Thursday, August 27, 2009

Painting her son's final images of Iraq

Typically, this site is devoted to posts about artists' first endeavors, or breakthrough moments in art history, but I was really moved by an article I recently read in the Los Angeles Times that may be more appropriately categorized as a "last".  Suzy Shealy, the mother of a soldier who lost his life in Iraq, is painting images of the last things her son saw in his short life.  An excerpt of the heart-wrenching story is below:

COLUMBIA, S.C. — Suzy Shealy was one of those preppy Southern moms whose artistic streak found expression in what she calls "crafty-type things": cross-stitched towels, Christmas ornaments, knitted scarves.

It was stuff to give away at school auctions or offer to neighbors, stuff with little hearts and frills, the comforting, precious visual language of mother-love.

Yet here she was on a balmy June afternoon, in a studio overlooking a yard full of petunias and marigolds, painting the kill-or-be-killed scowl of an American soldier patrolling on the streets of Iraq.

Whish-whish went her brush, and as if by magic, the planes and angles of the soldier's bones emerged from a light haze of grayish paint: gun-metal cheekbones and nostrils flared and fierce. She outlined the suggestion of a right arm, and a hand clutching an M-16 assault rifle.

The snapshot she painted from was attached to the canvas with a potato-chip clip from her kitchen. In the photo, a second soldier hovered in the background, his torso emerging from a Humvee turret.

But Shealy will not paint her dead son. She is not ready.

"I'm just not," she said. "I don't know why."

Some of Sgt. Joseph Derrick's personal belongings were returned to his family in boxes. Some of it came back in little velvet jewelry bags with "UNITED STATES ARMY" embossed in golden letters. His mother has kept nearly everything, no matter how trivial: the phone card he used to call her from Baghdad, his cellphone, his boot laces, his civilian clothes.

A mother learns that every one of her children has a signature scent. The old T-shirts and sweats still smell like her first child. She can still picture him the day he was born -- those perfect hands and perfect feet, those big blue eyes. How could she throw his things away?

Among the belongings that came back from Iraq was a tiny Flash drive she had sent to him as part of a care package. It returned to her filled with more than 500 photos. Some of them were taken by Joseph. Others were taken by his fellow soldiers. Before Sept. 23, 2005 -- before the insurgent sniper fired the bullets that pierced his neck -- Joseph had told her about the pictures. He couldn't wait, he had said, to come home and deliver the stories that the pictures promised. But without their narrator, Shealy found that the photos amounted to a chain of riddles. An eternally incomplete slide show.

Thursday, August 20, 2009

Chagall's first artwork

Marc Chagall, the painter associated with Modernism and France, was actually born Moishe Segal to a Russian-Jewish family in 1887. At the time of his childhood, Jewish students were not admitted to Russian schools. However, with a bribe to an official, Chagall's parents managed to get him access to attend, where he fell in love with drawing.

It makes perfect sense that, considering Chagall's contribution as a Jewish artist, his first artwork ever created was an illustrated Haggadah for Passover (a text that details the order of events for Seder) for his family. I couldn't seem to find any images of his particular Haggadah... perhaps it's still in his family and not on public view?

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

"Damien Hirst's auction" or "Hirst rhymes with first"


It's been almost a year since Damien Hirst's infamous auction took place at Sotheby's in London. Hirst is an interesting figure in the art world - his splashy work and astronomical prices have earned him a spot as one of the most loved and despised artists in the world. September 15, 2008, Sotheby's held a special two day sale of works by Hirst, which is nothing rare (I joke). However, it was incredibly rare, in fact the first time that a set of work went straight from an artist's studio to the auction block - no galleries, no exhibit, no public display. It was sensational. It angered many. It made a lot of people smile, and a lot more people curse his name.


Friday, August 7, 2009

Agnes Denes






The artist Agnes Denes, known for her "Whatfield - A Confrontation" in Manhattan, created a piece entitled "Tree Mountain - A Living Time Capsule" between 1992 and 1996. The drawings and renderings were the beginning of a project that the Finnish government would make as their Earth Day contribution at the Earth Summit. Denes invited 11,000 people to each plant a tree on a mountain, using a mathematical pattern. This marked "the first time that an artist has been commissioned to restore environmental damage with an artwork that is global in scale, international in scope, and unsurpassed in duration."