Stockholm, Part Four

Stockholm is a beautiful, easy to navigate city. The whole thing is very walkable, with lots of pedestrian only streets. 

Picked up a copy of Lee Hazlewood's Cowboy In Sweden from a flea market. 

 A traditional Swedish breakfast includes rye bread, cheese, cold cuts, a hard boiled egg, cucumber and tomato slices, and lots of coffee. 

Oatmeal and preserves on day two. 

We saw tons of kids everywhere. Our friend, Anna, told us that there is free healthcare, basically free day care, free education, and 18 months paid maternity leave guaranteed. And your job will be there for you when you get back. 

Also, lots of arts funding. 

Let's all move there soon.

Stockholm, Part Three

    I almost forgot to include this tap dancing performance piece. She was there most of the weekend. 

There was a dance party for the artists which was very nice, lots of techno and sweating. Strangely, it included free soup. 

Stockholm, Part Two

The fair was pretty packed all weekend. I was pleased to see so many different kinds of people-- young, old, single hip people, families. 

I sold a painting to this very sophisticated nine year old! This kid was amazing. His mom told me this was his first art purchase. 

Stockholm, Part One

I went to Stockholm for a week because I had some paintings in the "Stockholm Independent Art Fair", lovingly called "Supermarket." 

It was held downtown, at the Kulturehuset. We saw ads all over Stockholm. 

The art at the fair was pretty good.

Lots of spectacle and wacky performance art

including a woman who buried herself in clay. 

Laser Finger Pointing

This was part of a performance that involved throwing trays of lunch meats and dancing. 

                             On the spot, odd mask making.

Two very nice watercolors by Antti Savela.

                               A crown made of medications.

And my favorite, the bored child at the art thing.

Second Floor Rear Festival-- part two

I made a painting of a tunnel for A*Haul, the guerrilla art installation project of Betsy Zacsek and Juneer Kibria.

It wasn't serious painting à la Rothko's Black on Gray

but more Wile E. Coyote art

Second Floor Rear Festival

SLAC hosted the Society of Smallness during the Second Floor Rear Festival. It was loads of fun. They did a bureaucratic seance and typed up lots permits and licenses on the spot for guests. 

http://societyofsmallness.com/

http://societyofsmallness.com/2014/01/26/hey-pickelers-its-time-for-another-2fr-festival/

Painters I Like: Duncan Hannah

 "Sometimes I feel ghetto-ized by people who say, 'oh, it's nostalgia,'" Hannah says. "The way I paint, I suppose you could find in a painting from 1935. But I had to teach myself to paint that way. Once I realized there was a narrative impulse I wanted to explore, I slavishly studied paintings by dead painters to try to figure out how to do it."

Hannah describes his work as "a trip through other times, done in a rather straightforward style" that he arrived at after artist David Hockney told him, in the 1970s, to "take all the gimmicks out."

Among the "gimmicks" Hannah abandoned: writing on paintings, and borders, and scribbly bits that were there to make a painting look jazzy. "Hockney said this was like putting your painting in quotes, and hedging your bets, instead of trusting your painting to itself," Hannah says. "He said, 'Forget about the zeitgeist.' "

"I was always an imaginative kid and I loved other eras, cultural history and art history and film history and biographies," Hannah says. "I always wanted to roam around in the 20th century, just as a novelist or a filmmaker might choose to dwell in the past."


http://www.remodelista.com/posts/a-painter-at-home-duncan-hannah-in-manhattan

http://www.contemporaryartdaily.com/2014/01/duncan-hannah-at-castillocorrales/img_0190dmitry-bukreev/

http://duncanhannah.blogspot.com/