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vancafreader · 3 years ago

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Fine Art Comics of Canada: Sixties to Seventies - Heart of London, Snore & More by Robert Dayton

Part One: The Heart Of London

There was a time where artists were making vast ripples away from Toronto and other outsized hubs. London, Ontario was such a place, all eyes were on it in the late 60’s and not Toronto. The Heart Of London comic book from 1968 was actually an exhibition catalog, an overview of the art that was happening there at the time. Organised by The National Gallery of Canada, this exhibition traveled from London to Toronto, Kingston, Edmonton, Victoria, Charlottetown and, of course, The National Gallery H.Q. itself in Ottawa.

This catalog/comic book consisted of fumetti, comics done using photos for the images. Fumetti was most prominently used in the 60’s by Harvey Kurtzman in Help and Playboy, prolifically in numerous Mexican comic book melodramas, and in Italian comics featuring the masked master criminal Satanik. Heart Of London’s particular fumetti is further stylized by heavily contrasted processing causing colours so bright that they make everything heightened artifice, buzzing as if emanating from a higher plane of being.

Cover of the Heart Of London catalogue

The Heart of London logo in Pepto-Bismol pink is rendered somewhere between Archie and underground comix titles. Above it, The Comics Code of Authority symbol -a comic book mainstay of the day implying that the work is of safe moral quality- has been altered to “National Gallery of Canada”, the institution that made this comic book and exhibition happen. The cover features what appears to be London public workers, perhaps? These men in yellow hard hats casually stand in front of a store with a Coca-Cola logo also coloured Pepto-Bismol pink, Pop Art style, at the city’s main intersection in what very well may be the heart of London.

The comic opens with a quote placed above a looming Brutalist parking lot, huddling various small businesses below it. This quote contains the phrase “heart of London” but it is rather self-deprecatingly not about London, Ontario but London, England in World War One. Sharing a name with London, England has often made this Ontario city the butt of many a joke, ie. “I live in London… (long pause) Ontario” with its population being just over 200,000 in 1968. Named in 1793 by Lord Simcoe, Upper Canada’s first Lieutenant-Governor known for starting the abolition of slavery, he was also fervently British, his vision for Canada was for it to be like England which he looooved, desperately (but stiffly) wanting this particular London to become Ontario’s capital. Alas, Toronto was chosen instead. Related, always related to everything: the term “cosmic consciousness”, the higher state of consciousness, was coined in London in 1872 by Richard Bucke, a psychiatrist and head of The Asylum For The Insane, after he received a blinding vision, illuminating him. Besides being active in asylum reform, Bucke was heavily involved in the arts -the vision occurred after an evening spent reading Romantic poetry as well as poems by Walt Whitman, who he later befriended. Yes, London, Ontario is an eccentric place.

The artists involved in the Heart Of London show were part of what was known as “London Regionalism”, a loose-knit movement of artists who were adamant about residing in London, away from Toronto or New York. Artist Greg Curnoe helped establish some of the very first artist-run centres there. He was an early member and huge proponent of CARFAC, a Canadian organisation that fights for artists to get paid and paid fairly for their work. CARFAC was founded in London by Heart Of London artists Jack Chambers and Tony Urquhart -along with Kim Ondaatje.

Besides Curnoe, Chambers, and Urquhart, the eleven artists in Heart Of London included John Boyle, Bev Kelly, Murray Favro, Ron Martin, David Rabinowitch, Royden Rabinowitch, Walter Redinger, and Ed Zelenak. They are all profiled in fumetti form talking about their practice through speech balloons and captions, along with quick biographical details. Many of these artists were known for their inventiveness, they were influenced by a variety of subject matter -including comic art- without falsely delineating these influences into false boxes of high or low art. They didn’t just make work in the visual art field either. Along with a Hart Of London work-on-paper, Chambers made an experimental film with the same name in 1970. This film intensely shows brutal shots of an abattoir in Spain interspersed with London scenes; it has been described by Stan Brakhage as “one of the greatest films ever made.” Both Curnoe’s Heart Of London painting from 1967 and Jack Chambers’ 1968 work-on-paper Hart Of London are in the show.

Noted curator and historian Judith Rodger told me that Curnoe’s Heart Of London piece depicts The Forks Of the Thames downtown, “arguably the heart of London” near many of the artists’ studios with Greg’s studio as the main hub or heart of it all. As for the idea of a comic book catalog, it was a mystery until Rodger guided me to Katie Cholette’s PhD thesis Memory and Mythmaking: the role of autobiography in the works of Jack Chambers and Greg Curnoe which states that it was the idea of William Bragg, assistant to the director of The National Gallery’s extension services. Cholette’s paper quotes Bragg from the Sept 29, 1968 New York Times’ Arts Notes column, “…The idea was to make a kind of scrapbook, to talk as a group, not individuals. Their work is kind of echoed by the comics—it’s really their bag […] Everyone likes to read comics once in a while, anyway.” Due to its uniqueness, the catalog garnered a lot of press for the show. Beverley Lambert (Bev Kelly in the show) says, “I think we all thought it was pretty neat and it was funny. It got people’s attention.”

When I talked to artist John Boyle about this comic book catalog, he said right away, “It’s too bad that Greg Curnoe isn’t with us anymore, because he was really interested in comic books. And he always did comic book or comic-like drawings from the time he was a little kid.” In the book Greg Curnoe Life And Work, author Judith Rodger’s description of his 1963 painting Myself Walking North In the Tweed Coat could be ascribed to many of his works. “The flat, vivid colours; schematic outlines; and text all come from his love of the comic book.” As well as the inclusion of the name of the newspaper strip Mary Worth in the piece. Another colourful painting casually inserts Dick Tracy into the frame as a representative of one of his interests. Curnoe’s series of cut-out collages were often shaped into cartoony and anthropomorphic forms.

Curated by Pierre Théberge at The National Gallery, Boyle readily notes, “Both Curnoe and Chambers talked up all the other artists who were around in London, and ended up persuading Théberge to have a group show to get a sense of the whole London art scene.”

The comic book itself doesn’t give William Bragg’s name at all, nada. The designer is credited: Roger Duhamel, FRSC, Queen’s Printer and Controller of Stationery, a federal government official, as well as the design firm: Eccleston + Glossop International. All of the photos, however, were done by the late Don Vincent, of whom Boyle says, “He was a friend of ours, of all of us. And a really terrific photographer. And he documented the whole London scene as it unfolded taking photographs all the time of everybody in this show and just of London, his whole life was photography.” Vincent’s work also appeared in 20 Cent Magazine, a delightfully scrappy local art magazine started in the mid-60’s with many of the people in the show, including Boyle and Curnoe, contributing writings and drawings. 20 Cent Magazine sold for 25 cents, ha! Vincent also photographed The Nihilist Spasm Band who are regarded as the first noise-rock band; this amazing, mind-blowing, intense and milk-spurtingly funny act was founded by the late Greg Curnoe, with Boyle and Favro (playing unique guitars that he builds himself) as still very active members over fifty years later. They are unique cultural ambassadors bringing such songs as “No Canada” to the world, having performed in Japan and in Vancouver at The Western Front with poet George Bowering guesting on guitar, and have had a documentary made about them by the late noise artist Zev Asher.

In one of Heart Of London’s comic book panels about Boyle an early issue of the four color MAD sneaks its way in. I asked him if he read MAD, “Yeah. Although that is from the designer. I read MAD, although not madly.”

A very young Boyle states in one of his panels, “The day I can truly defile myself in public, I will have accomplished everything, and I will no longer have a need to paint.” Reflecting today he says, “I still think that actually, and I think I may have succeeded. Because I do still have the need to paint. But I don’t have the need to show it anymore, or to get applause or approval from anyone. And I don’t know how that arose in me. But I kind of had a fair amount of attention and approval and acceptance and shows in fancy places and meeting important people and pleasing art administrators. And I kind of reached the conclusion that most of them aren’t worth pleasing and their opinion was not as good or not as important as the opinions of other people that I happen to know. And I thought they made a lot of mistakes and people that they chose to support. And also, their approval was very fickle. They were very fickle about it because as soon as fashions would change, their eyes were directed elsewhere and the people they thought were geniuses today were no longer geniuses tomorrow. I did kind of lose my enthusiasm for the art world, but not for painting. So, I was mistaken.”

The final pages of this catalog feature a few reproductions of pieces from the show itself, including Bev Kelly’s window paintings which, with its window panels, adapt quite easily to the comic book form, comparable to an ornate and mysterious painted comic page. The layout, however, was a bit fast and loose with one of her works being printed sideways. In her fumetti section she says, “These windows aren’t ‘real’ windows, they are still paintings. They don’t have sashes and you can’t see through them. A real window is to look through, these are to look at.” Painted on canvas, the window pieces used lumber to make the frames of the paintings, carved to look like the ribbed mouldings of window frames.

Bev Kelly was the sole woman in the show and when I asked her about this she said, “I’m very happy that they didn’t concentrate on this issue that I was the only woman. I didn’t want to be known as an artist because I was a woman.” Having recently moved to London from Saskatchewan with her husband, they were warmly welcomed by Curnoe and she would go see The Nihilist Spasm Band play every week at The York Hotel. Her first solo show was at The 20/20 Gallery in London.

