Jane Chafin

TASCHEN has had its way with me again. This time it's Paris: Portrait of a City, a voluptuous oversized volume of photographs of the city of my dreams, a visual feast covering 150 years of Parisian history and culture that put me in a prolonged trance-like state. Glancing at my...

I was a practicing artist for 15 years. During 10 of those years, I worked at the LA Municipal Art Gallery, a 10,000 square foot venue that exhibited a never-ending parade of contemporary art. I was relatively young and didn't have the self-confidence to give voice to the questions in...

I recently read an LA Times article about a public feud between artist Damien Hirst and British art critic Julian Spalding, the latter of whom had written a short book, Con Art -- Why You Should Sell Your Damien Hirsts While You Can. I thought it might make...

I don't know whether to love or hate this book for being so inspiring. Many times while reading it, I had the impulse to close my gallery, stop writing this blog, and return to making art. Martin Gayford's A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney chronicles discussions between...

If I had to define my mission as a gallery director and blogger about all things art-related, it would be to put the visual back into Visual Art. Rarely am I interested in conceptual art where the visual is secondary, non-existent, or in a state of forced servitude to an...

Creative Block. We've all had it. I'm trying to work through it as I write this sentence -- negative thoughts, distractions, rationalizations, avoidance and procrastination all dance before me, trying to get me to do anything but write. It's a beautiful day. I should be outdoors gardening, not hunched over...

It was the era of the parisienne, the professional French beauty, famous worldwide for her looks. Whole lives were devoted to it. Some went so far as to have their skin painted or enameled, a practice which sometimes led to facial paralysis, blood poisoning and even death. One social observer...

This week I want to spotlight a book that dovetails neatly with the current zeitgeist in the Los Angeles art world, a spirit of time and place that I believe is largely a result of the Getty's city-wide Pacific Standard Time initiative. Taschen's fabulous photography book, Los Angeles,...

What happens when heavy metal meets Hieronymus Bosch? Watch avant-garde musician and songwriter Buckethead's Spokes for the Wheel of Torment video below and find out. Based on several of Bosch's masterpieces, it's not for the faint of heart.

Destino was originally conceived as a collaboration between Walt Disney and Salvador Dali. It was storyboarded by Disney artist John Hench and Dali for eight months in 1945-46, but the project was shelved due to financial problems. In 1999, Walt Disney's nephew, Roy E. Disney, unearthed the dormant project and decided to bring it back to life. It was subsequently released in 2003.

This next video is an animated sequence from the rarely-seen 1969 film The Picasso Summer, starring Albert Finney and Yvette Mimieux, and based on a short story by Ray Bradbury. A young couple strolls through what appears to be an underground grotto, illuminating Picasso paintings on the walls and ceiling by candlelight. The actual animation begins at 2:05.

Ending things on a lighter note is this animation based on M.C. Escher's endless staircase from his work Ascending and Descending. A lesson in frustration!

Cross-posted from Jane Chafin's Offramp Gallery...

John M. White has been making art for a long time. A fixture on the Los Angeles art scene since the early '70s, and honored last year by a retrospective at the Armory Center for the Arts, John M. White's considerable contribution to contemporary art in Los Angeles is further...

Lou Beach's 420 Characters is the perfect book for today's multi-tasking, time- and attention-challenged, media-gorging, art and literature lover (like me). Limited to 420 characters (including punctuation), each of Beach's very short stories started life as a Facebook status update. Vividly distilling experience into a haiku-like framework, Beach's...

Like most of the art world, I was stunned when I learned of artist Mike Kelley's suicide last week. The most recent issue of Artillery magazine, with the strange close-cropped photo of Kelley on the cover, had been on my coffee table for a couple of weeks, Kelley's...

Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe is the catalog from a recent eponymous exhibition at Harvard's Arthur M. Sackler Museum. (The exhibition is currently on view at the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, through April...

On those maddening days when I get blog-block and can't come up with a suitable topic, I often go to YouTube and type in "art" (but only after I've watched a few Doc Martin bloopers or cute animal videos). It never fails to lead me on a strange and wonderful...

Last week I talked about some amazing ways artists are repurposing books. Some of you were upset that anyone would cut into or alter a book, even to transform it into a unique work of art. The sad news is that libraries and bookstores are throwing out, burning...

"A room without books is like a body without a soul." -- Marcus Tullius Cicero

It will come as no surprise to anyone who reads this blog that I am a bibliophile. I've not yet reached the point of bibliomania, which Wikipedia defines as "an obsessive-compulsive disorder involving the...

Many of you wrote to thank me last summer when I posted a video (see below) of Hans Silvester's stunning photographs of the painted people of the Surma and Mursi tribes in Southern Ethiopia. The images are a magical portal to childhood fantasy and play, to a lost world of...

I'll be taking a couple of weeks off from blogging to enjoy the holiday (and to clean out the garage which is starting to look like an episode of Hoarders). I want to take this opportunity to thank you for reading, clicking and responding to my various musings on art...

Congratulations to Offramp Gallery artist Myron Kaufman, on the publication of his first short story, Horse Scents, in Bomb Magazine. Horse Scents, which is also illustrated by Myron, is the offbeat story of a man who falls in love with a horse. It begins with a touching introduction by Myron's...

In the last couple of weeks a feud has erupted in the upper echelons of gazillionaire art collectors. Three articles making the rounds on social media are at the center of the controversy. First there was Occupy Art Basel Miami Beach, Now! by son-of-a-billionaire art collector Adam Lindemann,...