George McKim - Paintings, Collage and Prints

My Poetry Blog

2010-04-04T13:07:00.000-07:00

Dr. Seuss Birdhouses

2008-06-27T04:06:00.000-07:00

Several weeks ago I participated in a crafts show where I had for sale a couple of birdhouses and some yard art flowers along with my regular fare of paintings and prints.
The birdhouses are made out of cedar wood and painted with enamel paint and the poles are made out of galvanized steel electrical conduit pipe and painted with enamel paint. The flower is made out of the same materials.

Five not 5

2008-04-27T17:36:00.000-07:00

Here's a somewhat new abstract painting on paper, actually a combination of painting and drawing on paper. All of the shapes and lines in this abstract composition are made from a template of the number 5. The title is "Five not 5". See more of my artwork at george-mckim.com.

I haven't done any art in about a month, I was very productive from December 2007 through last month, but I took a short break and that turned into a longer break! You know, it's easy to stop and hard to start back, just the opposite of drinking :-)

Couch made from 6,400 welded Nickels!

2008-02-23T16:46:00.000-08:00

Been looking for that hard to find $50,000 couch made out of 6,400 nickels for your living room or maybe the back deck or the pool area? I know I have! Well you're in luck because I know a sculptor who makes them named Johnny Swing. I went to school with Johnny Swing at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine back in 1986. Johnny was a sculpture student and was working mainly with welded steel and paint. Recently Johnny has used his welding skills to make Art Furniture in all manner of unusual combinations of objects. This is not your parent's furniture by any stretch of the imagination. Swing takes common, everyday materials and re-purposes them, and has created practical art that is as stunning to view as it is stimulating to use. His Nickel Couch, made of over 6400 welded nickels, is a magnificient piece of work that is contoured for the body. Swing spent more than 200 hours welding 6,400 nickels into a 110-pound metallic couch. Swing's creative use of his Class 1 structural steel-welder license brings new meaning to the term value added. Attaching each nickel took as many as five welds--a total of about 30,000 welds to fashion the coins into furniture. His Jardelier, a chandelier made of glass jars, evokes a feeling of early 20th century invention with its illumination. These are but two examples of an exceptional art furniture line. The difference is in the art. Each is a unique example of beautiful and functional sculpture. Here's a photo of the sculptor relaxing on his art furniture.

Jewelry - Custom Designed by Betty McKim

2008-01-12T18:59:00.000-08:00

Betty McKim is a fantastic jewelry designer, and I'm not just saying that because she's my wife, I swear! Betty has been creating awesome Jewelry for over 30 years and it shows in her design sensibility and her craftsmanship.
Here is Betty's profile:

Education and Experience -
Graduated with M.F.A. degree in Metals/Jewelry - East Carolina University
Attended selective Jewelry Workshops at Penland, Wild Acres and Revere Academy
Teaches and Directs the Jewelry Program at Pullen Arts Center in Raleigh, NC

Has her work featured -
Cedar Creek Gallery, Creedmoor, NC
Rebus Gallery, Raleigh, N.C.
Grovewood Gallery, Grove Park Inn, Ashville, NC
Lark Books Series - 500 Earrings

Participates in -
The Larkspur Garden Show, Raleigh, NC
Boylan Art Walk, Raleigh, NC
Art In The Park, Blowing Rock, NC
Carolina Designer Craftsmen Show, Exhibitor, Raleigh, NC 2007

Visit Betty's Website at: http://www.bettymckimjewelry.com

Vacation - Mixed Media Collage

2008-01-07T16:45:00.000-08:00

This collage is one of my favorites from my own georgemckim etsy shop. It's from my series of collages called "The Vine Series" and the curving and twisting red line that runs throughout the picture is like a red vine. The rest of the picture has dark gray clouds, blue clouds, pink and purple cloud outlines, yellow sun, circles and splatters of paint. The piece is titled "Vacation" just because I get a sort of cool and breezy vibe from the picture. The process I use starts with acid free colored artists paper and I splash watery acrylic paint on the paper in a random and free flowing pattern. After drying overnight, I cut and tear the painted papers into imagery that is simplified and somewhat abstract. I try many different compositional arrangements before I finalize the design and glue the papers down with acid free glue. Acid free materials ensure that the artwork will be permanent and artists grade acrylic paints are light fast and will not fade. See and buy my art at georgemckim.etsy.com. See a more complete selection of my work and a bio at george-mckim.com.

