Franz Kafka, artist
“Drawing and sketching extensively before he published a single word.”
A newly identified Van Gogh
Smithsonian magazine reports on a newly identified Vincent van Gogh drawing, made with the simplest materials.
Sardines, drawn
At Yellow Petals, George Bodmer shares a lovely can of sardines.
A Douglas Ewart exhibition
“Experimental Sound Studio (ESS) is pleased to present a retrospective of the virtuosic artist and educator Douglas R. Ewart, alongside Ewart’s recent large-scale audio-visual work Songs and Stories for a New Path and Paradigm, created in collaboration with NOW Society of Vancouver and 36 artists from across the globe.”
Lives of the fakes
“Works declared to be fake often enjoy diverse afterlives, according to law enforcement officials, academic scholars and art market veterans.”
Patrick McDonnell’s paintings
Patrick McDonnell, creator of the comic strip Mutts, has a show of his paintings. It looks to me as if he’s been paying attention to Joe Brainard. And perhaps John Ashbery.
The Fourth
Orange flag art, by Jasper Johns.
Eric Carle (1929–2021)
Artist and author of countless books for children.
The George Floyd Bunt Staff
A “sonic sculpture” by Douglas Ewart.
Art and speed and haste
A sentence from Finding Time Again.
A painting rediscovered
“Alice Neel painted two neighborhood boys in her studio in the 1960s. Fifty years later, the mystery of what happened to the picture has been solved”: a bittersweet story from The New York Times.
Zippy Nighthawks
Zippy, Claude Funston, Griffy, and a naïf in a baseball cap.
Valentine’s Day
A heart amulet.
A Gris collage
At The New York Times, Jason Farago offers a close reading of Juan Gris’s Still Life: The Table.
Cover for the turn of the year
A New Yorker cover by Harry Bliss.
“Tick-tack-toe on your apple”
From Robertson Davies’s What’s Bred in the Bone.
A suggestion from Annie Atkins
From a series of COVID-era postcards.
23C and 23D
Safe to say that the intended audience for this cartoon includes me.
Doodles
A two-page spread of doodles from Russell M. Arundel’s Everybody’s Pixillated (1937).
😱
Edvard Munch’s The Scream, the basis for the face screaming in fear emoji, may not depict a person screaming.
◯
Draw a circle and see how close you get to perfect. Caution: highly addictive.
Milton Glaser (1929–2020)
The graphic designer who gave us I♥︎NY.
マンホール蓋
Today’s Zippy takes us to Japan, where manhole covers are things of beauty.
Say Their Names
A New Yorker cover by Kadir Nelson.
Orange 1906 art
A lovely orange from the U.S. Department of Agriculture Pomological Watercolor Collection.
“There’s no dying in art”
Sonny Rollins: “Humans and materialism die. But there’s no dying in art.”
The art of the small oily fish
An invitation to draw a sardine.
The Art of Quarantine
“If the subjects of the world's most iconic paintings can practice social distancing, you can too.”
The blind king
A New Yorker cover.
Sluggo goes to a museum
I wonder if five might be the requisite number for “some paintings.”