This is a great show of painting

Lisa Yuskavage at David Zwirner Sept-Oct. 2011. Great color, great paint, great everything. One of those legs is orange and the other is green and you would never notice. See it.

HERE

EABOD

the futurelab

H E R E

Last night for dinner...

...I cooked a striped bass. I pan-seared it in browned butter, and then I stuffed it with sausage and panko, placed it on a bed of lemons, wrapped it in foil, put it in the oven for twenty minutes @ 350. Really really good.
I also made kale salad, and I have the best recipe in the word and so I wanted to share it with you, my audience of zero.

I borrowed this, or I guess they say, I am reblogging this from my friends' webite, http://www.whatweate.com/

Raw Lacinato* Kale Salad
(adapted from The New York Times)

1 bunch lacinato kale
1/2 - 3/4 cup panko bread crumbs
1 small-to-medium sized clove of garlic
1 tsp. red pepper flakes
1/4 - 1/2 cup finely grated pecorino romano cheese
1-2 lemons
Extra virgin olive oil
Kosher salt
Freshly ground black pepper

A note on lacinato kale: It is also known as black, Tuscan, or dinosaur kale, and differs from regular kale in that it is narrower and has crenulated dark leaves. In the fall, you can find it at the farmer's market, but Whole Foods usually sells it year-round. (Note: Do not use another kind of kale for this recipe*-- only lacinato kale is tender enough to work in this recipe.)
Because of its texture, lacinato kale is tough to wash. The easiest method I've found is to chop the kale first per the recipe, then rinse in at least two changes of water in your salad spinner before drying.

1. Line up your kale leaves into a bundle (you may need to do this in two batches) and cut the whole package, including stems, into a not-quite-chiffonade (I like shreds about a half-inch wide or less) down to an inch or so from the base of the stems. Wash and dry as describe above.

2. Toast your panko with some olive oil in a pan until golden and crisp. Set aside.

3. Using a mortar and pestle, pound garlic, about 1/2 Tb. of kosher salt, and the red pepper flakes into a paste. Transfer this mixture to your salad serving bowl, and add the pecorino cheese, plenty of fresh ground pepper, and more salt if you like. Squeeze at least one lemon into the bowl and whisk to combine. [Note: I am a lemon fiend, so I usually use the juice of two lemons -- but you need at least enough lemon juice to smooth out the cheese and garlic paste into a loose, mayonnaisey consistency). Whisk in olive oil (at least 1/4 cup) to taste until emulsified.

4. Drop your kale shreds into the bowl and toss very thoroughly (the dressing will be thick). Let the salad sit for five minutes, then serve topped with plenty of panko, and more pepper.

Unlike most salads, this one doesn't wilt into an embarrassing green pile if you leave leftovers in the fridge overnight. But I doubt you will have leftovers. If making this recipe in advance, you can shred the kale and make the dressing a day ahead of time, and just store them separately (kale in a ziploc) in the fridge overnight.

The original Times recipe says this yields 2 to 4 servings, which may be right depending on how greedy you are. If you are serving this to polite guests in individual salad bowls, four servings seems perfectly reasonable. But Carl and I routinely polish off a single batch for dinner, and would probably growl and bare our teeth at anyone who tried to sneak some off our plates.

*I, James, have never found this kale anywhere, but it works with whatever you can find if you rub some salt on the kale to soften or tenderize it. I usually do this the same time I am dressing it and just use my hands to mix. I also concur that a lot lemon is key.

Artist in France, Buyer in New York

Matisse at the Hendershot Gallery

hector madera-gonzalez

here

The Modern Version of Our Childhood Game of Telephone

So I recently got back on Facebook after much deliberating. I am pretty sure I hate it more this time around...but that is another post. Anyway, I was looking at my friend's photo of this rockabilly girl pictured below. As you will see from the comments, no one is too sure who she is, but they are pretty sure she is a model for some alt clothing line. I thought something seemed weird...sort of...well you will see...



So I used Google Goggles and searched for the image. I found the image on this awesome site called http://vi.sualize.us/

which listed 273 iterations of since the orignal posting, which they said originated here:

http://buetkween.tumblr.com/ ...

...which is like other stuff. Its excessive in a way I wish I could do things. I never seem to be able to do this quite as well as someone who was born with an internet connection and a laptop in their crib. Anyway, there I found what the internet calls the original source, though the blogger herself was simply reblogging from somewhere. Being unable to find where things originate is what makes the internet so great. I would imagine the people on FB wanting to marry her would change their mind if they couldn't have the septum ring, neck tats, and the gauges.



Telephone! but better. I wonder how gradual the changes were. God, I love the internet, so weird and about all the wrong things. If you got sucked in by buetkween like me, I also found this on her site:

Insane Commentary

about this

Insanity

what a disaster.

William Carlos Williams

On Friday, I went to Cabinet Magazine in Brooklyn for their Poetry Lab on William Carlos Williams, one of my favorite poets. Not the most original choice for a favorite poet for a painter, I know. The event was strange, with wine and scalpels and hipsters, but still probably a better choice for a Friday night then a bar. Below is one of the poems we took a scalpel to:

Daisy
by William Carlos Williams

The dayseye hugging the earth
in August, ha! Spring is
gone down in purple,
weeds stand high in the corn,
the rainbeaten furrow
is clotted with sorrel
and crabgrass, the
branch is black under
the heavy mass of the leaves--
The sun is upon a
slender green stem
ribbed lengthwise.
He lies on his back--
it is a woman also--
he regards his former
majesty and
round the yellow center,
split and creviced and done into
minute flowerheads, he sends out
his twenty rays-- a little
and the wind is among them
to grow cool there!

One turns the thing over
in his hand and looks
at it from the rear: brownedged,
green and pointed scales
armor his yellow.

But turn and turn,
the crisp petals remain
brief, translucent, greenfastened,
barely touching at the edges:
blades of limpid seashell.

on finishing things...

I hate finishing tasks. There is so much fear for me involved in finishing. It is in finishing that you admit to everyone that you didn’t know everything from the start. It is in finishing that they can see your faults…unless you know that right way to finish. Which undoubtedly I do not.

Hello Again to my Audience of ZERo

So I just found my blog on google, while searching for something. I had forgotten all about it, but when I got here, I realized that I like what I have here. And since no one reads it, but anyone could, I thought, perhaps I will continue. So I am going to start with a little picture I took at the Museum of Natural History where I took my very talented and ambitious Pratt students on Friday. Now if you look closely you will probably still not notice that these are real taxidermied penguins and not a painting of them. The lighting in this museum is fantastic. It is certainly a better version of history as fantasy then "A Night in the Museum". Everything is so dream-like and inspiring if you can manage to ignore the throngs of screaming people. Remember the admission is only suggested. I paid a quarter. Don't feel guilty.

Puppet Uprising's Julius Caesar

Last night I went to see my friend Leslie Roger's performance as Julius Caesar. Here is a clip, which I believe will speak for itself.

I want to make landscape paintings again.

I am using Kerry James Marshall as a starting point. He does all the things I like to see in paintings- a variety of text, each signifying something else, his flat paint mixed with the really wet paint, all on giant pieces of drop cloth. Hmm...I wonder why I like him so much?

So when I was in the city, I took a bunch of pictures of the walls. I will appropriate the entire image, paste it to a canvas, and paint over it.

I always wanted to invite the graffiti kids outside my building inside to start my canvases for me. But this will be better, because I would have had a hard time painting over their work. I need to go back to take more pictures, though, because I want the sidewalk and the sky in there to so I can put in some birds and people and dogs and babies.

hohum. it should get easier. is it and i just forgot how hard it was the first time?

Wordpress is better

Ok, so I'm not sure how wordpress measures views of my website, jameslipovac.com, but since I signed up 10 days ago, my site has been viewed 824 times. My blogspot, set up in the beginning of May, has been viewed 110 times. And, blogger counts every time I look at my own blog, even when I am signed in. Wordpress does not do this. And it lists where the people have been linked to my site from. So the day I posted a link to my new site on Facebook, I go 400 views. Now I think every time a page is viewed it counts as a site view, so if you looked at all twenty of my posts, that would be 20 views, but but but, 110 views, mostly from me, in four months vs. 824 in ten days, no comparison. No one is on blogger anymore. Its the myspace of the blogging world. Lets get out of here.

Measure Once, Cut Twice

Materials contain meaning, meaning that grows out of the color and texture that the material is. How smooth, rough, thick or thin, bright or dull, dark or light, opaque or transparent, labored over or half-a**ed, created or appropriated. There are no rules, except that all the above mentioned ways thing vary must be considered each on its own, and then considered in relationship to the whole, and then on its own again, and back and forth like googlie eyes. But if you try to think about it, then its no longer interesting, and its definitely no longer art. But if you don’t think about it sometime, it will hard to understand why what you are doing makes sense. I think you have to think about it when no one is watching, and then deny that you ever did.

Website update

www.jameslipovac.com

I have been working hard to make my website be as easy to navigate as possible, and at the same time make people see the things I want them to see. Check it out, let me know what you think, info@jameslipovac(dot)com.

MAURY

Peeping Tom

Oprah talks sex

I saw Jack Nicholson at the Phillies Game

Hunter Mountain

Northern Liberties

I am spending this rainy Saturday in the suburbs with Cy Twombly grilling corn on cob.

The Horse's Mouth

I am rereading my favorite book, Joyce Cary's "The Horse's Mouth", the third part of a trilogy about fictitious painter Gulley Jimson. I had to post two quotes.

First, when Gulley realizes his art needs to change:

"I could turn you out a picture, all correct in an afternoon...but it was just a piece of stuff. Like a nice sausage. Lovely forms. But I wasn't looking for any more than a sausage machine. I was the old school, the old Classic, the old church. I even sold some pictures...but one day I happened to see a Manet. Because some chaps were laughing at it. And it gave me the shock of my life. Like a flash of lightning. It skinned my eyes for me, and when I came out of it I was a different man. And I saw the world again, the world of color. By Gee and Jay, I said, I was dead and I didn't know it."

The second is when Gulley's buddy Planter tells a crowd that artist's are around to make the rest of us see the beauty in the world. Gulley responds:

“Well, what is art? Just self-indulgence. You give way to it. It's a vice. Prison is too good for artists- they ought to be rolled down Primrose Hill in a barrel full of broken bottles once a week and twice on public holidays, to teach them where they get off."

TIME LAPSE

when I was 18 I started this garden...

now I'm old and everything is HUGE!

I love this minature and faceless bear who lives under the pine trees.

And the cement racoon who sits and watches the real live frogs on the lily pads in the pond.

Check out this Go Green sign I snagged for free after school let out.

So Mirella, a 4th Grader at my mom's school left this beauty behind after school let out last week. She had hung it above the drinking fountain. There is a lot of good artistic supplies and ideas floating around an empty elementary school in the summer.

Cy Twombly meet Cy Twombly

For those of you who don't know, I have a dog named Cy Twombly- named after the this guy above. He is a bit much at times, but sweet. He looks like a bat in the face sometimes I think. And he sits like a frog with his hind legs spread out, but he is 100% dog. He has a million names and nicknames, I will list the ones I can remember below:

CC

CC. B. Moore

Cy

Mr. Twombly

Mr. Twombles

Scientist

Scientologist

Psychologist

Cyborg

CY TWOMBLY!!!!!!!!!

Airports

I have spent a lot of time in airports lately. I love them. The music that I would never listen to, and people I would never otherwise talk to, and stores I would never go into are all there to help me waste time getting somewhere really fast but, in a sense, very slowly. There are a lot of “I love you” conversations to overhear. And my favorite: the “set up a meeting for Tuesday” conversation. The views from the plane are great too. Flying into Cleveland, I saw a heart shaped pond on someone’s farm.

But the best of all things is flying and the quiet, meditative state that people seem to have. Especially when they take off. It feels so spiritual, a compressed group of strangers all thinking about whether they are about to die or not. At least that’s what I am thinking about.

The Stewardess yelled at me as I got off the plane for taking this picture.

HOME

Alinea- I want this yuppy cookbook

I thumbed through this the other night at a graphic designer's party, I feel like that is an important detail. Alinea is a fancy restaurant in Chicago that I have never had the chance (money) to experience. It is a bit much, but all the recipes looked so impressive and small and expensive. Its by Grant Achatz. http://www.alinea-restaurant.com/index.html

On Saturday at 1026 I went to see the Trutheater Theater. It was the best thing I have seen in Philadelphia in a while. It was a play about man and nature and it had a great title "The unbroken circle of broken things." It was low budget but not too low budget. In other words, lots of cardboard, but electric stuff too, which made it economical and intelligent.

Here is a blurb about it:

"A tree, a thief, an alchemist and an albatross match wits in this cycle of parables within parables whose cumulative power unveils a new plane of reality for the weary wanderer to enter upon and leave all worries behind. TRUTHEATER THEATER weaves this all together with their signature blend of transformative costumery, shadow puppets, video projections, electronic music, eerie voices and blacklit magic. THE UNBROKEN CIRCLE OF BROKEN THINGS promises a visceral experience, engulfing each and every audience member in its spell of baffling wonder."

Check out this kitty Cy found. Let me know if you want to own him!

Fabric Workshop/ PAFA Student Show

I have mixed feelings about the Fabric Workshop, but they do put on some good shows. This trip was no exception. The giant felt whale by Tristin Lowe was wonderful. It is covered in scraps and barnacles. And in the annex they have an installation by Ryan Trecartin that was intense and worth a visit. I felt sucked into a world that made me uncomfortable, but I couldn't walk away.
Then I traveled over to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts to see the annual student exhibition but I didn't go in because they wanted me to pay them $10. PAFA, seriously, there is almost no museum anywhere that costs that much and this is not a museum. This is a student show where you are trying to promote your students and your school. That just doesn't make sense to me.

SHOWA SOPHISTICATION: JAPAN IN THE 1930S

So I went to the MFA in Boston to see the Titian vs. Tintoretto vs. Veronese showdown. The paintings I hoped to see are still somewhere other than Boston (like Venice) and while it is great, wait and see if the show goes to the Met and save 20 bucks. I was lucky because my friend got me in for free. Thanks Emily. Anyway, they had another show of Japanese paintings that floored me. I am posting the ones I could find on the web, not the best of the show unfortunately. The had this beautiful show of a man on the summit of the mountains with his ski gear and snow all around him. If you are in Boston before November 9th, check it out. http://www.mfa.org/exhibitions/sub.asp?key=15&subkey=7510


Miki Suizan



Enomoto Chikatoshi