North Coast Cafe, South

New Orleans

Viewing this slide show makes me regret never having visited New Orleans.  It also makes me wonder what motivates those who suggest New Orleans should not be rebuilt. Go and click
play

Found Art

I remember living in New York coming across colorful chalk drawings on the sidewalks. For the most part they were exceptionally well drawn, often superbly done. I wondered if the artists made enough money in donations from passersby to make it worth their while.  These trompe l'oeils  sidewalk  drawings are of the  sort that represents the genre.

A "New" van Gogh?

Okay, so it doesn't look like the sun-spattered landscapes of Provence, or the hallucinogenic swirly starry nights of outdoor cafes.  But it's real.  So say the art historians who've been studying this painting and a bunch of others made by nutty Vincent before he left the Netherlands for France in 1885. More

Christmas Cards Through the Ages

The exchange of Christmas cards is a tradition I've failed to uphold more often than not.  Perhaps if these cards had been available I might have been inspired to do more.  With these examples does the word 'tacky' come to mind?

Naughty or Nice?
Somehow I think Naughty

Tucked safely in our beds, protected and defended from the Japs, Germans, Commies, Faggots, Terrorists and Dope peddlers.  Oh yeah, and the secular Humanists...boo,  hiss...

  But, never fear, Jerry Gar.....er...Santa is here!

Shamlessly lifted from Capnwacky Go there to see more.

Mail Art

I've been known to send some quirky hand-designed Leaf Day cards from time-to-time, but, who knew they could be called mail art?

Or that they could today have other than sentimental value? 

Who Let The Dogs Out?

Is it a Pollack?

Or a Kandinsky?

Nope. It's an Olmstead

Four-year-old Marla Olmstead, from Binghampton, NY has been painting since just before she was two years old.
Using brushes, spatulas, her fingers and even ketchup bottles, she is creating 6" by 6" canvases some of which have already sold raising $40,000. More

Perspective

Ron Gonsalves

Typewriter Art Not Forgeries

Along the lines of making silk purses out of sow's ears, without the hoopla about the alleged forged documents in the deserter-in-chief's National Guard records, who would have discovered what nifty things can be done with a typewriter?

Have a look

Emotions in Art and the Brain

I wish I was there...at the conference on neuroesthetics at the Berkeley Art Museum held earlier this month, I mean.

“Emotions in Art and the Brain.” was the theme of this year's session.

North Coast Cafe readers may remember my earlier post, The Chagall That Took My Breath Away in which I tried to describe the visceral experience I had in the Pompidou Centre in Paris.

I knew I was on to something when I started exploring the somatic influence of music and art. But I didn't know there were people holding conferences.

Damn! Wish I'd been there.

This is from the Washington Post.:

If you stick people into a machine that does functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI -- a brain scan, in layman's terms) and then show them paintings they find beautiful, you can see certain characteristic bits of their brains going wild with delight -- or so suggests the recent research of Semir Zeki, an eminent neuroscientist at University College London who's recently also become a leader in neuroaesthetics. The brain shows a slightly different response to ugliness, including stirring up motor centers that also buzz when someone's angry.

Other neuroaestheticians...are looking at the creative act from the point of view of those who participate in it. Her team combined brain scans with survey-style tests that are sometimes used to measure human creativity and found that the creative types who did well on the tests also had trademark patterns of brain activity.

[They] went on to do genetic testing on these same people, focusing on the areas in the human genome that code for such mood-altering brain chemicals as serotonin and dopamine, which seem likely to affect creative skills. [They] discovered that the creative, high-scoring testees had genetic kinks in common in just these areas. ...the work hints that even something as obviously culture-bound as art might not be all nurture and no nature.