Hockney's New Project + Sketchbook Pro (II)

One of my avatar-heroes in iDrawing/iArt, David Hockney (1937-) continues to push the boundaries of his artistic practice, as Martin Gayford discusses in his article "The Mind's Eye," in the current (September/October 2011) issue of MIT's Technology Review.  He recounts how Hockney has been using a special rig, holding 9  high-definition cameras, to view and photograph nature scenes, simulating and expanding the experience of (the) human...

Read More

Playing with Sketchbook Pro

It's a busy week, so here are a few iPhone and iPad sketches, of a different sort than my usual portraits. I'm still learning how to use Sketchbook Pro for the iPad; it's almost identical to the iPhone version of Sketchbook, but the screen requires a slightly different kind of dexterity.  I've also figured out how to play with text on both formats. In the past, as some of my posted images show, I've had to improvise with my cursive and block...

Read More

Irene Passes Through + Poem: Samuel Menashe

The fiercesome Hurricane Irene has now moved through New York and New Jersey, but not without a tremendous amount of damage From its first touchdown on North Carolina's Outer Banks, on through its departure onto Canada, it has left an estimated 23 people dead; vast areas, from neighborhoods to train lines, under water; an estimated $7 billion worth of damage in the its wake; and millions of people without electricity.  Thankfully, however, the...

Read More

Irene On the Way + What Obama's Read(ing) + Gawker's 50 Worst States

Lower Manhattan, from Hoboken, or The Calm before the StormIrene, if I recall correctly from my long-ago high school Greek classes, means "peace." This imminent, ironically named Hurricane Irene, which has already slammed Puerto Rico, DR, Haiti, and the Bahamas, is now hurtling northwards towards the Outer Banks of North Carolina, and weather forecasters expect it to tear into coastal New Jersey and the densely populated New York metro area beginning...

Read More

RIP Nick Ashford

I was so sorry to learn of the death of composer, singer and hitmaker Nick Ashford (1941-2011), who with his fellow songwriter and later wife Valerie Simpson (1946-), wrote hit after hit that I and millions of others grew up on.  It is hard to believe that he was 70 years old.  He had suffered from throat cancer, and died in a hospital in New York on Monday. He leaves his wife, two daughters, and other family members.A native of Fairfield,...

Read More

Borges' Birthday + Poem/Translation: Borges

Today would be the 112th birthday of Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), the poet, fiction writer, essayist, and aesthete, who was without a doubt one of Argentina's and Latin America's greatest gifts to the world of arts and letters.  I tend to think of Borges as a fiction writer, since it was through the genre that I first encountered his work, and it was as an innovator in the short fictional form that his global reputation took hold, but he began...

Read More

Eastquake

Bryant Park, after the quakeI'll admit it: I didn't feel it. I didn't feel anything. When the Eastquake or Virginiaquake or DCquake, the 5.8 earthquake centered near Mineral, Virginia (not far from where we used to live in Charlottesville) hit today, instead of sitting at my usual spot in the New York Public Library and pressing forward with my novel, I was dallying over a cup of coffee and the new New Yorker's unsettling article, by Jeffrey Toobin,...

Read More

4 Shows at the Whitney: Everson, Arcangel, Cha & the Founding Collection

Soon, the Whitney Museum of American Art, one of the icons of the Upper East Side's Museum Mile district, will abandon its striking Marcel Breuer-and-Hamilton Smith-designed home on 75th Street and Madison Avenue, and head downtown, closer to its original home, which still exists and is now the New York Studio School of Art, on 8th Street and 5th Avenue, for a new space near the High Line Park and New York's main fine art neighborhood these days,...

Read More

Random Photos

Some posts are coming. In lieu of one, some photos.At Madame Tussaud's Wax museum Giant racket, 34th Street The top-hatters, 34th Street Dancer-acrobats, in front of the New York Public Library's Schwarzman Branch Lonely crusader, 34th Street Man shaving his head outside, Mercer St., West Village Outside a butcher's shop, 9th Avenue Surveying Young man in a top hat Waiting for a pick-up  Willi Smith's plaque, New York Fashion Walk of Fame Lamppost...

Read More