She spent the first two years of her life in Biggar, Saskatchewan where the signs read, “New York Is Big, But This Is Biggar.” Being in London changed her notions of places like New York being the absolute cultural mecca. Beverley says, “There was a really vibrant cultural community there. You know what a regionalist Greg was. He really believed, as a lot of writers do, that you should write about what you know, or you should do your art about what you know, including where you live and so on. And, of course, when I started on the windows that was right out where I was living. The first ones were of my house and then I walked around and took pictures of various houses that I thought looked interesting. When I got a studio in London above one of the businesses downtown I used some of the windows there as inspiration for my works. And then when I went back to Saskatchewan, I was very into that, looking around at what is there where you live. I even got a grant to travel around small-town Saskatchewan and look at the local -in air quotes- ‘folk art’ or untrained artists, let’s say, just painting odd things on their house or their property or whatever. So, I went and I did interviews, took pictures of them, and I imagine I must have produced some kind of a report on it because I probably had to for my grant. So that led me into being more observant and looking more at where it’s from and what is around you and that you don’t have to go to some huge, big place to find art.”

Bev Kelly was her married name and she returned to using her original name, Beverley Lambert in the 1970’s. Lambert did a series of three large lithographs for International Women’s Year in 1975 on women’s issues dealing with real news stories that happened on the prairies. Many of these prints were donated to many women’s centres across the country. She has also worked in clay doing an entire main street based on the fictional Saskatchewan town in the humour book Sarah Binks by Paul Hiebert. Beverley Lambert currently resides in St. John’s, Newfoundland where she makes art and is active as a conservator.

Flip the comic over and it is the same but in either French or English depending on where you first started reading!

Boyle comments, “Last night, my wife and I were looking at the Heart of London catalog. She was amazed that this was a National Gallery touring show with a lot of artists who became major artists in the country. And it looked like they were trying to spend as little money as possible by making this skinny little comic book-like thing on newsprint and I think there’s a large measure of truth in that. Because, again, I remember when Greg Curnoe had a big one-man exhibition retrospective at The National Gallery and the catalogue that they did for him was kind of a minimal thing. It was like a paperback book with one colour reproduction and a number of inferior black and white reproductions and basically a list of artworks in the show. And in the same year, The National Gallery did a big one-man exhibition of Donald Judd, the American sculptor, and his catalogue was a huge coffee table book that weighed about 15 pounds and was three inches thick and loaded with colour from beginning to end. And that just, I think, represented a specifically Canadian problem.” When I mention this to Hairy Who member Art Green he responds, “Well, of course, because they’re trying to impress their betters in New York, so you get a job at The Whitney or The Museum of Modern Art. Canada has been an incubator for museum directors since forever.”

Hairy Who catalog page by Art Green, courtesy of the artist

This style of catalog for Heart Of London corresponds nicely with The Hairy Who, another such grouping of artists around that time who were part of “The Chicago Imagists.” Their three Chicago art shows starting in the mid-60’s were accompanied by comic books that also doubled as exhibition catalogs. The Hairy Who weren’t very aware of the underground comics scene then just barely getting started, they chose this method out of creative necessity, printing a glossy catalog was cost prohibitive. Green explains, “And the printing was expensive and not very good. And we didn’t want to have a show that was called ‘Six Recent Graduates’ or something unexciting like that. And so, we realised we all liked comics and we all knew how to do colour stripping because we’d taken silk-screening courses, we figured out we could do it. And it was cheap.”

Delineating further, The Hairy Who made playful art inspired by a wide range of neat stuff. The London artists were well aware of The Hairy Who. In fact, The Hairy Who were even going to show in London at The 20/20 Gallery. Boyle notes, “20/20 was kind of a precursor to the art in the so-called artist run centres, most of which aren’t run by artists anymore. But anyway, it was one of the first and it was all sponsored by local people in London. And I don’t think it lasted longer than a couple of years, but it was a terrific gallery while it lasted.” Many of the artists in The Heart Of London show were active in 20/20, which lasted from 1966 to 1971. Greg Curnoe discussed the show with Hairy Who artist Karl Wirsum, who in a letter to Art Green wrote, “Well, if they go ahead and publish a comic book, that would be all right.” Green notes, “He may have thought that the 20/20 Gallery was more well-funded than it probably was. But it was on, we all agreed to do it. We were looking forward to it.” Green himself left Chicago for Canada in 1969. The 1968 Democratic Convention had transpired and as Green puts it, “Everybody was angry at everybody.” He was dissatisfied with his teaching job there as well, so when offered a job at NASCAD, the art school in Halifax, he leaped at it.

Alas, the show didn’t happen. In a letter to Art Green, Curnoe writes, “We had to cancel The Hairy Who show and a lot of us were disappointed.” Boyle notes, “I suspect that it got caught up in the death throes of the gallery. And they would have had to cancel whatever exhibitions they had coming up.”

Green notes that both London and Chicago are far enough away from the more major centres that artists can, “…be free to go their own way because there’s not much at stake partly and nobody’s paying attention. And I remember the first time I had been in London, we were driving on our honeymoon to Halifax where I got the job. And I thought, ‘I’m gonna stop here and get a Canada Dry.’ I’m driving down what’s the main street that runs north south and pulled into a corner store. And I said, ‘Do you have Canada Dry?’ ‘No, but we got America Dry.’ I have never before or since seen a bottle of America Dry. I bought it and it wasn’t as good as Canada Dry. And, and that’s not a dream. I mean, I have never seen it ever again. But that made me say, ‘Wow, this is a weird place.’”

While Green was teaching at NASCAD, Curnoe came for what Green calls, “One of his annual excoriations, if that’s a word, he would rip them up one side down the other in public, for being a Canadian art school with no Canadians teaching, hardly any, and all yanks -and it was true! And so anyway, they would invite him and it was almost like a ritual. He would be in the public, there’d be 400 students there and Greg would just rip the place apart. I had known Greg, I heard about the show and so on, and we got along fine. And afterwards he’d come up to me and say, ‘Well, how did I do?’ ‘Greg, you’re doing great, but you do realise I’m a yank’, but I agreed with him 100%.” Both Curnoe and Green commiserated on how Canadian art was neglected at the school. “If he had been in Chicago, Greg would have been a member of The Hairy Who or maybe started it. But he was more political, he had to be, and Chicago, the politics were so acidic that you wouldn’t have wanted to be to be involved in it, unless you went in full immersion. And we were decidedly unpolitical. Although we all agreed on the politics of it. We were a collective in the sense that we wanted people to collect us.” On this, Art Green is a tad glib, having made art responding to and criticizing Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Both Art and Greg would visit with each other in various Canadian cities: Halifax, Vancouver, Toronto. “Nobody appreciated Greg in Toronto, they went out of their way to un-appreciate him. And luckily, they did put a put up a pretty nice retrospective after he was safely gone.”

Of London, Green notes, “I think that for a period of time. I don’t know how long it was maybe a few minutes, maybe a few hours, maybe a few months? Maybe a few years. London, Ontario was most interesting art scene and literary scene in the whole world.”

The propensity for great art still ran in the water there, the stream flowed, there was a continuum and a recognizing of that history. London has some great galleries including Forest City Gallery, founded by Jack Chambers and Greg Curnoe, where The Nihilist Spasm Band plays every Monday night.

In 2013 The London Museum held the group show L.O. Today with artists Jason Mclean, Marc Bell, Jamie Q, Billy Bert Young, Amy Lockhart, Peter Thompson, and James Kirkpatrick. Many of these artists are a part of the Canadian Psychedooolic art comic movement that began in the 1990’s, captured and collected in the book Nog A Dod, edited by former Londoner Marc Bell and released by Conundrum/PictureBox. Much of the work in Nog A Dod occurred in Vancouver with a couple of these London artists relocating there, immersing easily, doing a lot of collaborative drawing and art books with other Vancouver based artists. Yes, ‘Canadian Psychedooolic’ was named after the fact by Bell, but we weren’t thinking of ourselves as a movement or a group at the time. Yet all of these art books had an unfettered comic wildness, funny, and expansively playful. And Nog A Dod got out there, impacting and influencing a lot of artists the world over. Furthering the connective tissue, in 2003, The Western Front in Vancouver put on an art show featuring ‘documents and ephemera’ from musical acts The Nihilist Spasm Band, The All Star Schnauzer Band (a somewhat fake band as mail art project involving Bell, Mclean, and Thompson) and July Fourth Toilet, a Vancouver based group that often involves many Nog A Dod and Nog A Dod related artists, including yours truly occasionally wearing outlandish semi-functional semi-nude costumes specially designed by Jason Mclean. The show was curated by Jonathan Middleton, who is now Executive Director at Art Metropole, a Toronto based artist-run centre dealing primarily in artists’ publications.

