A Nod to Surrealism

In the image-driven web world most of us frequent today—Tumblr, Flickr, and Pinterest, for example — we are bombarded with images that beg us to look twice. It’s relatively easy to create a yellow zebra with blue stripes, if that’s what suits your fancy. Masterful digital imaging can bring us whatever level of Surrealism you may desire — if you can imagine it, it can be done with pixel manipulation. For artists not working in digital media — those who cut, build, draw, paint, glue, bend, and make things in the more traditional manner — there is something of a “Surrealist” popularity at hand today.

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Enjoying TypeToy

This week's Accidental Mysteries highlights the blog TypeToy — an online collection of mid-century design and typography created by Aaron Eiland. According to Aaron, the name of the blog is derived from the playfulness he sees from much of the work of that era.

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The Inkblot and Popular Culture

Hermann Rorschach (1884-1922), who is still famous today for his psychoanalytic work using inkblots, was very familiar with a popular 19th century parlor game called Blotto. So much, in fact, that as a schoolboy, young Rorschach was nicknamed “Klecks,” (or, “inkblot”) by his friends — because of his fascination with the game. Players of the game would make up poems or stories based on what they saw from the folded paper inkblots they would create.

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The Deep Roots of Modernism

The Modernist Movement was sparked by a desire by artists, architects and craftsmen to break free of the perceived bonds of “looking backwards” for cultural influences. Art historians have pointed to the British Arts & Crafts Movement, which began around 1880, as the beginning of this forward-looking push for fresh and unexplored creative thinking. It lasted well into the mid-twentieth century.

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The Imagination of Playgrounds

There is a picture by the American photographer Helen Levitt (1913 - 2009) that has always remained with my imagination. Taken in 1940, it is an image of 5 boys playing high atop an abandoned doorway in New York. Though the children could easily be hurt if they fell from their perch, these children are having the time of their young lives. With skinned knees and plenty of daring, these little pirates have created a playground from their imagination and city streets. Levitt was famous for her many marvelous photographs of children at play.

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A Collection for the Ages

A collection of microscopes and telescopes; medical devices and quackery; patent models and salesman's samples; early projectors, still and motion cameras; motors, archaic electrical devices and machinery; globes and surveying instruments; telegraphy and telephones; televisions and radios; as well as objects from our industrial past and household items such as typewriters and sewing machines.

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Drawn to Currency

From Andy Warhol to Howard Finster to Shepard Fairey and numerous artists in between, the beauty of past and present currency has attracted a considerable number of artists to interpret it. Today I introduce an artist well known in numismatic circles but relatively unknown to the rest of us. Tim Prusmack (1962 - 2004) was very active ten to twenty years ago in currency and coin shows, where he exhibited and sold his complicated, hand-drawn in ink currency. His fans called him the “Mozart of Money Art,” many of whom enjoyed purchasing one of his accurate renditions of currency.

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Defiant Beauty

Chakaia Booker strikes a dramatic a figure when you see her. Her elaborate and oversized headdresses of patterned African cloth might be imposing to the uninitiated, but people who have met her say she is a quiet and reflective woman. In many ways, Booker’s clothing is like her art and connects her to centuries of traditional African costuming. Each morning, before starting her day, she goes through a time-intensive procedure of wrapping and clothing of her body. It is a ritual that serves to remind her of her daily mission — that living creatively and making art is a process in which she has dedicated her life.

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Dreams of the Sonora Aero Club

Sometime in the mid-1960s, a junk dealer in Houston, Texas acquired 12 large notebooks that had been thrown out to the curb after a house fire. Filled with mysterious, double-sided, collaged watercolor drawings, the journals were eventually attributed to Charles August Albert Dellschau. Dellschau was a butcher for most of his life and only after his retirement in 1899 did he begin his incredible career as a self-taught artist. He began with three books entitled Recollections which purported to describe a secret organization called the Sonora Aero Club.

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Kodachrome Finds New Life

When young Fred Herzog selected Kodachrome slide film in 1953 as his choice for making photographs, he did it for two reasons: the intensity of the color which suited his eye, and affordability. Kodachrome had marvelous aesthetic attributes, but also a major drawback. The only way to make color prints with Kodachrome was to send the slide film to Kodak. But at age 23, Herzog didn't care. What he cared about was “making pictures.” So Herzog kept his images safely stored as slides, and continued to shoot. Now 85 years of age, the elder Herzog has lived long enough for technology to catch up.

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