Jim Kempner

Jim Kempner Fine Arts is a museum in the Chelsea Galleries that I find really interesting. Here's its website:

http://jimkempnerfineart.com/


The first thing that struck me about the gallery was the amount of art it contains that I recognize or is the work of artists I remember. For example, the gallery includes some of Gianfranco Gorgoni's photos of the environmental sculpture Spiral Jetty:



















Although I had never seen this piece before, I immediately recognized the name of Kiki Smith. This is the feminist artist's Europa:











Here are a few other artists I recognized:

Jeff Koons:

Balloon Dog






Robert Rauschenburg:

Opal Gospel



I really love this piece because of the use of rich hues and calming imagery. Even though Rauschenburg juxtaposes different forms of media, the piece forms a cohesive whole.

Back Out:

Even though it consists mostly of mundane images of sports, the abstracts portions give the composition a mystical vibe.

Pablo Picasso:

Mosquetaire






And of course I couldn't omit Picasso. This isn't my favorite Picasso piece, but it was the best one they had. I dislike it because of its unfinished look, which gave me an appreciation for Picasso's more famous pieces, which on the surface look unfinished because of their abstractness, but really have a lot of thought put into them.

Collage

Collage is a form of art in which pieces of paper and stuff are glued together on a backing to make an assemblage.

Kurt Schwitters was a German artist who is known for his collages:



I think it's really interesting how postmodern this looks even though it's from the early twentieth century



This piece - "The Hitler Gang"- is more subtle but I think the way paint and book paper and paper from miscellaneous items  are blended together gives the whole collage a striking quality.



This third one looks more like a Cubist painting than a collage, which I find really cool.



The And Picture

This one is humorous in the way all the attention is focused around the word "and" (or 'und')



And this one gives off a fantastical vibe, and is visually interesting in the way it uses objects to depict parts of a face.

Off the Canvas

Sandpainting is a form of two-dimensional art created in many traditional societies. It's interesting because of its comparative impermanence. However, it can be fixed into place:




Another cool nontraditional surface for painting is glass:





This last one is a Chinese reverse glass painting from the 1700's (really!)




It's called a reverse glass painting because it's made by painting on glass then flipping it around.



Reverse glass painting is one of the coolest things I've seen. It looks so much like regular painting, but the thought that it's on glass instead of canvas is shocking.

It's a really hard art form because there's no room for mistakes: everything you paint will show up, because everything is being done backwards. You start by painting the foreground and then you paint the background.

Botanical Art

Botanical Illustration is the art of drawing plants, often in a scientific capacity.

One of my favorite botanical artists is Ernst Haeckel:





One type of botanical art that I feel really drawn to is of a more fantastical variety:

ese are  from the mysterious Voynich Manuscript




And these are from an amazing book: Codex Seraphinius, which seems to have been inspired by the Voynich Manuscript:














The Codex Seraphinius is basically an encyclopedia of an imaginary world written in an imaginary language that nobody has deciphered, (similar to the Voynich Manuscript, except the Codex Seraphinius might just be nonsense)


I also really like the imagnary botanical art of the creator of the imaginary world of Ilion:

Nonfiction Book Covers

I spend a lot of my time reading nonfiction. I've developed an appreciation for good cover design and an awareness of...less good cover design.

Here's a really nice book cover: Jared Diamond's 'Guns, Germs, and Steel':



The cover is John Everett's 'Pizarro Seizing the Inca of Peru"



A more preposterous book cover is this one:



....

And in between we find books like:



(Which has an misleading title for a book that's literally about color perception)

The king of nonfiction book covers is indubitably Douglas Hofstadter's "Gödel, Escher, Bach":

Illuminated Manuscripts

Why don't we illuminate our manuscripts anymore?

Because everyone knows about the Christian ones, here are a few others first:


From the Lisbon Bible:

Here are some illuminated qurans:







From the Adysh Gospels:

An 18th century Ethiopian Bible:



From a 13th century bestiary (catalog of animals):