William Horberg

Diego's Museum of Mod-ERN Art

Being something of a post-post modernist himself, Diego thoroughly enjoyed hamming it up on his visit to New York's famous Museum of Modern Art on his recent visit for the winter holidays. With his natural delight in non-sequitors, incongruous juxtapositions, and verbal and visual puns, he felt right at home among the masters of 20th Century modernism.

Word play became part of the lexicon of modern artists, and Diego is no exception. Ever since Wall-E he has been fond of putting the emphaSIS on the last syllABLE of words, and the museum of mod-ERN art was no exception.

It was great to see him engage with so much visual input and stimulation, which can often overwhelm any of us, let alone children with autism who deal with issues of sensory integrtion and processing. 

Being an artist is hard work, he decided, and he found a nice place to relax at the end of his busy tour.

Enjoy!

william

 

Portrait of a Fellow Pupil

Natalie and Diego have been attending an "art camp" this summer.

Their daily immersion in creativity has been a joy to behold. Each day they come home with new handmade treasures. Natalie is already an accomplished artist, but for Diego this daily dose of independence in a structured environment has lead to an explosion of his fertile imagination. 

We all know children can create amazing works of art, all the more special for their unique way of seeing the world. On a recent trip to London, the small book that really caught my eye at the used book store on Charing Cross Road was "Children As Artists" by R. R. Tomlinson.

Published in 1947, the author used the work of young children from various Junior Girls' Schools and High Schools as the basis for his essay on these tiny Titans or Titians as the case may be!

These amazing paintings are all from that small volume.

With the near elimination of the long held idea of the arts being an essential component of a child's development and education in our No Child Left Behind era, Tomlinson's words of 65 years ago echo loudly today:

"This innate urge in a child to draw and create is a precious inheritance, the value of which has not yet been fully realised by education authorities; neither has the beneficial effect of its encouragement upon other forms of expression and growth been apprehended by them sufficiently."

Expression and growth have been running wild around here lately, with a tip of the hat to old R.R.

Enjoy!

william 

Seen On The Subway

I enjoy the effort that the NYC subway system has made to incorporate art work into the experience of riding the rails.

It is not quite the '80's heydey of unofficial art when Keith Haring was drawing his little outline figures everywhere, and graffiti artists were bombing the trains.

Now it is a bit more sanctioned and tasteful.

But fun nonetheless.

These figures on their way somewhere are only a few inches tall, like they escaped from "The Secret World of Arietty"!

Enjoy!

william

Pulp Collection

Original paintings made for the covers of pulp magazines from the 1930's were treated as disposable commercial art-for-hire in their time, and therefore are quite rare today.

One of the masters of the medium was Norman Saunders, so it was quite a treat to stumble upon a small exhibit of the original vintage paintings of some of his now famous work at an out-of-the-way gallery run by Syracuse University on a recent trip to New York.

One of Saunders many employers was Hugo Gernsback, the editor of Amazing Stories, Wonder Stories, Science-Wonder Stories and many of the other seminal pulp fiction publications that introduced writers like Jules Verne and H.G. Wells to the world. In fact, he is often known as the Father of Science Fiction, and the annual award for the best in science fiction writing, The Hugo, is named after him. I had never seen a picture of him at work, but they had a cool one in the exhibit.

Although not painted by Saunders, I liked this poster from one of the most successful pulp characters, spawning radio shows, comics, movies, and books for generations:

Norman Saunders knew what evil lurked in the hearts of men, and women, and he painted them luridly, and beautifully.

Enjoy!

william

Magical Mystery Tours

Scouting locations for a film is usually a bit of a magical mystery tour.

Venturing into unknown territory and discovering hidden facets of our world. I think that was the inspiration for this fantasy painting/photograph I made of one of the island parks we discovered on our visit to Prague.

But more than places, the fascinating and diverse people you get to meet along the way are always the things that stay with you.

Film professionals are film professionals the world over, with a common language and inate predisposition to solve problems. Two of the best in the business in their countries are:

Ildiko Kemeny of Pioneer FIlms in Budapest

Andjelka Vlaisavljevic of Work In Progress in Belgrade

It was great spending time with them in their native lands and learning their histories in the business and educating ourselves about local films and filmmaking traditions.

Got to go - the magical mystery tour is waiting to take me away!

Enjoy!

william

Pictures At An Execution

I saw this drawing on a friend's Facebook page, and was immediately arrested by its almost Goya-like power to capture a moment of indelible horror in simple black and white lines on a page.

The executioners and the executed lined up in a row, and so close to each other you almost feel the gun barrels will touch their victims before the bullets do. 

What fearful imagination guided this artist's hand to conjure such a timeless vision?

Linked to the drawing was an almost identical image, made by a man we must also consider an artist, using not pen and paper but the documentary tool of a camera to record photographically a real life firing squad in an act of mass execution, perhaps the inspiration for the sketch.

The story behind the photo is quite interesting.

Jahangir Razmi was an Iranian who bore witness to a massacre of Kurdish militants in Iran in 1979. His photo was published locally and then republished around the world, but the identity of the photographer was kept anonymous for fear of reprisal.

