Category Archives: Art

George W. Bush: Art Lover

Art, News and Politics

So apparently President Bush has a favorite painting. It’s buy an early 20th century illustrator named W. H. D. Koerner, titled _A Charge to Keep_. He says it shows one of the Methodist missionaries who travelled the American west during the 19th century.

According to Slate (and a book by Jacob Weisberg, apparently), he doesn’t *quite* have that correct:

>The artist, W.H.D. Koerner, executed it to illustrate a Western short story entitled “The Slipper Tongue,” published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1916. The story is about a smooth-talking horse thief who is caught, and then escapes a lynch mob in the Sand Hills of Nebraska. The illustration depicts the thief fleeing his captors. In the magazine, the illustration bears the caption: “Had His Start Been Fifteen Minutes Longer He Would Not Have Been Caught.”

(Seen via Pharyngula and Jeff VanderMeer.)

Meanwhile

Art

While you’re waiting for something more substantial, here’s a drawing I did while watching television.

I have no idea what this thing is.

Fog

Art

This is from a sketchbook I’m breaking in. The pages are thicker than normal, and take watercolor without wrinkling into uselessness.

Funny how these things look so much less competent after I scan them.

Art Means Never Having to Think Things Through

Art

It turns out if you put a bunch of contradictory signs up by a road, drivers will become confused.

>The art installation – part of a series of outdoor shows which pocketed a £50,000 grant from the Arts Council – has been slammed as “ridiculous” and “dangerous” by drivers and transport chiefs.

>The artwork, which includes signs such as one-way, mini-roundabout, no entry and 30mph, was erected on a busy ring-road in Ashford, Kent this week.

It’s part of a big art project called “Lost O”, parts of which, from the available reports, appear to have been designed to annoy anyone who happens across them.

>Many of the works are likely to confuse and surprise the public by playing on the level of attention they pay to their street environment – and disrupting it.

>This is precisely how US artist Brad Downey operates, by subverting the familiar system of signs and systems people use to navigate the city. His installation involves a pedestrian crossing control box that can only be reached by standing on someone’s shoulders.