Featured Stories in Visual Arts

Piper. Bagpiper. (Photo from Lux Tyro in our Flickr pool.)

An awesome Hipstamatic shot from friend-of-the-site Jennyrh8, in our Flickr pool.

By ChristineMphotos in our Flickr pool.

Our Flickr pool's Chris Blakeley came across this SUV "abandoned maybe fifteen feet away from the top of Queen Anne." Other drivers weren't so lucky.

We're going another way with Glimpses this morning. No snOMG pictures. Pure Kodachrome summer, courtesy of our Flickr pool's Great_Beyond, who writes:

"While summer '10 is all but dead and buried around town, thanks to the lag between me taking Kodachrome pictures and actually developing/posting them, we can still enjoy fragments of it.

Ah, summer...."

Wang Huaiqing (left) and SAM's associate curator of Asian Art, Josh Yiu (Photo: SAM)

You could call him an éminence grise if his hair wasn't so white, but he's not that well known in the U.S., as evidenced by this inaugural-yet-retrospective exhibition. Wang Huaiqing was born in Beijing in 1944, and thanks to his artistic talent was enjoying government-sponsored art education by the age of 12. Later, he studied folk art, architecture, and Western painting, and earned his Master's Degree with his painting "Wind with Aroma."

Now in his mid-60s, Huaiqing is an established master. In the 1990s, if you were in the right place at the right time, you could pick up a Huaiqing for between $3,000 and $10,000. Today, his paintings can sell for over a million dollars.

So while his Seattle Asian Art Museum exhibit is called Wang Huaiqing: A Painter’s Painter in Contemporary China (through April 10, 2011), that's more a reference to his artistic focus than his artworks' general appeal. You can view 25 of the 26 pieces at SAAM; a large scale piece is being shown downtown at SAM. (I'm told the lack of larger pieces is due to the artist's residence not being very large, so no canvases more than about six feet would fit.) That may account over one-quarter of his life's work. 

What people tend to see in Huaiqing's work, at first, is what's not there: Much of the recent art from China has been in understandably belated public dialogue with the Cultural Revolution and Chairman Mao. But Wang Huaiqing's foremost association is with a now-disbanded group of artists called "The Contemporaries," whose manifesto called for, in the classical Confucian mode, "brushing away the ugliness, perversity, and deception, and preserving beauty, warmth, and candor."... (more)

1972 "was a bad year if you hate snow," writes our Flickr pool's shawnmebo. "Let's see what Steve Pool has to say about it." Today a bunch of Canadian cold air heads our way, bringing lots of snow in the mountains. Cliff Mass waves off concerns of Snowpocalypse 2010...mostly, noting that tomorrow we see something "close to a pattern that brings snow...but the models are emphatic that it is too warm over most of the lowlands for snow. The freezing level is at around 2000 ft and the snow level is around 1000 ft. This is close."

You know, it's actually pretty rare that we have a photo of one of our Flickr pool contributors, since usually they're the one behind the camera. But here's elizabethspace, standing on a recent wet day at Olive and Broadway, totally and completely stoked that she just paid off her mortgage! Congrats to Elizabeth for managing to keep her head above water in this economy--she's got better money management skills than this writer for sure (though thankfully, I have no mortgage).

TheQ! brings us glamorous travel photos from far-off, Apple-loving locations...like Bellevue? All in our Flickr pool!.

What baby does to your life. (From Walsh, in our Flickr pool.)

If there's a more fun way than a Remix to visit the monumental Picasso exhibition ongoing at SAM, I'm not sure what it could be, and I suspect it isn't likely to be legal. Museum members get a special entrance and a lounge all their own, but regular people like you and me can also buy tickets (and do, the Remixes frequently sell out) and enjoy the slightly illicit thrill of taking over a museum for the night, having a drink or two, and discovering a wide range of amusements. 

Here's what you missed from last night's extravaganza:

The evening began with people milling about, drinking wine and listening to the marimba-playing, chanson-française-crooning Erin Jorgensen. There was a French culture theme on account of the Picasso exhibit coming from the Musée National Picasso, but it was also Seattle-French, like it had just biked down from Café Presse on Capitol Hill.

After Jorgensen came the Harlequin Hipsters, "Seattle's premiere partner dance improv troupe." That description seems complete but it does leave out the hula hoops.

I am notoriously bad at matching face to names, but if you want to give it a shot, here are the Hipster players. As you can see, they supply the ambiance.

Then arrived the sassiness of the Heavenly Spies, whose can-can dance mastery can be viewed at the Can Can. (That's them in the first photo, up top, too.) Pernod Absinthe was sponsoring the event so as you watched the dancing, a woman circulated among the crowd offering a sample absinthe spoon.

But it was not all DJ TigerBeat's dance music (with impromptu singalong by Seattle's young and chic to "Livin' on a Prayer"); up on the fourth floor you could wander the galleries to harp accompaniment, only to notice the songs were oddly familiar--anything from arrangements of Katrina and the Waves' "Walking on Sunshine" to The Eagles' "Desperado." Chilling.

You could watch video of a Dutch girl very hard trying to sketch a Picasso.

You could play trivia. If you're wondering about the sailor hats at the far table: The first 50 people wearing a sailor's outfit got in free. Almost everything about the museum experience is improved by having 50 people in sailor outfits wandering about.

You could have your portrait taken.

Or you could take the Portrait Challenge, and draw one yourself.

Portrait Challenge accepted! Kanye and bug-Kanye.

Crowds thronged the Picasso exhibit itself, of course. Everyone got a ticket with a 20-minute window, so that you could still move about. The exhibit comes with accompanying audio narration, which you listen to on "wands" that are about the size of an opened clam-shell cell phone. They're very popular, but you can also see that the attentional bottleneck that makes cell phone listeners bad drivers extends to walkers, too. The Remix may be over, but the Picasso exhibit runs through January 17.

Thanks to new TSB Flickr pool contributor Lotus21 for this thought-provoking image.

Do you remember where you were whenever whatever the hell this is happened? Just kidding--another rad photo via a toybox camera filter from Mr. Slightlynorth (actually, that'd be Mr. Shawn McClung) over in TSB's mad-hype Flickr pool.

From zenobia_joy in our Flickr pool.... (more)

Another fine Glimpses-worthy photo from lwestcoat in our Flickr pool.

Don't worry, Seattle--I'm not sure what the title means, either. :-) (From smohundro in our Flickr pool.)

An awesome shot from another TSB Flickr pool newbie, TheQ!. Thanks!

An awesome shot from Mr. Paul Swortz! Just an FYI--as I mentioned yesterday, we're seeing a lot of great photos in our Flickr pool we'd love to use for Glimpses, but it seems like the default settings in Flickr are turning off sharing options. While we love your submissions either way, if you're contributing, please take a moment to check whether your permissions would allow us to use your pics in Glimpses.

From smohundro, in our Flickr pool. Also, a note: we're seeing more and more photos that we'd like to display on the site locked up so that sharing is impossible. This makes our collective heart sink when it happens (denied!) and it also means we spend more time searching for photos. We absolutely respect your care for your photos, but since the goal of this Flickr pool is to highlight them on The SunBreak, please make sure the photos you add are shareable.

It is indeed that time of year! (Thanks to TSB Flickr pool contributor zenobia_joy for the pic).

Ooo! A fish-eye lens shot from TSB Flickr pool newbie abosco--that is, jazz guitarist, composer, and otherwise friend of the site, Andrew Boscardin.

Happy Halloween weekend!

Meet Heather, courtesy of lwestcoat, one of my fave Flickr pool contributors.... (more)

Thanks to Flickr pool contributor BritBeat for this awesome shot of Chase Jarvis's "Seattle 100" project, which you can read all about on TSB here.

Coffee table books, especially ones on photography, are one of my favorite things. So when I heard that Seattle photographer and social artist, Chase Jarvis was due to publish his latest labor of love SEATTLE 100: Portrait of a City, (published by Peachpit, a division of Pearson) it prompted me to get in touch and arrange some time to talk about his passion for democratizing creativity. The book is available now through Amazon, Borders and Barnes & Noble.

The two-hundred-plus page body of work is "a curated collection of leading artists, musicians, writers, scientists, restaurateurs, DJs, developers, activists, entrepreneurs, filmmakers, and more, all of whom are defining and driving culture in Seattle." As Jarvis points out, the list is not the definitive list, but a list and one that he hopes will be expanded through future contributions on the related website.

If you have a similar interest, you’ll agree that it’s a rarity to find a book by a photographer of Jarvis's caliber for such a reasonable price. Then when you learn that Jarvis specifically negotiated the price and committed to donate his proceeds to www.4CULTURE.org , a local non-profit which provides public support of cultural programs, you just feel good about the purchase.

Jarvis's philosophy is broadly appealing. Local businesses Theo Chocolate and Small Lot wine distributors jumped on board with contributions to the project in the form of a special edition chocolate bar and custom blend red and white wines. Darin Williams of Small Lot commented, "It was an easy decision. We signed up for the project because of where the proceeds were going. Generally, people pay attention to where they spend their money to support local businesses that's why I love this community."... (more)