Getting back to Greg Curnoe. Released in two parts in 1970, The Great Canadian Sonnet contained numerous images by Curnoe. Described as a “Beaver Little Book”, the format was modeled after the popular Big Little Books, distant cousins to comic books so named for being small, square and thick. Big Little Books were marketed to children and featured popular comic, cartoon, radio and film characters of the day in text-based stories with illustrations on every other page. Some Big Little Books had flip-it cartoons in the top corner so one could make the character move. With its second volume The Great Canadian Sonnet does this as well, stating “See ‘em move – just flip the pages” on the cover and, sure enough, in the corner a spot rolls up a hill-like abstract shape transforming into a medley of human faces.

Written by poet David McFadden, Curnoe riffed off lines in his text creating a great many detailed pen-and-ink drawings for the book with titles that included “Proud Possessor Of Meaningful Pain”, “One that will be Truly Loved by the Prime Minister”, and “The Empty Universe” which featured a drawing of a tin of apple juice and a packet of bird seed -the book’s drawings contained many such absurdist pairings. The Great Canadian Sonnet was published by Coach House Press who were -and still are- known for releasing all manner of experimental works including poetry, prose and beyond. Both volumes together weigh in at over 400 pages, with every other page being a drawing by Curnoe.

Many thanks to Jason Mclean, Marc Bell, and Judith Rodger for their immense help with this piece.

Thanks as well to Art Green for use of his respective artworks.

Part Two: Scraptures, Snore and More coming tomorrow, Friday, August 20!

Robert Dayton

www.robertdayton.com

www.patreon.com/CanadianGlam

#comicsjournalism #canadiancomics #theheartoflondon #hairywho #nihilistspasmband #vancaf #vancouvercomicartfestival #robertdayton

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loriglessner · 7 years ago

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Last year, I wrote a popular post listing the Encaustic Paint Colors I Can’t Do Without and as a result a reader requested I write a post listing some colors for the beginner. The International Encaustic Conference is starting this week with it’s overwhelmingly wonderful vendor room, so now is a perfect time for this post.

There are only a handful of colors one really needs in order to mix all colors; magenta, yellow, cyan, black and white or the primary colors Red, Yellow, Blue, Black and White…actually, you don’t even need black, you can mix that by mixing all the colors in equal proportions. But who has time for that, it’s just easier to have some colors at the ready and I developed this list with that thought in mind. I also thought about some colors that are just so luscious you might want them all the time without having to mix them. I started with a varied color wheel and branched off with a few oddballs you might find interesting. As a beginner, it’s important to start small and purchase some, rather than all. Buy the small sizes instead of the mega size, find what’s right for you and go from there. When I first started painting with encaustic, I only used 4 colors and slowly added more. This list is a good place to start for the beginner as well as advanced and I hope it helps you find the color combination of your dreams.

Other things I mentioned in the first post that I would like to reiterate. I never use colors ‘straight out of the tube’, all of my colors are mixed with 2-5 colors and yours should be as well. It creates a more personalized palette when you do this as well as a more interesting painting. Once again, this list is in no particular order and I photographed the paints on top of an in progress painting just as they are…messy, mushy, splashed with other colors, alluding a little to my process and looking like colorful little sculptures. If you’d like to see the paints pretty and clean, just click on the links to the paint distributor’s sites. If you’d like to learn more about encaustic color mixing, take a workshop with me, I discuss paint mixing in a all of my workshops.

If this post was helpful to you, please let me know, I invite your comments questions and suggestions in the comments section now located in the upper left sidebar of this post.

Stay tuned for my next post, Part Two of my Evolution of a Mark series of posts in which I trace back to my beginnings as an artist to where I am today. If you haven’t done so, make sure you read Part One so it all makes sense.

Enjoy the lovely flowers blooming everywhere.

R&F Paints

Alizarin Orange I LOVE this color, it will be on any list I make regarding paint colors. Bright and versatile, it can go from a light gold to a rich rusty orange in one swipe. When mixed with white or any other color, it retains it’s richness.

Payne’s Grey Like Alizarin Orange, this color will be on any encaustic paint color list I make. I use this instead of black to darken any color. For me, black tends to deaden the color as it darkens, while this one allows the original color to retain it’s voice.

Warm Pink Like neutral white, I have used this color since I started painting in encaustic. It brightens any color and when mixed with a little and painted next to or on top of earthy blues, grays or greens, the eyes vibrate!

Brilliant Yellow Extra Pale I love to use this color instead of white as it not only lightens, it adds just a touch of yellow and whimsy as it brightens as well.

Cobalt Blue A bright, clear blue, I use it more than any other blue.

Malachite Green I use this color way too much. It’s one of those colors that changes as it’s painted next to different colors. It makes any color and any painting sing.

Phthalo Turquoise Another color that looks dead in the package and like black when it’s melted, it is actually one of the brightest and most versatile colors. Add just a touch of any white and watch the magic happen.

Phthalo Blue Embarrassingly I just read what Phthalo colors actually are a few years ago and now buy anything described as such because of its unmatched intensity. There is a clarity to this blue that you will find in no other for water, skies, anytime you need blue. It mixes beautifully and always retains its voice.

Alizarin Crimson I do not have a Cadmium Red on this list, which may be odd to some, but quite honestly I have rarely ever used it because it always reads slightly orange to me. To be clear, Cadmium Red is the purest red and I would be remiss to tell you not to have it in your collection. However, I always find myself reaching for the Alizarin Crimson instead. It’s a cross between magenta and red and leans on the darker side of both. However, when it’s mixed with only a slight amount of white, it comes alive and is quite bright. It also makes a wide range of lovely pinks when mixed any light or white color.

Cadmium Green Pale Not really true green, not really yellow, its a good mix of both, but I wouldn’t call it yellow-green. This is my go-to green, it can be lightened beautifully as well as darkened.

Zinc White Not having Titanium White on this list may also be a color faux pas but again, I rarely ever use it because it’s so uncomfortably white and a bit too pure for my taste-kind of like a bridal gown that almost looks blue it’s so white. Zinc white is a cross between Titanium and cream. Zinc is very white, but it’s just a degree off and lightens colors just as well as Titanium, yet keeps them just a degree to the left.

Cadmium Yellow Medium & Light We have to have yellow, it’s the indispensable color, which is why I have two on this list. I almost always go for the Medium yellow, but sometimes I just want less and pick up the Light. R&F also offers a Deep Yellow, but I wouldn’t advise going for it just yet, it’s a bit orange and may not be needed for your palette if you have the other two.

Cobalt Violet Light I don’t use purple much and frankly, when I need it I mix it myself. However, this color is unusual, is difficult to mix and works well to add just a hint of pinkish-purple-violet to any other color.

Enkaustikos I can’t link directly to each color, so this link goes to all of the colors listed below, just scroll the list to see the color.

Opal Aquamarine I love this color so much I buy it in huge bulk and for all of my workshops. It makes any blue or green bluer and richer, like the most amazing, clear glacier water.

Indian Yellow Bright, clear, not quite yellow, not quite orange. I reach for it time and again in place of yellow and mixing it with R&F’s Alizarin Orange is magical.

Evans Encaustics

Manganese Black The only black you’ll ever need, I was instantly smitten when I first used it. So creamy rich, so deep and consistent. It’s a true black, no blue or brown or gray cast. You only need a teeny tiny bit to darken any color. If you use black by itself, you’ll never find grayish spots or be a bit dissatisfied with this color.

Kama Pigments I can’t link directly to each color, so this link goes to all their colors , just scroll the list to see the color I listed.

Rose Hornyak/Hornyak’s Pink Again, me and pink-I’ll buy any pink. This one is so Pepto Bismol its almost gross, but it does so many things that the average pink doesn’t do! It adds just that tiny bit of purple that makes other colors vibrate. Try mixing this with Alizarin Orange and/or Warm Pink and/or Brown Pink for a pink magic fest.

Going to the encaustic Conference this week? Before you enter the vendor room, be sure to read this post. This list is a great start for the beginning encaustic painter as well as advanced to find the color combination of your dreams. Last year, I wrote a popular post listing the Encaustic Paint Colors I Can't Do Without…

#art #art workshops #beginners encaustic #color #encaustic color mixing #encaustic conference #encaustic paint colors #encaustic painting #encaustic workshops #enkaustikos #Evans Encaustics #international encaustic conference #Kama Pigments #painting inspiration #R&F Paints

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caveartfair · 7 years ago

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Understanding Charles Ray through 8 Pivotal Artworks

Sculptor Charles Ray employs varied media—from ink to marble, photography to wood—to depict anything from a car wreck to clothing or a human figure. Indeed, it can be difficult for both newcomers and studied critics to describe just what exactly defines his oeuvre. If anything, it’s always an inventive meditation on sculpture itself.

Ray’s wry poetry extends across the body of work he’s made since the 1970s, when he studied at the University of Iowa (he later attended Rutgers University for graduate school). Born in Chicago in 1953 and now based in Los Angeles, the artist is better known for taking early morning hikes and building his own boats than he is for making appearances at major art world events.

