In the 1990s, Roy Liechtenstein created a body of work called Interiors, in which he mixed references to classical antiquity, the renaissance, and modernism. He also used visual signs plucked from his own illustrious career, such as his characteristic Ben-Day dots . Created in the last year of Lichtenstein‘s life, this drawing is a study for a painting, Interior with Ajax (1997), commissioned by the fashion designer Gianni Versace. In it, a confused looking Ajax, a hero of Greek mythology, finds himself in an an eclectically decorated room in which styles float free of their contexts and hatch marks are divorced from their descriptive function.
Oh man, I can’t even tell you how much I miss being able to go out to see new art, or attend my favorite design shows, such as the Architectural Digest Design Show and ICFF. Maybe you feel as I do, and are looking for new, creative ways to fight lockdown boredom, while also exercising your artistic talent and flair for design. If that is the case, then you will be excited to hear that manufacturers of custom, Mid-century design furniture, Joybird has created a free, downloadable coloring book featuring 8 escape-worthy living spaces for the interior design lover to color as they choose To start coloring, download the PDFs available at This Link and print them – it’s that easy. Here are a few of the cool room designs included.
The Bedroom
The Kitchen
Joybird would love to see the designs you come up with, so feel free to share your creations on social media with the hashtag #joybirdcolors.
Edward Hopper’s Seven A.M. (1948) depicts an anonymous storefront cast in the oblique, eerie shadows and cool light of early morning. The store’s shelves stand empty, and the few odd products displayed in the window provide no evidence of the store’s function. A clock on the wall confirms the time given in the title, and indeed the painting seems to depict a specific moment and place. Yet a series of Hopper’s preparatory sketches reveal that he experimented with significant compositional variations, depicting a figure in the second story window. He even considered setting the painting at another time of day. His wife, Josephine Hopper, a respected artist herself, described the store as a “blind pig” — a front for some illicit operation, perhaps alluding to the painting’s forbidding overtones.
OK, everybody recognizes the painting above, which is called A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, by French Post-Impressionist painter Georges Seurat, from the movie Ferris Buellers Day Off: that much we can agree on. However, this is not that actual painting but, rather, it is a study, or a sort of trial run of the finished painting. Even though it looks very much like the painting that Cameron stared at for ages during their visit to the Art Institute of Chicago in Ferris Buellers Day Off, it is not that painting.
In fact, this isn’t even the only study that Seurat created for A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, which he worked over the course of two years (1884 – 1886). Focusing meticulously on the landscape of the park, Seurat reworked the original, as well as completed numerous preliminary drawings and oil sketches. He spent hours in the park creating numerous sketches of the various figures in order to perfect their form. He concentrated on the issues of color, light, and form. The finished painting is approximately 7 by 10 feet in size.
Wikipedia also offers that, “Inspired by optical effects and perception inherent in the color theories of Michel Eugène Chevreul, Ogden Rood and others, Seurat adapted this scientific research to his painting. He contrasted miniature dots or small brushstrokes of colors that when unified optically in the human eye were perceived as a single shade or hue. He believed that this form of painting, called divisionism at the time but now known as pointillism, would make the colors more brilliant and powerful than standard brush strokes. The use of dots of almost uniform size came in the second year of his work on the painting, 1885–86. To make the experience of the painting even more vivid, he surrounded it with a frame of painted dots, which in turn he enclosed with a pure white, wooden frame, which is how the painting is exhibited today at the Art Institute of Chicago.
This photograph of the study for A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte was taken at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.
Three Studies of Lucian Freud, a 1969 triptych by Francis Bacon of his friend and artist Lucian Freud, sold for $142.4 million at Christie’s Tuesday night. The unknown buyer won the piece after six minutes of “fierce bidding.”
Thanks to both Geoffrey and Thomas for Encouraging me to Post this as a Bacon Thing! I will be doing a Post next week about the new incredible elo boost services!