The picture went on to win the Pulitzer Prize, the only time the award was ever bestowed on an anonymous source. It was not until 2006 that Razmi felt free to come forward and claim credit for the shot.

Think about today and the thousands of anonymous cell phone photographers whose images documented the recent violence in Iran, and the fear of reprisal that continues to drive witnesses underground.

What's past is prologue, and the Tempest still rages.

william

Help! Unstoppable Giant Robot Presents Elsa Mora!!!

Giant Robot is the brainchild of Eric Nakamura, and a brand that includes a cool store, magazine, art gallery, music label, and line of toys and clothing. But it is much more than the sum of its individual parts - it is an expression of a way of seeing the world as a place of boundless imagination.

Eric discovered Elsa's work on the web and invited her to participate in a group show, and the result was the delightful "Realms" featuring some of Elsa's latest papercuts, along with beautiful drawings and paintings by artists Ako Castuera and Yellena James.

Eric has a real talent for bringing people together and an eye for new talent. Elsa and Ako had not met before the show, but both their work and their personalities were muy simpatico.

Yellena James had a conflict and could not personally attend the opening, but her work spoke for itself.

Eric told me that one day a few years back a young man walked into the Giant Robot store and showed him a prototype for what was a really strange looking stuffed doll. He had never seen anything like it, and encouraged the artist to make a few more and bring them in for sale. The rest is history, and the "Ugly Doll" dolls have been a ubiquitous presence in kid's lives for the last decade.

Natalie and Diego enjoyed attending the opening of Mom's art show, but they enjoyed reading their newly purchased Ugly Doll book, from the many treasures on offer at the Giant Robot store, even more!

Enjoy!

william

Social Skills

How many of us have the skills to effortlessly navigate social situations? To read non-verbal clues? To take turns listening, and to really focus on what the other person is saying and respond appropriately?

Making friends, keeping friends, being a good friend - these are the challenges all of us face at all walks of life. Children on the autism spectrum especially can struggle to decipher and to understand the fundamental building blocks of human interaction, and Diego, at times, needs a lot of help to get the clues that he needs to help him successfully navigate any group activity or one-on-one play with his peers.

This weekend he went to his very first social skills class, a kind of Emily Post's Rules of Etiquette for kids with special needs. It was pretty much a disaster, but in a good way, as every journey begins with a first step, and it really put into focus some of the areas we want to focus on as parents, and with his team of therapists and caregivers.

The greatest part for us was how, later, he was able to reflect back on and process the experience, and how it bubbled up in this amazingly expressive drawing he made - let's call it a mash-up portrait of the various children that were in the social skills group with him, combined with his current obsession of watching commercials for Trix cereal on YouTube!

You can see the Rabbit and the fruit shaped cereal floating up and out of the bowl, and one kid in line singing the Trix jingle, and at the same time he was able to recreate from memory the constellation of new kids he had met in class.

As always, we look forward to learning as much from Diego and this experience as we do watching him learn.

With his artistic skills, he will always find a creative way to communicate what he feels about the unfolding, mysterious process of mastering his social skills.

Enjoy!

william

 

Sign(s) of the Times

Enjoy!

william

The ART of Sibling Rivalry

Natalie was awarded a certificate as the Best Artist in her second grade class last week. It was no surprise to those of us who have been following her awesome creative output for some time. The apple doesn't fall too far from the tree, and Natalie definitely has taken her Mom's inspiring example as a point of departure for her own original way of seeing the world and expressing herself in a visual medium.

In fact, Natalie's talents are so precocious that at times it has been intimidating for Diego, whose challenges with autism included a delayed ability to grasp a pencil and write or draw. For years he didn't express much interest in Art, ceding that territory entirely to his older sister, and when he did engage it was often only to demand of her to be a gun-for-hire executing his ideas for drawings (rows of tools and lists of numbers being his favorites). Natalie happily obliged, and the status quo side-stepped any typical sibling competition or rivalry.

But all that has changed as Diego has made such amazing progress this last year, really coming into his own and finding it easier and more comfortable to express his own unique independent ideas and to communicate with others, including his interest in picking up pencil and paper and drawing his own artwork.

This explosion has been exciting to watch, and has mushroomed as Elsa and I decided to enroll both Diego and Natalie in separate weekend art classes at a wonderful local studio this Fall. Natalie's Panda painting and Diego's pencil character sketch are just the tip of the iceberg of their prodigious output which is rapidly filling up our home.

It's funny how the onset of their sibling rivalry, which can be intense and competitive and at times conflict-filled and is usually a headache for parents, has been such a pleasure for Elsa and I to witness. At least for now we just can't complain or be annoyed by the kids' typical power struggles, as it is the very fact that they ARE typical, and the huge change that represents, that we celebrate.

The kids get mad at us as sometimes we can't help but laugh when they turn up the heat on their artistic rivalry like some pint-sized Van Gogh and Gauguin, and of course we should be taking their feelings seriously.

Yet the real artistry of these two is how they have figured out a way to get along so well in spite of all of the challenges and obstacles that come along with having a child with special needs as a brother and a child with special talents as an older sister. I wish we could take more credit for it, but these two usually show us the way when it comes to the Art of having a loving family.

Thanks, guys!

william