Every urban population believes in having its own collective psychology. One can ridicule this belief, but it has produced a lot of poetry, music and cinema that we are accustomed to valuing. The volume of poems about Parisian air or St. Petersburg’s weather is a sufficient justification for their architecture. However, if we don’t speak about art that is stimulated by a city but about art in the public space, then one should be very careful. The chance that any really good artwork can go through all possible channels that evaluate it is minimal. And, in general, art that is exhibited outside of arts institutions has to additionally identify itself as art. That makes art shown in the public space even more conservative than art shown within the framework of institutions.

— Boris Groys, excerpted from “6 Questions for Boris Groys”, Art Lies no. 58, p. 19

It is not important at all to me that you or anyone else should have this or that knowledge of anything written or recorded about my pictures of anyone else’s. It’s about experiencing the pictures, not understanding them. People now tend to think their experience of art is based in understanding the art, whereas in the past people in general understood the art and were maybe more freely able to absorb it intuitively. They understood it because it hadn’t yet separated itself off from the mainstream of culture the way modern art had to do. So I guess it is not surprising that, since that separation has occurred, people try to bridge it through understanding the oddness of the various new art forms. Cinema seems more of less still in the mainstream, as if it never had a ‘secession’ of modern or modernist artists against that mainstream. So people don’t tend to be so emphatic about understanding films, they tend to enjoy them and evaluate them: great, good, not so good, two thumbs up, etc. Although that can be perfunctory and dull, it may be a better form of response. Experience and evaluation — judgment — are richer responses than gestures of understanding or interpretations.

— Jeff Wall, excerpted from ‘An email exchange between Jeff Wall and Mike Figgis’, Contemporary, no. 65, 2005

There’s been plenty of talk lately in the news about the role of public art as Olafur Eliasson’s quartet of waterfalls were turned on last week. Some see the display as a way for the public to newly experience their urban surrounding (Mr. Eliasson has said that his intention was to draw fresh attention to the NYC’s waterways more than to himself or the art). Others questions the price tag: a bit over $15 million of privately-donated funds, although the money generated for the city by the tourism could well exceed that amount according to some sources.

As someone who doesn’t know very much about the critical discourse on public art (heck, I barely claim to understand “institutional” art), I find it useful to gauge the art by how the people who live around it interact with it. My first visit to Chicago coincided with the opening of Millennium Park, and I was engrossed by the sculptures, even if they are more “conservative” than the works shown in the nearby Art Institute. Perhaps not because of any transcendent message or societal insight, but because the crowd that had gathered there both day and night were having such a good time enjoying the works on display. Seeing kids laughing and playing around the Crown Fountain, adults smooshing their faces up against Anish Kapoor’s still partly-under-wraps Cloud Gate, it was all very fun and engaging. Not like other sculpture gardens I had been to! (Check out this relevant 37Signals article to see what I mean…) Another good example is Richard Serra’s Vortex at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth: it’s beautiful visually, but step inside and the sculpture takes on a totally different level of interactivity, with museum-goers quickly discovering the loud reverberations they can make by clapping, jumping, shouting, screaming.

Public art seems to draw suspicion from both the citizens that pay for it and live around it as well as the art critics — is that suspicion unfounded? Does public art suffer from those who regard it too highly (the “don’t touch!” signs at the Seattle garden) or from those who feel that art has to be understood rather than experienced? I’m glad that we have the AIPP here in Austin, and it’s good to see their map dotted with “in progress” works, I just hope they don’t turn out like the ill-fated and much-maligned Moments project.

I like this quote from Sports Illustrated writer Peter King that S.C. Squibb brought up on the ArtCal Zine blog:

Saw The Gates… Nice. Unusual. Great to see Central Park so packed with people and transformed into a pretty sight in the middle of a harsh winter. An enjoyable experience. But art? I don’t see it.

Even though the fogged photograph is not in itself pure absence, but rather the eclipsing of an image, we know that what we are seeing is a representation that has been spoilt, a calamity that no technology can ever repair. The image is there, but hidden, ‘fogged’, concealed forever by a curtain of shadow, which no one is capable of raising.

