6 Tips on How To Avoid Work

Star Trek; the Borg

If you've regretted not starting or finishing a painting, then you've experienced resistance. We all have. Steven Pressfield says that, "most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the un-lived life within us. Between the two lies resistance." And, as the Borg in Star Trek like to remind us, "resistance is futile."

Right unicorn, wrong planet

But what if your dreams are unrealistic? My un-lived inner life was once to be a unicorn-tamer on Planet Nipple, but then I grew up and realized that that was ridiculous. Now I crush out the fire of my dreams before they have a chance to poison the monotony of my day. The truth is, painting makes me quite unhappy. It's boring and tedious for the most part, but it's all I know how to do. It's a bit of a trap, and to paraphrase Homer, my own witlessness will one day cast me aside. It's not that I want to do nothing, I just want to do other things. Sometimes I have to admit, painting your toilet-bowl to look like "pink" marble is just not that attractive to me.

I'd like to think I could've done a better paint job

It's not always easy to turn down work, but I've been known to run from it like a cockroach from sunlight. Still, there are times when you might legitimately want to say "no." I was once painting a mural in a bar in Northern Ireland and was approached by a certain Catholic paramilitary organization and asked if I wouldn't mind painting an exterior mural of the pied piper carrying an Irish flag and leading a bunch of kids out of the rubble. It was to be painted between the hours of 2-6am, but don't worry about the cops, "there'll be a lookout."

Monty Python: Michelangelo and the Pope [Video Link]

The most notorious example of reluctance on the part of a painter was a commission for Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Michelangelo first tried to avoid the job by repeatedly telling the pope that painting was not his artistic forte; sculpture was. When that failed, Michelangelo insisted that Raphael could execute a finer fresco.  Yet, as Vasari tells the story, "The more he refused, the more the impetuous pope insisted."

 When that too failed, (according to Ascanio Condivi in his biography The Life of Michelangelo), "When [Michelangelo] had completed the picture of The Flood, it began to mildew so that the figures could barely be distinguished. Therefore, Michelangelo reckoning that this must be a sufficient excuse for him to escape such a burden, went to the Pope and said to him, "Indeed I told your Holmess that this was not my art; what I have done is spoiled, and if you do not believe it, send someone to see." The Pope sent San Gallo, who when he saw it, realized that Michelangelo had applied the plaster too wet and consequently the dampness coming through produced that effect; and, when Michelangelo had been advised of this, he was forced to continue, and no excuse served."

Pope Julius II ordering Michelangelo, Bramante and Raphael to build St. Peter's, 1827, by Horace Vernet

This sort of arm-twisting took its toll on Michelangelo, who once confided his resentment toward the pope in a melodramatic letter to a friend: "Here I am, having lost my whole youth chained to this tomb [the church] . . . and my excessive loyalty which is unrecognized is my ruin. Such is my fate. I see many people with an income of two or three thousand scudi [an Italian coin] remain in bed, and I, with the greatest labor, toil at impoverishing myself." No doubt followed by him crying into his lacy sleeves and quaffing cheap hooch from a goblet. Damn papal commissions always getting in the way of a good snooze.

Michelangelo was, I suspect, like the rest of us. It's not that he didn't like painting, it's just that he didn't like it all the time. And he knew when to spot a shitty client when he saw one walk through the door with a papal entourage. Here are some great tips on spotting and avoiding problem clients, which is really the point of this whole post. It's not about procrastination, or unrealistic dreams of becoming a professional frisbee player. It's about taking the good jobs, trusting that others will come, and leaving time for the fun stuff in between.

1. Have a Little Faith.
Trust that as a freelancer, the phone is going to ring and that next job will always come in. You don't have to accept every job that comes along.

2. Get a Little Bit Bitchy.
Nothing works better with particularly nasty clients than a little push-back. Tell them that you don't like to be treated badly, and be prepared to walk away no matter what the cost.

3. Raise Your Price.
A good friend once advised me to pick my highest price, and then double it. Send them the estimate, or tell them the price in person, then say nothing. Keeping your mouth shut right here is the best strategy. If they want you, they'll still hire you, and that added profit margin may make their bullshit acceptable.

4. Leave a Paper Trail.
For God's sake, stick to this if there's even a whiff of nastiness coming off the client. Set up a payment plan, and stick to it. Demand a hefty 50% deposit payment up front. I have friends who've started jobs without even the deposit payment, worked their asses off, then had the client change her mind about the color. My friend got not one penny, and was stuck for some major payroll expenses.

5. Be Specific About Money.
Spell out what is and particularly what is not included in the scope of work. Add a clause saying that any additional work will be charged at $X per hour/square foot. Write in the estimate the date you want final payment (for example: COD, or 30 days after completion of work), and schedule progress payments. Your deposit (if you followed Rule 3) should be enough to cover most, if not all, payroll and material expenses. Tell them exactly when you expect a further progress payment of 25%.

6. Stick To The Schedule.
If they don't make any of your scheduled payments, be prepared to stop the job until that check clears.

Also recommended:
The War of Art, by Steven Pressfield
The Four-Hour Workweek, by Timothy Ferriss
How to Avoid Work, by William J. Reilly

A Few Thoughts on Rosa Bonheur's Use of Space in "Horse Fair"

Rosa Bonheur's fantastic "Horse Fair" is a massive canvas that caused quite a stir when it first appeared at the Salon in France back in 1853. Standing in front of the painting today at the Met, the effect of the circling horses was dizzying. I could almost hear the commotion and clatter of hooves. The visceral sense of "being there" is accentuated by the way Bonheur constructed her painted space. 

Solution 1: Objects on the same perpendicular plane get smaller to the left and right

The panoramic sweep of her canvas seems to adhere to this Hyperbolic perspective grid. Imagine that these black silhouetted figures are all standing in a perfectly straight line from left to right. I've exaggerated the effect a bit in the illustration, but to the real-world viewer it would appear that they shrink towards the horizon line as they get further away from us. We know that the line they are standing on is straight, but it appears curved in reality. 

Our brains do lots of similar tricks, lining up our reality with what it knows to be true rather than what it actually sees. Imagine you arrived late to a movie and you're sitting in the front row of the theater, squashed all the way over on the furthest seat to the right. A giant square shape appears on the screen. Your brain knows for certain that that's a square, despite the fact that it looks nothing like one from your current vantage point. 

You can see the same effect in this stitched-together panoramic photo I took of Storm King seen from Breakneck Ridge. It's not a bend in the Hudson river you're looking at here. It's just that it adheres to the same "optical" grid as Bonheur's painting whereby objects in the center appear larger (because they're closer) than objects to the distant left or right. This happens when we try and squeeze anything beyond about 60º (our normal - undistorted - field of vision) into the frame. In this case, the extreme distortion of the river is due to the 180º view.

Solution 2: Objects on the same perpendicular plane stay the same size

Linear perspective takes a simpler solution to the problem of how to represent objects in space. Its solution is Euclidean in that its geometry is based on straight lines. The standard approach would have us portray as the same size any objects on the same plane, perpendicular to the viewer. This works just fine when we stick to portraying a scene that's within the undistorted 60º field. 

When painting especially wide scenes we are faced with a dilemma. Maybe we just paint everything the same size (as in Solution 2 above) and let reality do the shrinking for us. If you've ever stood in front of Veronese's gigantic canvas in the Louvre you'll know that he had no need to artificially reduce the scale of his figures in paint. The outer figures are so far away from the viewer that they naturally appear smaller.

Fish-eye distortion isn't just for large canvases

 It's not that painters didn't understand the problem. It seems that they simply found this fish-eye distortion unattractive, so (for the most part) they chose to ignore it and paint everything in straight line grids.

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes chose to ignore the issue. He painted incredibly long paintings, where each figure was the exact same size. His "Allegory of the Sorbonne," painted as a mural in 1889, reads as a long decorative frieze rather than a painted depiction of actual space, and that's not just because it contains all those allegorical figures (symbolizing Eloquence, Poetry and Drama etc).