Diamond Encrusted Human Skull - Is it Art?

2007-12-26T10:35:00.000-08:00

Article By
By WILLIAM SHAW
Published: June 3, 2007

It’s particularly fitting that the title of artist Damien Hirst’s new headline-grabbing work came from an exasperated exclamation of his mother’s: “For the love of God, what are you going to do next?

The answer, pictured here, is a life-size platinum skull set with 8,601 high-quality diamonds. If, as expected, it sells for around $100 million this month, it will become the single most expensive piece of contemporary art ever created. Or the most outrageous piece of bling.

(Photo: Courtesy Science Ltd. and Jay Jopling/White Cube - London)

At home in Devon, Hirst insists it’s absolutely the former. “I was very worried for a while, because if it looked like bling — tacky, garish and over the top — we would have failed. But I’m very pleased with the end result. I think it’s ethereal and timeless.”

For Hirst, famous pickler of sharks and bovine bisector, all his art is about death. This piece, which was cast from an 18th-century skull he bought in London, was influenced by Mexican skulls encrusted in turquoise. “I remember thinking it would be great to do a diamond one — but just prohibitively expensive,” he recalls. “Then I started to think — maybe that’s why it is a good thing to do. Death is such a heavy subject, it would be good to make something that laughed in the face of it.”

The dazzle of the diamonds might outshine any meaning Hirst attaches to it, and that could be a problem. Its value as jewelry alone is preposterous. Hirst, who financed the piece himself, watched for months as the price of international diamonds rose while the Bond Street gem dealer Bentley & Skinner tried to corner the market for the artist’s benefit. Given the ongoing controversy over blood diamonds from Africa, “For the Love of God” now has the potential to be about death in a more literal way.

“That’s when you stop laughing,” Hirst says. “You might have created something that people might die because of. I guess I felt like Oppenheimer or something. What have I done? Because it’s going to need high security all its life.”

The piece is not exactly the stuff of public art, but Hirst says he hopes that an institution like the British Museum might put it on display for a while before it disappears into a vault, never to be seen again. Whether the piece is seen or not, Hirst will likely go down in the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s most extravagant artist.

“I hadn’t thought about that!” he suddenly snorts with laughter. “I deal with that with all my work. The markup on paint and canvas is a hell of a lot more than on this diamond piece.”

Giant Spider Sculpture

2007-12-26T04:29:00.000-08:00

Do you have a 12-year-old boy who thinks spiders are really, really cool? Here’s an introduction to art that will get his attention. The National Gallery of Canada recently acquired Maman, a 9.27 metre (30-foot) spider sculpture, which is now on display at the Gallery’s Plaza. The gargantuan bronze spider, by Louise Bourgeois, weighs 8,165 kg (or 18,000 lbs) and carries a sac of 20 pure white marble eggs under her belly. Spiders, with their ability to fabricate complex and calculated webs, serve as a natural metaphor for creativity. This artist intended this sculpture to be an ode to the artist’s mother, who was a restorer of tapestries. Called "Maman", it is the last of six spiders cast by renowned Franco-American artist Louise Bourgeois as a tribute to her mother. It was created in 1999 and cast in 2003. Bourgeois was born in France in 1911 and has been working as an artist for nearly 70 years. She immigrated to the United States in 1938.
Maman's $3.2-million price tag could raise a few eyebrows. Rather than being concerned about gallery-goers turning into Miss Muffets, Franklin says the giant spider is already doing what it's supposed to do – inspire people to talk about art. "The very elegant structure of the spider will certainly enhance the entrance and hopefully draw people to the entrance who maybe have not come to the National Gallery before, but who will be fascinated by this piece," he said. Maman joins several other Bourgeois sculptures in the gallery's collection. The 93-year-old artist – whose work is featured in institutions such as the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and Florence's Uffizi Gallery – is considered among the world's most important sculptors living today and will be celebrated with a retrospective at the Tate Modern in 2007.

Increase your traffic with BlogRUSH.

