beasts. Her classroom experience is evident. Whereas others might think a steady stream of bright chatter is necessary to keep very young participants engaged, Barry’s thoughtful words develop in real time along with her drawing:

This is a tough animal. It has a big stinger on the back. This is a rough animal… angry. Put the eyebrows like this. It makes them look angry. What kind of teeth do you think this animal has? I don’t think they have little bitty teeth. I think they have big fangs.

Others in the “strange animal” family: a CatDogSealFish, an octophant, and a catterfly (featuring a cameo by Barry’s inquisitive pooch’s snout.)

Draw along with Lynda Barry on this YouTube playlist.

Watch Cartoonist Lynda Barry’s Two-Hour Drawing Workshop

Lynda Barry’s Wonderfully Illustrated Syllabus & Homework Assignments from Her UW-Madison Class, “The Unthinkable Mind”

- Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Library of Esoterica: Taschen’s Visual History of Tarot, Astrology & Witchcraft

in Art, Books, Religion | April 18th, 2022

Generations and generations of Americans dissatisfied with life in their hometowns have acted on the same migratory impulse: to go west. Many have done so in order to make their fortunes, but a fair few have been seeking varieties of satisfaction altogether less tangible. In the human spirt in general and the American spirit in particular, there is a yearning for “secret knowledge” of reality’s hidden workings. Those whose spirits most yearn for that knowledge tend to end up in California, the logical end of American civilization. There they’ve found vibrant communities of yogis, spiritualists, Aenerians, theosophists, healers, Unarians, alchemists, Rosicrucians, witches, tarot readers, astrologers… the list goes on.

More recently, California has also been home to Taschen’s American headquarters, the acclaimed publishers of lavishly produced books on art and culture with no compunction about exploring the fringes of human experience. A couple of years ago we featured their visual history of tarot Divine Decks here on Open Culture; now they’ve put out a three-volume coffee-table Library of Esoterica that includes books on not just tarot but astrology and witchcraft as well.

Assembled and designed to Taschen’s usual aesthetically painstaking standard, the set comes edited by writer and filmmaker Jessica Hundley, who used the opportunity to open the most “inclusive and seductive way into these practices, which is through the art” they’ve inspired.

That’s what she told Los Angeles Times’ Steffie Nelson, who writes that “Hundley has been fascinated by alternative spiritualities and the occult since she was a goth-punk teenager on the East Coast.” Later she moved to Los Angeles, “drawn to the city’s legacy of esoteric exploration and its renown as a place where dreams are made manifest and identity is mutable.” This project’s worldwide search for art and other materials related to these fields of esoterica began at Los Angeles’ own Philosophical Research Society, founded in the nineteen-thirties by mystic Manly P. Hall. With its richly reproduced imagery and accompanying explanatory essays, the Library of Esoterica offers a reading experience liable to open anyone’s doors of perception. The age of Aquarius may be over, but there’s a seeker born every minute.

The Library of Esoterica can be purchased as a complete collection. Or you can purchase separate installments on Astrology, Tarot and Witchcraft.

The Artistic & Mystical World of Tarot: See Decks by Salvador Dalí, Aleister Crowley, H.R. Giger & More

Exquisite Watercolors of Demons, Magic & Signs: Behold the Compendium Of Demonology and Magic from 1775

Aleister Crowley: The Wickedest Man in the World Documents the Life of the Bizarre Occultist, Poet & Mountaineer

Watch Häxan, the Classic Cinematic Study of Witchcraft Narrated by William S. Burroughs (1922)

Atheists & Agnostics Also Frequently Believe in the Supernatural, a New Study Shows

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

How France Hid the Mona Lisa & Other Louvre Masterpieces During World War II

in Art, History | April 15th, 2022

Photograph by Pierre Jahan/Archives des museés nationaux

Twice, we’ve brought you posts explaining how the Mona Lisa – the most famous painting in the world – went from near obscurity to global notoriety almost overnight, after an employee of the Louvre purloined and tried to hide it in 1911. Accusations flew – including very public accusations against Pablo Picasso; salacious rumors circulated; the enigmatic smile of Lisa del Gioconda — the Florentine silk merchant’s wife depicted in the painting – appeared in black and white photographs in newspapers around the globe. When she returned to the museum, visitors couldn’t, and still cannot, wait to see her in person. As great as that story is, what happened a few decades later under the Nazi-controlled Vichy government makes for an even better tale.

