Color Inspiration from Mark Rothko

For a clearer view, double click on picture!

In the midst of procrastination from doing real work (at 2:30 am), I decided to find out the hexadecimal codes of the Mark Rothko's White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose)"(1950).

The artist probably took a freaking long time to mix paints to get the right shade that felt right to him.

50 years down the road, some lazy bugger like me copies his color scheme within seconds, using the eyedropper tool in Photoshop. But ooooh, look at that. Doesn't the purple text look great on the white background? Great for web design.

Mark Rothko's Wiki page.

There's something different about great art

Mark Rothko's White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose)" (1950)

I subscribe to the RSS of a group on Flickr, one where anyone can tag the art (painting / digital art / etc.) they've done. Some are okay, most are just crap. That's how the Internet is: anyone having access to it can have a space to present themselves; we just have that tedious job of looking through shit until we find something outstanding.

Now, who am I to talk? I'm hardly an artist. I don't even bother looking stylish like an art-school kid (which I'm not). The irony is: I suppose I do have an eye for great art and web design. That eye took some time to develop. Bad design makes me shudder.

We know that achieving greatness in anything you do takes time. That would include art. This would mean that some of that crap art on the flickr group might be the preliminary 'sketches' of something great to come.

So here's a reminder to anyone reading this: don't give up.

Interesting fact: The above painting by Mark Rothko was sold for a cool $72.8 million in May 2007. Read more at the wiki page.

Layers.

Read books on Oil / Acrylic Painting and you will find that there are so many layers to a painting; make an X-Ray on an Oil Painting and may find another artwork that was painted over by the artist. A masterpiece beneath a masterpiece? Well if it's started off with a masterpiece, why was it painted over in the first place? It's a piece of draft which the artist doesn't want us to see.

Call it a mess, but even Jackson Pollock's (the painting above) work has so many layers to it. It is so raw: it's like you could see the many drafts of his work. Layers and layers of drafts. No secrets. Very brave. Like a uncensored teenager.

I'm just wondering what was his thought process as he splattered and dripped paints on the canvas on the floor. Must have been liberating. No planning. Just release.

I'm also wondering whether he demands for shoulder massages after long hours of bending over to 'paint' this.

Give me my money back!

And so I haven't gotten down to writing about my recent holiday in Bangkok, Thailand. So here's a preview.

Here are my nieces, the crazy little beautiful girls who entertained me throughout my stay.


Doing their Hannah Montana thing, in front of the Damien Hirst print.

The "Hannah Montana" thing comprises of them chanting I want my money back, I want my money back!, clamping their left palm between their right armpit, alternate arm in alternate armpit, repeat. They looked like little monkeys.

Wasn't intentional that they looked like they were mocking my cousin's Damien Hirst's famous "spot painting" print. Looks like Wrapping paper when I first saw it, he confessed.

In colloquial speak, it's a like that also can ah? kind of art.

I didn't ask my cousin how much he bought it for. Yes, didn't want to sound like a n00b. But he was nice enough to explain a little of contemporary art to me: it's concept over technique!!, and that I could look at Sotheby's to have a clue on how much a piece of art is currently valued at.

Wah kao! 120,000—150,000 GBP for an original?!

Like that also can ah??

Excuse me while I recreate this in Photoshop....

BeeNahLey!

Maggots, cuter than gross.

Was over at the Singapore Biennale 08 with Audrey last Sunday; well not really, the whole exhibition is held at various venues (as indicated here), and the both of us only dropped by the one at City Hall.

True to say, I don't understand some of these contemporary art. Used to feel inferior, afraid to give my two cents worth about art, because I'm hardly a professional. These art critics with their arts degree, wanting us to find the "deeper meaning" in weird surrealist shite like Ants crawling out of a hand, making us feel like the Art World is some elitist group, which not everybody will feel comfortable in. Feck,I'm over that la: accept that I'm a layman and it's my layman point of view, and I'll attempt to appreciate it the way I want.

Well here are some of what I enjoyed anyway:

1) Wit Pimkanchanapong (Yeah, grovy name, huh!) from Thailand. His work, Singapore (2008), is really a Google-Earth satellite image of Singapore, pasted across the floor.
We had many squatting over the map, looking for landmarks that meant something to them, I found it pretty amazing that it's so easy to trace bus routes to find where me and my friends live; for Audrey her's is right beside a huge reservoir near the sea. Ours is a small country after all.

The volunteer was giving out stickers to us, to mark out landmarks.

Here's one of my little contributions:

Our favorite escape artist in forresty area of Bukit Batok. Thanks Charlie, for inspiration :P

Audrey and I had a riot of a time participating in this artwork. I supposed we spent half an hour here.

2) E Chen's Tropicana

The scooter and the bird are both woven in yarn. So are the other little items in this installation, which is beautiful. Apparently there's a motor installed away from the public's eye above the artwork (within the false ceiling), and the yarn in the artwork is being winded up slowly. By the end of the Biennale (in November), the artwork will have disappeared.

Go la. Only SGD$10. 50% off for students.