While he’s chosen to live outside the limelight, major institutions still avidly promote his work. The Whitney Museum of American Art has featured him in its biennials five times. A 2015 retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago introduced fresh eyes to his labor-intensive pieces, including an oversized sculpture, Huck and Jim (2014), which depicted the protagonists of Mark Twain’s most famous novel in the nude. At the moment, Matthew Marks Gallery in New York is showing five new works by the artist in “three rooms and the repair annex,” including a massive steel nude and two painted steel sculptures of tiny mechanics.

Ray’s own body has often figured prominently in his practice—he’s photographed and sculpted himself, including most memorably in a 1992 piece, Oh! Charley, Charley, Charley…, which features eight onanistic sculptural approximations of the artist. Ray’s output is small, as it can take years to complete a single work. Some pieces can be relatively simple, like Ink Line (1987), where a steady stream of ink flows from the gallery ceiling onto its floor, daring viewers to reach out and touch it. Others—such as Unpainted Sculpture (1997), a sculpture of a bashed-up four-door sedan—require a wealth of planning and expertise. Here are a few other highlights from the sculptor’s preeminent contribution to contemporary art.

All My Clothes (1973)

All My Clothes, 1973. Charles Ray Phillips

“The interesting thing is the repeating of the blue jeans,” Ray tells Artsy about this early work from his college days: a linear photographic series in which the artist wears different configurations of all the clothes he owns. “I had more shirts than I had pants.” The serial aspect, he says, is particular to the era. According to him, the work’s “documentary nature,” along with the fact that the figures are lined up in a row, gives the piece away as a product of its decade (conceptual photography projects of the time often had a serial nature, as in the work ofRobert Kinmont). Additionally, Ray produced the work at a time when images of young men lining up in a row were common: The draft for the Vietnam War finally ended in 1973, its legacy preserved in pictures of youthful soldiers standing side-by-side in much more formal, mandatory dress.

Plank Piece I-II (1973)

Plank Piece I–II, 1973. Charles Ray Gagosian

Throughout college, Ray made sculptures with heavy materials, such as sacks of cement and stone blocks. “My body was always present in the activity of the studio,” he says. “What was important to me, looking back now, was how close at hand my body always was.” He’d lie in his bathtub, considering how his own body itself might become part of one of his pieces. In this diptych, Ray captured performances in which a wooden plank fixed him to the wall, first by the backs of his knees, and then by his midsection. When he was young, he denied empathetic readings of Plank Piece I-II that considered how painful it must have been to pin his body to the wall. He used to tell people that it was much more impersonal, merely “a relationship between a wall, a plank, and a body. I was very dry about it.” Ray is less dogmatic about the work now. Indeed, Plank Piece I-II can read as embodied artistic strife: a creator becoming overwhelmed and dominated by his material.

Pepto-Bismol in a Box (1988)

This sculpture is quite literally what its title implies. Artist Mike Kelley once wrote that the work “seems to conflate minimalist sculpture and the vomitoriums of ancient Roman arenas.” Kelley focused on the rarity of the color pink in contemporary work; in his mind, Ray’s brightly hued sculpture implies a perversity, and an unmasking of the art world’s “masculine orientation.” Ray offers a more prosaic story. “I think one season there was a bad flu around,” he says, simply. “Marble was ubiquitous at the time: in counters, bathrooms, and stalls. Pepto-Bismol is a popular cure for nausea—and the sculpture, that volume of [the medicine], kind of causes nausea.” Is there an irony that something that was supposed to cure nausea would then induce it? According to Ray, if that’s the case, then the piece failed: He wants his sculpture to transcend irony. In all his work, he aims for what he terms “sculpturalness” to surpass any literal reading that would too easily allow a viewer to derive a clear, one-note message from a piece. The meaning, he says, should simply derive from the sculpture itself. “The poetry I’m creating is sculptural rather than verbal,” he explains.

Firetruck (1993)

Charles Ray, Firetruck, 1993. © Charles Ray. Courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery.

This 12-by-46.5-by-8-foot replica of a toy fire truck, made from painted aluminum, fiberglass, and plexiglass, turns a child’s plaything into life-sized artifice (and art). Ray has generally chosen to park the sculpture out in front of museums, such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Whitney, where the sculpture’s presence begs the question—where’s the fire? No matter what kind of metaphorical blaze the truck could potentially put out, it’s incapable of doing anything besides sitting on the street: After all, it’s just a sculpture (and modeled off a toy, no less,branded “Tylink” with the words “Metal Muscle” across its wheels). The work evokes all the action that would attend a real fire truck’s arrival on-site, while reveling in its own inefficacy. These considerations bring the viewer back to a central question within Ray’s work: What can sculpture actually do?

Family Romance (1993)

Charles Ray, Family romance, 1993. © Charles Ray. Courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery.

Ray isn’t a fan of Freudian, psychological readings of his work. Yet eying this painted-fiberglass and synthetic hair sculpture of four naked family members at disconcerting scale—the children enlarged and the adults shrunk, so that everyone stands at roughly the same height—it’s difficult not to consider what kind of complexes an analyst might ascribe to the whole thing. With hands clasped, the figures form a familial barricade; the viewer can only walk around the quartet, which turns them into a single, impenetrable system (which is kind of how contemporary post-Freudian therapists think about families anyway).

Hinoki (2007)

Charles Ray, Hinoki, 2007. © Charles Ray. Courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery.

This sculpture of a giant, fallen tree, when situated within a gallery space, evokes both the natural world’s destruction and art’s preservative powers. The piece began with a dead oak tree that Ray spotted while driving along California’s central coast. Ray retrieved it in order to cast its form in silicone and fiberglass. He then employed woodworkers in Japan to carve a replica from a Japanese cypress, or hinoki tree. After 400 years, it’ll decay—sharply at first, and then more gradually. The final work, then, is two layers removed from its original source material. Ray, whose casts were doubtless impacted by his own emotional response to the object, allowed a disinterested party on the other side of the world to render the final piece. (Plenty of sculptors use fabricators, but the coldness of, say, a Jeff Koons balloon dog or a Donald Judd box is replaced here with something warmer and earthier.) For millennia, philosophers have wrestled with the idea of “tree-ness,” or just what constitutes the “form” of a tree. Ray’s art—sculpture about sculpture (and, in this case, about life and death, too)—grapples with the same issues. What makes this carved hinoki wood a sculpture, while the original fallen oak is not? Will Hinoki still be a sculpture (or the same sculpture) when it decomposes?

Young Man (2012)

Charles Ray, Young man, 2012. © Charles Ray. Courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery.

Far from the idealized male form we traditionally associate with figurative sculpture (see Michelangelo’s David, 1501–04), Ray gives us a shaggy-haired guy who bulges a bit at the hips. Like most of Ray’s figures, he’s not on a pedestal, but merely standing barefoot and naked in the gallery on the same level as his viewers. His weight is real, though: The solid stainless steel work clocks in at 1,500 pounds. The model for the piece is Ry Rocklen, a Los Angeles-based artist who is a former student and friend of Ray’s. Smooth, shiny, and grounded, his likeness is far more approachable than anything from antiquity.

Reclining Woman (2018)

Charles Ray, Reclining Woman, 2018. © Charles Ray. Courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery.

Made out of a machined block of steel, Reclining Woman features a smooth, shiny sculpture of a woman lying on a large steel box. The work took Ray seven or eight years to complete. “I’d look at it and think about it, change a direction, think about a toenail, think about an involuntary gesture of the toes in relationship to her squint,” he says. The extensive process required photographs and casts of thesubject; computer modeling; real clay and plaster mock-ups; a machine-foam prototype; and many assistants’ hands. The final piece asks the same question with which so many artists are still consumed: Is there anything new to do with the female nude? This time, thejust-larger-than-life woman gets a solid steel pedestal that’s even larger than she is. It’s as though Ray conjoins two different sculptures: one minimalist and abstract, the other figurative and uncanny. But it’s the body we remember.

from Artsy News

#Artsy News

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yourlittlestarlight-blog · 7 years ago

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I Have Blood In My Poop!

You probably don’t want to yell “I have blood in my poop!” when you’re standing in a crowd. However, if you turn around one day and see bloody stools in the toilet, it’s certainly something you might be screaming inside your head. Seeing blood is bad enough, seeing your own blood is worse. When you start seeing blood in your poop, that’s gone too far. If you’ve just exclaimed to yourself, “I have blood in my poop!”, what could be the problem? What should you do?

There are actually quite a few reasons why you might have blood in your poop. Some of them could be serious. Most of them are not. The first thing you need to ask yourself is, “How do I know it’s blood?” You may not have realized this before, but there are actually several foods that can make your poop look bloody. Tomatoes and beets can turn your stools red. That makes sense now that you think about it, doesn’t it? Other possibilities include blueberries, licorice, iron supplements, Pepto-Bismol–all of these can turn your stools black, which looks a lot like blood in your poop. So the first thing you need to eliminate as a cause is your diet. Have you eaten any of these foods or taken any of these substances in the last 18 hours?

If food is not the cause of your strange-looking stools, then you probably should accept the likelihood that you actually do have blood in your poop. By itself, this certainly isn’t the end of the world. But here’s the thing–you need to call up your doctor and tell him, “I have blood in my poop!” Or, you might want to wait until you’re back in one of those private exam room. It’s your decision. But don’t delay making an appointment to see your doctor. Most causes of blood in your poop are minor. But it’s important for you to know for sure.