By the 1930s, the Mona Lisa was deemed the most important work of art in France’s most important museum. With due respect to the Monuments Men (and unsung Monuments Women), before the Allies arrived to rescue many of Europe’s priceless works of art, French civil servants, students, and workmen did it themselves, saving most of the Louvre’s entire collection. The hero of the story, Jacques Jaujard, director of France’s National Museums, has gone down in history as “the man who saved the Louvre” — also the title of an award-winning French documentary (see trailer below). Mental Floss provides context for Jaujard’s heroism:

After Germany annexed Austria in March of 1938, Jaujard… lost whatever small hope he had that war might be avoided. He knew Britain’s policy of appeasement wasn’t going to keep the Nazi wolf from the door, and an invasion of France was sure to bring destruction of cultural treasures via bombings, looting, and wholesale theft. So, together with the Louvre’s curator of paintings René Huyghe, Jaujard crafted a secret plan to evacuate almost all of the Louvre’s art, which included 3600 paintings alone.

On the day Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Nonaggression Pact, August 25, 1939, Jaujard closed the Louvre for “repairs” for three days while staff, “students from the École du Louvre, and workers form the Grands Magazines du Louvre department store took paintings out of their frames… and moved statues and other objects from their displays with wooden crates.”

The statues included the three ton Winged Nike of Samothrace (see a photo of its move here), the Egyptian Old Kingdom Seated Scribe, and the Venus de Milo. All of these, like the other works of art, would be moved to chateaus in the countryside for safe keeping. On August 28, “hundreds of trucks organized into convoys carried 1000 crates of ancient and 268 crates of paintings and more” into the Loire Valley.

Included in that haul of treasures was the Mona Lisa, placed in a custom case, cushioned with velvet. Where other works received labels of yellow, green, and red dots according to their level of importance, the Mona Lisa was marked with three red dots — the only work to receive such high priority. It was transported by ambulance, gently strapped to a stretcher. After leaving the museum, the painting would be moved five times, “including to Loire Valley castles and a quiet abbey.” The Nazis would loot much of what was left in the Louvre, and force it to re-open in 1940 with most of its galleries starkly empty. But the Mona Lisa — at the top of Hitler’s list of artworks to expropriate — remained safe, as did many thousands more artworks Jaujard believed were the “heritage of all humanity,” as Inge Laino, Paris Muse Director, says in the France 24 segment above.

How Did the Mona Lisa Become the World’s Most Famous Painting?: It’s Not What You Think

The 16,000 Artworks the Nazis Censored and Labeled “Degenerate Art”: The Complete Historic Inventory Is Now Online

The Louvre’s Entire Collection Goes Online: View and Download 480,00 Works of Art

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Make Your Own Medieval Memes with a New Tool from the Dutch National Library

in Art, History, Web/Tech | April 14th, 2022

As much joy as internet memes have given you over the years, you may have struggled to explain them to those unfamiliar with the concept. But if you’ve found it a tall order to articulate the power of found images crudely overlaid with text to, say, your parents, imagine attempting to do the same to an ancestor from the fourteenth century. Introducing memes to a medieval person, the best strategy would presumably be to begin not with sardonic Willy Wonka, the guy distracted by another girl, or The Most Interesting Man in the World, but memes with familiar medieval imagery. Thanks to KB, the national library of the Netherlands, you can now make some of you own with ease.

“On www.medievalmemes.org visitors can use images taken from the Dutch national library’s medieval collection and turn them into memes,” says Medievalists.net. “When using the meme generator, people actively create new contexts for these historic images by adding current captions. The available images are accompanied by explanatory videos, providing viewers with background information and showing them that, much like today, people in the Middle Ages used images to comment on their surroundings and current affairs.” You might repurpose these lively pieces of medieval art for such twenty-first-century topics as clubbing, online shopping, or the COVID-19 pandemic.