— A Short History of the Shadow by Victor Stoichita, in reference to an 1839 cartoon by Cham (Amédée de Noé) from the book L’Histoire de Monsieur Jobard

Segueing nicely from their book on Gothic literature and art, I’ve been plowing through another great edition from Whitechapel’s Documents of Contemporary Art series: The Cinematic. The editor has assembled critical essays on photography, its relation to cinema and video, to temporality, to narrative, to contemporary art practices — all with a fluid sense of motion conducive to making connections across the gamut of the 20th Century art world. Many of the essays touch on photography’s nature as a perverse mirror capable only of capturing what was, the inherent implications about death and impermanence corresponding to much of the Western catalog of art from the past couple hundred years. Other essays deal with the conflict and interaction between still photography and the re-playable, less-bounded world arising from Sergei Eisenstein and his early modernist contemporaries. In short, it’s right up my alley, and I hope the library here gets more from this series soon.

With these thoughts in mind, I was pleased last weekend to find the theater series of photographs by Hiroshi Sugimoto sitting quietly by themselves on a side wall in the otherwise colorful LEWITT×2 show at the Austin Museum of Art. These photographs, seemingly simple shots of the interiors of old American movie palaces, speak volumes about these issues of time, death, photography, cinema, and reflection. The burning white oblivion central to the frame, created by setting up a large format camera with its shutter open through the duration of a feature film, softly illuminates the space surrounding it, highlighting the emptiness as though time itself has run its course. The blur of human motion on the screen over time adds up to a brilliant nothingness, irretrievable. Somewhere on the boundary between conceptualism and zen meditation, these were easily my favorite pieces in the show.

See also:

• Edward Hopper’s New York Movie
• Hubbard/Birchler’s Arsenal and Grand Paris Texas
• Christian Metz, Photography and Fetish on JSTOR (may require a login)

Photo above: “Canton Palace, Ohio (1980)” by Hiroshi Sugimoto. From the Hirshhorn Museum collection.

Update:

Flipping through the New York Times the day after I posted this, I was very surprised to see this photo from Fred R. Conrad’s Geometry series. Spooky!

I just finished reading through The Gothic, a recent essay collection from the Documents of Contemporary Art series published by MIT Press. The book stitches together a variety of short essays centered on discussion of classic gothic literature and contemporary art, tapping into the thoughts of well-established artists like Damien Hirst and Jeff Wall while also reflecting on younger members of the field like Banks Violette, David Altmejd, Aïda Ruilova, and Sue de Beer. Crammed within its scant 230, large-typeset pages you’ll find writing on Edgar Allen Poe (any book on gothic literature and modernity needs to have lots of Poe!), Michael Jackson’s Thriller, Freud and Lacan’s theories of the uncanny (unheimliche), deconstructions of 1980s slasher movies, psychoanalytic musings on duality and transgression, bits of cyberpunk from William Gibson, and more! When I was younger, I was thrilled reading Poe, Shelley, Baudelaire, et al., without realizing until recently how much of an impact their writings had on art and literature, continuing even today as the art world emerges slowly out of post-modernism and back towards theatricality and the sublime. Highly recommended.

Closed source software like JAWS will face a real challenge as open screen readers like the NVDA project become more mature and build on the popularity of other software like Firefox — while NVDA is certainly lacking the features and polish found in the more widely-used commercial products, the price (free vs. $1000) and ease-of-installation certainly make it compelling.

I also learned about the following accessibility-checking programs and Firefox extensions, immediately adding them to my developer’s toolbox:

• Colour Contrast Analyser, a great tool available for Windows and OS X that gives you two color pickers: one to choose a foreground color (probably your main text color) and a second to pick a color from the background to compare it with. It then gives you detailed contrast ratio information for the two colors along with clear indicators as to whether your site or application complies with the suggested contrast needed for visually impaired users and for colorblindness. It’s one of those tools that simply works as advertised.
• Fangs, a screen reader emulator built as a Firefox extension. When run on a page, Fangs displays a mashed-together, color-highlighted, text-only version of your content as a screen reader would read it aloud. If you’re a sighted web developer, this is a handy tool for getting a quick impression of how your page will hold up under JAWS or similar. (Bonus points for having an attractive, accessible website)
• The Firefox Accessibility Extension from the Illinois Center for Information Technology Accessibility. This tool helps you generate reports on various accessibility issues, can display information about your page’s semantics (headings, list items, links), lets you easily switch into various high contrast modes, etc. It’s a great companion to the awesome Web Developer extension.
• You should also check out Color Oracle, the cross-platform color blindness simulator. It’s pretty sobering if you have regular vision like I do, and it will make you appreciate that yes, two different hues can be very, very similar-looking to a good portion of your audience, and yes that’s a big problem.

