#san solomon

[sairceketli]

hüzne giriş.

[sanschips]

you just know this could have been canon 😔😔

[slayersins-art]

—————bunny café menu—————

-EoS special: Permission to play with the tail of your preferred bunny boy (30$)

[katboykirby]

Anyway bring them to AX this year Solmare you cowards

[favouritefi]

the dogboy household (fitzjames) and the catboy household (crozier)

[12am-motivation]

roughly 2 days left until the full version!!

absolutely obsessed with sol's "are you ready? in 3, 2, 1, ah~" (and how he's most likely also the one doing the high-pitched backup vocals)

and i'm reminded of this bit from kawata-san himself from otaku FM mini (plus how he voiced the backup singers in obm the anime S2E6 lol)

[nerds-yearbook]

In 1879, Billy the Kid got in a bar fight after cheating at poker. He was aided by two teens who turnned out to be time travelers. He became their right hand man as they went through time picking up historical figures and he took a particular shine to Socrates. Then Billy the Kid and the historical figures Napoleon, Socrates, Sigmund Freud, Beethoven, Joan of Arc, Genghis Kahn, and Abraham Lincoln are brought to 1988 to spent the day in San Dimas, CA (Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Flm)

[searchsystem]

Barbara Stauffacher Solomon / San Francisco Museum of Art (SFMOMA) / Program Guide / 1968

[dramapetit]

all of us are dead headers

[nnnneeev]

fun fact! the townsfolk in the obey me! anime season 2 episode 6 was voiced by none other than solomon’s VA, Kazuki Kawata! (yes, all of them)

[kheyys-worms]

So, Barbatos stans... how feelin after that prologue movie?

[moonfie]

All Of Us Are Dead!

[sanschips]

protecting seb 😤😤

[countrylessman]

official driver 2 merch: majorette toy cars

photos are the courtesy of the majorette cars wiki: https://majorette-model-cars.fandom.com/wiki/Driver_2

[studioahead]

Barbara Stauffacher Solomon: Northern California Legacy Spotlight

Last April, just before her death at 95, we had the privilege to interview Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, the trailblazing landscape architect and artist best known for her supergraphics inside Sea Ranch. Solomon, or “Bobbie” as everyone called her, was much more than her famous graphics, as her daughter Nellie, who helped parlay our questions to Bobbie, emphasizes.

Nellie King Solomon is an artist in her own right, whose gorgeous abstract paintings almost match the vibrancy of Nellie herself. We spoke with the two of them about memory and landscape, about love and what each has learned from the other, and about looking back on a life well-lived. Nellie’s daughter Fia joined in.

A few months after Bobbie's death, we revisited Nellie to ask what her mom’s legacy might be. 

Studio AHEAD: Did California’s landscape influence your work once you returned from Switzerland?

Bobbie: It was the freedom of being a California woman that influenced you more than the landscape. Being in California as a woman was very different than being in Switzerland as a woman. I could do anything I wanted.

Nellie: I feel you, too, about the California woman thing and the freedom here having worked and lived in Europe and New York. I’ve come back to California multiple times as a result. There are hard-to-describe unspoken freedoms that are unheard of elsewhere. Even in New York. I would do things and be dismissed as “Californian”: make a drawing a certain way, have a different relationship to abstraction. At Cooper Union I would jump on top of my drafting table just so I could get a good look at my drawing from a distance. It seemed like the most natural thing in the world! Definitely a California move.

I would spend the weekends at Martha’s Vineyard looking at a seashell, stoned, and come back Tuesday morning with clear ideas about what I was going to draw for afternoon critique—that was a very different way of going about it. Slaving all weekend and sleeping under your desk was the East Coast Cooper way. Not for me. Go jump in some water and look at seashell instead.

Bobbie: About architecture, I see the corners of buildings and how they relate to each other. Supergraphics is all about relating everything to the corners. It never works having to do a computer printout ahead of time. It doesn’t work because it’s all about tying the graphics to the corners, which is on site. The architecture tells you what to do.

Studio AHEAD: The contrast between the colorful, geometric quality of Sea Ranch’s Supergraphics and the rolling hills and waves of Sonoma is very striking. Was this on purpose?

Bobbie: I didn’t want it to stick out. I didn’t want it to be more visible than the landscape itself. Well, it is but it’s indoors.

Nellie: You were doing the Supergraphics indoors so that it wouldn’t stand out against the land and look obnoxious. That’s why there’s all those rules up there at Sea Ranch—that whole dictatorial handbook that comes with the property that says don’t plant a rose or do Supergraphics outdoors. Your stuff is brazen but it’s inside.

Bobbie: Like once I was teaching at Sitka, Alaska and a woman wanted me to paint the main street with Supergraphics—this little town. I said “No!” with vengeance.

Nellie: I remember the walk through the forest and the ancient weathered totem poles and you would let the students paint inside the ugly fluorescent lit hallways. You wouldn’t let them paint outside in the beautiful quiet forest.

