TUMBLR
A scrapbook of stuff I'm reading / looking at / listening to / thinking about...
Posts tagged "Romania"
Andrea Dezsö’s Embroidered “Lessons From My Mother”
I met Andrea in San Diego last year and was immediately floored by her work. (Also, being 1/4 Romanian but still knowing almost nothing about Romania, I’m always fascinated by Romanian artists.)
From afar, the stitching and calming colors looked like the work of a doting grandmother, but up close there were images of vaginas, fetuses and a study of the myths that mothers told their daughters in Transylvania, Romania, where Ms. Dezsö, 39, was raised…
Working in the city has provided fodder for many of her ideas and for her embroidery series, which she stitched while traveling throughout the city. A woman stitching in public is viewed differently in different neighborhoods, Ms. Dezsö found.
“If I’m in Queens, people think I’m a traditional woman,” Ms. Dezsö said. “If I’m in Manhattan, it’s the hippest thing.”
See more of Andrea’s work here.
Picasso, the vampire
Here’s a fun art story about the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncuși and Pablo “Art is theft” Picasso, from John Richardson’s A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932 (Vol 3).
Brancusi, who’d had several of his sculptural ideas ripped off from Pablo, “was anything but an admirer of Picasso or his work”:
[He] disapproved of [one of] of Picasso’s fundamental characteristics—one that was all too familiar to the latter’s fellow artists and friends—his habit of making off not so much with their ideas as with their energy. “Picass is a cannibal,” Brancusi said. He had a point. After a pleasurable day in Picasso’s company, those present were apt to end up suffering from collective nervous exhaustion. Picasso had made off with their energy and would go off to his studio and spend all night living off it. Brancusi hailed from vampire country and knew about such things, and he was not going to have his energy or the fruits of his energy appropriated by Picasso.
Lynda Barry has a bit where she talks about choosing to hang out with werewolves instead of vampires. I tried to find it online, but all I found was this bit, which I think Brancusi would’ve dug:
Street View Romania - Google Sightseeing
Romania has today become the 27th country to receive coverage on Google Street View. Almost 4,000 miles of road has been photographed, capturing sights such as Bran Castle, the probable inspiration for Count Dracula’s castle.
This makes me want to visit the homeland even more.