(It goes without saying that these are useful but imperfect tools, never capable of giving you the full insight that would come from actual user testing. The only real way to know what real frustrations an impaired user will have with your new web app or site? Get one to come in and give it a spin!)

The other good news coming out of the past couple of weeks is the support the major browser makers are giving to the WAI-ARIA suite of standards for making web applications and forms and controls more semantic and accessible. Opera 9.5, Firefox 3, and now even IE8 (imperfectly?) are slated to support ARIA (whither Safari?). The Secrets of JavaScript Libraries panel discussion at SXSW also brought news that jQuery will soon join the Dojo toolkit in supporting ARIA-enabled widgets (I think that’s where I heard the news, feel free to correct me if I’m wrong).

These are the kinds of open source projects that I really dig: good for users, good for shaking up the established software licensing model, and good for helping solidify support for web standards. Know of any other good tools?

A couple of weeks ago I found a new local arts magazine sitting on the freebie shelf at Flightpath, featuring the William Hundley photo taken in front of the Daniel Johnston “Hi How Are You” frog seen above — surely a cover designed to catch my eye! The newly launched magazine is called Odic Force Magazine, evidently named after the founder poked through his thesaurus and came across the Victorian-era term. At first I was worried that it was going to be another slickly-produced-but-light-on-actual-content local “arts and culture” magazine (I’m looking at you, Tribeza and Rare), but there are some good writers involved (Steve Wilson, Rachel Koper of Gallery Lombardi, et al.) and artists profiled (fun to see the workspaces of folks like ceramacist Ryan McKerley and painter Jennifer Chenoweth). It touches on the local art, music, architecture, writing, and fashion scenes without being too unbalanced or terse. It’s not yet ART LIES but it’s an impressive first issue, and it is attempting to cover far more than just the visual arts.

Odic Force’s first issue is generously available online using one of those crazy sorta-works Flash viewers (I couldn’t get it to spit out the PDF so I could read it offline, your mileage may vary).

PS: On a related note, I’m very glad to report that Cantanker’s website is back from the dead. Their domain lapsed, and I worried that they had succumbed to the fate of most good art magazines. Looking forward to their issue #5!

I know little to nothing about curatorial practice. After reading about the Austin Museum of Art’s new building, I started thinking about the number and type of shows that they put on each year, how many have been retrospectives of well-established artists or “blockbuster” shows designed to lure in the art-timid. That’s probably overly cynical, and I really appreciate their ongoing “20 to Watch / New Art in Austin” triennial series, but we’ve definitely had a healthy dose of traveling Warhols, Lichtensteins, Christo + Jean-Claudes, etc. Who can blame them? With only four shows a year in a rather tiny space, a self-described “modest” permanent collection, and a need to draw visitors from a state where art isn’t exactly on the forefront of civic spending, I’m glad that they feature less-known and local artists at all. Hopefully their new permanent space, smaller than proposed a few years back but still more than double their current size, will help them put on more challenging shows.

An article on Bloomberg.com celebrates the recent resignation of the Guggenheim’s director, Thomas Krens. Under his watch, the museum expanded into “franchises” around the world, from the well-received Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain to the less-appreciated Guggenheim Las Vegas. It sounds like the spreading of their collection worldwide is what did him in, with members of the foundation decrying the lack of attention being paid to New York and their collection there (not to mention the building’s crumbling façade). Also contentious were the party-like exhibits being thrown, and commercial-heavy shows like “The Art of the Motorcycle”. Will toning down the hype help focus on curating good contemporary art? I didn’t get the impression that the other peripheral museums will be closing down, and the one slated for the UAE is still forthcoming, so how will they beef up a collection that’s spread amongst so many campuses?

Over in London, the new director of the National Gallery had this to say: “The responsibility of a major gallery is to show people something they haven’t seen before … A major national institution should be one that proves a constant attraction to the public. What is important is encouraging historical and visual curiosity in the general public.” This approach brings up some interesting issues about a museum or gallery’s role in modern life. What’s the right balance of crowd-pleasing and crowd-challenging? There’s an interesting quote from the director in this article in the Times in which he says that 20 years ago people expected to be introduced to new art by an exhibition. How widely spread is that sentiment today, and has it been stymied by these big blockbuster shows, or is contemporary art too alien (unpleasant?) for the public, or is something else at play?

Today sees a new homepage for the University of Texas School of Law. This iteration is more of a realign than a redesign as the decision was made to keep our interior pages intact while we continue a long-term look at our branding and online presence. The biggest design challenge was creating something cleaner and more useful for our visitors while retaining most of the same content and enough of the previous design to tie it in comfortably with our current site’s look-and-feel.

Realignment

The new version emphasizes our communication pieces, changing the rotating banner graphic into something more dynamic: the accompanying text is now HTML-based and will link to richer features similar to our Clinical Education stories. Our previous 75×75 pixel highlight buttons (which themselves were reduced from the intricate 200×140 highlight graphics of two years ago) have been folded into our general News list to help simplify the page. The navigational links were dramatically reorganized to make the hierarchy clearer and more contextual. Everything’s still there, it’s just been reshuffled.

Make it pretty

The goal aesthetically was to reduce the homepage’s clutter and to make the information presented more visually balanced. I designed the old homepage, so I’m to blame! To accommodate the larger banner graphic I increased the width of the site to 840 pixels, and then subdivided that width into a five-column layout. The typography is much more consistent, and care was taken to align the text vertically on a baseline grid. The colors are lifted from the previous version but greatly toned down — far less orange, no more crazy orange-stripe-gradient thing, and a nice white background with some subtle color at the top. Still feels like UT, but doesn’t scream it, and the new design continues to match our internal pages.

Behind the scenes

I’ve shifted the site from Transitional to XHTML 1.0 Strict and have made greater use of XML for the maintenance of the feature stories and news items. The layout and typography are all still handled with plain CSS: if you strip away the stylesheet, you’ll find that the homepage is semantic, streamlined, and very navigable with screenreaders or other assistive technologies. Text can be adjusted in the browser to just about any size without breaking the layout. We’re also sporting a bit of hCard markup so that folks can easily scrape our contact and location info into more useful formats.

Hopefully the refresh is just what we need to help carry us along until the sitewide redesign. I think the updated technology and cleaner look will do a lot for us, and it should help increase our visibility as one of the top-ranked law schools. If you have any comments about the design or about site refreshes, I’d love to hear them.

The New York Times ran a piece detailing a proposal presented today to the faculty at Harvard. Their scholars’ academic work could soon be automatically published online, publicly available, on a surprisingly opt-out basis. While many professors already publish their work online at one journal repository or another, this could become a compelling centralized resource. This kind of no-cost open access has the journal and database publishers a bit worried, and for good reason. I haven’t been able to turn up any info yet on whether the proposal passed or not, or when exactly it’s up for vote (if that’s the way it works). Will developments like this kill niche journals that rely on their sibling publications’ high subscription fees? Will this change the business model of scholarly journals?

Next, Professor Lawrence Lessig of Creative Commons fame writes that the “Legal Commons” project has seen their first release of case data, available as CCØ-licensed XML. This organization seeks to bring 1.8 million pages of federal case law into the public domain before the year is out, available for free for any use or purpose. It’s an ambitious goal, especially considering the clout of the expensive subscription-based alternatives, but a worthy one. After all, shouldn’t the word of the law be in the hands of the public?

Finally, I came across a post on the O’Reilly Radar blog about a newly announced non-profit service called CK-12. Their system provides a UI that will allow educators, students, and the public to assemble their own textbooks using open data and resources. Right now it sounds like it’s mostly limited to flat text, but in the future they plan to incorporate more dynamic items like RSS feeds, videos, and widgets. A bit of Web 2.0 for the classroom. I hope that it catches on with a least a few tech-savvy teachers. I’ll have to browse through the other news coming out of O’Reilly’s Tools of Change conference to see what else is going on along these lines in the publishing world.

UPDATE: Looks like Harvard’s faculty overwhelmingly accepted the proposal. There are more open law projects cropping up (like The Public Library of Law, which includes some commercial links) and public.resource.org’s archive is being picked up on legal information sites like Justia.

I’ve been surrounded by stories of shadows lately, especially stories of people separated from their shadows. It hasn’t been intentional. I’m midway through Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, I recently found the Faust-like tale of Peter Schlemihl, and shortly before that, His Dark Materials (I guess “Peter Pan” will have to be added to the list eventually). Figuring that there must be something to this, I checked out a copy of Victor Stoichita’s A Short History of the Shadow for a bit of enlightenment. The writing is at times trying, full of academic language and awkward phrasing (just like my writing!), but that can be forgiven as it’s a translation. The meat of the book is worth the effort.