Studio AHEAD: What is one of your works that you’d wish had gotten more attention?

Bobbie: Graphics at the San Francisco Museum. It’s the biggest artwork in the museum that a woman has ever been allowed to make. And what does that mean? There really hasn’t been any press.

Nellie: And you’ve been annoyed about that. It’s bigger than a football field, and stronger in a way.

Studio AHEAD: Nellie, you help your mom with these large installations. What have you learned from her?

Nellie: Be big, bold, and beautiful. Be brazen. Think of the whole space and really go for it. These are all things that come in the territory of helping my mom do what she does. They definitely have rubbed off on me. To think of things from the perspective of the negative space, as opposed to the positive space, that’s a more formal quality. I think of the principles that she learned from Armin Hoffman. What I absorbed in watching her put together and draw Green Architecture and the Agrarian Garden when I was in fifth grade. So many gardens Bobbie and I snuck into all over the world. That there’s a certain irreverence and physical relationship to space and making that I’ve adopted from working with her.

I learned a lot of stuff from her and that would be very hard to figure out. It’s like untangling pantyhose that has been in a drawer forever. It’s all tangled up. And then some stuff I learned from Cooper Union and then some stuff I learned from Hoffman. I mean where does one education start and another education begin? What stuff did you learn from which grandmother or which parent? These influences are all different voices mixed together and yet when you get in your studio—there’s a great quote—when you close the door to your studio, you have to kick out all the voices and then begin.

Studio AHEAD: Bobbie, what has Nellie taught you?

Bobbie: What has Nellie taught me when you have a kid you love? You just learn how to try and make them happy.

Studio AHEAD: Fia, what’s going to be your medium of choice?

Fia: I'm a singer-songwriter, writer, and aspiring actress. I have an idea. I think that the youngest one should ask a question to the oldest one. I want to ask Bobbie, Why is your imagination at the end of life so opposite to your work?

Bobbie: You smart little thing!

* * *

Nellie: At the end Bobbie saw all of these romantic, fanciful, green, growing vines all over the ceilings and over the whole house. At one point the house turned into a hot-fudge sundae with different shades of light, dark, and milk chocolate for all the shadows. All these romantic and wild, elaborate visions would appear over the white walls of the clean, modernist house where she lived. Entirely opposite to the stark hard-edged graphics she was known for. That’s why Fia asked her question and why Bobbie knew it was wise.

Bobbie always loved the “schmaltzy” as she would call it. The romantic gardens, the formal gardens, the Tuileries, France, Turner Classic movies, Hollywood plots. When we wheeled her up to the entrance of SFMoMA to see her Strips of Stripes exhibition from the revolving doors, there was, flanking her work, two large Julie Mehretu works: “Ah, those are real art. The kind of stuff I would’ve made if I didn’t have to make money.”

As she lay dying in a magical space, her imagination ran wild on the stark white ceiling. She was enveloped in a romantic fantasy, ever-changing, constantly urgent to describe it to me, or anyone who would listen, as she slipped between worlds.

* * *

Studio AHEAD: What do you think your mom's legacy will be?

Nellie: There’s a chance that Bobbie’s Northern California legacy continues to be Sea Ranch. Bobbie does not see herself as defined by Sea Ranch at all. She is much more interested in her books and her continual evolution. Bobbie has a much more complex legacy than that one early project. She has multiple voices: hard-edge Supergraphics, complex books like Good Mourning California, the Green Architecture and the Agrarian Garden landscape drawings in the 80s.

She continually reinvented herself. Which made it tricky to pigeonhole her into a discipline or a style for a final summation, but it’s also her brilliance. In a 1968 Vogue issue, Bobbie (and her friend, the film critic Pauline Kael) were named “two of the 20 (?) women most in touch with her times.” Bobbie continually stayed “in touch with her times” by evolving with the times.

Studio AHEAD: What has been the reaction since her passing?

Nellie: People’s reaction is with a certain sense that Bobbie is immortal. It’s a funny thing. A dealer she worked with said “it seemed like she would never die. She couldn’t.” Even as she got old, she said “who you calling old?” Fia and I have decided not to refer to Bobbie in the past tense. We refer to her in the present tense. “Bobbie is” as opposed to “Bobbie was.”

There’s an outpouring of caring. It makes me want to invite everyone to be together in her honor, and onward. Bobbie lives in us. Bobbie is not at all gone.

“To be is not to know what to be”—this is one of my favorite things she wrote. If she is not being, then she now IS. Perhaps this is why galleries prefer to represent estate artists. Quantifiable only after death.

Photos: Ekaterina Izmestieva

[the-gershomite]

The Savage Sword of Conan the Barbarian #20 -July 1977-

Solomon Kane's Homecoming: a poem by Robert E. Howard

adapted by Roy Thomas

art by Virgilio Redondo & Rudy Nebres

"Sing a Song of Sonjas" Red Sonja in San Diego article