At the top of this post appears an image from 1327, originally created for a book of miracles King Charles IV ordered for his queen. As KB explains, it offers “a warning of what can happen if you don’t learn your prayers properly.” Below that is “a sort of Mediaeval cartoon” from 1183 about the techniques involved in properly slaughtering a pig. And just above, we see what happened when “the Kenite Jael lured the leader of the army, Sisera, into her tent. Sisera had been violently oppressing the Kenites for 20 years. While he slept, she whacked a tent peg straight through his head.” Though created for a picture Bible 592 years ago, this picture surely has potential for transposition into commentary on the very different perils of life in the twenty-twenties. But when you deploy it as a meme, you can do so in the knowledge that even your medieval forebears would have known that feel.

via Medievalist.net

Killer Rabbits in Medieval Manuscripts: Why So Many Drawings in the Margins Depict Bunnies Going Bad

Why Knights Fought Snails in Illuminated Medieval Manuscripts

800 Illuminated Medieval Manuscripts Are Now Online: Browse & Download Them Courtesy of the British Library and Bibliothèque Nationale de France

160,000 Pages of Glorious Medieval Manuscripts Digitized: Visit the Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis

The Aberdeen Bestiary, One of the Great Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts, Now Digitized in High Resolution & Made Available Online

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

How Ukraine’s Works of Art Are Being Saved in Wartime–Using the Lessons of World War II

in Art, Current Affairs, History | April 11th, 2022

Much in Ukraine has been lost since the Russian invasion commenced this past February. But efforts to minimize the damage have been responding on all fronts, and not just geographical ones. The preservation of Ukrainian culture has become the top priority for some groups, in response to Russian forces’ seeming intent to destroy it. “Cultural heritage is not only impacted, but in many ways it’s implicated in and central to armed conflict,” says Hayden Bassett, director of the Virginia Museum of Natural History’s Cultural Heritage Monitoring Lab, in the Vox explainer above. “These are things that people point to that are unifying factors for their society. They are tangible reflections of their society.”

This very quality made them a sadly appealing target for Russian attacks. As the video’s narrator puts it, Vladimir Putin “has made it clear that identity is at the ideological center of Russia’s invasion,” ostensibly an effort to reunify two lands of a common civilization. For Ukraine, the strategy to protect its own cultural heritage during wartime involves two phases of work.

First, “identify what needs protecting,” already a requirement of the 1954 Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict (known as the “Hague Convention). In Ukraine’s case, the list includes no fewer than seven UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

Step two is to secure these cultural treasures, whether they be paintings, sculptures, buildings, or anything else besides. This requires the collaboration of “government agencies, militaries, NGOs, academics, museum institutions,” says Bassett, as well as of volunteers on the ground physically safeguarding the artifacts. This often involves hiding them whenever possible, and “if history is any indication,” says the narrator, “collections have moved underground or outside of major cities, or outside the country entirely.” So it was in Europe under the marauding of Nazi Germany, including, as seen in the France 24 segment above, with holdings of the Louvre up to and including the Mona Lisa. The state of world geopolitics today may have us wondering if we’ve truly learned the lessons of the Second World War, but at least the fight to save Ukrainian culture reminds that we haven’t forgotten them all.

Take a Virtual Reality Tour of the World’s Stolen Art

Ukrainians Playing Violin in Bunkers as Russians Bomb Them from the Sky

Listen to Last Seen, a True-Crime Podcast That Takes You Inside an Unsolved, $500 Million Art Heist

When Pablo Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire Were Accused of Stealing the Mona Lisa (1911)

Why Russia Invaded Ukraine: A Useful Primer

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Rembrandt Book Bracelet: Behold a Functional Bracelet Featuring 1400 Rembrandt Drawings

in Art, Creativity, Design, Fashion, Museums | April 8th, 2022

Admittedly jewelry is not one of our areas of expertise, but when we hear that a bracelet costs €10,000, we kind of expect it to have a smattering of diamonds.

Designers Lyske Gais and Lia Duinker are getting that amount for a wristlet comprised chiefly of five large paper sheets printed with high res images downloaded free from the Rijksmuseum’s extensive digital archive of Rembrandt drawings and etchings.

Your average pawnbroker would probably consider its 18-karat gold clasp, or possibly the custom-made wooden box in which it can be stored when not in use the most precious thing about this ornament.

An ardent bibliophile or art lover is perhaps better equipped to see the book bracelet’s value.

Each gilt edged page — 1400 in all — features an image of a hand, sourced from 303 downloaded Rembrandt works.

An illustration on the designers’ Duinker and Dochters website details the painstaking process whereby the bookbracelet takes shape in 8‑page sections, or signatures, cross stitched tightly alongside each other on a paper band. Put it on, and you can flip through Rembrandt hands, Rolodex-style. When you want to do the dishes or take a shower, just pack it flat into that custom box.

