Paula Scher: Recent Paintings

Paula Scher, NYC Transit, 108 in x 60.5 in, acrylic on canvas, 2007.

Paula Scher, NYC Transit (detail).

Okay so I know I ripped on Paula for her HP templates, but I do love her paintings.

Did I mention I like maps?

From the Pentagram website: "An exhibition of new paintings by Paula Scher opens this Thursday, 8 November at the Maya Stendhal Gallery at 545 West 20th Street in New York City. Featured is work from her ongoing Maps series including the paintings India, Tsunami, Manhattan at Night, NYC Transit, Middle East and Paris. An exhibition catalogue has been published. The show remains on view through 26 January."

We Feel Fine

Check out this amazing database of feelings (We Feel Fine) by Jonathan Harris & Sepandar Kamvar:

It's such an amazing and diverse way to gather and map out information. I would love to do a project like this someday.


Excerpt from the site:

"Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

"The feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine's Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on."

Cartographismes

I love love love maps. They are so beautiful. When I visited the Vatican museum there was a whole corridor of maps which pretty much served as a waiting area until the crowd gets up to the really famous artwork. It quite possibly might have been the most interesting part of the museum for me.

I found this blog by of...artwork? maps? both? It's all in French so I can't read it but it doesn't matter because the images are so interesting. A few of these resemble Jackson Pollock paintings, but they are all pretty different. I believe they are all from the same artist, but I can't find an author on this blog.

Check it out: "Cartographismes"