Hasta La Ideas

Mother’s Day is this weekend (May 13) and although flowers and plants are usually an appreciated and safe gift, you may be thinking outside the (flower) box this year. If you’re still looking for ideas, consider giving an uncluttered gift:

• Consumables. If you know she loves them, get her fancy chocolates, coffee beans, teas, or another treat.
• Services. Take her car to be detailed, have the oil changed, and fill up the tank. Get her a gift certificate to a renowned spa for a pedicure or massage. Treat her to dinner at her favorite restaurant.
• Adventures. In my opinion, spending time with someone is an amazing gift. Take a weekend vacation to a relaxing getaway. Make a date to go on a hike through a local state park. Surprise her with tickets to the opera or to hear a band she likes or to a sporting event she enjoys.
• Wants. Listen for hints about gifts she would use. Does she want a new Chef’s knife? Has she told you five times she’s in the market for new sunglasses? Has she been talking nonstop about wanting a Kindle? Does she have a board on Pinterest called “Please Buy This for Me”? (If so, you should check there.)

What uncluttered gifts are you thinking about getting for the moms in your life this coming Mother’s Day? I bought my mom an adventure gift (we’re going to take a much needed vacation together later this year), my mother-in-law’s gift is still a secret (sorry, no spoilers here!) and I’m pretty certain my husband and son are getting me a physical gift I really want (new earphones, to wear while I run and work, as my beloved pair bit the dust last week).

Also, check out all of our previous Gift Giving Guides for even more uncluttered suggestions.

Image of the Golden Gate Bonsai from Calyx Flowers.

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Yan Pei-Ming captures past and present in five large-scale paintings

The first thing Yan Pei-Ming said while presenting his new exhibition, “Black Paintings” at David Zwirner was “I aspire to be an artist, period. Not a Chinese artist.” Though born in Shanghai, the artist is now based in Dijon, and speaks French—not Chinese—through a translator. “My work,” he continued, “does not have a ‘made in China’ feel to it. I’ve always tried to speak in a universal pictorial language.”

Pei-Ming certainly has a knack for choosing subject matter with a global reach. In the past, he’s gained notoriety for his large, monochromatic portraits of people like Lady Gaga, Bernard Madoff, Michael Jackson and Maurizio Cattelan. In this show, however, you won’t see many familiar pop-culture faces, save for Muammar Gaddafi in the work “Gaddafi’s Corpse”, which is hard to discern without reading the title first. In “Pablo”, Pei-Ming shows Pablo Picasso as a huddled young boy wearing large men’s shoes, an imagined memory of the great painter playing dress-up, perhaps, in his father’s clothing. “Exécution, Après Goya”, a bright red homage to Goya’s “The Shootings of May Third 1808“. The show’s title, says Pei-Ming, is “derived from a late series of wall paintings by Goya, since transferred to canvas. In these works, not originally intended for public view, the Spanish artist offers haunting visions of humanity’s darker side.”

“When Goya worked he had to work from his imagination, but in my case I’m working from documentation” says Pei-Ming, referencing the artist’s historical paintings. “We’re surrounded by photographs and documents that attest to what has happened and I use that as source material.” Though it’s doubtful that much original source material was needed for “Pablo”, it’s still true for most of Ming’s work, including his dark interpretation of the Acropolis, which he describes as “the cradle of Western civilization and democracy.” Titled “All Crows Under the Sun Are Black!”, Ming mounted it first in his show, as his way of putting “it in dialogue, face to face with art in the contemporary world,” he says.

“Moonlight” is another monochromatic gray painting depicting an immigration over rocky waters, illuminated by brushstrokes of white moonlight on the waves. Painted in much the same style as “All Crows Under the Sun Are Black!”, it too is a landscape that features a barely discernible outpost on the dark horizon, but the Acropolis is so dark it almost fades into the feverishly painted background. If you’ve ever seen a picture of the Acropolis you know that it’s huge and white, the centuries-old pillars standing strong on their flat-topped perch above Athens—and at night it’s lit up like the Lincoln Memorial. Here, Ming has shrunk it down and killed the lights, blending it so thoroughly into the background he seems to almost be wiping it from history itself.

“Black Paintings” marks a departure in Ming’s work not only from his focus on contemporary culture but also in his point of view. Instead of traditional portraiture, we see his figures splayed out, crouching on the ground or facing a firing squad. They’re not only shown in scene, in a narrative, but as part of a larger historical context, one that’s not pinned down to a specific moment in time. Instead of immortalizing a cultural icon at the height of their fame, Ming is depicting history in progress. He goes back in time to moments history may have overlooked in an attempt to connect the recent and distant past, and though he makes his point of view clear in the subjects he chooses to paint, those choices don’t represent a distinctly Chinese or even Eastern perspective, but one that’s uncompromisingly universal.

“Black Paintings” runs through June 23, 2012 at David Zwirner.

David Zwirner

525 W. 19th St.

New York, NY 10011

Your Kees = Your iPhone cover, your way.What does Your Kees look like? However you want it to! We work with a gifted product designer, top illustrator..

Global Design Creative Lead
TaylorMade Golf Company
Carlsbad, California

TaylorMade Golf is seeking a Global Design Creative Lead to oversee Art Direction and Design across the entire spectrum of graphic design, 3D, Environments, and advertising projects for the TaylorMade, adidas Golf and Ashworth Brands. The ideal candidate has past experieence in Global Corporate Branding and a portfolio that manifests a high-level of creative versatility, competitive mindset and project management skills. This role has excellent long-term potential for career growth within the Company.

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Maurice Sendak, Caldecott-winning author of classic children’s books such as Where the Wild Things Are, died this morning due to complications from a stroke. He was 83. His most recent book was Bumble-Ardy (HarperCollins), the tale of a mischievous pig named Bumble who has reached the age of nine without ever having had a birthday party. He takes matters into his own hands (well, cloven hooves) and invites all of his friends to a masquerade bash that quickly gets out of hand. In discussing his widely beloved work, Brooklyn-born Sendak was always quick to credit his mentors, the late Ruth Krauss (The Carrot Seed) and her husband Crockett “Dave” Johnson, who wrote Harold and the Purple Crayon. The most valuable lesson they imparted to the budding children’s book author, whose big-headed kids were initially rejected by publishers for being “too foreign-looking”? Be truthful. “If there’s anything I’m proud of in my work—it’s not that I draw better; there’s so many better graphic artists than me—or that I write better, no. It’s—and I’m not saying I know the truth, because what the hell is that? But what I got from Ruth and Dave, a kind of fierce honesty,” Sendak said in a 2005 interview, “to not let the kid down, to not let the kid get punished, to not suffer the child to be dealt with in a boring, simpering, crushing-of-the-spirit kind of way.”

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