Gais and Duinker also include an index, which is handy for those times when you don’t feel like hunting and pecking around your own wrist in search of a hand that appeared in the Flute Player or Christ crucified between the two murderers.

The Rembrandt’s Hands and a Lion’s Paw bracelet, titled like a book and published in a limited edition of 10, nabbed first prize in the 2015 Rijksstudio Awards, a competition that challenges designers to create work inspired by the Rijksmuseum’s collection.

(2015’s second prize went to an assortment of conserves and condiments that harkened to Johannes Hannot’s 1668 Still Life with Fruit. 2014’s winner was a palette of eyeshadow and some eyeliners inspired by Jan Adam Kruseman’s 1833 Portrait of Alida Christina Assink and a Leendert van der Cooghen sketch.)

But what about that special art loving bibliophile who already has everything, including a Rembrandts Hands and a Lions Paw boekarmband?

Maybe you could get them Collier van hondjes, Gais and Duinker’s follow up to the book bracelet, a rubber choker with an attached 112-page book pendant showcasing Rembrandt dogs sourced from various museum’s digital collections.

Purchase Rembrandt’s Hands and a Lions Paw limited edition book bracelet here.

And embark on making your own improbable thing inspired by a high res image in the Rijksmuseum’s Rijks Studio here.

via Colossal/Neatorama

– Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and creator, most recently of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Home Movies of Frida Kahlo (and a Side Order of Romantic Entanglements)

in Art, Film, History, Life | April 1st, 2022

Early home movies have a certain predictable quality. Their subjects wander around, pointing at things. They shoo the camera away with embarrassed grins, cluster together awkwardly, and casually chat up their side pieces in front of their spouses….

Wait, what now?

The visit between married artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera and exiled Russian Communist leader Leon Trotsky and his wife Natalia Sedova appears both cordial and ordinary in American photographer Ivan Heisler’s footage, above.

The Trotskys took up residence in La Casa Azul, Kahlo’s family home in January 1937, after Rivera persuaded President Lázaro Cárdenas to offer them sanctuary in Mexico.

Shortly after arrival, Sedova wrote a letter to friends, speaking warmly of the hospitality she was receiving:

We were breathing purified air…A motorcar…carried us across the fields of palms and cacti to the suburbs of Mexico City; a blue house, a patio filled with plants, airy rooms, collections of Pre-Columbian art, paintings from all over: we were on a new planet, in Rivera’s house.

Heisler’s slice of life film would appear to be a continuation of this relaxed and happy vibe.

Trotsky pats Rivera on the back and converses animatedly with Kahlo, nearly 30 years his junior. The two women embrace and stroll arm in arm, as the men take interest in a cactus. Sedova seems delighted when Rivera kisses her hand. Then everyone stands around and looks at trees.

Gosh, isn’t it nice when all members of two couples get along so well?

Is it possible, though, that an extra couple was lurking in plain sight?

Shortly after meeting, Trotsky and Kahlo entered into a brief but passionate fling, exchanging sweet nothings in English, concealing love notes between the pages of books, and borrowing Kahlo’s sister Cristina’s house for trysts.

They called it quits in July of 1937, after Sedova caught on and issued her husband an ultimatum.

According to the Hoover Institution Library and Archives, Heisler’s film was shot in 1938.

So we will amend our statement to say, isn’t it nice when two couples get along so well, even after two of them were discovered to be cheating on their partners with each other?

Kahlo’s and Rivera’s extramarital dalliances are hardly news, of course.

Dangerous Minds suggests that part of what drew Kahlo to Trotsky was the opportunity to get back at Rivera for his affair with Cristina — the sister who volunteered her house as love nest.

And in Vanity Fair, Amy Fine Collins details how Rivera “boasted to anyone who would listen” about Kahlo’s same sex liasons, but was apoplectic over her entanglements with men, including sculptor Isamu Noguchi, photographer Nickolas Muray, and Trotsky’s secretary Jean van Heijenoort, witness to the blatant flirtation between the artist and his boss.

The romance with Trotsky “infuriated him most” Collins writes, adding that “long after Trotsky’s assassination, Kahlo delighted in driving Rivera into a rage by humiliating him with the memory of her affair with the great Communist.”

…kind of makes one wish this little film had sound.

The absence of audio is also lamented by viewers of this colorized assemblage of amateur footage starring Kahlo and Rivera.

Trotsky appears again at the 1:03 mark. Dare we describe him as looking smitten?

There’s some speculation that the young woman at 1:17 is musician Chavela Vargas, another of Kahlo’s lovers. In that same moment, Kahlo proves herself as in command of her cinematic image as she was in her self-portraits. She’s as self-possessed as a movie star throughout.

Which makes the early glimpse of her sketching en plein air in a fur coat and Western style hat, feet propped on a low wall, all the more disarming.

It’s rare to see Frida Kahlo caught off guard, or so she appears, smiling and gesturing offscreen toward the ostensible subject of her drawing.

Is there a lip reader in the house?

(Serious question.)

For good measure, here is even more footage — the Kahlo-Riveras at the Casa Azul, as captured by Kahlo’s lover Nickolas Muray, whose famous 1939 portrait of the artist in a magenta rebozo was declared “marvelous as a Piero della Francesca” by her husband.

“To me it is more than that,” Kahlo wrote to Muray:

It is a treasure, and besides, it will always remind me [of] that morning we had breakfast together.

Understandably, some viewers remain disappointed that the snippets of Kahlo on film lack sound, but surely the “voice” in which she wrote her many loves, Diego included, is far more expressive than any audio that a home movie might have captured.

Which is not to say we’ll never hear Frida. Above is a recording the National Sound Library of Mexico believes to be her, from a radio show aired the year after her death.

The title of the text from which she is heard reading?

Portrait of Diego.

A Brief Animated Introduction to the Life and Work of Frida Kahlo

What the Iconic Painting The Two Fridas Actually Tells Us About Frida Kahlo

Visit the Largest Collection of Frida Kahlo’s Work Ever Assembled: 800 Artifacts from 33 Museums, All Free Online

Take a Virtual Tour of Frida Kahlo’s Blue House Free Online

Discover Frida Kahlo’s Wildly Illustrated Diary: It Chronicled the Last 10 Years of Her Life, and Then Got Locked Away for Decades

– Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and creator, most just lately, of Inventive, Not Well-known: The Small Potato Manifesto. Comply with her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

A Gallery of Fantastical Alchemical Drawings

in Art, Books, History, Internet Archive, Libraries | March 31st, 2022

I once had to tell a ten-year-old that the Harry Potter book series was not a historical literary classic but a recent publishing phenomenon that occurred in my lifetime. She was amazed, but she wasn’t silly for thinking that the books might date from a faraway past. They do, after all, make frequent reference to figures from centuries when alchemy flourished in Europe, and magicians like Paracelsus and Nicholas Flamel (both of whom appear in Potter books and spin-offs) plied their solitary craft, such as it was. Should we call it magic, early science, occult religion, outsider art, or some admixture of the above?

We can call it “black magic,” but the term was not, as the Christians thought, a reference to the devil, but to the soil of the Nile. “Derived from the Arabic root ‘kimia,’” writes the Public Domain Review, “from the Coptic ‘khem’ (referring to the fertile black soil of the Nile delta), the word ‘alchemy’ alludes to the dark mystery of the primordial or First Matter (the Khem).”

Finding this first substance constitutes “the alchemist’s central goal – along with the discovery of the Stone of Knowledge (The Philosopher’s Stone) and the key to Eternal Youth.”

In the description above, we can see the roots of Rowling’s fictions and the origins of many a world-shaping modern myth. Alchemists study and change matter to produce certain effects – just as early scientists did – and it may surprise us to learn just how fervently some well-known early scientists, most especially Isaac Newton, pursued the alchemical course. But the essence of alchemy was imagination, and the artists who depicted alchemical rituals, magical creatures, mystical symbols, etc. had no shortage of it, as we see in the images here, drawn from Wellcome Images and the Manley Palmer Hall collection at the Internet Archive.

The images are strange, surreal, cryptic, and seem to reference no known reality. They are the inspiration for centuries of occult art and esoteric literature. But each one also had practical intent — to illustrate mysterious, often secretive processes for discovering the foundations of the universe, and profiting from them. If these techniques look nothing like our modern methods for doing the same, that’s for good reason, but it doesn’t mean that alchemy has nothing to do with science. It is, rather, science’s weird distant ancestor. See more alchemical images at the Public Domain Review.