"The Allegory of the Sorbonne," Pierre Puvis de Chavannes

De Chavannes' broad panorama is a simplified depiction of reality in that he chose to present all the figures the same size as each other. In reality, if we were positioned directly in front of the central figure of the Virgin, then all the figures to the left and right would appear to get smaller the further away from us they were.

Unless we happened to be witnessing the scene through a pair of binoculars, that is. Then we'd be at a sufficient distance away from the action that it would indeed tend to appear as De Chavannes portrayed it: a flattened frieze with very little variation in depth, scale or value. But de Chavannes knew what he was doing, of course. He knew this was a mural, and was not meant to be experienced from a single, fixed viewpoint, like Bonheur's painting. He knew that people would be milling around the Sorbonne, experiencing his painting from various angles.

"The Triumph of Aemelius Paulus," by Carle Vernet

A third solution is also possible: Why not just kind of blend the first two solutions together? You know: fake it a bit?

Carle (Antoine Charles Horace) Vernet did just that. He painted "The Triumph of Aemelius Paulus" in 1789, as a bravura performance of pre-Revolution pro-Empire sentiment. Vernet painted the architecture in perfectly straight, horizontal lines, but his painting avoids the stiff frieze-like nature of De Chavannes. How? He manages to inject a little hyperbolic perspective into the scene in two ways. 

Central figures are close to the bottom of the canvas, and have strong value contrasts, thus appearing closer

Firstly, the central figures are lower on the canvas than those to the left or right. This simple trick makes them appear closer (even though the are the same size as those to the left or right. It also approximates the optical effect we would have if viewing this scene in reality, in that figures to our distant left and right would appear closer to the horizon (and thus further away). 

I say he "approximates" because, in reality those peripheral, distant figures would also appear to be smaller. Vernet, however, defers to the same unnatural rules of linear perspective as Pierre Puvis de Chavannes in that he presents these peripheral figures the same size (Linear perspective tells us that figures on the same plane should be painted the same size).

Figures on the right are higher up and less "contrasty", making them seem further away

The second little trick he pulls to avoid de Chavannes' "frieze" trap is to reserve his strongest values for the central figures. Although the figures to the far left and right are painted the same size as those in the center, they appear to be further from us because they are painted with a narrower range of values. While he does use strong lights, his darks are greyed-out. This pushes the figures back in space.

Anyway, there you have it. A few thoughts I had while strolling through the Met the other day. A comment by Annabel Armstrong on my last post got me thinking about this subject. One of the great benefits of working on an apartment literally across the street is that I get to spend my lunch break with this stuff.

Gustave Caillebotte: Mystery in the Making

Le Pont de l'Europe, Gustave Caillebotte 1886

Every time I walk down the street, the most instinctive, primal part of my brain asks two questions of each person I pass:

1: "Is this person a potential threat?"

2: "Is this person a potential mate?"

The first question may just be a throwback to growing up in Dublin, where every approaching kid in the lane by the railroad tracks was a potential threat to this skinny art kid. It was always tense and nervy. The second is, well, just human nature. It's a fleeting nod to my simian side, and I don't have to act on it to recognize its existence. I'm a believer that we are animals first, and humans second. But maybe that's just me, I don't know.

Anyhoo: If the answer to both questions is "no," then I feel nothing and go about my day. But if the answer is "yes" to either one (and if I'm being honest), then there's a momentary charge in the air. Even the mutt in the painting seems to feel it. The point is; I believe that Caillebotte created his painting, "Le Pont de l'Europe," to deal specifically with this instant of primal recognition. The mystery that's endured speculation is; to which question is he answering "yes?"

The dress code may be different, but "Le Pont De l'Europe" depicts that same scene from the railroad tracks of my childhood, except that here it's a flaneur from nineteenth century Paris instead of some scumbag from Dublin. 

Le Pont de l'Europe from Le Gare St. Lazare, 1868 [source]

The area around the railway station, Le Gare St. Lazare, was pretty seedy around the time. The protagonist (let's assume it's Caillebotte for now) is seen walking a couple of steps ahead of a woman dressed in black. Women dressed in this manner, and hanging out by the railway station in nineteenth century France, were assumed to be prostitutes. If we assume that this woman is walking alone, and that old Gus has simply passed her by on the street, then we can be pretty sure in this assumption as to her trade. Women rarely, if ever, would walk unaccompanied in so rough a neighborhood. 

