NARCISSISTIC EXPRESSION

We all do it - self-portraits that is - whether we use reflection or shadow as our means or merely extend one arm outward as an organically connected tripod.


Self-Portrait, holding Polaroid SX-70 Alpha, Encino, CA 2006

This is the image that I use the most online as the photographic representation of me (it's the image that greets you here on my blog, and on my flickr and twitter feeds) is a self-portrait that I shot in one of the bathrooms of my house. I like bathroom light, sometimes it reminds me of candlelight and it's usually a little softer and moody and the mirrors usually provide nice soft fill light. Holding my beloved Polaroid SX-70 Alpha in one hand, I used my other hand to hold my Polaroid SLR 680 SE and take the photo. I had to try it several times to get the expression and framing just right. I like how my eye connects with the viewer and that my expression is sexy and assured. I'm wearing no makeup whatsoever - what you see is what you get - natural me. But there are some tricks too, by using a slightly higher angle, I get more definition around the jaw line and eliminate any double chin. I like this picture the best because it distills me best as how I see me.

The reason I bring up self-portraits is that yesterday I saw The Sum of Myself: Photographic Self-Portraits from the Audrey and Sydney Irmas Collection at BCAM (Broad Contemporary Art Museum). The exhibition's last day is tomorrow, January 3, so I urge you to go this weekend. LACMA & BCAM have a great pay what you wish policy after 5pm, so you can even go for free or a slight donation.

Strangely, BCAM doesn't have an actual webpage devoted to the exhibit, but if you go here, you can scroll down and find a blurb about it. There's also a link here to the Irmas' collection online that has more info and photos.

What really struck me about the collection is the extra creativity people have when photographing themselves. Nearly all the shots represent truly thinking outside the box. Plus it's a chance to see prints from amazing photographers including Nan Goldin, Robert Mapplethorpe (represented in a self-portrait as a young man in drag and in a second intense portrait near the end of his life when ravaged by AIDS), Andre Kertész (the master of working with distortion from mirrors), Catherine Opie, William Wegman, Diane Arbus, Weegee, Walker Evans, and Lee Friedlander (whose buzz cut shadow self-portrait on the back of a woman's head and fur coat was pure genius). Honestly there's so much incredible work in this exhibit that it's the kind of show that gives me the good kind of headache that comes from inspirational overload.

Here are a bunch of my self-portraits:


Self-portrait, costumed as Andy Warhol for Halloween, Woodland Hills, CA 2006


Self-portrait, top of a boulder at Stoney Point, Chatsworth, CA 2009


Self-portrait, ornament on the Venice Canal, Venice, CA 2008


Self-portrait, mirror in antique shop, Oatman, AZ 2009



Self-portrait, mirror at Bagdad Cafe, Amboy, CA 2009


Self-portrait, reflected off a building at the Getty Center, Los Angeles, CA 2009


Self-portrait, mirror on trolley in Beverly Hills, CA 2009


Self-portrait, Stoney Point, Chatsworth, CA 2009


Self-portrait, shadow behind Tom's Welding, Barstow, CA 2009

And here are some self-portraits on display in The Sum of Myself: Photographic Self-Portraits from the Audrey and Sydney Irmas Collection at BCAM (Broad Contemporary Art Museum).


Clockwise from top: Nan Goldin, Self Portrait in the Mirror at the Lodge, Belmont, MA, 1998, Diane Arbus, Self Portrait in Mirror, 1945 (detail), Robert Mapplethorpe, Self Portrait, 1988. All images in this post: The Audrey and Sydney Irmas Collection
(Image pulled from the LACMA blog UNFRAMED)


Bruce Nauman, Study for Holograms, 1970, Catherine Opie, Self Portrait, 1993
(Image pulled from the LACMA blog UNFRAMED)

SUBURBAN 'STANG

"Suburban 'Stang"
Polaroid Photo credit © Lydia Marcus 2009 / www.lydiamarcus.com
Photographed May 17, 2009 in Lake Balboa, CA

LUCY THE CHOCOLATE LAB

Lucy is a Chocolate Lab I met a few weeks ago. Lucy's "Mom" Chrystyna and her boyfriend Jorge were walking past my yard and I invited Lucy in to play with Cali. Chyrstyna got Lucy from an ad on Craigslist. The owners had neglected her and were going to dump her at the pound and they were threatening to put her down if no one came to get her! She's only a year old and she's super sweet and loving and thank God she's out of a place that doesn't care about her into a a loving home that does.

Cali and Lucy have had a few doggie play dates, gone on one off leash hike together (their first!), and today Jorge brought Lucy over so we could bathe Cali & her in my backyard. He helped to hold Cali while I washed her and I held Lucy still while he washed her.