A Short History presents a compelling look at the development of the Western art tradition, a series of essays framed around artists’ use of shadow and simulacra as allegorical devices. Stoichita wanders from Pliny and Quintilian’s early explications of painting’s history (departing loved ones captured by silhouette traced on the wall) to the optical and philosophical experiments of the Renaissance to the modern investigative works by Kazimir Malevich, Joseph Beuys, and Andy Warhol.

The common threads of these stories are fascinating: shadow as a powerful double of the human form; specular reflection as a evanescent ‘other’; shadows bearing the indication of a man’s true nature; the emptiness of a person bereft of their shadow. All themes I’ve been encountering in other writing lately. Shadows have always been much more than devices for the simple rendering of volumes, and this book is loaded with examples.

A fairly recent interview with Stoichita conducted by Cabinet Magazine is available on their site, summarizing many of these essays.

“If the swift moment I entreat:
Tarry a while! You are so fair!
Then forge the shackles to my feet,
Then I will gladly perish there!
Then let them toll the passing-bell,
Then of your servitude be free,
The clock may stop, its hands fall still,
And time be over then for me!”

“Faust,” Norton Critical Edition, lines 1699–1706

The above lines are from Goethe’s story about the scholar Dr. Faust and his famous bargain. The scholar promises his soul to the devil in exchange for earthly knowledge and power, on the condition that his life will be forfeit only when he experiences a moment that he wishes would persist. What does this have to do with Internet Explorer 8? It’s a tortured and overblown metaphor to be sure, but for some reason this week’s developments in the world of web development reminded me of this fable.

If you haven’t already, start off with this article from A List Apart and perhaps move along to Eric Meyer’s analysis of the news. These articles appeared almost simultaneously with a post on the IEBlog about the scheme. To grossly summarize, the IE team has worked out a deal with some of the major players in the web standards scene and representatives of the browser makers to introduce a new <meta> tag allowing developers to target specific browser implementations. They argue that this move will help prevent complaints of new browser versions “breaking the web” when they are released to the public.

This news seems to have come as quite a surprise, with heated discussion (mostly negative as far as I can tell, and at times sadly mean-spirited) breaking out in the usual forums. Molly Holzschlag provides the most level-headed analysis I’ve read so far, and alludes to the secretive, NDA-protected discussions that led up to this decision. Even Ars Technica and El Reg have weighed in on the issue.

The contemptible part of the new specification is that it’s designed to allow sites to lock into a current implementation, and Microsoft has made the decision that the default rendering engine for pages lacking this meta tag will be IE7 (not IE8, the browser that’s introducing this feature, or the more sensible default of “latest version”!). The implications of this are that future versions of IE (and other major browsers?) will contain emulation code allowing it to switch back to a previous engine at will so that sites will always look and act the same as the designer intended, quirks and all. If you have IE10 and look at a page lacking the proper meta tag, it will use IE7 to display the page. I guess that means IE8 won’t pass the Acid2 test by default? What does that even mean?

In my humble, semi-educated opinion, this could be a major setback to the web standards movement and to the speedier development of better web technologies (and things already move at a glacial pace in the web world). We’ve been taught for years that the road to enlightenment was paved with progressive enhancement and future-proofing, and this goes against that grain. I find the idea disquieting too for its other more pragmatic implications — how will this actually be implementable? I was relieved to find in a post by Robert O’Callahan, a coder who works on Firefox, that he was puzzled by many of the same questions I was having. Won’t this increase dramatically the footprint of each successive browser release? And I’ve used emulators of all kinds in the past, and they simply aren’t perfect.

Will this end web development as we know it, or kill the open standards movement? No, of course not. But it’s confusing enough and sudden enough that it’s not surprising that more than a few people are upset by the news. Maybe I’ll warm up to it when I hear more specifics about how this will actually work in the real world, but for now I’m highly skeptical.

