All Photos By Gail
Stephen Sprouse is widely regarded as the artist and fashion designer who brought counterculture style to a broader American audience. A high-profile member of New York’s art, fashion and music scene, he rose to prominence in the early Eighties with his revolutionary fusion of uptown sophistication and downtown punk sensibility, gritty street style and glamorous high fashion. Continue reading Pink Thing of The Day: Louis Vuitton Stephen Sprouse’ Graffiti Trunk By Marc Jacobs
Photo by Gail
This Crystal Chandelier was one of three acquired by artist Danh Vo during the restoration of the former Hotel Majestic in Paris. It came from the hotel’s grand ballroom, which served as a meeting site for numerous political gatherings from World War II through the hotel’s closure in the first decade of the 2000s. For instance, on January 27, 1973, the hotel was host to the signing ceremony for the Paris Peace Accords, nine-point planned aimed at guaranteeing lasting peace in Vietnam. Each chandelier’s title notes the time and date when the artist removed it from the ballroom’s ceiling — in this case,16:32, 26.05.2009 coincides with 4:32 PM on May 26th, 2009. By divorcing the opulent chandelier from its function and historical setting, this object, designed to convey elegance and celebration, holds within it the memory of the difficult moments in global history it has witnessed.
Photographed in the Whitney Museum in NYC.
Report From Rockport By Stuart Davis (All Photos By Gail)
Although he passed away when I was only three years old, Stuart Davis is an American painter whose works I’ve completely fallen in love with through seeing his paintings in the permanent collections of The Met, MOMA and The Whitney – the latter of which is currently hosting a career retrospective of Davis’ paintings entitled In Full Swing, which is just mind blowing.
Continue reading Stuart Davis, In Full Swing at The Whitney Museum
When I first moved to New York City about 20 years ago, I didn’t know many people, and so I spent a lot of time by myself, exploring my East Village neighborhood, and just people watching. On Sunday afternoons, I used to enjoy sitting at a window table at the late, great 7A Restaurant, having a cheap, boozy brunch while watching the parade of tattooed rockers and rock star wannabes that would pass me by on their way to their mid-afternoon adventures. It’s true what they say that some of the best forms of entertainment are totally free.
Continue reading Book Review: Tattoo Street Style By Nicolas Brulez
Photo By Gail
Matisse painted this oil sketch in the summer of 1904, while working alongside fellow artist Paul Signac on the French Riviera, and he completed the final painting (now at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris) the following winter.
Both Signac and Matisse were influenced by the elder painter Paul Cézanne, whose discrete strokes of color emphasized the materiality of the painted surface over naturalistic illusion. But Matisse went further, using a palette of pure, high-pitched colors (blue, green, yellow, and orange) to render the landscape, and outlining the figures in blue. The painting takes its title from a line by the nineteenth-century poet Charles Baudelaire and shares the poems subject of an escape to an imaginary, tranquil refuge.
Study for Luxe, Calme et Volupté (Luxury, Calm and Pleasure) is part of the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC.