art – Chad Comello

What is art for?

Nick Wolterstorff on the purpose of art (via Alan Jacobs):

What then is art for? What purpose underlies this human universal?

One of my fundamental theses is that this question, so often posed, must be rejected rather than answered. The question assumes that there is such a thing as the purpose of art. That assumption is false. There is no purpose which art serves, nor any which it is intended to serve. Art plays and is meant to play an enormous diversity of roles in human life. Works of art are instruments by which we perform such diverse actions as praising our great men and expressing our grief, evoking emotion and communicating knowledge. Works of art are objects of such actions as contemplation for the sake of delight. Works of art are accompaniments for such actions as hoeing cotton and rocking infants. Works of art are background for such actions as eating meals and walking through airports.

Works of art equip us for action. And the range of actions for which they equip us is very nearly as broad as the range of human action itself. The purposes of art are the purposes of life.

February 15, 2024 Add Comment

The 4 year old and I were drawing shapes on our whiteboard, and he told me to draw a beehive. I guess it wasn’t up to his standards because he said “this is not art” and drew a red circle and slash over it:

I agree it wasn’t my best work but still… harsh.

February 7, 2024 1 Comment

How to make time for art

I noticed three writers posted about similar things around the same time, so I thought I ought to pay attention…

Oliver Burkeman:

In the end, the reason actually doing things matters so much isn’t because it’s the right way to raise a successful adult, complete a novel, or achieve some other beneficial future goal. It’s because you’ll be using a bit of your actual time on the planet to live how you want to live.

Mandy Brown:

It turns out, not doing their art was costing them time, was draining it away, little by little, like a slow but steady leak. They had assumed, wrongly, that there wasn’t enough time in the day to do their art, because they assumed (because we’re conditioned to assume) that every thing we do costs time. But that math doesn’t take energy into account, doesn’t grok that doing things that energize you gives you time back. By doing their art, a whole lot of time suddenly returned. Their art didn’t need more time; their time needed their art.

Austin Kleon:

The way I show up for myself, the way I discover who I really am, is to make an appointment every day to show up to the page. If I show up to the page, I show up to myself.

September 11, 2023 Add Comment

On the aesthetic mindset

I enjoyed the recent Armchair Expert conversation with Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross—the authors of Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us—about how the arts affect our brains and well being.

At one point they talk about having an aesthetic mindset, which isn’t some kind of highfalutin theory but instead just the concept of taking things in through your senses. Their four key aspects of that mindset: curiosity, playfulness, sense experiences, and making/beholding.

I’m definitely now intrigued by the book, not that I need to be convinced of its thesis…

April 2, 2023 Add Comment

On the arts as blunt instruments

Alan Jacobs, considering a John Adams letter on the usefulness of the arts:

Everyone in power, or aspiring to power, in this country seems to be studying Politics and War, though they will sometimes cover that study with a flimsy disguise.

On the so-called Left we see surveillance moralism (and often enough the sexualization of children and early teens) masquerading as science.

On the so-called Right? It’s wrathful trolling masquerading as political philosophy.

None of these folks, God bless their earnest if shriveled hearts, have any room inside for the arts. Everything has to serve their political purposes, and works of art are rarely sufficiently blunt instruments.

October 4, 2022 Add Comment

The Actor’s Vow

“The Actor’s Vow” by Elia Kazan (via The Last Movie Stars on HBO Max):

I will take my rightful place on stage
and I will be myself.
I am not a cosmic orphan.
I have no reason to be timid.
I will respond as I feel;
awkwardly, vulgarly,
but respond.
I will have my throat open,
I will have my heart open,
I will be vulnerable.
I may have anything or everything
the world has to offer, but the thing
I need most and want most,
is to be myself.
I will admit rejection, admit pain,
admit frustration, admit even pettiness,
admit shame, admit outrage,
admit anything and everything
that happens to me.
The best and most human parts of
me are those I have inhabited
and hidden from the world.
I will work on it.
I will raise my voice.
I will be heard.

August 10, 2022 Add Comment

Let gun violence be your guiding force in Indiana

Magazine mashup of the July/August 2021 issue of Chicago Parent. More mashups here.

