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Archive for the ‘Art’ Category

Mid-August Man

August 16, 2024

(Naked male bodies, some with full frontal nudity, but in fine art, so exempt from the WordPress ban on naughty bits — but still not suitable for kids or the sexually modest)

A 1977 linocut print by German graphic artist Roland Rudolf Berger, encountered on Pinterest yesterday, shows us Mid-August Man:

(#1) Berger’s Sommer (Summer)

According to Wikidata, Berger (born in 1942) is a German graphic artist whose work incorporates gay themes; his specialty is linocut prints made in his studio in Berlin. That’s pretty much all I’ve been able to discover about him, though art auction sites seem to do a profitable business in his prints.

What to do in mid-August: Berger at the beach. Now, three Mid-August Men (cavorting naked at the beach) from Berger, plus an inscrutable couple — a naked guy greeting a clothed one, possibly also at the beach (though the setting is unclear):

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Posted in Art, Calendars, Events and occasions, Holidays, Homosexuality, Language and plants, Language and the body, Names | Leave a Comment »

The Emperor’s August festival

August 15, 2024

That would be today’s holiday: Ferragosto! From Wikipedia:

Ferragosto is a public holiday celebrated on 15 August in all of Italy. It originates from Feriae Augusti, the festival of Emperor Augustus, who made 1 August a day of rest after weeks of hard work on the agricultural sector. [During the festivities, horse races were organized throughout the Empire and draft animals (oxen, donkeys and mules) were released from work and adorned with flowers.]

As the festivity was created for political reasons, the [Roman] Catholic Church decided to move the festivity to 15 August, which is the [feast day of the] Assumption of [the Blessed Virgin] Mary …

(#1) Imperial illustration from the Scuola Leonardo da Vinci website, “Ferragosto in Italy” on 8/13/21 (with holiday wishes in Latin and in Italian)

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Posted in Art, Holidays, Italian | 1 Comment »

Giving two figs, for science

August 14, 2024

A delightful science-nerd cartoon manifested in several versions being passed around on the net. In my favorite, we’re given a science-illustrator’s b&w drawing of two (edible) figs in cross-section, labeled “fig 1.” and “fig 2.”:

(#1) The labels we expect are abbreviations for “figure 1.” and “figure 2.”: “fig. 1.” and “fig. 2.”. Instead, we get labels for two figs. Note that the drawings are illustrative figures and also of two figs — so the labels are a subtle graphic pun (“fig” punning on “fig.”)

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Posted in Abbreviation, Art, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Puns | 2 Comments »

Timeless fashion for all seasons

August 12, 2024

For all seasons, Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky wrote me a little while back, in recommending a Wooly Mammoth fashion plate (in wool) from the “Autumn / Winter 300,000 years ago collection” by Ruby (rubyetc_) on Instagram (where she identifies herself as “lllustrator, artist, big silly”); Ruby’s full set of mammothwear:

In wool, but also in linen, latex, and tulle (fashions for all tastes)

From NOAD:

adj. woolly (US also wooly): 1 [a] made of wool: a red woolly hat. [b] (of an animal, plant, or part) bearing or naturally covered with wool or hair resembling wool: woolly gray-green foliage | the woolly aphid. [c] resembling wool in texture or appearance: woolly wisps of cloud. …

Hence the name of the (now-extinct) wool(l)y mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius), which was covered in warm fur.

Posted in Art, Clothing, Fashion, Lexical semantics, Mammoths | 1 Comment »

Harry’s scaffolding

August 10, 2024

From New Yorker bob (Bob Eckstein) — a regular visitor on this blog — in the West Side Rag (in NYC), as reproduced in his 8/9 newsletter The Bob, this charmingly absurdist cartoon:

(#1) Into an ordinary living room obtrudes one of the banes of urban street life, the often years-long scaffolding for construction projects — highlighted here by showing not just the scaffold structure of pipes, but also some green protective sheeting for the project (this in an otherwise b&w cartoon, so it’s shriekingly obtrusive)

Very roughly, cartoons and comics hinge on either word play (very commonly, punning) or the humor of situation. In turn, the humor of situation either comments on social, cultural, or political matters, or displays an absurdity — like surrealistic art, depicting discordant, inappropriate, ambivalent, or inexplicable elements of some situation, as if in a dream. And then, a lot of absurdos (absurdist cartoons) depict scenes that seem surreal because they unfold simultaneously in two different worlds, in what I’ll call an anchor world and an intrusive world.

The cartoon in #1 is a two-world absurdo. The anchor world is a modern middle-class living room, inhabited by three characters all sitting on comfortable furniture in the room: two women engaged in conversation about the third character, Harry, who’s engrossed in reading something. The trouble with Harry is that he’s covered in scaffolding, as in the intrusive world, a city street where construction is going on.

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Posted in Art, Comic conventions, Linguistics in the comics, Surrealism | 1 Comment »

Flavor of the Week

August 9, 2024

The New Yorker cover for the August 12th, 2024 issue is a great big Roz Chast cartoon. With the accompanying cover story, “Roz Chast’s “Flavor of the Week”: The artist’s enticing (and not so enticing) tweaks to one of summer’s enduring pleasures” by Françoise Muhly on 8/5/24:

(#1) Along with plain Vanilla, there are strangely modified real flavors, in it for the alliteration (Microchip Mint, First Avenue Fudge); actual food names not especially attractive in an ice cream (Lard Swirl, Hardtack, the potato variety Yukon Gold); and lots of totally non-food allusive names (Placebo, Bitcoin, Tumbleweed, Amnesia, Tsunami, and the noble gas Xenon)

For the cover of the August 12, 2024, issue, the cartoonist Roz Chast — who has delighted readers since 1978 with her opinionated and peculiar takes on life’s indignities — gives ice-cream makers some suggestions for new flavors. “There are a lot of things I like about ice-cream stores aside from the ice cream itself,” Chast said. “I like looking at the different colors and patterns of all the bins. I like comparing cones: wafer flat-bottom or pointy classic? And the names of the flavors: the more preposterous and baroque, the better.”

(There’s a Page on this blog with links to my postings about Roz Chast and her work)

Preposterous and baroque naming schemes run riot in several domains: famously, for colors, especially of paints and of fabrics; and then widely in the word of ice cream flavors, where many frozen-confection firms exult in their naming practices. I’ll comment on just three US companies, with three different approaches: Häagen-Dazs, Baskin-Robbins, and Ben & Jerry’s.

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Posted in Alliteration, Allusion, Art, Color, Language and food, Naming, Portmanteaus, Puns, Quotation, Rhyme, Taste, Trade names | 3 Comments »

The sensuality of the male nude

August 7, 2024

(Visually over the line for kids and the sexually modest)

The sensuality of the male nude, at least as painter Ron Griswold — a recent Pinterest discovery — sees things. Which means not shrinking from the sexual element in the genre, but embracing it (NOAD on the adjective sensual: ‘relating to or involving gratification of the senses and physical, especially sexual, pleasure’), and that includes full frontal nudity in compositions where it seems appropriate to him (especially in paintings of male couples). And, in turn, that means everyday-sized penises, rather than the ascetically small genitals on heroic statues of classic antiquity and in Renaissance paintings in this tradition. RG brings us hot dudes with noticeable (but not obtrusive) cocks, yes, but they’re in high-art paintings depicting the beauty of the male body and the affection of lovers, and the paintings lavish as much attention on the faces of the men in them as on their packages.

I’m going to show you only one of RG’s male couples, but felt I had to justify flouting the WordPress ban on genitals by claiming the High-Art Serious-Intent Exemption for it — while warning my readers what’s about to come, so that they can opt out of viewing it if they wish; the painting (Nella Foresta) will come last in my three examples.

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Posted in Art, Language and the body | Leave a Comment »

Silver Bob and Wooden Bob

August 6, 2024

Silver Bob. From Max Vasilatos Rasmussen on Facebook yesterday:

It’s lived as a piece of carved poplar at Arnold Zwicky’s house since the 1990s.

It’s taken a lot of years to get around to the cast piece.

Here is Bob in sterling silver, waiting to go to Arnold’s to complete the circle.

(#1) Silver Bob, soon to join his poplar brother; Max says: I’ve left him not entirely finished, so his sprues are showing, and he’s a little oxidized, which I think is good

(sprue ‘a channel through which metal or plastic is poured into a mold’ (NOAD))

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Posted in Art, Lexical semantics, Music, My life | Leave a Comment »

Bijlert, Leonardo, parody magnets, and the Priapic-Apollonian opposition

August 5, 2024

The July 26th opening ceremonies for the Paris Olympic games included a tableau — of drag queens posed as presiding over a banquet — that vaguely resembled Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper painting: