We are an insanely exciting country. Come on over and head to St. John’s to drink screech and kiss a cod. Or let’s meet in the Sourdough Saloon in Dawson City, Yukon, and we can enjoy the Sourtoe cocktail together (I dare you to look up what that is). Eh?
Steve Prime
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan
(From a letter to the NYTimes, 2-14-19)
(c) 2019 JMN.
A Tibetan Weaver, 1895, by William Simpson from Watercolour World. Photograph: Private collection.
A new website is digitising millions of watercolours – to make instantly available a wealth of vital historic imagery that could assist everything from climate research to school teachers[.]
Private view of the Royal Academy, 1858, by William Payne from Watercolour World. Photograph: Bernie C Staggers/Yale Center for British Art.
The [Watercolour World] website, which has launched with about 80,000 works, focuses on pre-1900 documentary paintings: archival information gathering often duly kept in binders and boxes ever since. Some of the artists on the site were professional painters. Others were military draughtsmen, official expedition watercolourists, botanists, surveyors, as well as the untold numbers of amateurs – which [Fred Hohler, originator of the project] suspects will turn out to have mostly been women, unpaid for their time and skill – who picked up a paintbrush to record the world around them.
(Dale Berning Sawa, “Our lost world in watercolours – the paintings that documented Earth,” The Guardian, 2-14-19)
(c) 2019 JMN.
A studio portrait of Dudley Randall, whose Broadside Press helped amplify the voices of prominent black poets. Credit Yancy Hughes/Job Trotter Foto, via Bentley Historical Library/University of Michigan.
Randall started the publishing house, which was based in Detroit, with his librarian’s paycheck, and it swiftly became a success, producing dozens of broadsides — a printing style in which just one side of the paper is used — as part of the Black Arts Movement, a flowering of African-American literature, theater, music and other arts.
“Black authors could not be published by white publications, white magazines or by white publishers,” Randall said in a 1973 interview with Speakeasy Culture, a literary publication out of Central Michigan University. “We had to do it ourselves.”
(Morgan Jerkins, “Overlooked No More: Dudley Randall, Whose Broadside Press Gave a Voice to Black Poets,” NYTimes, 2-13-19)
(c) 2019 JMN.
Monica Lee opened Beverly Soon Tofu in 1986, specializing in soondubu, Korean-style tofu stew. Credit Coral Von Zumwalt for The New York Times.
While new restaurants in Los Angeles struggle to train and retain staff, the cooks at Beverly Soon Tofu have worked with Ms. Lee for decades, fermenting kimchi and frying kelp. “They speak broken Korean to me, I speak broken Spanish to them,” Ms. Lee said. “And this is how we work together.”
(Tejal Rao, “The Old-School Reasons to Love Los Angeles Restaurants,” NYTimes, 2-12-19)
(c) 2019 JMN.
Ai Weiwei and Frank Gehry, photographed in Los Angeles on Nov. 1, 2018. Credit Joe Leavenworth.
Frank Gehry: Like in [the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum, 1997, designed by Gehry]…, when I look at the building, personally I have all kinds of criticisms of it — I can’t understand why they like it so much.
Ai Weiwei: I’ve never been to the museum, but I hear people say the internal spaces are really well designed. So you’re lucky. You made good mistakes.
(Quoted by Jori Finkel, “Ai Weiwei and Frank Gehry Talk Art, Legos and Being Cultural Renegades,” NYTimes, 2-12-19)
(c) 2019 JMN.
Miguel Covarrubias’s 1925 watercolor-collage caricature of his friend the photographer Carl Van Vechten. Creditvia Throckmorton Fine Art/Estate of Maria Elena Rico Covarrubias.
Born in Mexico City in 1904, Covarrubias was a member of Kahlo’s inner circle — a highly sociable workaholic, painter, anthropologist, teacher, writer and sometime curator — who had a chameleonic talent for drawing. He would illustrate his own books on the ethnography of Mesoamerican Mexico, but arriving in New York, at age 19, he established himself with influential celebrity caricatures for magazines like The New Yorker, Vogue and Vanity Fair… Covarrubias died in 1957 at age 53, ending a career worthy of a much longer life.
(Roberta Smith, from “What to See in New York Art Galleries This Week,” NYTimes, 2-7-19)
(c) 2019 JMN.
A detail of “Strangers,” which shows a bent-over figure with one large eye peeking out. Credit Rebecca Smeyne for The New York Times.
None of this would be too interesting if Ms. Schutz’s way with paint, like her way with images and details, were not so engrossing and perplexing, and did not provide so much to work with. Narrative and brushwork tangle and confuse, repel and seduce, often leaving us (or at least me) not sure if what’s going on is completely likable, or should be.
(Roberta Smith, “Dana Schutz’s New Paintings Just Might Be Her Best,” NYTimes, 2-7-19)
(c) 2019 JMN.
At Sir John Soane’s Museum (the former home of the 19th-century architect), London-based designers who embrace a maximalist aesthetic. From left: Fran Hickman, Martin Brudnizki, Beata Heuman, Rita Konig, Luke Edward Hall and Rifat Ozbek. Credit Photograph by Daniel Stier. Shot on location at Sir John Soane’s Museum. Photo assistants: Joshua Payne and Juan Patino.
[This entertaining article about contemporary UK interior designers has stunning photo illustrations. The excerpts I provide here are mere pointers to author Hass’s sprightly, scintillating text.]
“The English,” says Rita Konig…“have never been afraid to seem a little mad…” A longstanding delight in globe-spanning, era-leaping, florid kookiness sets the British apart… The island-bound English… have long prized ecumenical, brightly colored cheekiness… The result can be read today as a parody of highbrow semantics… Such barmy eclecticism resonates with the current generation of English designers… For [Rifat] Ozbek, such a mix telegraphs contemporary internationalism… Deeply saturated colors are a first gesture of liberation, says… Luke Edward Hall… “When it’s grim in the world, you want to challenge that quite strongly.”… “[Sibyl Colefax] knew that what matters most is not the color but the tone,” [John Fowler] says. “If it is vibrating at the right frequency, there is no limit to what you can use.”… The British have never bothered to neatly segregate representational patterns from the abstract…“In this country, we have rarely done what Americans do,” [Rita] Konig says. “We don’t call up a decorator and chuck out everything we have, see something on Pinterest and overnight become something new. We keep that wretched thing your grandmother gave you and make it fantastic.”
(Nancy Hass, “Long Live Eccentric English Design,” NYTimes, 2-11-19)
(c) 2019 JMN.
apple.news/AhZ4ZKdByRU-EyGkpCYgX6w
Country music was a good way to get my foot in the door, but . . . when you venture out of country music you have more freedom to say what you want….”
(Greg Jaffe, “This Liberal Country Singer Is Up for a Grammy, But Not on the Radio,” Washington Post, 2-10-19)
(c) 2019 JMN.
EthicalDative 
“Flowers” and Candy Bars
[Watercolor by Harold J. Nichols, 1924-2013]
I’ve started viewing “Flowers” on Netflix, a British series starring Olivia Colman. In episode 2, I think I heard a character ask a refreshment vendor for “two Clunks and a Milky Finger.” The vendor hands him three candy bars. Dialog goes at a fast clip in this endearingly daffy comedy, so I can’t be sure, but I’m hoping that’s what I heard. I’ve collected American candy bar names for years — O’Henry, Snickers, Butter Finger, Bit-‘O-Honey, Payday, Almond Joy, Mounds, Three Musketeers, Baby Ruth, Zero, Mister Goodbar — those are ones from the top of my head; however, their names are stale enough to have lost their laughability. If Clunks and Milky Fingers are indeed two wrapped British treats, freshness arrives.
(c) 2019 JMN.