William Horberg

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

 

Wooden Dolls

 

Elsa was a guest speaker last year at a Doll Convention for makers and collectors of artistic dolls. Lately she has started to make her own handmade dolls of original design including clothing, hair, and accessories. Its fun to come home every day and find these new additions to the household, sometimes just heads or limbs or body parts, and sometimes fully assembled and kitted out.

I remember growing up we had these beautiful Kachina Dolls that were handmade by American Indians. My Dad brought them home one time from a trip to the Southwest, and they sat on the mantle in our living room. They were carved wood and covered in feathers and paint. We weren't allowed to play with them which of course made them all the more desirable.

The dolls on this post are also wooden; handpainted and designed by Alexander Girard. He was a famous mid-century designer, mostly of textiles, who worked for Herman Miller and Georg Jensen and Charles and Ray Eames and other iconic figures of Modern design. This vintage Girard doll collection has been reproduced and they are individually available here.

Enjoy!

william

 

The Magical World of My Imagination

In the spirit of UPA, Natalie too has developed a special artistic vocabulary to express her ideas. Here is her "inverted world" with a super cold blue sun, rain falling upward, a tree with green roots and brown leaves, and a yellow tree that is glowing warm like the sun.

And here are some of the unique creatures that live on this imaginary world.

The Horse Girl. The Blue Owl. The Intelligent Ladybug.

When I asked her what she was drawing, she said: "The Magical World of My Imagination", so that is what you are looking at here!

william
 

Red Kley

I found this striking vintage digest of science fiction stories at the flea market recently. 

 

Naturally, I was curious to find out more about the cover artist, only credited by his last name "Kley".

Heinrich Kley was born in the 1860's and reportedly died in Munich near the end of World War 2. He was a master of line illustration, and supposedly his published work in Germany was brought to the attention of Walt Disney and was an inspiration for some of the animation of the "Dance of the Hours" sequence in "Fantasia".

I loved learning this fun fact from a website which has a short biographical sketch of Kley:

Heinrich Kley was first introduced to the American audience by the then new Coronet Magazine in three consecutive issues in 1937. A few of his satirical line drawings were reproduced. In its introduction to Kley, Coronet said that he had "died in a mad house a few years back." In 1937 Kley still had eight years to live, and he had never been in a mental institution.

I wonder what he would have thought about his art being used posthumously to illustrate the work of American science fiction writers in the small pulp digest format that graced the newsstands of our postwar metropolis? He might have ended up in that madhouse, after all!!

william

E-M-S-H

An anagram for MESH? 

Nope! 

A curious set of initials that sleuthing owners of various paperback science fiction books from the 1950's or '60's may have stumbled across upon careful examination of the fine print. I can't recall when I first became aware of the name EMSH, but I suspect it might have been on the covers of one of these Philip K. Dick books. I avidly collected and read most of Dick's mind-bending novels in my youth, before I started collecting paperbacks, or became curious about the artists and illustrators behind their staggeringly inventive and enticing cover art.

Sometime later I became aware that EMSH was short for Emshwiller, whose full name was Ed Emshwiller, an artist and later independent or avant-garde filmmaker who was also a teacher for many years at Cal Arts (and a colleague there of another one of my heroes, the British film director Alexander Mackendrick).

Here is a textless cover painting that EMSH did for a book by Isaac Asimov that was published by Lancer, one of several paperback houses specializing in publishing original science fiction that he worked for back then. 

It is one of many wonderful examples of Ed's work that can be found in a new book - Infinity x Two:The Art and Life of Ed and Carol Emshwiller - that I found while browsing in the Minotaur, a megastore of comic books and all things related that I stumbled into and frequented while living in Melbourne this summer. 

Ed's wife Carol was also a writer and an artist and they made an interesting and talented couple. Ed died in 1990 after a battle with cancer. He was posthumously inducted into the science fiction Hall of Fame.

His beautiful and ever varied artwork lives on, sure to grab the eyes and interest of any who stumble across it, as I was lucky to years ago.

william

James Ensor - The Art of the Horrific

One interesting thing about working on my first horror film "don't Be Afraid of the Dark" is that it has given me the curiousity to go back and dig into some of the history of the horrific in art and literature, to reread some of the stories of Howard Phillips Lovecraft and Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood, the films of Polanski and Franju and Murnau - to find the artists that were interested in the poetic expression and the psychological truth of that which we are truly afraid of. 

That search led me to James Ensor, an artist I was not previously familiar with but whose work I really admire.

Serendipitously, my own discovery of Ensor happened to coincide with a new exhibition of his work at the Museum of Modern Art, a show alas that I am destined to miss as I am on the other side of the world. But you can read a great informative review of it here. It sounds like one worth seeing.

Ensor lived a long life, from 1860 to 1949, spanning some of the most incredible decades of transformational change the world has ever seen including two world wars and the birth of the modern world. As a child he grew up on top of his mother's costume shop where she sold grotesque masks at Carnival time, and he spent the rest of his life working out his fear of masks, dressing up skeletons in his studio and painting these tableau in the most poetic and expressive manner.

What are you most afraid of? How does it manifest itself in your life and your art? Hmm.

Questions that James Ensor leads one to think about.

william

Hello, Dali

The National Gallery of Victoria here in Melbourne has a stunning exhibition of work by Salvador Dali called Liquid Desire. Although some of his most famous paintings such as The Persistence of Memory are not in the show, it is the breadth of his work over seven decades in so many mediums including painting, drawing, watercolour, etchings, sculpture, fashion, jewelry, cinema, photography, as well as book illustrations, that make this show so spectacular. 

I was familiar with his famous film collaborations with Luis Bunuel as well as Alfred Hitchcock (the dream sequence in Spellbound) and Walt Disney - the amazing cartoon Destino that was shelved back in the day, but recovered and restored a few years ago.

Equally cool and less known to me were the illustrations that Dali did for The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, a book that many years ago John Patrick Shanley told me was one of the most amazing stories he had ever read.

I was also unfamiliar with the Dream of Venus pavilion that Dali created for the 1939 World's Fair, pictured below.

           

According to the museum's literature, although it was torn down after the fair, the surviving photographs of Dali's creation mean that is now recognized as one of the earliest full-scale installation pieces. Lured by a siren's recorded chant (sung by B-movie legend Ruth Ford) visitors purchased twenty-five cent tickets from a fish-headed booth, and then passed through an entrance flanked by two towering legs clad in stockings and high-heels. Inside the building, visitors entered a lavish grotto, the centerpiece of which was a nude sleeping Venus, who reclined in a 36 foot-long bed covered in white and red satin, flowers, and leaves. Her dream was staged underwater in the adjacent aquarium, where women wearing revealing costumes adorned with fins and spikes milked a mummified cow, tapped on giant typewriter keys, and answered oversized submerged telephones. 

I also learned about Dali's friendship with Harpo Marx, who he sought out as "the most surrealist figure in Hollywood" and saw as a kindred spirit. He even gifted him a surrealist harp with barbed wire strings and teaspoons and forks for tuning knobs.

With his restless searching intellect, later in life Dali became fascinated by the work of Dennis Gabor, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1971 for his invention of the hologram.

From the website of the Centre for Dalinian Studies we learn that:

In 1965 his interest in holography and three-dimensional art began to be awakened. Over the course of the decade he continued to study the latter aspect and the work of Gerard Dou, in whose canvases he discovered dual images, that is, stereoscopic images. From that time, 1970, he began to work with a Fresnel lens in order to put together these images. In 1971, when Denis Gabor was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work on lasers, Salvador Dalí interested himself in holography and in 1972 staged his first hologram exhibition at the prestigious Knoedler Gallery in New York, where the hologram Holos! Holos! Velázquez! Gabor! was presented.

With little time off from shooting, we took the whirlwind tour of the exhibit.

I hope to get back soon to take a more leisurely stroll and savor the kaleidoscope of imagery on display. If you make it down to this neck of the Southern Hemisphere, don't miss it!

william

Polanoid

If you haven't seen it yet, there is a cool site called Polanoid that is dedicated to all things Polaroid and is amassing a database of old polaroids posted by fans of instant photography worldwide.

They have a ton of different images to browse, from more traditional portraits or landscapes or tourist souvenir shots, to more artistic images like this one titled "The Same Deep Water As You".

It is definitely inspiring, and motivated me to dig into some old albums and unearth a few shots from back in my own Polaroid-taking days. 

Here is a street shot of the old Cicero Lounge in what was purportedly a mobbed-up neighborhood on Chicago's western fringe, taken sometime back in the early 1980's. The picture cannot possibly convey how cold it was standing outside on that blustery winter day!

And here is a photo I call "Too Fast" which is a typical portrait of my oldest son, who hated having his picture taken and was lightening quick, so most of my attempts ended up feeling like deliberately arty compositions like this one.

And here is one that seems appropriately black and white, as it carries a lot of nostalgia and sadness for me: a picture of the late director Anthony Minghella talking with the unit publicist Larry Kaplan while production designer Roy Walker looks on, taken during the New York City portion of the production of The Talented Mister Ripley in the summer of 1999.

There really is something unique about the polaroid image that makes it distinct from regular 35mm film or today's digital snaps. If you share my sensibility on this topic, you won't go wrong by checking out and joining up to the Polanoid polaroid project!

william

Stare

More than thirty-three years ago my friend Kevin Riordan was creating Stare magazine, one of the first and best art/punk magazines reflecting the late '70's Chicago art scene, of which he was both a member and trenchant observer.

Copies of those vintage self-published issues are rare as hen's teeth today and are fascinating time capsules of a particular time and place and culture. 

So I was really pleased when a friend sent me a link to Riordan's new blog - STARE Magazine - and saw some of the cool artwork of Chicago street scenes that he has already posted up there, like this watercolor of an old building on South Clark Street.

I'm sure Kevin's blog will be an artful and literate spot, and should be a regular haunt for any of you out there who enjoy the Chicago posts I occasionally put up here, so go and visit and welcome him to the blogosphere.

william