#about art

BREAKING: The first official portrait of Barack and Michelle Obama together has been unveiled and it's absolutely stunning.

Look closely at the tiny components of this piece...

"Tradition is not untouchable. We can own it, we can shape it, we can move it the way we need," Nigerian-born artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby told Harper's Bazaar.

The artwork is one of 28 pieces that have been commissioned for the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, which opens later this week on Juneteenth.

Harper's explained that Akunyili Crosby’s masterpieces are "technically complex" and while they are designed to "resemble conventional figurative paintings at a distance" they are actually "composed of dense layers of embedded images, in something like a visual archive."

If you look, you should be able to spot a volume of the Harvard Law Review that was published while Barack Obama was the journal's first Black President. You'll also spot Stevie Wonder's "Talking Book," which was the first album that the former First Lady ever owned.

“Yes, he was the President. But she is incredible," said Akunyili Crosby.

“Nostalgia for the past is always a dicey thing. But that does not mean it wasn’t important for me to kind of touch upon the feelings we all had—and the hope," the artist added.

I love how you draw characters running, jumping, or even when they're sitting down—they look so alive!! I'd love to know your process of how you learned to draw that way 🥺 eats ur art

(also, I'm letting you know that I'm cooking up an oc for Martyr.... (⁠ㆁ⁠ω⁠ㆁ⁠) we love the religious trauma over here)

Hello! Life has me pretty busy and more than a little art blocked rn, but I'm surviving. 😔🙏

I get a little rambly, so cut:

A brief story, if you'll indulge me.

Some years ago, I briefly taught literature at an art school. At the end of the academic year, I was asked to be one of the judges for the seniors' final exhibition. (This wasn't because of any special competence on my part--everyone took turns judging.)

The highlight of the exhibition, to my mind, was a huge canvas by a very talented young man who had combined oil paint with pasted-on newspaper clippings about current events. When I asked him what it meant, he explained that it represented the futility of art, its complete exhaustion in a postmodern world. He then added that once he graduated, he planned never to paint again.

Creative energy is a renewable resource; you can use it on any number of projects in many different art forms, including ones you've never even tried before.

"but I don't know anything about--" Who cares??

Amateur work is more than okay. You don't have to show anyone, and you don't have to learn any of the complex theories if your goal isn't to get really good at whatever you're doing.

(and who knows, maybe you'll fall in love with the new form!)

Also, sometimes you just need to get an insistent idea onto something other than your brain matter so other ideas can keep flowing. Our minds can be like clogged drains that way.

Tanto aquellos objetos creados con la intención deliberada de producir estímulos eróticos, como otros que simplemente pueden ser adoptados y reinterpretados en la imaginación para tener el mismo efecto. Pero, al mismo tiempo, nada es pornográfico hasta que alguien, en el papel de censor, lo determina como tal.