The very first thing that your doctor will want to know is what color your stools were. The obvious answer is “red,” but not all bloody poop is red. The actual color depends on where the problem is. The farther up your digestive tract the bleeding is occurring, the darker the blood will be. You see, as blood passes through your intestines, bacteria works to digest it like food. The chemical changes that bacteria cause darkens the color of the blood. The longer it stays inside your body, the darker it gets.

So what does this all mean? Well, bright red blood in your stool most likely was added just before exiting your body. The most common causes of bright red blood in your poop are hemorrhoids and anal fissures. Hemorrhoids can begin to bleed when you strain during a bowel movement or even when you wipe a little too roughly. Anal fissures are also quite sensitive to straining and may cause you to have bloody poop. If this is the cause of your problem, the doctor will probably encourage you to drink more fluids and deal with any possible causes of constipation. Another remedy that will provide great results is a colon cleanse. Natural colon cleaners help to remove old waste matter that may be contributing to your constipation.

Darker blood in your stools means that the cause is more likely in your stomach or small intestine. One of the most common causes of blood from your stomach is a bleeding ulcer. Although this sounds dangerous, it’s often a result of taking medication. Even over-the-counter medications like aspirin or ibuprofen can lead to ulcers that cause no pain but that bleed into your digestive tract. If your doctor believes that this is a likely cause, he may recommend a change in medications.

Why is it so important to tell your doctor about blood in your poop? The problem could be caused by bleeding from intestinal polyps. Polyps are not that dangerous by themselves, but there is a possibility that polyps could develop into colon cancer. This type of cancer is much more likely in people over age 50. If that describes you, then you should not hesitate to get screened for colon cancer. Although colon cancer is one of the major cancer killers, it’s also very easy to prevent. By discovering and removing polyps before they turn cancerous, colon cancer can be completely prevented. Whenever you notice anything that might indicate digestive tract bleeding, call your doctor immediately and tell him, “I have blood in my poop!”

Ata Rehman

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yourabsentgod-blog · 7 years ago

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I Have Blood In My Poop!

Ata Rehman

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freedomopinion-blog1 · 7 years ago

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Date: 2017-03-29 21:00:00

From iridescent bismuth used in beauty products to stormy black opal, here are 23 Of The Most Unique Looking Minerals. Geology can be cool too! Subscribe for new videos Monday Wednesday and Friday! 9. Bismuth You may or may not have come across this rainbow element but chances are you probably just don’t know it. It has a few pharmaceutical applications, most notably Pepto-Bismol and can be found in your cosmetics that have an iridescent glow. 8. Fluorite This mineral comes in a wide array of colors and actually has the same amount of color when it is put under ultraviolet light and gives off a fluorescent glow. That’s probably why this mineral has been named “the most colorful mineral in the world.” 7. Opal This special one of a kind opal appears as if it’s housing a smaller replica of the ocean inside of it. It could be just a type of reaction that is known to be caused by some type of jaspers. 6. The Empress of Uruguay This amazingly massive geode mineral can be found on display in Brisbane, Australia. It contains thousands of tiny amethyst crystals and weighs around 2.5 tons. It was discovered in Brazil and Australia paid $75,000 US dollars for it with an additional $25,000 to have it shipped. 5. Chalcedony Nodule This type of mineral has quite a number of variations ranging from Onyx to Heliotrope. Their appearance is mostly described as having a waxy luster to them and translucent. It’s earliest uses have been dated all they way back to 1800 BC. 4. Black Opal These wondrous beauties look like they’re brewing up a storm. Black opal is considered by many to be the rarest variation of opal out there and is only found in the few regions of Australia, The United States, Ethiopia, and Mexico. 3. Opal Fossil Nature is pretty amazing, to be honest but then it goes and does things like this to remind us just how amazing it really is. The fossil has managed to produce opal inside of its cracks and crevices. We aren’t geologists so don’t ask us how. 2. The Fire Opal Look at this magnificent piece of a mineral! Seriously, it looks like there’s a tiny sunset going down in this thing. This has got to be worth some major cash but honestly, how could you part from something so stunning to look at? Before we reveal number one, let us know in the comments below which one of these minerals you thought was the best and don’t forget to subscribe! And now... 1. The Contra Luz Opal This ethereal beauty was discovered back in 2013 when it was unearthed in Opal Butte, Oregon. If you look closely, it almost looks like there’s a mini nebula trapped within. The appearance is thanks to the Jaspar that is located inside of it. It sold for exactly $20,000 and weighed 119.0 karats.

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apologiestomyexboss · 7 years ago

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Sorry you don’t trust me or anyone else

Dear X,

I don’t think of you very often anymore, which is a sign I am healing, but when I do think of you, it’s usually a bad memory of something you have done to abuse me or damage our relationship and the work we were doing. I’m apologizing today because you don’t trust me or anyone else.

It’s sad that you don’t trust others, but you just don’t. I’m not sure where this lack of trust comes from, since I put up with your demoralizing behavior for years before doing anything about it. I remained steadfast in my devotion to our product and to trying to improve our relationship by looking at my own behavior (which is a classic behavior of someone who is abused) to no avail.

Over time, your lack of trust for me and all the other members of our team slowed the development of our product and created a culture of blame on our team that exists even today. Here are the ways you have shown a complete lack of trust in me or your other team members:

You question everything I do and say, down to email syntax or specific tasks. I’ve talked before about your toxic micromanagement problem and I think part of the cause of that woeful behavior is a real lack of trust for people. You try to mask your constant questioning by saying things like “I’m someone who needs a lot of information and I like to understand all of the details.” That’s just your way of deflecting or explaining away your lack of trust. Why do you need to know every single detail? You’re a director-level manager. You need to be thinking about strategy, not what color pen someone is using. I see you regularly attacking people over syntax of emails or order of tasks that a person is doing. Why do you care? Did the email include multiple swear words or the account information of the company’s finances? I feel like those two examples fall totally within your purview to correct for an employee, but getting upset over the syntax of “let me know if you have any questions or concerns” is kind of a waste of time.

You say things like “we need to trust, but verify”, Stop saying this. Just stop yourself. Trust means “faith”. Verify means “test”. “Test” is actually the opposite of “faith”. Ronald Reagan brought this saying into our common vernacular when he was describing a situation involving nuclear weapons. Nothing we do at our company is on the same scale as the threat of a nuclear attack. Not even a little.

You share private details about people to other co-workers and generally gossip about people, even if they are your “friends”. Part of trusting others is being trustworthy yourself. After I left your team, I found out from one of your peers that you shared personal health information about me, information which I told you in confidence, in an attempt to characterize me in a specific light to others in the leadership team. I know now that I’m the fool for trusting you with information like that, especially since you routinely revealed to me in 1-on-1 meetings information about our co-workers’ professional performance and personal lives when you’re unhappy with them. You paint yourself to be professionally and personally someone who understands data privacy, protected health information, and confidentiality, when you have demonstrated time after time that you are not someone who can be trusted with that information.

Loyalty and friendship does nothing to deter you from fucking people over. I mentioned previously your propensity to nuke relationships with trusted friends and colleagues who have been loyal to you. I was your right hand through one of the most politically charged projects in our company’s history and always put your point of view first. I ran through the rain to the pharmacy one time to buy you Pepto Bismol when you were doubled over in pain from your chronic GI issues--even though that very day you had said incredibly rude things to me about the work I was doing to manage our project. I was one of the people who helped bring you back to our company after the start up you went to caught onto your toxic management style and tossed your ass. None of this factored for you when you tried to destroy my reputation to one of the most influential people in my life at the time. I was a complete idiot to think that the same treachery that you used against others before my very eyes would not some day be turned around on me.

I’m not sure what I did to make you feel like you couldn’t trust me. And now, look! Here I am, airing all this dirty laundry about our relationship on the internet. Guess you were right about not trusting me, huh?

Sorry about it.

#longreads #Long Reads #apology #sorry #bad bosses #trust #software #tech #work #career #leadership

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northshoregadgets · 7 years ago

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What Causes Abnormal Dog Stool?

Did you know there are rating systems for the quality and consistency of dog stool? Becoming familiar with the normal consistency, texture and color of dog poop is one way of gauging a dog’s digestive health and recognizing when there might be a problem. There are a couple of different approaches and charts for measuring canine excrement. Popular charts issued by the Waltham Centre for Pet Nutrition and Purina describe similar ranges by shape and texture. The Waltham guide has nine categories and the Purina chart has the familiar seven-point scale.

Whether or not you use a scorecard to rate your dog’s dung, being aware of what’s normal for your dog can give you useful information to share with your vet in the event of troubling alterations, such as:

Diarrhea in dogs

Green dog poop, yellow dog poop or other unnatural dog poop colors

Blood in dog stool

Small, hard feces or constipation in dogs

Let’s look at some of the most common causes of abnormal dog stool!

Diarrhea in dogs

Diarrhea takes a number of forms, from loose stool that emerges long and snake-like to a messy puddle, and falls under two general categories, acute and chronic. Acute diarrhea in dogs is a sudden-onset condition, meaning that there is a rapid transition from solid, well-formed feces. To some extent, regularity is a function of maintaining habits, whether that’s being acclimated to a certain diet or a certain location.

Healthy stool varies in appearance from dog to dog. Photography via Wikimedia Commons.

Any abrupt change in a dog’s food can lead to an episode of acute diarrhea. It is recommended that any such change be managed over the course of several days, during which the new food is combined with the old, giving the dog’s digestive system time to adjust. Anxiety can also cause fecal disruptions; a dog who is not prepared or unused to car or air travel may experience short-term diarrhea as a response to stress. In situations where food or motion is the cause, regular consistency should return within a day or two.

When a dog experiences diarrhea on a regular basis over the course of two or more weeks, it is referred to as chronic diarrhea. Chronic diarrhea in dogs may indicate a number of potentially serious health issues, including organ dysfunction, parasites, and infection. Inflammation or irritation of key organs in the digestive tract, such as the liver, pancreas, or the intestines themselves, can cause extended periods of digestive upset. Chronic diarrhea also tends to present with additional symptoms or complications, such as vomiting, fever, weight loss, or abdominal pain.

Accidentally ingesting parasites or infectious agents can lead a dog to develop chronic diarrhea, and both are key reasons to keep your dog’s food and water dishes clean at home, and to pick up after your dog when you’re out in public. One of the most common parasites involved is the single-celled Giardia, which is found where infected feces contaminate and are ingested from a range of items, from grass to drinking water. Among infectious agents, parvovirus in dogs is particularly dangerous to puppies, and largely preventable with standard combo vaccines.

Green dog poop, yellow dog poop and other weird dog stool colors

Since there are so many potential causes of both acute and chronic diarrhea in dogs, it’s worth taking special note of the relative shape or shapelessness of the feces, as well as its content and color. When dogs poop, they’re not only excreting waste products and indigestible parts of food, but also eliminating internal waste. This internal waste includes dead red blood cells, which come out in feces in the form of bilirubin. In the process of digestion and excretion, bilirubin combines with bile, giving dung its typical brown color.

Sudden changes in dog poop color can be alarming. Photography by Joshua Ganderson on Flickr.

Discoloration in dog poop, particularly if the feces is yellow or green, can be caused by a variety of factors. Yellow stools that have a normal consistency and shape may indicate a simple short-term dietary shift. In cases like these, when things move too quickly through the digestive system to allow bilirubin to pass with feces, poop can take the yellowish tint of bile. Yellow poop can also be the result of liver, bile duct, or gallbladder problems. Green stool or dark green diarrhea may be a result of your dog eating too much grass or plant matter, or a result of ingesting a household toxin or rodenticide.

Dog pooping blood

As disconcerting as it can be to see your dog’s poop change colors, it is startling to witness an episode of hematochezia, or bloody dog stool. Here again, there is no easy answer, as the causes can range from eating a foreign object discovered in the litter bin to colon inflammation. The color of the blood can be an important indicator of the approximate area of the affliction; the more vivid the red, the more likely the source of the problem is in or near the colon. Darker, blacker blood indicates that the problem is higher in the digestive tract and has had time to be digested.

The amount of blood in the dog’s stool, as well as the relative consistency of the poop, are key signs in determining a course of action. For instance, a small streak of blood, seen once on an otherwise normally shaped piece of poop, but not afterward, could signify nothing at all. On the other hand, repeated incidents of bloody diarrhea in the course of a single day should certainly warrant a veterinary consultation. The more senior a dog, the more likely the cause is to be tumor-related; the younger the dog, the more likely the source of bleeding is parasitic.

Constipation in dogs

Any general overview of abnormal dog stool should take into account, not only degrees and colors of wet diarrhea, but also the appearance of small, hard poop. Since nearly 75 percent of normal dog poop is water, struggling to defecate, or producing dry stools with great effort, could be a result of dehydration. Dogs can become constipated by swallowing foreign objects, especially bones or hair. These items can also absorb available water and prevent normal poop formation.

If abnormal dog stool lasts more than a day or two, consult a vet. Photography by Shutterstock.

Regular exercise has an impact on normal stool formation and movement through the digestive system, as does a dog’s diet. Dogs who are overfed, or exclusively fed low-quality dry kibble, may be consuming more fiber and filler than their digestive systems can process. The longer a dog excretes dry feces, or none at all, the greater the chance that constipation can turn into obstipation. Obstipation occurs when difficulty defecating causes a logjam in the colon, and unmoved feces itself causes an intestinal blockage.

Is your dog’s poop normal or not?

It might sound unappealing, even repulsive, but regularly observing and cleaning up after your dog’s poop can be both intimate and comforting. The more familiar you are with the typical appearance and texture of your dog’s feces, the more aware you’ll be when it deviates from the norm. I admit to feeling a sense of satisfaction with my dog’s diet and exercise habits, and with myself as a dog owner, when she is in a good rhythm with her pooping.

Should you notice any of these changes in your dog’s feces for more than a day or two, resist the urge to treat your dog with human medications. Before you dose your dog with something as seemingly innocuous as Pepto-Bismol, consult your veterinarian. The more detail you can provide, including when the changes started and how long they’ve persisted, the better equipped your vet will be to diagnose and treat the underlying issue.

Read more about dog poop on Dogster.com:

13 Ways to Pick Up Dog Poop

All About Dog Gastrointestinal Issues — Diarrhea, Vomiting, Constipation and More

How I Taught My Dogs to Help Me Find Their Poop

About the author: Melvin Peña trained as a scholar and teacher of 18th-century British literature before turning his research and writing skills to puppies and kittens. He enjoys making art, hiking, and concert-going, as well as dazzling crowds with operatic karaoke performances. He has a two-year-old female Bluetick Coonhound mix named Baby, and his online life is conveniently encapsulated here.

The post What Causes Abnormal Dog Stool? appeared first on Dogster.

from Dogster http://ift.tt/1TkZQPQ via http://www.dogster.com

#Pets

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buynewsoul · 7 years ago

Text

What Causes Abnormal Dog Stool?

Diarrhea in dogs

Green dog poop, yellow dog poop or other unnatural dog poop colors

Blood in dog stool

Small, hard feces or constipation in dogs

Let’s look at some of the most common causes of abnormal dog stool!

Diarrhea in dogs

Healthy stool varies in appearance from dog to dog. Photography via Wikimedia Commons.

Green dog poop, yellow dog poop and other weird dog stool colors

Sudden changes in dog poop color can be alarming. Photography by Joshua Ganderson on Flickr.

Dog pooping blood

Constipation in dogs

If abnormal dog stool lasts more than a day or two, consult a vet. Photography by Shutterstock.

Is your dog’s poop normal or not?

Read more about dog poop on Dogster.com:

13 Ways to Pick Up Dog Poop

All About Dog Gastrointestinal Issues — Diarrhea, Vomiting, Constipation and More

How I Taught My Dogs to Help Me Find Their Poop

The post What Causes Abnormal Dog Stool? appeared first on Dogster.

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stiles-wtf · 7 years ago

Text

What Causes Abnormal Dog Stool?

Diarrhea in dogs

Green dog poop, yellow dog poop or other unnatural dog poop colors

Blood in dog stool

Small, hard feces or constipation in dogs

Let’s look at some of the most common causes of abnormal dog stool!

Diarrhea in dogs

Healthy stool varies in appearance from dog to dog. Photography via Wikimedia Commons.

Green dog poop, yellow dog poop and other weird dog stool colors

Sudden changes in dog poop color can be alarming. Photography by Joshua Ganderson on Flickr.

Dog pooping blood

Constipation in dogs

If abnormal dog stool lasts more than a day or two, consult a vet. Photography by Shutterstock.

Is your dog’s poop normal or not?

Read more about dog poop on Dogster.com:

13 Ways to Pick Up Dog Poop

All About Dog Gastrointestinal Issues — Diarrhea, Vomiting, Constipation and More

How I Taught My Dogs to Help Me Find Their Poop

The post What Causes Abnormal Dog Stool? appeared first on Dogster.

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daddyslittlejuliet · 7 years ago

Text

What Causes Abnormal Dog Stool?

Diarrhea in dogs

Green dog poop, yellow dog poop or other unnatural dog poop colors

Blood in dog stool

Small, hard feces or constipation in dogs

Let’s look at some of the most common causes of abnormal dog stool!

Diarrhea in dogs

Healthy stool varies in appearance from dog to dog. Photography via Wikimedia Commons.

Green dog poop, yellow dog poop and other weird dog stool colors

Sudden changes in dog poop color can be alarming. Photography by Joshua Ganderson on Flickr.

Dog pooping blood

Constipation in dogs

If abnormal dog stool lasts more than a day or two, consult a vet. Photography by Shutterstock.

Is your dog’s poop normal or not?

Read more about dog poop on Dogster.com:

13 Ways to Pick Up Dog Poop

All About Dog Gastrointestinal Issues — Diarrhea, Vomiting, Constipation and More

How I Taught My Dogs to Help Me Find Their Poop

The post What Causes Abnormal Dog Stool? appeared first on Dogster.

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jeffreyrwelch · 7 years ago

Text

What Causes Abnormal Dog Stool?

Diarrhea in dogs

Green dog poop, yellow dog poop or other unnatural dog poop colors

Blood in dog stool

Small, hard feces or constipation in dogs

Let’s look at some of the most common causes of abnormal dog stool!

Diarrhea in dogs

Healthy stool varies in appearance from dog to dog. Photography via Wikimedia Commons.

Green dog poop, yellow dog poop and other weird dog stool colors

Sudden changes in dog poop color can be alarming. Photography by Joshua Ganderson on Flickr.

Dog pooping blood

Constipation in dogs

If abnormal dog stool lasts more than a day or two, consult a vet. Photography by Shutterstock.

Is your dog’s poop normal or not?

Read more about dog poop on Dogster.com:

13 Ways to Pick Up Dog Poop

All About Dog Gastrointestinal Issues — Diarrhea, Vomiting, Constipation and More

How I Taught My Dogs to Help Me Find Their Poop

The post What Causes Abnormal Dog Stool? appeared first on Dogster.

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grublypetcare · 7 years ago

Text

What Causes Abnormal Dog Stool?

Diarrhea in dogs

Green dog poop, yellow dog poop or other unnatural dog poop colors

Blood in dog stool

Small, hard feces or constipation in dogs

Let’s look at some of the most common causes of abnormal dog stool!

Diarrhea in dogs

Healthy stool varies in appearance from dog to dog. Photography via Wikimedia Commons.

Green dog poop, yellow dog poop and other weird dog stool colors

Sudden changes in dog poop color can be alarming. Photography by Joshua Ganderson on Flickr.

Dog pooping blood

Constipation in dogs

If abnormal dog stool lasts more than a day or two, consult a vet. Photography by Shutterstock.

Is your dog’s poop normal or not?

Read more about dog poop on Dogster.com:

13 Ways to Pick Up Dog Poop

All About Dog Gastrointestinal Issues — Diarrhea, Vomiting, Constipation and More

How I Taught My Dogs to Help Me Find Their Poop

The post What Causes Abnormal Dog Stool? appeared first on Dogster.

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ladytheresa28 · 8 years ago

Text

The 'Dream Cremes Collection' by allmixeduplacquers.com

Welcome to another edition of my musings and ramblings over nail polish. Not just any polish. Oh no. This is a 12 piece collection by allmixeduplacquers.com, that covers every shade of a typical purple to pink rainbow, and a few segueway colors in-between.

Okay, let me first start by saying that I am a creme polish junkie. I don’t care if it is the most crazy shade of ‘what mutant color is that’?, because if it’s a creme, I’m going to want it. So when this 12 piece collection came up, I said to my husband, 'hold your wallet honey, I’ve got this one.’ Yes, I have an addiction, no, I don’t much care. If I run out of shelf space, closet space, shoe boxes and cubby holes, we will get a bigger house. Actually, thats in the works anyway, But that’s a blog entry for another day. Let’s get started with this incredible 12 piece collection.

Let’s round them up by color and name and describe them. The two purples in this collection are named 'Storms Rolling In" which is the richer and deeper purple, and 'Purple Sunset’ which is the lighter, leaning more lavender colored purple. Each is uniquely beautiful in its own right. They both stamp and watermarble, and they play well together in a gradient.

Next up are the blues. (Colors, not music, stay with me here..)Well, truth be told, one is a beautiful, incredibly gorgeous deep shade of teal and is named 'Blue Lagoon.’ I have a couple of real polishes in my collection, but they lean either to the blue or to the green. This shade of teal, doesn’t need to lean at all, because it’s a stand out teal color all on it’s own. The blue is named 'Picnic Weather’. It’s a lovely sky blue. You ever look into the sky on a sunny day and those big puffy white pillowy clouds are floating by, and the sky is so blue that you find yourself staring at it? This is THAT. In a bottle, for your nails.

Next up are the greens. 'Rolling Meadows’ is a just a crazy beautiful green. There are a ton of greens on the spectrum. From forest green to kelly green to winter green and this, is none of those. This is the green crayon you pull out of the 64 count box of crayons that simply says"green". This is the green of the leaves that spring from the flower seeds you’ve been waiting more than a month to see, so that you know you’ve planted them right. The other green is named 'wheat grass shots. And this is a lighter, softer green. Almost pastel green. Well, it’s the color of what grass shots. I’ve never had one before, but I’ve seen them being made. It’s a very lovely pale green.

There is only one yellow in this collection and it is named 'Lemon Drop.’ I love this yellow. It’s a really richer yellow that has depth to it. It’s one of my favorite colors in this entire collection.

Next up, the oranges. 'Mango Salsa’ is an orange, that just kisses peach, (but doesn’t ask for a sleep over), as a true mango color does. (Sidebar? The one thing about the names of these lacquers is that they give you a pretty good idea of what the color is. Which is really nice when it comes to writing about them.) The other orange is named 'Push-Up Pops’ and when I first looked at it, it reminded me of a creamsicle. One of my favorite frosty treats ever invented.

Up next are the pinks. The darker of the two is named 'Strawberry Daquiri’ and it is exactly that color. Never had a Daquiri before? Ohhh, you should. They even make virgin ones without alcohol which are so yummy. Yes, I said yummy. Just keeping it real folks. Also, for future reference, I am so not a pink fan. Pinks generally remind me of Barbie or pepto bismol. And this one does neither. It’s like red has been blended down with white until it’s this incredibly rich bubblegum pink. It’s really quite beautiful. The other is named 'Chilled Watermelon.’ And it looks exactly like the watermelon that’s closest to the rind when it has been chilled. Lastly is 'Raspberry Smoothie and it’s a straight up magenta colored polish. The same color of a raspberry smoothie. Remember what I said about the descriptive names? These are all pretty true to form.

These all watermarble, stamp, gradient, they don’t get muddied when you combine them and they play extremely well together. You can buy them as a single, or in sets of 3 or 6 or you can buy all 12. If nail art is your thing, this one collection will either be a great starter for someone who needs every color, or to add to your collection to fill in the gaps in colors that your collection doesn’t have. Thanks for hanging with me and I’ll catch you next time.

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nofomoartworld · 8 years ago

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Hyperallergic: A Western Cultural History of Pink, from Madame de Pompadour to Pussy Hats

View of the Women’s March on Washington from the roof of the Voice of America building in Washington, D.C. (image via Wikimedia)

Visitors to the official website of the Pussyhat Project are welcomed with an exclamation of color and joy from founders Krista Suh and Jayna Zweiman: “We did it! We created a sea of pink!” And indeed they did. The Women’s March on Washington, D.C., and the 600 allied marches across the United States and the world, drew between 3.3 and 4.6 million protesters, making it one of the largest single-day demonstrations in the nation’s history. Suh and Zweiman launched the Pussyhat Project in advance of the march with the goal of having one million hats on hand, and their website includes PDF patterns for knit, sewn, and crocheted versions, which have collectively been downloaded more than 100,000 times. The resulting sea of cat hats caused a run on pink yarn across the country and quickly became a powerful visual shorthand for this particular swath of anti-Trump protest movements.

The message of the color pink is so powerful that it rarely needs explanation. We all know what it implies: it’s feminine, frilly, cheery, and delicate, certainly not a color we expect to see on, say, the cover of a scientific journal. It is often used to stand in for character development, as in the 2001 movie Legally Blonde, in which it’s implied that the pink-clad sorority girl Elle Woods, who carries a pink-accessorized chihuahua for good measure, can’t possibly be serious about applying to Harvard Law School. A claque of superficial teenage girls is similarly characterized in the 2004 film Mean Girls (“On Wednesdays, we wear pink,” says the alpha.) Unlike red, which flexibly symbolizes both Communism and the GOP, pink is so precisely coded that it’s almost impossible to misunderstand its intent. For this reason, pink tends to be either loved or loathed.

This happened yesterday in San Francisco! Were you there? We see a mini sea of pink. Resist, dear ones. And may we never stop Stefan Ruenzel

A post shared by Pussyhat Project (@p_ssyhatproject) on Feb 12, 2017 at 5:04am PST

The Women’s March managed the tricky feat of eliciting criticism from both the right and the left, and one of the themes of that criticism has been the Pussyhat Project, and its signature color, in particular. A week before the March, Petula Dvorak admonished her readers in the Washington Post: “Please, sisters, back away from the pink.” Dvorak argued that pussy hats risked trivializing the message of the Women’s March, and she focused much of her critique on their color and crafting. Her language is telling: She writes of “pink pussycat hats, sparkly signs, and color-coordinated street theater,” as well as “she-power frippery,” then goes on to describe the imagined march as “an unruly river of Pepto-Bismol roiling through the streets.” Noting that the issues at stake for women in the Trump era are “serious stuff,” Dvorak makes the case for equal pay and reproductive rights, asserting her feminist bona fides, then goes on to mock pussy hats as “totally clever and cute and fun” — a clear dig based on negative stereotypes of young women’s speech. And in his predictably tone-deaf post-mortem of the march in the New York Times, the conservative opinion writer David Brooks proposed that the whole exercise was mired in the dead-end rituals of lefty identity politics and that its props and crutches were distractions disguising a lack of real substance from which a coherent anti-Trump agenda might arise. He singles out “pink hats” for disdain, and his lack of any descriptors to characterize them makes his logic clear: It goes without saying that pink is unserious. But why?

