A beautiful salesman sample book with twenty hooked rug designs, each hand-painted in miniature by a Massachusetts woman by the name of J. A. Harlow. Not only are the samples beautiful and creative, they are rendered here in remarkable detail. Note prices! One of my favorite book titles is Anonymous was a Woman which detailed the extraordinary "women's work" created by artists who never signed their needlepoint, quilts, rugs and such. In this case, there is a name. The paintings are so beautiful, each could stand alone as a piece of wall art. The salesman sample book also has numerous descriptions, instructions to order, and not surprisingly a note to return the book in good condition! "Please be careful of it" reads one. I will.
J. A. Harlow's Homemade Salesman Sample of Hooked Rugs Collection Jim Linderman
One of the tenents of librarianship is privacy. It's why I love librarians...you can ask them ANYTHING and they won't spill the beans. Privacy, the right which we have almost given away for free (witness the growth of Facebook, where one is asked to indicate their "status" on a minute by minute basis for advertisers and anyone else, including divorce lawyers, to plunder). Trust me, all those status updates will come back and chew you a new one someday.
Librarians used to only very, very reluctantly give up circulation records to the feds, even Oswald's! But today folks willingly click "I am reading so and so" instead of keeping their knowledge quests private. For librarians, a noble profession with noble rules, intellectual freedom was paramount.
For decades the only bugaboo in the library privacy record was the checkout card. Anyone could see who else read the book, or at least carried it home. My mother, herself a junior high librarian in her day, used to say every book she checked out had my name on the card. He said modestly. Eh...there were no books about Marxism in the junior high anyway, I found those in high school. Today, I am trying hard to fill my kindle so I can justify buying the new one.
These lovely relics come to me from artist Mary Gibney, and they come with a good story. I received an email from Mary about my recent post of mug shots. It is always nice to receive notes with comments and such, but this one was different. It came from an artist who PAINTS mug shots! I can get behind that...how many cool ideas are left, after all? Mary Gibney found one, and she is doing a good job with it.
Ms. Gibney and I exchanged a few pleasantries, and that she had this collection of library checkout cards came up...so I finagled a few for the blog. They are lovely and odd, and I can't thank Mary enough for sharing. She also has an overdue notice for Victorian potboiler "The Magnificent Ambersons" which is surprising as the filmed version is so, so much better. At least the first three minutes of it. (Seriously!) Why anyone would struggle with the book when an Orson Welles masterpiece is available is beyond me.I have also cribbed a handful of Gibney's splendid mug shot work. She really deserves a post of her own here, and one day I hope to.
Gibney has a long exhibition history HERE and seems to be doing quite well selling her work. As you can see, the mugshots are done of both celebs and regular mugs, and she has also done a series of works based on the faces shot by Weegee. Gibney is a Minneapolis artist, cyclist, library worker (ah HA!) and collector of odd objects, scraps and castoffs. As becomes an artist, she has a statement.
"I rely on intuition, mixing up, shapely objects, found bits and ephemera, the arcane and the obsolete, mistakes and fortunate convergences. I am fascinated by mugshots, anonymous faces and abandoned photos which I use to make portraits of unknown people. Other inspirations are maps, children's encyclopedia illustrations, paint color chips, sideshow art and theatrical illusions, old toys and unnecessary objects, handwritten signs, ads from old Popular Mechanics and Ladies Home Journals and mid-20th century illustrations of the wonderful future."
Mary Gibney Website HERE
Vintage Library Circulation Cards collection Mary Gibney Paintings by Mary Gibney Private CollectionsJim Linderman books and Ebooks HERE
Today's "book review from the past" is in fact an artist review and it isn't from the past, as David Bates is doing quite well. The first time I saw a David Bates painting was at the Whitney Biennial in 1987 where it stuck out from the conceptual art like a big red mistake-smashed thumb. I don't remember what it was called, but it depicted a HUGE square-jawed Goober in a red flannel shirt, a logger I think, or a fisherman, with giant gobs of oil paint slopped on actual canvas. He was holding a fish in each hand which looked like they came out of a radioactive pond, and Gomer seemed proud, curious, ashamed and, well...real all at the same time. I remember it making the whole place smell of paint. It was like painting had returned somehow to an art museum. In my mind still it sits between Marsden Hartley and Red Grooms and they are both looking up at it grinning. I show it here from a catalog I own, when I bailed out of my three-story walk-up, I wasn't feeling too well and left many of the books behind. But I did box up all my David Bates catalogs.
So among the new-wave and Guerrilla Girls and theorists and critics and Eurocentric noses hung this bigass chunk of solid Southern American Regional blurt. And I loved it.
I have followed his work ever since. I briefly owned a print he made from his early days in Texas, it was a splendid 6 color lithograph of his fishing guide or friend titled "Blue Heaven" and I wish I hadn't sold it two decades ago to meet a month's rent during the summer I was drying out. But things come and go.
David Bates is a long way from that show, but he hasn't changed much. There is a consistent body of goofy glorious work. He'll move from painting to wood to iron then back to canvas and they'll all look the same. He's done a ton of beautiful southern plants, each dripping sweet and fresh...his ham fists make an iris look clumsy and beautiful all at once. Who says painting should be delicate? His is honest, direct and bold as a fat loud neighbor but far from simple.
I have never figured out the relationship Bates has with folk art or primitives. The work is 100% sincere and faux nothing. While frontal and direct, it seems to come more from the type of person he is portraying than any strategy, technique or trick. Honest work by honest folks. And despite the often "over-friendly" simple things he paints, there is no satire or irony. Real is good, and for 25 years David Bates has painted real good.It is a curious thing to stop one moment and realize you have had a "favorite artist" for two decades. It is also nice to have a small, tiny forum in which to share it. I once realized there were about only three things I have kept from my drunk days...Dylan, George Jones and David Bates. A back-handed compliment, but it is the truth. The gentleman above with the perfect guitar is a bonus, Johnny Shines, a blues singer who crooned and quivered like a bird. A few years ago I was able to go to an opening of his work and meet Bates briefly... he had moved uptown since I used to see his shows at Charles Cowles Gallery in Soho. He was kind and a gentleman but nervous in a suit. I think he would be more comfortable in a flannel shirt.
Jim Linderman
Dull Tool Dim Bulb BOOKS HERE
