From the free-for-all at Juvenal Reis Studios

We spent most of our time at the LIC Arts Open wandering around the open studios at Juvenal Reis Studios, 43-01 22nd St., Long Island City. The studios are open to the public again tomorrow from noon to 6 p.m., and I highly recommend taking some time to get lost in the mazes of the second, third, and fourth floors of the spacious building. LIC Art Center is also throwing its doors open tomorrow; I feel like going back and doing a bit of poking around there, too.

There were more than a hundred artists opening up their doors at Reis Studios (including Jaclyn Santos from Bravo's Work of Art -- reality TV meets reality!); the following are works from a few of our favorites.

Leah Reid, oil on canvas

Tet 7, Andrea Bergart, oil on canvas (Bergart also makes excellent necklaces with mosaics of Perler beads based on many of her paintings)

From Untitled or Relevant, Lilly Handley

  

Left: Page 86, Eric Rhein, wire and paper; right: a portion of an untitled work of ink on paper by Rena Teratani

Finally, although we only went to explore, we ended up taking home a painting: Locust Grove, 1998, by Paul Fortunato. Fortunato needs to expand and is moving studios; there are a number of great $50 canvases in his current space, which I think is on the fourth floor of Reis. Snap them up! Or just enjoy some of his large-scale pieces, like this cat smoking a cigarette.

To Long Island City with you!

There's one more day to enjoy the LIC Arts Open, and you, I assure you, should go (at left is a sculpture outside PU(I)NK!, by The Space artists, at 46-46 Vernon Boulevard). There are open studios all over the rapidly gentrifying Queens neighborhood, and the art of the street competes, in my opinion, with what is being created in the studios.

We started around the intersection of Vernon Boulevard and Jackson Avenue (although the 7 train is not running this weekend, there are shuttle buses from Queensboro Plaza, or you can get off at Court Square on the E). Then we made our way toward Queens Plaza, stopping at Ten10 Studios and a few other free-standing spaces before spending a few hours at Juvenal Reis Studios.

My next post will highlight some of the artists we enjoyed; the photos here are odds and ends we saw as we walked.

White heart, 44th Avenue near 22nd Street, Long Island City

Able Steel Equipment, faded painted sign on the side of a building off Vernon Boulevard, Long Island City

Obscured comestibles, Long Island City

Industrial cityscape, Long Island City

Poor pensive Pekoe

First fig

Pigging out

Left: Porky neon fellow outside Au Pied De Cochon in Paris; right: cartoonish quadruped visible from the High Line in Manhattan.

Through a glass darkly

Window washers in a dark passage on the High Line in Manhattan, May 11, 2011.

The definition of Glamour (June 2011)

I used to like to read lady mags, but now I mostly enjoy cutting them up. Here's a little collage series I worked up last night with the help of the June 2011 issue of Glamour and a funky old copy of Webster's New World Dictionary of the American Language from the 1970s.

From the top, and left to right: Glare of Glamor, Secondhand Secrets, Brassiere Bravado, Bright and Brisk, Pukka Pucker, Cheerful Chatter, and We'd Wedge.

For bonus points, here is June 2011 Glamour covergirl Olivia Wilde inviting you to take a peek at the magazine's new iPad app. There's something vaguely nightmarish about it to me, but such are the wonders of technological advancement.

Glamour June 2011 (iPad) The Secret Issue - Olivia Wilde from Fashion Copious on Vimeo.

Read the dictionary. Love the dictionary.

I have been misusing "akimbo," it seems, all my life. Because hands on hips was not the image that popped into my head. This was:

I guess that's more flailing, or arms raised in exaltation. Duly noted, Webster's New World Dictionary of the American Language, 1975 paperback edition.

Free in digital

Yale has instituted an "open access" policy to make its cultural collections available free online; the university added more than 250,000 public-domain images to a new catalog that can be searched anytime, anywhere. The undated Tucker Bobst lithograph above is just one of innumerable treasures to take in.

Absorbed

Hills Creek Lake OR 4, Matthew Brandt, 2009

Matthew Brandt's "Lakes and Reservoirs" series is made up of photographs of bodies of water that have been soaked in said water. All the prints respond in their own way; some seem washed away, but others take on new colors and specks of life.