Visual Inspiration: Matt Duffin

Matt Duffin is an American artist. I didn't even need to look it up to know it when I first saw his works. There's no way he could have been anything but, which has made me think twice about the qualms I had with nationalism as a way of classifying and identifying art as per the Venice Biennale. Duffin's primary medium is encaustic painting, and unless you're an experimental artist or an art history buff, you probably won't have come across the technique before.
Encaustic is painting with hot wax, typically beeswax, which is then mixed with pigments and spread on wood or canvas before being shaped with heated metal tools or heat guns. It's laborious and difficult, but produces sensational effects with the right lighting. The most famous practitioner of encaustic painting is Jasper Johns, who used the technique to great effect in his flag and target paintings.


Jasper Johns's 'Flag', Encaustic, oil and collage on fabric mounted on plywood, 42 x 61 in., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1954-55. Art (C) Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Duffin has moved on from Johns's impasto encaustic to a lighter, glazed effect which is what gives his images such a luminous quality even though he works primarily in shades of black, grey, and white. The other clear American influence is one of illustration (also, Duffin originally trained as an architect, which clearly shows in the spatial nature of his images). Many writers have commented that Duffin's works have an illustratory quality about them, but even more specifically, Duffin's works borrow from the visual language of illustrator Chris van Allsburg. Allsburg is a wonderful illustrator, one who can tell a story without any text; whose images have a grainy, textured quality -- as do Duffin's -- and who depicts objects from a childlike point of view, but with a rather unsettling, disturbing perspective.

Chris van Allsburg, illustrations from Jumanji; (C) Houghton Mifflin Company













All other images (c) Matt Duffin

visual inspiration: London Zoo

I was having a little clear out of my computer this morning and I found these photos from the AJ field trip to the London Zoo last August.

The London Zoo is quite expensive but worth it if you haven't been, and a really lovely way to pass a lazy summer day.

So, a few silly animal pictures to entertain on this grey February morning. Aside from the cuteness factor, these snaps also made me smile because they served to remind me that, after the zoo, I passed a very lovely evening with a rather morose young man at 69 Colebrooke Row...

visual inspiration: astronomy picture of the day

Saturn Storm Credit: Cassini Imaging Team, SSI, JPL, ESA, NASA; Color Composite: Jean-Luc Dauvergne

Unlike the more narrow scope of the UK undergrad educational model, as a liberal arts student at a large American university, despite the fact that I majored in political science (yeah, it seems weird now to me too), I had to take two years of a foreign language (French), macroeconomics (loathed it), a cultural diversity course (African-American literature in society, which I also loathed), English lit courses, some other things I can't really remember, and two years of a 'hard' science. Because I did lots of chemistry in high school I opted for organic and biochemistry instead of classes like Geology 101, i.e. Rocks for Jocks or Astronomy 101, which annoyingly doesn't have a catchily insulting slogan, but is also known to be an easy A for idiots. 

Though I was more than happy with the science courses I did take - I mean you don't get to pulverise beef heart and whiz it in a centrifuge to purify the protein in geology -  when a friend introduced me to NASA's astronomy picture of the day site, I felt a little cheated. I mean yeah, we got to make acetylsalicylic acid in one of our first organic chemistry labs (I was so excited that I convinced the lab tutor to let me smuggle the test tube full of aspirin home), but we never got to look at anything as splendid as the gorgeous spiral galaxy NGC 3521.

A new picture is posted on the site every day, but I like to let it pile up for a few days, sometimes a few weeks and then binge on a load all at once. Not only are most of the images astonishingly beautiful, but they make me feel so excited, so alive, so completely in awe of how incredible our universe is. I don't know about you, but a regular dose of that kind of amazement makes me feel far more jazzy than the caffeine from my morning coffee.

These are my favourite images from 2010.

Globular Star Cluster 47 Tuc Image Credit & Copyright: Dieter Willasch (Astro-Cabinet)

A Sun Halo beyond Stockholm, Credit & Copyright: Peter Rosén

NGC 7293 The Helix Nebula, Image Credit & Copyright: Ed Henry (Hay Creek Observatory)

Eclipsing the Sun, Image Credit & Copyright: Thierry Legault

Sunrise, Moonrise, Image Credit & Copyright: Robert Pölzl

NGC 3521 Close up, Credit: Data - Hubble Legacy Archive, ESA, NASA Processing - Robert Gendler  

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visual inspiration: dance

visual inspiration: griffith observatory

photos by: Floyd B. Bariscale, seany, Goodnight London, and prayitno

While Los Angeles certainly doesn’t hit my city sweet spot, it does have its own peculiar charm.  It’s one of the most superficial cities I’ve ever lived in, yet it has a colourful and interesting history of cultural philanthropy.  LA’s museums might not be as plentiful or as show stopping as her New York City counterparts, and yet, for all the sky-scraping towers in Manhattan, there’s no place quite so wonderful for star gazing as LA’s Griffith Observatory.

As a child, I found everything about the Observatory completely spellbinding: the long, winding drive up the hill; the art-deco curve of the central rotunda; the Foucault’s pendulum swinging underneath; Hugo Ballin’s wall murals depicting the history of astronomy; and especially, the view over the city at night. 

But I think the thing that captivated me then, as now, was the set apartness of the place; the feeling that when you finally arrived at the top of the hill you weren't in LA anymore.  That once you passed through the Observatory's doors you weren't just entering a building, but another world.  As a child, you never felt that this alchemy resulted from the technical capabilities of the telescopes or the transporting trickery of the planetarium, but that the place itself was somehow closer to the Milky Way. Who cared about the celebrities on Sunset Boulevard when the glitter at Griffith was so much more spectacular.  And despite the fact that I’ve visited rather a lot of beautiful buildings since my first trip, this sense of mystery and otherness has remained. I find the Observatory just as beautiful now as I did then.