2007-12-20T04:08:00.000-08:00

Let me introduce you to a new system that will increase the amount of relevent traffic to YOUR Blog! The name of the system is BlogRUSH and here are a few simple steps you can take to get started. First, locate the "FROM THE BLOGOSPHERE" BlogRUSH widget located on the left side of my blog in the sidebar (see the picture on the right with the red arrow pointing to the BlogRUSH widget). Just scroll down until the widget is visible. You'll notice there are 5 blog posts links listed in the widget and they are all active links. These are blog sites that have similar content categories as my site, that category being Art. After you sign up your blog post link will be listed in hundreds or thousands of these widgets on blog sites all across the internet. Next step is to click on the phrase "Add Your Blog Posts - FREE" which is located in the blue border of the widget at the bottom of the widget (see the red arrow in the picture on the left). This is a link to the BlogRUSH home page where you will see a video presentation on how the BlogRUSH system works and it will explain in detail the levels of traffic that are possible with this system. This is a system that is free so what do you have to lose? You have nothing to lose and traffic to gain, so go ahead, give it a spin. The sign-up process is fast and easy, however there is one part of the sign-up process where you will need to list your "Feed URL" which for Blogspot users will be http://georgemckim.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default
and of course you will substitute the name of your blog where I have georgemckim.

Couch made with 6,400 welded Nickels!

2007-12-19T15:54:00.000-08:00

Been looking for that hard to find $50,000 couch made out of 6,400 nickels for your living room or maybe the back deck or the pool area? I know I have! Well you're in luck because I know this guy who makes 'em up named Johnny Swing. I went to school with Johnny Swing at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine back in 1986. Johnny was a brash young sculpture student and was working mainly with welded steel and paint. Recently Johnny has used his welding skills to make Art Furniture in all manner of unusual combinations of objects. This is not your parent's furniture by any stretch of the imagination. Swing takes common, everyday materials and re-purposes them, and has created practical art that is as stunning to view as it is stimulating to use. His Nickel Couch, made of over 6400 welded nickels, is a magnificient piece of work that is contoured for the body. Swing spent more than 200 hours welding 6,400 nickels into a 110-pound metallic couch. Swing's creative use of his Class 1 structural steel-welder license brings new meaning to the term value added. Attaching each nickel took as many as five welds--a total of about 30,000 welds to fashion the coins into furniture. His Jardelier, a chandelier made of glass jars, evokes a feeling of early 20th century invention with its illumination. These are but two examples of an exceptional art furniture line. The difference is in the art. Each is a unique example of beautiful and functional sculpture. Here's Johnny relaxing on his couch.

Da Vinci - hammered!

2007-12-18T14:16:00.001-08:00

Albanian artist Saimir Strati takes hammer to Da Vinci Self Portrait....... and does a portrait with nails on a huge wood panel! Here is the artist on the right with a DaVinci portrait drawing in the background and it looks like he's building some furniture, but au contraire! He is actually recreating the self-portrait by DaVinci with nails driven into a huge, probably 10' foot by 20', wood panel. First the artist has sketched out the DaVinci Self Portrait and has proportionately enlarged the drawing to a quasi-massive scale of about 15' tall for maximum impact but also allowing him to use large nails that will make the portrait even more detailed looking. As you can see from the next photo on the left the nails are driven into the board at different depths, the higher the nail heads are above the surface of the board the more shadow they produce and therefore the more prominent features of the portrait are made more visible by the nail heads that are highest above the surface of the board. The nails are very close together and the nail heads overlap each other for maximum density and maximum detail. Another visual element that is very interesting is the metallic surface of the nail heads which adds an interesting quality to the picture and is perhaps metaphorically alluding to the military armaments and battle gear of DaVinci's time. The nail is a tool that has been around for a long time and is visually appropriate for the nature of the portrait. After all the nails, approximately 500,000, are finally nailed into place the finished masterpiece is finished. Awesome!