And if he is walking with her, why is he acting cagey and walking so far ahead? No well bred man would precede his companion. Either way, and despite the fact that she is looking at him, Caillebotte seems oblivious to her presence and is instead gazing at the man on the bridge. 

Dressed in the blue and bowler hat of a laborer, perhaps he is simply lost in thoughts of work and life. Caillebotte the engineer and lifelong bachelor, might naturally have an affinity for this. But perhaps this man in blue - idle during what is after all the middle of the work day, judging by the shadows - is on the prowl for someone just like Caillebotte. The painting has been interpreted as two men cruising each other.

I like how Caillebotte changed the architecture of the bridge between paintings

As if to prove my point, Caillebotte created this second painting around the same time. It's a wonderful cinematic moment that seems to capture the scene a few seconds after the first painting. Caillebotte has ditched his female companion (for it was never her that he was interested in), and has stopped by the man in blue. Is this just the engineer in him that's been distracted by the marvels of steel and industry on the horizon, or is he up for a little what-not in the hoo-ha with our man in blue? 

Well, "who cares," is the obvious answer. But it's fun to speculate, and the air of mystery around the painting is much of its enduring charm. What's especially interesting is how he has used linear perspective to help construct his narrative. 

He tampered with the reality of the actual scene, straightening buildings on the background that are in actuality oblique to the bridge, and widened the left of the bridge so that "the universe faithfully transcribed proves an illusion, and accuracy covers a lie." [Kirk Varnedoe]

"The superfluity of lines, which all seem to converge on the profile of the man, raises the question of what exactly Caillebotte was seeking to achieve through such unusual emphasis. Everything would seem to suggest that it identifies this man as the protagonist of a narrative encompassing the entire work." [Hirmer]

Various interpretations exist. Some say that this rigidly constructed scene "depicts a city that would have interested the Futurists, a place of dynamic intersections and personal anonymity, where human relationships count for nothing." [source]

"They seem to be quite alone," says Nicolas Sainte Fare Garnot, curator of the Jacquemart-Andre Museum. "Every person is lost in a very wide world."

In an earlier painted sketch (above), the architecture of the bridge dominates and overwhelms the scene. Though we see the same man, it's hard for our attention not to be sucked to the back of the painting, towards Place de l'Europe.

This sketch seems to back up the "critique of modernization" interpretation, with its overbearing architecture dwarfing a faceless man.

In another sketch, he's introduced a couple to stop our gaze from being distracted by the roaring perspective, and to draw our attention back to the guy on the right. Caillebotte paints the couple's heads at the same level, suggesting a whispered conversation regarding the other man's intentions. Perhaps this is the moment before a robbery. 

He's instantly created narrative, and established that human interaction (or the lack of it) is precisely what the painting's about.

Comparison between sketch (left) and final painting (right)

Comparing the compositions of the sketch and the final painting (above), the woman in the sketch (left) looks like a basketball player. She's massive. With her long dress, she appears to be even taller than him. This clearly wouldn't do for a gentleman to be dating a giraffe in 19th Century Paris.

But Caillebotte obviously wanted to keep those two heads close together and aligned with the horizon line in the final painting. Why? Maybe it's simply a compositional choice he made about the connection between their heads being more important than the distance between their steps.

In order to do that, and to remain true to linear perspective, he had to position the woman a few steps behind our protagonist so that she didn't appear to be as tall as him. 

Maybe the painting is simply about a shared moment of intimacy between them. In the close up, he appears to be leaning back as if to hear what she's saying. She seems to look at him adoringly. We're also aware that there are other figures on the bridge. The tight bunching of heads along the horizon line emphasizes the isolation of the figure in the shadows.

Suddenly, we've got it all wrong. Caillebotte is not the man walking with the woman; he's the man standing by the bridge. Isolated by the shadows and alone with head in hands, it's Caillebotte the sad loner.

"Modern life doesn't create close relations between human beings," Garnot says. "You are [in] complete loneliness in these new buildings, new avenues, new boulevards. There's something quite sad about that."

We'll never know the intended meaning of the painting. Caillebotte was known in his time as a collector of paintings and not as a painter, his work only becoming popular as late as 1950. He started painting relatively late, at age 27, and only lived to 45. A catalog from his Musée d'Orsay show states that "since the artist is dead, no amount of documentation will ever recapture a complete reckoning of his view of the world, or understanding of him as an individual."

Thomas Jayne Wins Arthur Ross Award

I had the pleasure of restoring these antique Chinese panels for Thomas Jayne

Congratulations to Thomas Jayne for winning the Arthur Ross Excellence Award for Interior Design, announced by ICAA today. It's no surprise really, as Jayne and his team have been producing stunning interiors informed by history yet resolutely facing the future, for over two decades.

Beaux-Arts apartment in New York City [photo Peter Estersohn]

Schooled with the likes of Parish-Hadley and Kevin McNamara (who once quipped that "rich people don't need towel bars because they never hang up their towels"), and having received a scholarly education at Winterthur, the Met and the Getty, Jayne was a shoo-in for the Architectural Digest Top 100 list of best decorators in America.

Philadelphia townhouse [photo Peter Estersohn]

Join us on February 28th as we attend Jayne's lecture in promotion of his new(ish) monograph, American Decoration: A Sense of Place, published by Monacelli in 2012.

Cabinet Room, downtown loft, New York City [photo Peter Estersohn]

 His traditional schooling might otherwise imply the production of dry "period" rooms, but Jayne is always conscious of the current time and place. And that place, for him, is America.  In his most recent book he traces his lineage back 400 years in America, through each of his family's homes, citing the likes of America's very first interior designer, Elsie De Wolfe, as influences. He refers to her ability to reference and assimilate European taste and style into something quintessentially American, and while he allows that there is no such thing as an absolute definition of American decoration,  it is something he consciously strives to achieve in his own work.

[photo Peter Estersohn]

He also, somehow, finds time to write weekly for his blog, for a personal glimpse into the working mind of one of America's top designers.

Jayne also authored the renowned Finest Rooms in America, showcasing the very best in interior and architectural design, from classics like Frank Lloyd Wright and Frances Elkins, to contemporary designers such as Bunny Williams, John Saladino, and of course, Albert Hadley.

[photo Peter Estersohn]

[photo Peter Estersohn]

Guest bedroom, [photo Peter Estersohn]

West Side apartment, New York City [photo Peter Estersohn]

I Brake For Fake: Tourists Flock to Replicas of Reality

The real (in case it wasn't obvious) Halstatt, in Austria [image]

China's unveiling of it's $9 Billion fake Alpine village was in the news recently, when it was "revealed" that "spies from a Chinese developer [Minmetals Land Inc.] had been secretly preparing detailed blueprints on furtive European trips, posing as tourists." According to Breaking Travel News, "the plan was discovered when a Chinese guest at one of the village hotels left blueprints behind."



The real Halstatt is an idyllic lakeside hamlet in Austria nestled in the mountains of the Alps, which are incidentally quite difficult to fake owing to their being humongous. China wisely avoided papier-maché mountains, and instead opted for plopping their version in an industrial park.

Mary Tudor in America anyone? Sefton Manor, at Mill Neck New York [source]

Visit blogger Gary Lawrance's Mansion's of the Gilded Age

It's easy to scoff, but remember that America was, and continues to be, just as infatuated with buying the credibility that Old Europe affords. The Vanderbilts and Astors built towering "cottages" in the European style, appropriating ready-made culture to offset the shiny newness of all that money. The Breakers is no different in it's intent than the Alpine replica of newly minted China.

The Venetian Casino, Las Vegas

In fairness to the Chinese, they did a pretty good job copying Halstatt. Interestingly, if not ironically, more Chinese tourists now travel all the way to Austria to visit the original than their homegrown replica. I doubt if the same can be said of Americans visiting Venice, since the vast majority don't even have passports.

Brrrr; creepy mustachioed man in a trench coat

From Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) to The Truman Show (1998), Hollywood reflects our simultaneous fascination and revulsion with the fake environment. In The Experts (1989), John Travolta and Kelly Preston are "two young hipsters" drugged and kidnapped by the KGB and shipped unknowingly to Russia. They awake thinking they're in Nebraska, open a nightclub and teach the Russian townies to dance. But what happens when the townsfolk taste freedom and the KGB want to kill them? Will our heroes awake from their nightmare in time to escape? It's xenophobia and paranoia wrapped up in bad hairdos and worse comedy.

What could be more grim than this Chinese replica of an E German town?

The Chinese Halstatt announcement caused a mixture of "astonishment, amusement and ... outrage" among Europeans. They may have forgotten that the very European idea of the Grand Tour was exactly the same in nature. In the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, young "cultural ambassadors" (basically spies) were encouraged to venture forth by a government greedy to keep it's cultural advantage in a dangerously unstable Europe. Young men came home with armfuls of drawings of monuments, studies of the classics, and copies of Italian paintings. They weren't seen as grave-robbers. On the contrary, they were seen as the advance guard in a very serious war.

You could argue that even the "real" Halstatt is faked for the tourists [Getty Images]

British historian E.P. Thompson explains that if the British were to maintain control of their Empire they must be seen to be at the forefront culturally, and that meant studying the classics at their source. According to Thompson, "ruling-class control in the 18th century was located primarily in a cultural hegemony, and only secondarily in an expression of economic or physical (military) power."

The Chinese Dorchester

This isn't the first time it's happened in China. "Chengdu British Town is modeled after Dorchester. Shanghai has xeroxed sections of Barcelona, Venice and Germany (the latter, a 2005 generic modernist village designed by Albert Speer Jr., remains a ghost town)." [source]

"In Pujiang, another Shanghai suburb, 100,000 citizens will soon occupy an Italian dreamscape complete with languid canals. In all, at least 500,000 people are expected to live in Shanghai's seven new satellite towns, each designed in the style of a different Western nation." [Der Spiegel]

What all this appropriation signifies, at least in part, is the belief that Knowledge is there for the taking. Just as European and American ruling elites believed that might makes right, and stole or destroyed everything they could get their hands on during their initial Empirical expansionist phases, so too does China. It's the cultural equivalent of the land-grab.

In an age where an ever increasing number of people don't pay for movies or music, they just grab them for free from the internet, it's hardly surprising that this is simply being met with a shrug of the shoulders. Old news is no news, it seems.

Kijong Dong, or "Peace Town" in the North Korean DMZ

Sometimes it's not the buildings themselves that are designed to deceive, but the intentions behind them. So called "Potemkin villages," fake Hollywood-style facades built by secretive governments intent on waging a propaganda war, are fascinating relics of political paranoia and xenophobia. Perhaps the most infamous is Kijong-dong, in North Korea with its 323 foot flagpole. Supposedly a 200-family collective farm built by "the illustrious leader" in the 1950s on the South Korean border, it has been exposed as an elaborate fake to fool the world into thinking North Korea is anything other than a complete disaster. The only "residents" are skeleton crews of street-sweepers hired to keep up the ruse. Keeping the streets nice and tidy, they wear earmuffs to block out the blasting anti-Western propaganda speeches emanating from speakers all over town.

In many ways, Europhilia and Euroscepticism inform each other. As one group is wearing pastel sweaters tied around their necks and fawning over French cheese, another is battoning the hatches against foreign cultural "invasion." In "What are we doing to stop our beloved Britain being taken over?" journalist Peter Hitchens argues for a British bulwark against cultural dilution, just as the French have argued for the removal of anglicized French words from le dictionnaire.

Source for a slideshow of renderings of the interior

Religion, not surprisingly, is no stranger to these bold statements of culture and empire, usually reserving their most bombastic architecture for either frontier outposts or GHQ. Scientology built it's so-called Superpower building in Clearwater, Florida, to "expand on technology developed by NASA to train astronauts." Despite antigravity simulators said to "speed the release of Super Power," it has been lying empty and unused for years. In reality, the building was conceived and thrown up as a propaganda backlash against the media storm surrounding the Lisa McPherson trial.

Occasionally, fake towns become real over time. Take the case of Agloe, New York. A fictitious map entry, designed as a copyright trap, Agloe was a "paper town" that existed in name only. Initially just a dirt-road intersection in the 1930s, until along came some pioneering entrepreneur who staked his claim and opened the Agloe General Store and suddenly the "town" started appearing on the Rand McNally Atlas. Not surprisingly, the store went out of business before long proving that not all small businesses are a good idea.

The West Texas movie set town of Alamo Village [image source]

Now over 50 years old, a fake movie facade of the Alamo is beginning to take on the real patina of age. Despite the historical re-enactors, this copy of 1836 San Antonio is surprisingly convincing and blurs the line between fake and real.

"It's like a real old-west town - difficult to tell the difference most of the time between what are essentially movie props (although built as real, functional buildings, not just facades) compared to real century-old buildings in western ghost towns."

Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck

G. Trignac

“I have always looked upon decay as being just as wonderful

and rich an expression of life as growth.”

Henry Miller

The Empire in a state of dissipation, portrayed as a post-industrial nightmare on the brink of total ruin, is a theme common to art since, well, the Industrial Age. [I'm doing my best Robert Hughes impression here]. The theme has many artistic commentators working in various media, but there's something about engraving that lends itself best to burned-out apocalyptic landscapes.

 Piranesi (1720-1778) was above all an architect who loved recording ancient ruins in his etchings, but it's his Carceri (1745), or Prison Views, that are called to mind in the works of French engravers Charles Meryon (1821-1868) and Gérard Trignac (1955-). Supposedly conceived as "visions during the delirium of a fever," it's Piranesi's surrealist side that is his most enduring legacy, and it's illustrators like these who've carried the torch.

G. Trignac

Why do we love dead things? From "live fast, die young," to Shakespeare, to furniture with a fake patina, we have a double-edged relationship to physical decay. We like to surround ourselves with stuff that looks old. Edgar Allen Poe said that "the death of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world." Besides it's morbidity and sexism, he touches on a powerful subject.

G. Trignac

The Freudian preoccupation with Eros and Thanatos, sex and ruin, is all around us. This fascination with memento mori lies partly in the puritanical reminder that while everything dies we are here now, hanging on to life. That ruin lies just around the corner for all of us is something we enjoy being reminded of now and then, if only from a distance. "But far from nihilism, tragedy is a storyteller laying the cards on the table and asserting that even though the journey ends in a cliff, the miles are worth it for their own sake." [S. L. Wilson]

[image source]

All that death and decay making you feel frisky? You can even book your wedding at the neon boneyard in Las Vegas. This acreage in downtown Vegas is off the tourist trail, but has been a steady spot for nuptials amid the detritus of old casinos and storefronts slowly falling to dust in the desert sun.

 Beauty in Decay: The Art of Urban Exploration [Image source]

The exhibition and Book, "Beauty in Decay" showcases the photographs of "urban explorers", anonymous artists who risk police records and safety by busting into "overgrown industrial complexes, disused lunatic asylums, abandoned palaces and forgotten monasteries," recording what they see and then leaving with no trace but their footprints. 

Flickr group Abandoned Urban Decay is a pool of hundreds of great shots taken by these intrepid explorers the world over.

"There is no true Beauty without Decay"

-Uncle Monty from Withnail and I

Vicissitudes series, Jason deCaires Taylor

Jason deCaires Taylor's work wrests life from decay. His "eco-sculptures" are essentially lifeless, but they take on the living and morph into magnificent coral gardens. Ignoring the morbid preoccupation with death as an endpoint (but perhaps referencing it), deCaires Taylor emphasizes the cyclical nature of life while reminding us that 40% of the world's reefs have disappeared in recent years. But, rather than disappear in Poe's adolescent funk and hug gravestones all day, deCaires Taylor does something about it, and in the meantime creates art of the most sublime beauty.

Vicissitudes series, Jason deCaires Taylor