Spencer Tunick

I guess there's a project for everyone. While browsing Life Magazine's website, I came across Spencer Tunick, an artist who creates art by arranging naked people.

Stephane Halleux, Sculpteur

When I was in Paris in 2001, I discovered that one of my favorite artists, Picasso, also made sculpture.

Courtesy of Life Magazine.

Picasso's sculptures, like his art, were interpretations of objects rather than replications. So when I saw the work of Stephane Halleux, it reminded me of him.

Halleux is French-speaking Belgian. His type of sculpture is called steampunk. Rock on.

Henry Moore, Sculptor

Came across the sculptor, Henry Moore, when browsing The Guardian's website. I like his stuff, very organic.

For information on Moore, go here or here.

Some nice quotes by Henry Moore:

• "To be an artist is to believe in life."
• "The observation of nature is part of an artist's life, it enlarges his form [and] knowledge, keeps him fresh and from working only by formula, and feeds inspiration."
• "In my opinion, everything, every shape, every bit of natural form, animals, people, pebbles, shells, anything you like are all things that can help you to make a sculpture."

For Those of You Who Might Be Interested

My parents forwarded me a link to a YouTube video of the winner of Ukraine's Got Talent, Kseyina Simonova. I don't particularly care for America's Got Talent, but I'm glad they sent me it. Simonova's is drawing using sand and a light board (and she is amazing). She performs, drawing, with mood music in the background. The story that she told involved how ordinary people were affected the German invasion during World War II.


First, she paints a couple holding hands sitting on a bench under a starry sky. Soon warplanes appear and the happy scene is obliterated.

Next, it is replaced by a woman’s face crying. A baby arrives and the woman smiles again. The war returns as Simonova throws the sand into chaos. A young woman’s face appears.

She quickly becomes an old widow and then the image turns into a monument to the Unknown Soldier. Simonova then frames it with a window and the performance ends with her creating a touching goodbye, with a mother and child inside and a soldier standing outside, with his hands pressed against the glass.

Tы вcюдa pядoм - You are always quite near.

The Great Patriotic War resulted in one in four Ukranians dying, eight to 11 million deaths out of a population of 42 million.

The Passing of a Great Man

While studying, I discovered that one of my favorite artists, Andrew Wyeth, had passed away a few weeks ago. He was 91.

“PENNSYLVANIA—Painter Andrew Wyeth, 1991.” ©David Alan Harvey/Magnum.
He was most famous for his Helga paintings, and for Christina's World, but I loved him because of his other works. I was lucky enough to get to see an exhibition of his work at the Nelson-Atkins Museum. And in person, they were breathtaking. Some of them were practically 3-dimensional and others looked like photographs, with the amount of realism in them. What I really loved about them is how they celebrated the New England landscape and how they weren't about people, even when people were in them. It was as if the people were part of their surroundings, that those surroundings were what were being reveled in. And he wasn't afraid about the stillness that comes with being alone:

"I do an awful lot of thinking and dreaming about things in the past and the future ~ the timelessness of the rocks and the hills ~ all the people who have existed there. I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure in the landscape ~ the loneliness of it ~ the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it; the whole story doesn't show. I think anything like that ~ which is contemplative, silent, shows a person alone ~ people always feel is sad. Is it because we've lost the art of being alone?"

Here's a few of my favorites: