Newborn Maeve at Five Weeks: One-Month Check-Up, My Birthday and More

Happy parents Carrie and Joe with our 5-week-old daughter Maeve. We don’t have a lot of photos of the three of us together… this one was taken by Carrie’s brother Bob earlier today.

It’s been a relatively uneventful week for baby Maeve, born July 30th 2013, about to turn five weeks old as I post this. Yesterday, my wife Carrie posted some of her thoughts at one month. I am going to post briefly with plenty of photos and a few thoughts. I’ve been posting weekly updates on my our daughter’s progress, find earlier ones here.

Maeve sure looks cute when she’s sleeping and moving around

MoMA Highlight: Doris Salcedo Sculpture

untitled work by Doris Salcedo – installed at MoMA

Carrie and I went to MoMA – New York City’s Museum of Modern Art – last week. In addition to artists whose work I already enjoy (Beckmann, Cornell, and many more), I was happy to encounter three pieces of sculpture by Doris Salcedo. 

Mom’s Art 2: Collages and a Cactus Drawing

Inside cover of Mom and Paige’s collage book. Text reads: this book was made by Paige Gastil and Grandma Marge Linton – finished in 2002

Thinking of my mom lately… wishing she was still around. Mom was pretty creative, but I think poured a lot of that energy into raising four kids.

I posted a few of my mom’s Stockholm drawings earlier here, today it’s some collages that she did with my niece Paige.

Art Show Preview

My artwork hanging on the wall now at Barbara Mendes Gallery

A quick post to show some photos from my upcoming art show which opens this Sunday July 15 2012 at Barbara Mendes Gallery at 2701 South Robertson in Los Angeles. The show is called City and Country: Art by Rick Cummings and Joe Linton. 

Reblogged from Handmade Ransom Notes – my art blog

Handmade Ransom Notes

Hey fans, art world investors, and other followers!!! At long last I’m going to have another art show. The show is called Country and City – Art by Rick Cummings and Joe Linton. The opening will be Sunday July 15th 2012 from 3pm to 7pm. The show runs July 12th 2012 through August 15th 2012 at the Barbara Mendes Gallery at 2701 South Robertson Boulevard in Los Angeles 90034. 

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An Egon Schiele Homage of Mine

I’ve been going through some of my old artwork to pull pieces for a show I am having at Barbara Mendes Gallery (opens July 17th 2012 – facebook event here.) I came across this piece which I still like, which I figured I’d share here (though I don’t plan to include it in the show):

Michelle Mascarenhas and Self Portrait, ink and watercolor on paper, 20 March 1999, about 9″x12″

It’s a portrait of Michelle, my girlfriend at the time, done with inspiration from this piece below. 

My Long Beach Symphony Orchestra Rehearsal Sketches

Long Beach Symphony Orchestra rehearsal 15 November 1993, ink on paper

When I used to live in downtown Long Beach, I got season tickets to the concerts of the Long Beach Symphony Orchestra. LBSO, under conductor JoAnn Falletta, was excellent; they probably still are. Back in the early 1990s, in my opinion, they had a great balance between more familiar traditional classical music, plus contemporary and premier pieces – sometimes Latin American and other overlooked composers whom I hadn’t been familiar with.

One day I received, in the mail, one of those donor letters that asks if I have overpriced stocks or vacation homes that I would like to donate to LBSO. I wrote that, even though I don’t have extra homes lying around, I am an artist, and I think tossed in a photocopy of a drawing I’d done of a string quartet, and mailed it back. I’d done this with this type of solicitation before and hadn’t heard back… and didn’t really expect to hear back.

But, this time, I did. 

Remedios Varo Wondrous In Wonderland

The Flutist, painting by Remedios Varo 1955

Yesterday, I got around to seeing the In Wonderland show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It’s closing this week Sunday Friday May 6th, and if you haven’t seen it already, at least once, you should stop reading and make plans to go. Museum is open 12noon to 8pm daily except Wednesday. Last day for show is this Sunday Friday.

There’s a lot of compelling work, including Frida Kahlo pieces that are definitely great! Also work by Kay Sage, Lenora Carrington, even Lee Krasner… but the artist whose work made the biggest impression on me is Remedios Varo (1908-1963.) She was born in Spain and worked mostly in Mexico. 

My Swipes From Max Beckmann

Departure (after Beckmann) by Joe Linton, watercolor and India Ink on paper, 2001

Many years ago, I think when I was in college, my mother took me to a big retrospective of artwork by Max Beckmann. Beckmann is a German painter who lived from 1884-1950. The show was at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It included a lot of self-portraits that really showed his own evolution as an artist. I went home and started doing a bunch of self-portraits.

I really enjoy Beckmann’s artwork. It’s often dark and brooding, big and heroic too. There’s a story going on behind his tableaus… and the story is usually big, powerful, legendary, mythic. Also, on a more low-brow note, he uses a lot of black outlines… so do I… and so do comic books. Incredibly, he captures light and skin tone really well, and still includes sometimes bulky black outlines. Lastly, perhaps completely over-stretching this thin analogy, Beckmann’s most famous works are multi-panel triptychs.

So, over the years I’ve based a few of my pieces on Max Beckmann paintings. Though I think that pretty much all artwork is inspired by other work, this basing one’s work on another’s can be seen as lazy, or as honorable, or something between. In highbrow art, borrowing can be called an homage or a reference; in comic book art terminology this is called a swipe. Not all swipes are bad; many are great. I learn copying from masters. Alan Moore very much swipes stuff and reinvents it brilliantly in the process. But it’s, of course, generally dishonorable (sometimes illegal) to swipe without acknowledging the source. 

Some of My Comic Book Cover Sketches

Jury Duty comics cover, from Sketchbook No. 44, 2001

In this blog, I’ve been exploring some of the vernacular language of comics – or “sequential art” as Scott McCloud and Will Eisner call them. Ways that stories are told from panel to panel fascinate me. For this post, though, I am going to toss out that sequential storytelling and, instead, dwell on the comic book cover.

The cover isn’t generally sequential the way comics’ interiors are… but I think that comic book covers pack a lot of punch. I think that, when done well, covers (of almost anything – books, dvds, etc.) have a certain iconography and power. Not that mine are done all that well.

I mentioned it in this earlier post about Mike Mignola: comic covers are an example of a metonym – or maybe synecdoche (I get those two fancy English Lit words mixed up a bit – and they overlap.) More vernacularly put: the cover is a single image that stands in for an entire story. So the cover sort of crystalizes the story down to a single moment. It tends to need a lot of energy, a lot of punch.