Portrait of Madame de Pompadour by Maurice Quentin de la Tour, painted between 1748 and 1755, Musée du Louvre (via Wikimedia)

Pink’s cultural history is complicated. Its first real moment in the spotlight was during the European Rococo period, when it became a favorite hue for fashion, confections, tableware, and the lighthearted frolicking depicted in the Romantic paintings of Jean-Antoine Watteau and Jean-Honoré Fragonard. Madame de Pompadour, the chief mistress of Louis XV, famously loved pink clothes, and she commissioned a bright pink porcelain service from Sèvres, which developed a new color for the set called Rose Pompadour in 1757. But throughout this period, pink was more strongly associated with style and luxury than with a particular gender. Quoted in a 2013 article in The Atlantic, fashion historian and Director of the Museum at FIT Valerie Steele notes that “in the 18th century, it was perfectly masculine for a man to wear a pink silk suit with floral embroidery.” Pink was still understood primarily as a paler version of red — a bold, even bellicose color that had military associations.

Soft-paste porcelain Potpourri vase, Sèvres Manufactory (French, 1740–present), modeled by Jean-Claude Duplessis (French, ca. 1695–1774, active 1748–74), ca. 1757–58, Gift of Samuel H. Kress Foundation, 1958 (image via Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Even more surprising is the fact that light blue — which, as many a modern-day sex-reveal cake will confirm, is virtually synonymous with the phrase “it’s a boy!” — was more strongly associated with female children until just after World War II. Sociologist Jo B. Paoletti, whose book Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys from the Girls in America traces the history of color and gender in children’s clothing, writes that for most of the 19th century, the go-to color for dressing infants of both sexes was white. This was partly for practical reasons: Dyes during this period were apt to fade with repeated washing, particularly the boil-washing and bleaching required to keep baby clothes clean, so there wasn’t much point in spending money on fashionably hued garments for infants. The second reason is that, at the time, babies’ perceived gender ambiguity was viewed not as a problem to be solved with a color-coded headband, but as a virtue to be cherished and protected. Gender was understood as a component of adult sexuality, which in turn was considered taboo in the context of young children. If prepubescent children were “innocent,” they were to be only vaguely gendered. As color became a potent branding tool in the first decades of the 20th century, pink and blue emerged as interchangeable colors for children’s clothing and nursery décor, along with pale yellow and green. And sometimes pink was perceived as more appropriate for little boys, owing to its relationship to the robust and “masculine” red. But, according to Paoletti, well into the 1920s, there was little consensus on the part of department stores and women’s periodicals as to which color was properly assigned to which gender, and many parents simply gravitated to whatever looked more attractive on their child.

How and when did this change? “There was no sudden, unanimous cultural shift,” Paoletti writes in Pink and Blue. “It evolved over decades. At the same time, clothing manufacturers did their best to anticipate those choices better than their competitors and to shape those choices in order to make them more predictable and profitable.” In other words, it may not have happened overnight, but it was clearly the influence of manufacturing and marketing in the postwar United States that caused the gendered assignments of pink for girls and blue for boys to stick for good.

Print ad for Hotpoint Stoves, 1956 (image via Flickr)

Pink emerged as one of the dominant hues in the 1950s at precisely the moment when American women were whisked off the wartime assembly line and back into the kitchen. Thanks to the postwar proliferation of suburban tract housing with brand new appliances in fashion colors, American homes simultaneously became more explicitly gendered and more actively color-coded than ever before. In her book The Color Revolution, design historian Regina Lee Blaszczyk finds one of the earliest moments of pink’s emergence in, of all places, the preppy men’s retailer Brooks Brothers, which in 1949 opened a department store just for women on 5th Avenue and introduced a popular line of pink blouses that got major publicity in the fashion press. This, combined with First Lady Mamie Eisenhower’s fondness for a shade that became known as “First Lady Pink,” helped propel the color into American shops and homes. Unlike Italian fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli’s version, Shocking Pink, which enjoyed a somewhat avant-garde moment in the late 1930s, First Lady Pink was soft and subdued.

Mamie Eisenhower in her inaugural gown, painted in 1953 by Thomas Stevens (via Wikimedia)

After pink conquered the fashion world, Blaszczyk writes, Armstrong premiered pink vinyl flooring and General Electric started selling “Petal Pink” appliances. Scores of competitors quickly followed suit. For women in the 1950s who were old enough to remember cast iron stoves, a pink cooktop and a matching floor would have been a revelation. The novel colors and sleek designs of the postwar period transformed kitchens from hot, uncomfortable workspaces into natural extensions of a feminized, comfortable, and stylish home. “Linked with the idea of female childhood,” writes Penny Sparke in her 1995 book As Long as It’s Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste, “[pink] represented the distinctive gendering that underpinned 1950s society, ensuring that women were women and men were men. Gendering had to start at an early age, and parents were the key role models. The use of pink in the home emphasized the essential femininity of girls and women, and it showed daughters that their mothers understood this and wished them to recognize the distinctiveness of their gender as well.” Unsurprisingly, one of the main critiques of the limits of postwar life for middle-class American women was that it was akin to playing house. Betty Friedan famously characterized housewives as “childlike” and “passive” in The Feminine Mystique in 1963.

With pink’s complex lineage, it’s useful to think of its cultural footprint as intersectional. While its feminine association with gender is now unquestioned, it’s also a symbol, perhaps more crucially, of age. More than womanhood per se, pink represents girlhood, and it can be understood as a gendered yet asexual marker of femininity. Like the all-in-white infants of the 19th century, today’s little girls are awash in pink — a global phenomenon beautifully captured by the South Korean artist JeongMee Yoon in her “Pink and Blue Project.” But adult women are pinkified, too: The Breast Cancer Awareness movement has all but co-opted pink through advertising, product design, and even museum exhibition sponsorship, as in the well-received 2013 show Think Pink, which was on view at the MFA Boston in October 2013 (during Breast Cancer Awareness month). When we seek a pretty razor with a built-in dab of sweet-smelling moisturizer, we pay the “pink tax” to buy a product for women that’s nearly identical to its dark blue or steel gray (and less expensive) male counterpart.

JeongMee Yoon, “The Pink Project II: Lauren & Carolyn and Their Pink & Purple Things” (2009), light jet print (image courtesy of the artist)

So as consumers and activists today, when we embrace pink, are we proudly reclaiming a color that has been unfairly maligned and prone to sexist ridicule, or are we just falling into an advertiser’s trap? And conversely, when we denigrate pink, are we simply being reactionary, carping about an innocuous cultural trait the way radio listeners complain about vocal fry? It’s impossible to untangle the 1950s gendering campaign that made pink so pervasive from the sexism inherent to the era. We can’t know if we perceive pink the way we do because it became associated with women, or indeed if it became associated with women because it had been associated with childhood, and housewives were not perceived as fully adult. This netherworld of the not-quite-grownup woman is evident in pink’s cultural symbolism even now. While breasts are as sexualized as ever in popular culture, the Breast Cancer Awareness movement’s devotion to pink seems like a clear attempt to recast an illness that primarily afflicts a female erogenous zone (although men can also suffer from breast cancer) as something girlish, even prepubescent. Likewise, the Pussyhat Project took its name from the Access Hollywood tapes that record Donald Trump describing how and where a male celebrity can “grab” women. Though they have been referred to as “vagina hats” by critics on the right, in an attempt to vulgar-shame the protesters, the hats themselves, handmade and cozy, are more akin to stuffed animals than sultry clothing.

WOW Um, good morning! We woke up and there were #pussyhats on @theviewabc! Photo by @the_lemonade_shop

A post shared by Pussyhat Project (@p_ssyhatproject) on Jan 18, 2017 at 10:25am PST

I personally like pink quite a bit, even as I’m keenly aware of the machinations of the pink-industrial complex. On one hand, I resent the implication that women are being silly when they wear pink, and on the other, I resent the notion that girlishness is itself synonymous with frivolity. I happen to have been a pretty serious little girl, even as I wore pink stirrup pants in the 1980s. Yet we tie ourselves in knots trying to outrun the misogyny that’s both within and outside us. As the symbol of Code Pink and Act Up’s iconic and highly effective Silence = Death campaign, which referenced the pink triangle that was used by Nazis to identify gay men in concentration camps during World War II, pink has done some serious heavy lifting in social justice movements. It may do us all some good to reconsider pink as an unironic color of protest, and in doing so, to help exorcise some of our impulses to denigrate the color of girlhood. Since its cousin red is the color of war, I like to think that pink could become the hue of nonviolent battle, and that learning to embrace it may be a very small first step toward ending the war on women for good.

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