Lucy is a gem and has so much potential. She was overweight when she was adopted and in just a few weeks of regular exercise she's already trimmed down. She doesn't know a lot of commands (I think sit and lie down are it), but today in just a few seconds I was able to teach her "Leave It'. Cali and I are happy to call her a friend.

Here's a cropped version of the first shot.



Lucy has beautiful yellow eyes and a radiant smile. This is how she looks most of the time, ears back and relaxed.





I took a few Polaroids of Lucy and Cali too. It took Jorge and I quite a lot of futzing and commands and treats to finally get them close enough for a side by side portrait, but we finally did it!







Digital and Polaroid Photo credits © Lydia Marcus 2009 / www.lydiamarcus.com
Photographed November 18, 2009 in Encino, CA

CONTINENTAL TRIPTYCH

Polaroid photo credit: © Lydia Marcus 2009 / www.lydiamarcus.com
Photographed May 9, 2009 in Culver City, CA at the Sixth Annual Cruisin' Back to Culver City Car Show

From Hemmings.com:

"Bizarre or beautiful? Lincoln's all-new Mark III, IV and V Continentals upped the ante in luxury motoring. To some, the 1958 through 1960 Lincoln Mark III, IV and V Continentals are under-appreciated middle children, straddling the line between the understated, classic 1956-'57 Continental Mark II and the Camelot-chic 1961 Continental; others consider them the redheaded stepchildren of the 1950s Lincoln line. Whatever your thoughts, there's no escaping these Continentals' advanced unit-body design, massive stretch-out room and distinctive styling. With prices on their forebears and followers rising by the day, now is the time to aim for middle ground and pick up a 1958-'60 Continental."

LANDSCAPED

Polaroid Photo credit © Lydia Marcus 2009
Photographed April 4, 2009 in Encino, CA

GOLDEN BIRD

Pontiac Trans Am Firebird
Polaroid Photo credit © Lydia Marcus 2009
Photographed June 28, 2009 in Van Nuys, CA
At the All GM Car Show

HAPPY 4TH!

Polaroid Photo by © Lydia Marcus
Photographed May 2008 at Los Angeles National Cemetary
Westwood, CA

SO LONG "GOOSE"

Lucy lost her six month battle with Lymphoma today. I adopted her on December 8, 2007 and let her go on June 30, 2009. Words just cannot express how I'm feeling. It's been said that a picture is worth a thousand words, so I'll let this photo taken less than an hour after her passing do all my talking for now.

Lucy The Boxador R.I.P
Photo © Lydia Marcus 2009
Photographed June 30, 2009 in Encino, CA

DOXIE LOVE

Meet my doggie "nieces" Mathilda and Talullah, blue Dachsund sisters that are two months old. Their human mommies are very close friends of mine. They just brought them home yesterday. They're the first blue doxies I've ever seen!

Talullah (on the left in the Polaroid below) is the one that seems the most photo savvy - she stared straight at the camera in practically every shot. Mathilda (on the right) seems to be more shy (or maybe less interested) in the camera. Talullah is larger but a lot more easy going and gentle. Mathilda has an obvious Napolean complex and is a raging little scrapper!


Sheryl & Denny (aka Shirley and Lennard) with their new doggie babies.








Photos by © Lydia Marcus 2009
Photographed in Lake Balboa, CA on June 7, 2009

GOT WINDOWS

Photo by © Lydia Marcus 2009
Photographed May 9, 2009 in Culver City, CA

FLY PEGASUS FLY

Photo by © Lydia Marcus
Photographed February 8, 2009 in Barstow, CA
at Tom's Welding near Route 66

SOMEWHERE IN TIME

1955 Packard Clipper Custom Constellation Polaroid Photo by © Lydia Marcus
Photographed April 4, 2009 in Encino, CA

KITCHEN KITSCH

These are tchotchkes perched on my kitchen window sill. The two female figures belonged to my Mom and were probably a garage sale find. The slender flower vase is either Murano or a look-a-like. It was one of my Mom's favorite pieces and it's always been one of my favorites as well. The lavender jar I recently bought it at an antique shop in Oatman, Arizona while I was on my Route 66 trip. The antique shop had a note next to it that said it was a "ghost town bottle" dug up from an early mining camp in either California, Nevada or Arizona. MOUTARDE DIAPHANE LOUIT FRERES & CO is embossed on the glass. I researched it and apparently this stylized "barrel" shaped bottle dates from the mid-19th century until the early 20th. The last item is a small, cobalt blue glass pitcher with chevron details on each side. It dates back to the 1930's. I always had a thing for cobalt glass so I probably picked it up at an antique shop or garage sale but I have no memory of ever buying it. When I was cleaning out some kitchen cabinets I found it tucked in the back and decided it would go well with the rest of the kitchen kitsch. It sure picks up the afternoon sunlight nicely.

