Mac Harshberger illustrations from "Madrigal and Minstrelsy" (1927)

"Home They Brought Her Warrior Dead"

In her Author's Comment prefacing
"Madrigals and Minstrelsy" (published  in 1927)
Juliet Raphael states:

"In this book I have endeavored to translate the words of the poets into music...

"... The music has been done only as a setting for the words -- sung or chanted. To those who love poetry, and love to hear it read, chanted, or sung, this book is offered."

Illustrations accompanying the poems are by Frank Macoy "Mac" Harshberger

 (1900 – 1975).
Born in Tacoma, Washington, Harshberger studied art in Paris in 1921, settled in New York in the '20s where he taught for many years at the
Pratt Institute.

Though he worked in many styles and media in his career, some of his more striking images are his stylish black & white illustrations, sort of an American Art Deco equivalent to
Aubrey Beardsley. 

The cover image at right ▶

illustrates "Home They Brought Her Warrior Dead" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

Please click on images to enlarge, and click on any image caption titles to read that poem online.

frontispiece: "An Arab Love Song" by Francis Thompson

 "Laughing Song" by William Blake 

"Song" by Christina Rossetti

"The Fifteen Acres" by James Stephens

"A Woman's Last Word" by Robert Browning

"Music, When Soft Voices Die" by Percy Bysshe Shelley

"Matin Song" by Thomas Heywood

"Little Lamb" by William Blake

Sonnet XXIX by William Shakespeare

"The Song" by James Stephens

"The Fiddler of Dooney " by William Butler Yeats

"Night" by William Blake

"Give A Man A Horse" (a.k.a. "Gifts") by James Thomson

"Up-Hill" by Christina Rossetti

"Nurse's Song" by William Blake

"When You Are Old" by William Butler Yeats

◀At left, Mac Harshberger in 1926.
(image from Confessions of a Bookplate Junkie)

There's more to be found regarding
Mac Harshberger elsewhere around the net.
Here's a few places to start looking:

- a mini-biography at Victoria Chick.
- a portfolio and some background at Thomas Reynolds Gallery.
- some illustrations from Tristan and Isolde at Art Reference Blog.

If you have more information or images to share regarding Mac Harshberger, I'd love to hear from you!
Please feel free to leave comments.

Thanks to the following sites for the poetry links:

- Poetry Foundation
- Bartleby.com
- allpoetry
- Poetry Archive
- About.Com: Classic Lit
- EnglishVerse.com

El Bandito Jalapeno con El Accesorio Prominente, and other Taqueria Folk Art in San Francisco

Walking along Mission Street in San Francisco on a recent afternoon, I did a serious double-take while passing by a colorful taqueria.
Visible through the open door of El Gran Taco Loco is this ▼ memorable image, painted on the wall...

Wow. So many questions.
Not just the jalapeno's 'stem', but the taco's eyeglasses, the gun - -
- - What exactly are we witness to in this scene?

Immediately I cursed myself for not having my camera with me.
Thinking about it this morning, I decided that others before me must have documented this fascinating piece of artwork.
- - And sure enough, that's just how amazing the internet is.

- Click here for another view of the above image. Larger, slightly different angle. (Source)

All of the images in this post come from the home page of Burritoeater.com, a site providing a valuable public service, having reviewed (and "mustache-rated") over 725 burritos (so far) all around the City and County of San Francisco, California.











I loves me a good burrito AND being transfixed by art, so clearly, there's much to explore...

(click on images to enlarge in a new window)

Some facts behind 'You Can Shave The Baby': The art of Zbigniew Libera

Our internet is a fun and fascinating tool, but its laziness can be confounding.
Pertinent background information is so often avoided, or eschewed in favor of propagating misinformation.

A small case in point: Images of the oddly hairy baby doll shown below have been circulating on the web for several years now, most often presented as a lone, wacky 'WTF' photo, and almost always with the implication that it was spotted for sale in a marketplace for cheap Asian-produced toys.






Almost never mentioned is that
'You Can Shave The Baby' was never a
consumer item, but rather an art object created in 1995 by Zbigniew Libera, consisting of a set of ten matching dolls in ten matching cardboard boxes.

As described at the Polish artist's website;
"...His works - - photographs, video films, installations, objects and drawings - - piercingly and subversively (in an intellectual way) play with the stereotypes of contemporary culture."






In this vein of presenting 'transformed toys', Libera preceded 'You Can Shave The Baby' with 'Ken's Aunt' in 1994, a similar set of heavier-set Barbie-like dolls wearing unflattering foundation undergarments - -


(click on image to enlarge)




- - he followed in 1996 with perhaps his most famous and controversial work,
'Correcting Device:
LEGO Concentration Camp'
- - Three editions of 7 different highly customized boxed
Lego System sets.










From Zbigniew Libera's Artist's Statement included in an exhibition at The Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota:

"My ability to work with objects is taken from everyday urban contemporary life. In my study of the development of correctional devices and educational toys, I see such devices reveal more about a society and its mechanisms for creating and enforcing its norms than any study of society could.

"'Lego', a construction made partially from various Lego kits, takes us into a village with a mental hospital, Stalin's prison, World War II and Bosnian concentration camps. Thus, I feel I mix historical with contemporary references to represent our world, our little inferno, as built and sanctified by norms.





"'Eroica', is a four-boxed set of toy soldier-sized women figures. They are based on classical models.

"They are a reminder that in the 1990s no toy soldier set is complete without the inclusion of women, who have become the special targets of victimization in genocidal settings such as Bosnia, where rape camps have been well documented. Such is the fashion of 'heroic' actions of armies in genocidal and even less violent encounters where women are victims.

"During an academic conference in Brussels in December, 1997, an agitated audience, who felt that the Lego Concentration Camp was a real toy which was available for sale, demanded that I comment about why I constructed it.

"My response then, as it is now, was:
'I am from Poland. I've been poisoned.'"


- More Zbigniew Libera links are at Wikipedia.

Reasons To Be Cheerful: Isabel Samaras

It was in a previous 'Reasons To Be Cheerful' post, a little over a year ago, that I happily reported that I'd found a new website for artist Isabel Samaras.

- That post mentioned how the various mythologies at play in her paintings had been changing in recent years; It also displayed a few examples, provided links to more, and excitedly mentioned that a book collecting her work was being planned. (Follow link)

Now here we are, Spring of '09, and I'm excited to have received word of an Isabel Samaras double-whammy in the offing...

◀Her long-awaited monograph from Chronicle Books, 'On Tender Hooks: The Art of Isabel Samaras' is due to make its appearance any day now, and looks lovely.

Chronicle is also simultaneously releasing a fancy limited edition of the book that's packaged with a print, and a handy paperback book of 30 Samaras postcards, which will surely feature some of her earlier 'classical' riffs on pop-culture icons.


But wait! There's more - -


A new series of Isabel Samaras paintings will be unveiled in a few weeks in
San Francisco!

- Into The Woodz: New Works by Isabel Samaras will show at The Shooting Gallery, 839 Larkin Street in San Francisco, from 5/9/2009 - 6/4/2009.

◀ The new paintings take the childrens classic 'Goldilocks and the Three Bears', and re-works it as a more contemporary romantic tale.

In a preview posting at her blog, i feel it too, Isabel gives some details:

"When I started working on the paintings for this show I was thinking about the Princess culture being sold to little girls – how your highest aspiration is to be rescued, married off and whisked away to a far off castle.

"But what happened to the girl who didn’t hook up with a Prince, who stayed in the woods?

"I wanted to explore that story, so for this show I picked Goldilocks, and as I so often do I created my own version of a happier ending — that the moment when she and Baby Bear lay eyes on each other it was love at first sight. (Goldy has definitely gone to the bears.)

"In my imagination the girl who stayed in the woods got to find herself after she got lost — she didn’t trade her identity in for a tiara, and she found true love (because love conquers all, even inter-species romance)."


- Read more of Isabel's thoughts about these paintings and sneak a few further peeks of them at her blog.

- Read more about the gallery show at Happenstand and at Juxtapoz.

(link:) J.R. Williams' art and comics collages at Flickr

(Reposted from 'Brief Window')

A treat to find new artwork by
Alternative Comix creator J.R. Williams!

- Follow this link to J.R. Williams' 'Cartoons and Comics' Flickr set.

I recall first seeing his comics in the pages of 'Weirdo' back in the '80s, and then in' Crap' and other titles in the '90s, but it seems like it's been a little while since running across his name.

(Not to be confused with the earlier
'Western' cartoonist of the same name)

Recent work on display at Flickr shows that he's been busy, and branching into fine art, but the comics background is still present.

Images rendered in ink, acrylics and watercolor mix with delightfully odd digital collages.

(Via Eye of the Goof)






















































See also:
- A December '08 interview with Williams at the Blah Blah Gallery blog.

- Another Flickr set; less comicky, more artsy, and very cool.
Follow link to J.R. Williams' 'Abstract/etc.' gallery. ▼

What are the origins of Faile Dreams?

I was quite pleased the other day when someone sent me a question in an e-mail and suggested that I "...look like I know what I'm talking about".

Thank you! That's one of the nicest compliments I could hope to receive.

The question asked of me was whether I knew the origins of the image adapted for 'Faile Dreams' ►,
a recent print from the Brooklyn, New York-based art collective Faile.

What the person didn't know was that up until that moment I'd never heard of Faile, or ever seen their work.

I feel I've been deprived!

Thank you, E-mailer, for turning me on to something new. (and thanks to you too, wikipedia)

So the gist of what I've learned is that Faile began in 1999 as street artists pasting posters around NYC and elsewhere, they moved eventually into graffiti stenciling, and inevitably into the world of fine art.

Common to much of their work are images and themes adapted from comic books, trashy novels, graphics in the yellow pages, and other such 'low-brow' pop-culture media.

- Examples can be seen at the Faile website, and also at a FAILE flickr set.

Not unlike tracking down the sources of audio samples in hip-hop records, a 'game' that ensues for Faile enthusiasts is to try and determine the origins of the many visual 'samples'.

- Examples of those discussions can be seen in various places online, including the 'Original Sources of Images and Fonts' at the Faile Forum.

SO BACK TO THE QUESTION: Regarding the original source of the line of kneeling ladies image in the 'Faile Dreams' print, I don't know the answer.

- - BUT DO YOU?

In a large number of Faile works (from what I have determined so far), a common reference point are girl's romance comics of the 1960's and '70's, and that looks to be a fairly safe bet here.

I'm most familiar with the romance books published by DC rather than other companies, and in looking at other Faile prints I feel like I was seeing several examples of DC material, often in what looks like a typically 'flat' Don Heck or Vince Colletta drawing style.
(or someone from that 'school')
The kneeling ladies look just a bit different to me.

The font in the title looked at first to me like it could have been inspired by the old 'Logan's Run' title logo, but the two are a little different...

(UPDATE, 9.20.08: A reader has identified that title font as having been derived from the old Marvel Comics Micronauts series. See comments.)

... And that's about all I have.
To me the kneeling ladies image looks just a bit strange to have come from a comic book cover, but perhaps a splash page inside that comic book?
- - Of course, it doesn't have to be from comics at all...

WHAT ABOUT YOU?
Knowledge? Insights or clues to share?

Now I'm very keen to have an answer. PLEASE leave a comment if you can help.