Drums For Peace Knotted Gun By Ringo Starr ($1390) For The Non-Violence Art Project
Life is better with Art in it: it’s just a fact. Whether you are a seasoned collector, someone looking to start a collection by investing in a single piece for your home, or an art lover who just enjoys the inspiration and joy of browsing, the Affordable Art Fair is a great place to expose yourself to (and purchase) art of almost every tangible medium.
Held in a dual-floor space inside the Metropolitan Pavilion, AAFNYC gathers contemporary galleries from across the globe in the spring and fall each year for a three-day event that’s always both educational and lots of fun. This season’s fair boasted the most diverse collection of high-quality, original art that I’ve noticed for as long as I’ve been attending. Let me turn you on to some of my favorite pieces spotted at this year’s fall fair!
This still life, Bouquet of Flowers in a Vase (1890) is not mentioned in Vincent Van Gogh’s letters and has puzzled scholars as to its place in his artistic production. The subject enjoys a certain rapport with the mixed bouquet of summer flowers he made in Paris; the quasi-abstract floral wallpaper design in Berceuse of Arles , and the white porcelain vase in the Irises of Saint-Remy (both paintings also on exhibit at The Met). However, the palette and style of this painting, especially its distinctive blues and ochers and graphic, brick-shape hatchings, link it firmly with the landscapes made just prior to his death in Auvers on July 29, 1890.
Photographed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.
Rose Painting Near Van Gogh’s Grave By Julian Schnabel (All Photos By Gail)
Confession: Julian Schnabel is not an artist whose work I particularly admire. To me, his stuff almost always seems uninspired, phoned in, and, well, just plain ugly. I do not think that I’m alone in that opinion. Schnabel’s latest exhibit, New Plate Paintings, which is his first solo show at Pace Gallery since leaving Gagosian, is a collection of nearly-identical variations on a theme: paintings depicting pink roses on a bed of greenery, which is notable for being painted on a relief of broken dishes mounted on the canvas.
While recovering from a mental breakdown at a hospital in Saint-Remy, Vincent Van Gogh created this depiction of the Alpilles, a low mountain range in the southern French town. Van Gogh‘s characteristic heavy impasto and bold, broad brushstrokes activate the terrain and sky. In his letters, the artist wrote: “I rather like the ‘Entrance to a Quarry’ — I was doing it when I felt this attack coming on — because to my mind the somber greens go well with the ocher tones; there is something sad in it which is healthy, and that is why is does not bore me. Perhaps that is true of the ‘Mountain’ too. They will tell me that mountains are not like that and that there are black outlines of a finger’s width. But after all it seemed to me it expressed that passage in [Edouard] Rod’s book [Le sens de la vie, 1889] . . . about a desolate country of somber mountains, among which are some dark goatherds’ huts where sunflowers are blooming.”
Photographed in the Thannhauser Collection Galleries at the Guggenheim Museum in NYC
Please be assured that I did not lisp when I say, May the Fourth Be With You! — for it is May 4th, also known in the GeekoSphere as Star Wars Day!
To celebrate in style, this awesome design, a mash up of Star Wars‘s character Boba Fett, and Vincent Van Gogh’s The Starry Night, is available on a T-Shirt for just $19.95— with 20% off your purchase through May 8th — and other fashion swag for a few dollars more, at This Link!