Albanian artist Saimir Strati has hammered tens of thousands of nails into a wooden board over the past 24 days to create a portrait of Leonardo da Vinci and the world's biggest nail mosaic. "I can officially confirm that we have a new record for the largest nail mosaic of eight square meters," Guinness World Records adjudicator Scott Christie said late on Monday. The mosaic stood in the main hall of Tirana's pyramid-shaped culture centre, exactly where a larger-than-life sculpture of the late Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha used to stand. Large-headed nails shone in the light falling on the sides of Da Vinci's flowing gray beard. Smaller black tapestry nails created shadow below his eyes and chin. Three rows of yellow nails framed the portrait. "I have lost count of the nails, but I think it was around 400 kilos (880 pounds) of nails. I have used different nails. The condition was they should be industrial nails and they are," Strati said. "I used a computer to map the spots where each nail is placed. My technique resembles (digital) camera pixels. I have used a nail for each pixel," he told Reuters. A video record of the feat showed him nailing away for up to 12 hours a day. "This is something quite unique and quite spectacular," Christie told Reuters, adding the mosaic is "a completely new category" for Guinness. "We did not know quite what to expect before we came, but we are amazed and truly astounded at the fantastic work he has done, days and nights and hour upon hour," he added. "Someone will have to try to beat that, but I do not think it will be beaten for some time."

Martin Puryear Sculpture at MOMA

2007-12-17T16:09:00.000-08:00

New York Times
Art Review | Martin Puryear

Humanity’s Ascent, in Three Dimensions

By ROBERTA SMITH

Published: November 2, 2007

On Sunday, when the Museum of Modern Art’s 30-year retrospective of the sculptor Martin Puryear opens, the New York art world will find itself in what may be an unprecedented situation. For the first time in recent memory — maybe ever — two of the city’s most prominent museums will be presenting large, well-done exhibitions of living African-American artists. The Whitney Museum’s 15-year survey of Kara Walker’s work has been searing hearts, minds and eyes since it opened early last month. Now it is Mr. Puryear’s turn to weave his finely nuanced yet insistent spell.

Perhaps in the future welcome and overdue coincidences like this will no longer merit mention. In the meantime this one has the added bonus of representing radically different ways of being an artist, black or otherwise. Ms. Walker comes out of Conceptual and appropriation art and makes the bitter legacy of race relations in this country the engine of her cut-paper installations, animated films and language pieces.

Mr. Puryear, who was born in 1941 and grew up in Washington, D.C., is a former painter who emerged from the Minimalist and Postminimalist vortex making hand-worked, mostly wood sculptures. These soothe more than seethe, balancing between the geometric and the organic with Zen aplomb.

Mr. Puryear is a formalist in a time when that is something of a dirty word, although his formalism, like most of the 1970s variety, is messed with, irreverent and personal. His formalism taps into a legacy even larger than race: the history of objects, both utilitarian and not, and their making. From this all else follows, namely human history, race included, along with issues of craft, ritual, approaches to nature and all kinds of ethnic traditions and identities.

These references seep out of his highly allusive, often poetic forms in waves, evoking the earlier Modernism of Brancusi, Arp, Noguchi and Duchamp, but also carpentry, basket weaving, African sculpture and the building of shelter and ships. His work slows you down and makes you consider its every detail as physical fact, artistic choice and purveyor of meaning.

The MoMA show, which has been organized by John Elderfield, the museum’s chief curator of painting and sculpture, is quite beautiful and conveys Mr. Puryear’s achievement persuasively. With 40 works on the sixth floor and 5 more on the second-floor atrium level, it displays a lack of repetition unusual in these product-oriented times. Of the five in the atrium, two are attenuated sculptures that reach upward several stories, making new use of that tall, awkward space. “Ladder for Booker T. Washington” from 1996 is a wobbly ladder whose drastic foreshortening makes it seem to stretch to infinity.

It suggests that the climb to success is deceptively long — and perhaps longer for blacks than whites. But its limitless vista also has a comedic joy worthy of Miró.

Mr. Puryear once said of Minimalism, “I looked at it, I tasted it, and I spat it out.” But he has taken a lot from it, and used it better and more variously than many of his contemporaries.

While rejecting Minimalism’s ideal of being completely nonreferential, he said yes to its wholeness, stasis and hollowness, to sculpture as an optical, imagistic presence that nonetheless can’t be known completely without walking around it. Above all he applied the Minimalist embrace of new materials in a retroactive manner: using wood in so many different ways that it feels like a new material, both physically and poetically.

Mr. Puryear’s treatments of wood verge on the encyclopedic and give the material an almost animal diversity, creating a kind of rainbow coalition of contrasting skin tones and textures, bone structures, muscle densities and personalities. Surfaces are light or dark, matte or gleaming, smooth or bristling, richly stained or au naturel. Woods are thick, thin and very thin; opaque or transparent; solid or skeletal.

Each piece is to some extent a new start, with its own integrity and references. Topped by a layer of dried mud, the squat bulletlike block of weathered wood that is “For Beckwourth” (1980) conjures up an Indian lodge, a Baule sculpture coated with dried sacrificial material, an early Greek tomb and a nondenominational church dome. (These associations can arise before a label informs us that James Beckwourth, the son of a black mother and a white father, was born into slavery and was eventually made a chief of the Crow Indian nation.)

The elegant 1975-78 wall piece “Some Tales” is a series of lines so spare they might almost be drawn, but are in fact long, thin pieces of wood, abstract yet glowing, with intimations of human use, and somehow sinister too. They bring to mind drumsticks, an oxen yoke, saws, bullwhips, tree branches. One long loop is both a giant hairpin and a rope ready for coiling into who knows what. “Bask” (1976) is a low-lying floor piece in black-stained pine, tapered at both ends, but with a gently swelling center. It suggests a sleeping seal, but also a rolling wave of oil that might kill a seal.

A mysterious seductive blackness, one of Mr. Puryear’s touchstones, dominates in a large rounded monolith from 1978 whose polished, headlike form is tellingly, even ominously titled “Self” — the dark inescapable thing within us all. But this looming form also tilts oddly, a little like the Rock of Gibraltar or a whale’s breaching snout..

The monolith of “Self” is also a Puryear staple. Later on it is streamlined and open like a rib cage in the lustrous “Bower,” and a kind of crazy scribble in “Thicket” — or as close to a scribble as raw two-by-fours can get. In “Old Mole” it culminates in a beak and its densely crisscrossing lath suggests a creature both blind and bandaged. In “Confessional” the monolith expands into a habitable hut made of a semi-transparent patchwork of wire lightly clotted with tar. One side is truncated by a large plane of wood that might be a door or even a face, at which point the hut mutates into a cowled head, that of a priest or perhaps of Death.

The face of “Confessional” becomes explicit in “C.F.A.O.” (completed this year), whose initials stand for Compagnie Française de l’Afrique Occidentale, the French trading company that sailed between Marseille and West Africa beginning in the 19th century. Its most striking form is an enlarged negative impression of a white Fang tribal mask that is embedded in an impenetrable scaffolding of wood dowels. This in turn rests on a worn-out wheelbarrow: European and African forms enmeshed in an intractable post-colonial chaos.

Mr. Puryear’s work is humorous but not ironic. It has a complex worldview devoid of trendy critique. It offers more integrity than innovation and proves repeatedly that accessible doesn’t rule out subtle. Like Elizabeth Murray, who was also the subject of a recent MoMA retrospective, Mr. Puryear has pursued what might be called an old-fashioned approach to the new. But really, both have done nothing more, or less, than ground formalism in the rich world of their own experience and identity. And that is new enough.

Da Vinci gets hammered!

2007-12-02T17:37:00.000-08:00

Just when you think it's safe to go back into the waters....... Check out this new technique, sort of gimmicky, but interesting - nails on panel! Here is the artist on the right with a DaVinci portrait drawing in the background and it looks like he's building some furniture, but au contraire! He is actually recreating the self-portrait by DaVinci with nails driven into a huge, probably 10' foot by 20', wood panel. First the artist has sketched out the DaVinci Self Portrait and has proportionately enlarged the drawing to a quasi-massive scale of about 15' tall for maximum impact but also allowing him to use large nails that will make the portrait even more detailed looking. As you can see from the next photo on the left the nails are driven into the board at different depths, the higher the nail heads are above the surface of the board the more shadow they produce and therefore the more prominent features of the portrait are made more visible by the nail heads that are highest above the surface of the board. The nails are very close together and the nail heads overlap each other for maximum density and maximum detail. Another visual element that is very interesting is the metallic surface of the nail heads which adds an interesting quality to the picture and is perhaps metaphorically alluding to the military armaments and battle gear of DaVinci's time. The nail is a tool that has been around for a long time and is visually appropriate for the nature of the portrait. After all the nails, and I don't know how many nails were used, are finally nailed into place the finished masterpiece is finished. Awesome!