July 28, 2022 1 Comment

Where there’s fire, there’s the genius of Aretha

Magazine mashup of the April 2021 issue of National Geographic. More mashups here.

January 26, 2022 1 Comment

Draw it, erase it

My wife found a kid-sized easel on post-Christmas super sale that’s whiteboard on one side and chalkboard on the other, and so far it’s been Mr. Almost 3’s go-to activity.

Fortuitously, and perhaps relatedly, his drawing skills have evolved just enough to be able to depict some basic body-like shapes and eyes:

Though they look more like ghosts (or amoebas, or maybe potatoes?) than humans, he’s on the right path and I’m impressed all the same.

It’s been fun drawing alongside him, and trying to keep up. I’ve had to relearn a lesson similar to when he was in his building blocks phase as a baby: no matter how proud I am of what I manage to make, it’ll be gone in a minute or two, tops, because he loves erasing as much as drawing.

“Draw it, erase it” is the new “build it up, knock it down”.

January 23, 2022 1 Comment

Gangsters for children

Magazine mashups from Entertainment Weekly, November 2019. More here.

December 3, 2021 Add Comment

Ideas as kin

In a recent newsletter about the movement to dismantle the classics, Andrew Sullivan wrote about Martin Luther King Jr.’s syllabus for a seminar he was teaching at Morehouse College in 1962, which included Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Augustine’s City of God—a glimpse of what King believed an educated black man at that time should know.

Sullivan:

What King grasped, it seems to me, is the core meaning of a liberal education, the faith that ideas can transcend space and time and culture and race. There are few things more thrilling than to enter a whole new world from another era — and to see the resilient ideas, texts, and arguments that have lasted (or not) through the millennia. These ideas are bound up, of course, in the specific context and cultures of the past, and it is important to disentangle the two. But to enter the utterly alien world of the past and discover something intimate and contemporary is one of the great joys of intellectual life.

As Alan Jacobs put it in Breaking Bread with the Dead (one of my favorite books of 2020):

We cannot use the past to love ourselves unless we also learn to love our ancestors. We must see them not as others but as neighbors—and then, ultimately, as kin.

February 19, 2021 2 Comments

Send everyone all your vibe

Magazine mashup from the Shutterfly 2020 Cards & Gifts catalog. More mashups here.

November 20, 2020 Add Comment

Recent Views (in my kitchen)

We’re finally redoing the original kitchen in our 1956 house. Once the old metal Youngstown cabinets were removed, I noticed this collision of patterns on the unfinished wall:

I also discovered some old-school miscellanea:

September 8, 2020 Add Comment

American Virus-Response Solutions

Magazine mashups from American Libraries, September/October 2020

September 2, 2020 Add Comment

Home is where we all are back to school

My first magazine mashup in a while. This one is courtesy of the July 2020 issue of Costco Connection:

July 10, 2020 4 Comments

City roads turned into line drawings

Andrei Kashcha’s City Roads tool beautifully renders every road of any city in the world into a simple line drawing using OpenStreetMap.

I did my hometown of Madison (above), knowing its isthmus gives it a distinct look. I then did the city where I work and discovered that for some reason it includes a large chunk of the interstate that borders it:

(Via Kottke)

January 25, 2020 1 Comment

When we make our art

“When we make our art, we are also making our lives. And I’m sure that the reverse is equally true.”

— Wendell Berry, in the beautiful documentary Look & See. Might have found my new life motto.

March 25, 2019 Add Comment

Circle of lives

Somewhere on the Internet I stumbled upon this print from the artist Nina Montenegro’s series Against Forgetting:

It struck a chord in me not only because I’ve been reading the tree-centric novel The Overstory, but also because six days ago I became a father. And I’ll tell ya, I know I’m barely a week into this, but there’s nothing like having a child to make you reconsider everything you think you know about time.

February 23, 2019 Add Comment

Help, History is Addictive

Magazine mashups from Sports Illustrated (forgot to write down issue date). More here.

January 28, 2019 Add Comment

Denver Crush Walls

Got to visit Denver for the second time this year for a friend’s wedding. While there another Denver friend brought me on a walking tour of the Crush Walls urban art festival in the RiNo neighborhood, where we saw some really cool graffiti: