Art

Childhood Boredom and Wonder Abound in Aron Wiesenfeld’s Inky Post-It Drawings

When a friend asked for a small drawing on a Post-It note to add to his growing collection of artworks on the iconic yellow square, Aron Wiesenfeld obliged. The North Carolina-based artist rendered one of his introspective scenes and enjoyed the process enough to create an entire series on the 3 x 3-inch canvas.

Wiesenfeld has since created dozens of drawings in black ink, translating the mystery and ennui of his paintings onto the scaled-down surface. In one work, an open dresser drawer reveals a toddler tucked inside, while another piece depicts a child listlessly watching a record turn. The artist rarely plans a drawing before putting ink to paper and challenges himself to capture the same depth, moods, and stories of his larger works with much more minimal tools. He shares:

It forces you to be very economical since you only have 10 to 20 lines to make a cloud or a field of grass.  I have so much respect for cartoonists who do that well, like R. Crumb or Edward Gorey…Because the drawings are so small, every movement of the hand is magnified when seen on a screen, and the lines seem more fluid or spontaneous than a larger drawing might be.

In October, Wiesenfeld will show some of his larger oil paintings at James Freeman Gallery in London. He periodically adds his Post-It drawings to his shop and plans to publish a book of the works later this year. Follow news about those releases on his Instagram.

 

Craft Design

Picking Up Pixels: Rüdiger Schlömer Designs Typefaces for Knitting

Rather than build the letter “A” or “R” through digital layers, Rüdiger Schlömer constructs the alphabet, numbers, and basic symbols stitch by stitch. The Zurich-based designer devised Typeknitting, a project that interlocks two distinctive creative forms into a methodically constructed, tactile hybrid. “Typographic knitting to me is a process of translation between two very different fields, hand knitting structures and type design. This is what makes it so interesting to me,” he shares.

Schlömer first melded the two practices when refashioning soccer scarves. He knitted team colors, phrases, and the occasional mascot into long wearables, a process that taught him to pair the mediums. He learned that “patchwork knitting works better for large-scale pixel designs or modular typography. Mosaic knitting has a lot in common with geometric Kufic calligraphy and works better for small letterforms and repeat patterns.”

From that came his first typeface, Knit Grotesk. Taking cues from the san-serif Futura, the design features squares that evoke a low-resolution pixelation and is made for slip stitches rather than the characteristic “v” of the basic knit stitch. Schlömer adds:

When developing a typeface for knitting, I constantly change in between analog and digital. This is important in order to not get stuck in the logic of either medium. Some details might look great on screen but turn out to be problematic or boring when knitted. It’s a kind of cross-medial prototyping between the screen and knitting needles.

Since publishing his first book Typographic Knitting, Schlömer has leaned into teaching and will lead workshops in May for Zurich’s Craft Week and another in July with the Berlin Letters Festival. He also released a pattern for the blue-and-white striped alphabet blanket above on Ravelry, inspiring several knitters to take on the project. “Knowing how much work this takes, this means a lot to me,” he says.

Next up is designing a typeface accessible to beginners who might be trying their hand at lettering or knitting for the first time. Keep an eye out for that release and news about upcoming workshops on Instagram. You also might enjoy these stitched CMYK studies.

 

Nature Science

A New Video Captures Mossy Corona in the Sun’s Atmosphere in Extraordinary Detail

A new video released by the European Space Agency (ESA) reveals the riotous activity of the sun’s atmosphere in unprecedented detail. Taken by the Solar Orbiter in September, the footage captures a lush blanket of “coronal moss” met by bright arches, or the magnetic field lines that shoot from the interior. Researchers say the brightest regions reach a whopping one million degrees Celsius—the cooler spots appear darker because they absorb radiation—and the “fluffy” hair-like structures are made of charged plasma.

As the video illustrates, spires of gas, a.k.a. spicules, shoot up along the horizon and sometimes soar 10,000 kilometers high. High-density clumps of plasma known as cool coronal rain are gravitationally sucked back into the atmosphere. There’s also a “small eruption” that occurs in the center of the frame that’s anything but small: the burst of light is larger than the earth.

This mind-boggling shift in perspective is, of course, due to the distance of the spacecraft from the sun. Since the Solar Orbiter launched in February 2020, it has continuously flown nearer to the star than any other instrument before it, reaching up to 42 million kilometers away. On this September mission, the orbiter was about 43 million kilometers away, which is about a third of the earth’s total distance from the sun.