Polaroid Photo by © Lydia Marcus
Photographed March 5, 2009 in Encino, CA

BMW ART CARS @ LACMA

Yesterday I made it over to LACMA to see the four BMW ART CARS on display and I was not disappointed. I had wanted to see Andy Warhol's M1 since I saw a video of him painting it on You Tube last year. The Warhol car in particular is the star of the show - although in a way it looks like someone set a five year old upon the car with finger paints - all together the paint and colors and haphazard nature of the application just make the M1 look like a car in motion even when it's dead stopped. While so many of Warhol's famous silkscreens weren't even made by his own hand (in some ways you could say the manufacture of his art was akin to Ford's Model T production), but here, Warhol painted and designed every inch of the M1 himself by hand. Even his signature on the left side of the rear bumper was signed using his fingertip.



LACMA put out a very nice brochure curated by Christopher Mount, a Design Historian. What Mount says in the intro paragraph just reiterates what I wrote in my previous post about some cars being art.

"In his preface to the catalogue for the 1951 exhibition Eight Automobiles at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Arthur Drexler observed, "Automobiles are hollow, rolling sculpture." Justifying their display in a museum, Drexler summed up his belief that if you could for a moment disregard the functional aspect of cars and instead look at them as works of art, appreciating their beautiful lines and fine craftmanship, you would see them in an entirely new light. Eight Automobiles was in fact the first time an art museum had ever displayed automobiles alongside more conventional works of art, treating them with the respect and regard usually given to sculpture. Countless exhibitions of automobiles in otherwise traditionally fine art museums have taken place since. The BMW Art Car project, which asks artists to transform both series production models and race cars into new "painted rolling sculpture," takes the relationship between art and automobiles to fascinating and unique heights."

Here are some of my digital photos and Polaroids from LACMA plus more text by Chistopher Mount from LACMA's catalogue brochure.

Andy Warhol (USA) 1979 BMW M1 Group 4 Race Version



"For Andy Warhol, the actual painting of the car became a performance piece, done by his own hand live before cameras as a publicity event. Warhol approached the car with a carefree spirit and an uncharacteristic interest in a sort of "action painting." The car, a BMW M1, is covered with multicolored areas of paint that suggest movement (blurred particularly at racing speeds), but also perhaps individual side panels taken from different cars. This greatly oscures the overall form of the car. With the handle edge of the brush, Warhol scraped lines into the painted surfaces, implying wind moving over the surface but also further de-materializing the surface of this fine racing car. "I adore the car," Warhol said after he'd finished. "It's much better than a work of art." Certainly from a formal perspective much differs from Warhol's paintings, which were often achieved with the use of stencils or silkscreens with a prescribed order."













Frank Stella (USA) 1976 BMW 3.0 CSL



"A car enthusiast and collector, Frank Stella employed the most rational approach to the painting of his BMW 3.0 CSL. "My design is like a blueprint transferred to the bodywork," he said, and in fact the graph paper-inspired decoration suggests a two-dimensional drawing inflated to three dimensions. Stella sought inspiration from the car's technical drawings and found this to be the "most agreeable solution." However, this is not truly a technical exercise, and Stella references his own sculptures and drawings with the recurring appearance of the French curve and other forms taken from an architect's drawing table."




Roy Lichtenstein (USA) 1977 BMW 320i Group 5 Race Version



"Like the Stella, Roy Lichtenstein's automobile (BMW 320i) incorporates an artistic vocabulary familiar to him (including Benday dots and flat areas of color), but also adapts to the unusualness of the assignment. He said, "I pondered on it for a long time and put as much into it as I possibly could....I wanted the lines I painted to be a depiction, the road showing the car where to go." Again the modulated strip of color indicates movement and wind traveling from front to back of the car. However, Lichtenstein goes further conceptually: "the design also shows the countryside through which the car has traveled....One could cal it an enumeration of eveyrthing a car experiences - only that this car reflects all of these things before they actually have been on the road." On one side a rising sun, and over the rest a depiction of the natural and physical forces that a car encounters on its daily journeys."





Robert Rauschenberg (USA) 1986 BMW 635 CSi



"Robert Rauschenberg took a completely different approach, not attempting to play with the materiality or non-materiality of the car or suggest speed, wind, or movement like the others. Instead his painting is static and approaches a painted car from an almost educational point of view. "I think mobile museums would be a good idea," he said. "This car is the fulfillment of my dream." Renowned for his use of collage and a multiplicity of materials and forms, Rauschenberg employed a kind of appropriation in his BMW 635 CSi. The most humorous of the automobiles, Rauschenberg painted the hubcaps as though they were fragile antique plates and reproduced Bronzino's famous Portrait of a Young Man on one side of the car and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres' Le Grande Odalisque on the other. In a reference to the posssible ecological damage caused by the proliferation of automobiles, the artist included his own photographs of flowers, trees, and swamp grass to the hood and roof."