Update: The debate continues, with two further articles from A List Apart. The first, “They Shoot Browsers, Don’t They?” by Jeremy Keith makes the case that a good beta version of IE8 would go along way towards making the case for one side of the other, depending on how its display holds up on the current web. I’d have to agree, and I’m glad to see ALA giving a contrary opinion some space, after the articles from last month caused such an uproar. Having said that, Zeldman’s “Version Targeting: Threat or Menace?” fans the flames a bit as he tries to make his case again in favor of the default opt-in method. This time it’s revealed that major DOM scripting changes are the root cause of Microsoft’s concern, which I don’t think was mentioned previously. The argument doesn’t seem to stick, at least based on the response the article’s drawn. I still stand by my view that this is a pretty bad deal, and one that’s only intended to help Microsoft’s short-term financial interests. Check out the commentary on these two articles, though, for a handful or other good opinions. Even though there doesn’t seem to be much traction, public discourse is always welcome.

First new sketchbook post in a while, and first post with new site theme. Now to get started on the next design…

The new Clinical Education at UT Law website is now live. This is another site refresh that was begun earlier this summer, replacing the limited content that was on the old version with more personalized, dynamic information. Each clinic and internship now has its own mini-site, with highlight photography and feature stories coming soon, and a more uniform approach that should make it easier for students to find out what courses are being offered and how they can apply. The site’s template has been written from the ground up, featuring the usual blend of lean, accessible xhtml and CSS. The site is served up through PHP, mainly to make the feature stories and photos easier to update. The textual content was developed by our communications department along with the clinical faculty, and is a work in progress. (Many thanks to Austin Kleon for his help in populating all of that content while I was on vacation!)

That’ll teach me to draw across the fold in the Moleskine. Oh, well. First sketch in a while, feels good to draw again.

Just a reminder that the Multiples show is opening tonight at the CRL, 2832 MLK Jr., from 6pm–9pm. I haven’t seen it yet, but the show sounds like a good mix of faculty, staff, alumni, and others scattered across the community, a curatorial approach that I’m seeing more of under Jade Walker’s direction. The faculty show that opened the season there at CRL even included people from the art history and design departments, a welcome addition to the fine arts mix. It’ll be up through November 10, with an artists’ talk scheduled for the 6th.

The piece that Marsha and I made for the show consists of 63 close-cropped drawings of eyes arranged in a grid, all focused on an imaginary center point. I’ve been reading lately about vision research, and this drawing was mostly inspired by the book The Moving Tablet of the Eye. The piece’s title, Saccade and Fixation, is a term that describes the short, rapid motions that our eyes make constantly when surveying a scene. The motion is almost imperceptible, and we don’t notice our own eyes making these movements as our brain compensates for them. Researchers and philosophers have been studying their effects on vision and perception for thousands of years: Aristotle, Ptolemy, and Victorian scientists all wrote on the phenomenon, and they play an important role in modern-day vision research, computer imaging, and artificial vision. This theme of one scene comprised of many discrete images seemed like an appropriate place to start for this Multiples show, and so we set to drawing. It also ties in a bit with some ideas I’ve had about surveillance and the gaze (so very Philosophy 101!). Two weeks later, the piece is hanging at the gallery, so come out and see it while it’s up!

This summer I had the pleasure of designing and coding one of our largest recent projects at UT Law: the new system that would house the collection of English translations of international law for the Institute for Transnational Law. The previous version of the system was an ungainly assortment of static, invalid .html and .shtml SSI files that were inherited from another university (meaning no offense), and at a couple of thousands pages deep it was a bear to maintain. The new version of the site is now available for your perusal.

We consulted with main campus ITS to build the perl scripts that culled the juicy bits from the old html, the resultant data scrubbed a bit and dropped neatly into an Oracle database. After a few strong shots of relational SQL kung fu and a bit of object-oriented PHP, everything is up and running efficiently. The front end display is now (mostly) valid XHTML, with CSS for the visual styling. Google’s much happier, I’m much happier, and hopefully the refreshed site will help make this important legal resource even more visible and valuable.

Marsha and I will be in the upcoming show at the Creative Research Lab. The opening reception is on October 13, so come out and enjoy some art + people + wine. More details about our project will be coming soon to a blog post near you.

I’ll nominate this as one of the best/weirdest things I’ve seen in a long time.

Marsha and I took a very good life drawing informal class at UT this summer with Melissa Grimes. I think I got some decent drawings in, especially considering that I’m more used to three- or four-hour poses! It felt good to be forced to work so much quicker, and to work in drawing styles that are outside my comfort zone (I’m looking at you, blind contour). The longest poses were around 15–20 minutes, and most were in the 5–10 minute range. If you like, you can see some more of these short poses on my Flickr account.