Nate
: ?Alas, the site offers neither name nor date of these beautiful rock drawings. They have a similar look to those at Newspaper Rock, near Moab, Utah. The style of many petroglyphs seems to be a sort of elemental human visual consciousness—some of the oldest surviving evidences of culture-making (though if these drawings are as exposed as the picture suggests, they're probably much more recent).?
The exhibition is a knockout, at once sumptuous and restrained. The entire show fits into three galleries, but what galleries they are! Holcomb has gathered books and manuscripts from museums, libraries, and religious institutions in Europe and the United States. And it is in these bound volumes that the signal graphic achievements of the Middle Ages are to be found. Everybody, of course, knows the illuminated manuscripts of those centuries, with their dazzlingly colored pages, finished to a jewel-like shimmer. Holcomb’s great idea has been to set those works aside for the time being, and focus instead on what have traditionally perhaps been regarded as humbler fare. These are the pictures done with black or brown or sometimes colored ink, many of which have, at least at first glance, a more casual, more informal character. Such works, she argues, put us in touch with the medieval artist’s most immediate impressions and responses. I think she is absolutely right. There is an easygoing, wonderfully lowdown quality about a lot of the work in this show. We have gotten beyond the delicious formality of the illuminated manuscript. We are seeing artists in a variety of moods, sometimes ruminative or contemplative, at other times more intuitive, more playful. Even when the artists are doing something wonderfully elegant, it is an off-the-cuff elegance, an improvisational elegance. There are so many different kinds of lines to be seen in this show, from skeletal and attenuated to athletic and even frenetic. We see flashes of humor and wit, but also agitation, anxiety, and melancholy.
Nate
: ?I actually had a photo of this famous D.C. eatery, located on the U Street corridor then known as "Black Broadway," all queued up for eventual posting, but this charming painting/sketch showed up and trumped it.?
Nate
: ?OK, so I stole this post's title from Galileo via Thomas Lynch's lovely (though off-topic) book. Let's resume the thread with the artist's own statement: "Subway drawings have become a big part of my sketching life, I used to read on my commute to the city but if you've read one Grisham you've read 'em all. I live out in Crown Heights, Brooklyn and take the 5 train into the city, as any commuter will tell you, you see the same people time and time again."?
Nate
: ?I love the idea of the fogged-up window taken as a canvas, and the act looking through one's handiwork into the outside world: drawing as a way of seeing.?
Nate
: ?A page from the 1927 edition of Samuel Welo's 233-page Studio Handbook, a type and design book in which every page was hand-lettered by Welo. Many of the pages remind me of dialogue cards from silent films, which makes sense given the era. The whole handlettered aesthetic, though, also brings to mind a line from book-cover-designer Chip Kidd in which he and another designer agree something to the effect of "Computers and graphics software are wonderful tools, but no designer should be allowed to use then before age 40."?