 

Art

In an Emoji History of Art, ND Stevenson Playfully Recreates Iconic Paintings

More than 100 years after it was first exhibited, art historians still debate whether Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain,” submitted to the 1917 Armory Show in New York, was a wry joke or sly commentary on modern art—or both. That’s because the sculpture, a urinal the artist signed “R. Mutt,” was just a standard piece of plumbing. But Duchamp is also known to have coined the term “readymade,” in which he displayed objects like bicycle wheels or snow shovels as artworks unto themselves, posing the fundamental question that still thrills theorists: “But is it art?”

If Duchamp were around today to know what an emoji was, he’d probably love comic artist ND Stevenson’s take on “Fountain,” composed of a slew of what we might consider 21st-century digital readymades. A few years ago, the artist figured out that he could add countless icons to the standard Instagram stories template, resizing and rearranging them to create original compositions.

Starting with a basic background image, Stevenson adds numerous elements, like a fork standing in for a pitchfork in Grant Wood’s “American Gothic” or an upside-down red exclamation point in place of a necktie in René Magritte’s “The Son of Man.” For Johannes Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” a bowl and a cloud provide the basis of the subject’s famous blue-and-white head wrap; a toilet stands in for Duchamp’s urinal; and numerous flowers, evil eyes, books, cheese, and urns make up the patterns of Klimt’s embracing figures in “The Kiss.”

It’s worth diving into Stevenson’s post for more emoji recreations.

 

Art Social Issues

Used Envelopes Hold Thriving Potted Plants in Fidencio Fifield-Perez’s ‘Dacaments’

Fidencio Fifield-Perez’s Dacaments series began as a response to the bureaucracy of the U.S. immigration system. The Oaxaca-born artist immigrated with his family as a child, making him eligible for DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals). To qualify and retain his status, he needed to collect official documents, the envelopes from which became the substrate for his paintings.

When the Trump administration terminated the policy in 2017, people like Fifield-Perez were thrown into limbo before the Supreme Court reinstated it in 2020. His hyperrealistic renderings of potted plants reflect this precarious position as symbols of domesticity and thriving life rest atop discarded mailers that have fulfilled their purposes. “Painted envelopes are configured into intimate portraits of the only home I have made for myself, moved across the country, and mourned for with the imminent threat of DACA’s repeal,” the artist says, adding:

The plant paintings are physical and metaphorical maps of personal and official correspondence. The rubber plant abandoned outside The University of Iowa’s art studios painted on the mailer envelope of my graduate degree; the split-leaf monstera gifted to my husband and me for our wedding ceremony; the jade plant given to me by the only other dacamented professor I’ve met.

Ongoing since 2016, Dacaments will conclude this year when Fifield-Perez’s DACA status ends.

As part of a McKnight Fellowship, the artist is working toward a show at Highpoint Center for Printmaking in Minneapolis, where he lives. Find more of his paintings and collages on his website and Instagram.

 

Art

Petrit Halilaj’s Scratchy Doodles Grapple with Childhood Innocence on The Met Rooftop

When visiting his hometown of Runik, Kosovo, back in 2010, Petrit Halilaj realized that his elementary school was being demolished. He went to the site—which had miraculously survived the Yugoslav wars that spurred his family to flee to an Albanian refugee camp in 1998—and found a pile of desks, many with doodles and notes scratched into their surfaces.

These etchings have now found their way to New York, where they’re perched atop The Met’s rooftop garden for Abetare, which translates to primer, as in the early education books used for learning basic literacy. Enlarged to proportions that would crush any singular tabletop, the rough drawings are presented as scratchy bronze sculptures depicting a flower, house, and spider á la Louise Bourgeois.

For the exhibition, Halilaj (previously) paired his initial findings with other scribbles recovered from desks throughout Albania, North Macedonia, and Montenegro, Balkan countries impacted by Serbian hostilities following Yugoslavia’s dissolution. “For me, returning to the region and visiting numerous schools was prompted by a desire to construct my own intimate map, in contrast to historical maps that reflect dominant narratives,” he shares. “We do not exist in isolation. We are shaped by each other’s identities, both positively and negatively.”

 

On view through October 27, Abetare features smaller works among the freestanding sculptures, including an arrow with Runik written in the center. Halilaj fastened that smaller piece to a concrete wall and pointed it toward the village as a way to tether the distant locations.

While playful and evocative of adolescent impulse, the works are a reminder of how war and conflict warp innocence. The project is also particularly timely as the city contends with helping tens of thousands of school-age migrants and the world witnesses mass atrocities in Palestine and Ukraine. Magnifying childhood transgressions, Abetare highlights what the artist refers to as small “acts of freedom” that defy ideology and systemic oppression.

Find more from Halilaj on Instagram.