Art

As fond as Kusama: Infinity is of its subject, the film does Yayoi Kusama a disservice by framing her story in a typically American binary notion of success. Apparently, prior to the last few decades of her status as one of the world’s most celebrated living artists, Kusama’s visionary talent was uniformly overlooked and/or disrespected, which is a funny thing to say about someone who spent the ’60s and ’70s exhibiting all over Europe and… See more →

I’m not a math or programming whiz, so my hope for this project is that by demystifying algorithmic art for myself, I can demystify it for others too. twitter.com/robweychert/st…

The first issue creates dozens of images from different stacking orders of a series of striped cards with geometric shapes cut out of them. plusequals.art/01/

Hey, I started a new art zine! plusequals.art

These were part of the path that led me here: cubes-revisited.art

I’m not close to that level, but I’ll pull a thread with a few of my dalliances in the genre.

I’ve never met @beesandbombs but he just wrote my biography. twitter.com/beesandbombs/s…

I began last year’s “That Was 2019” post by expressing disappointment in my immune system’s poor performance that year, so let me begin this year’s wrap-up by praising that same immune system’s effectiveness in 2020. More than 1.8 million people died of COVID-19 in 2020, a disproportionately high 340,000 of them Americans, and I didn’t get so much as a head cold. I spent much of the year being grateful for my health and financial… See more →

A sloppy film in many respects, but its formal shortcomings do little to diminish how fascinating its subject’s single-minded obsession is. Reading some of the more prominent critiques of said subject in the Guardian and the New York Times, which describe Tim Jenison as a philistine whose attempted deconstruction of Vermeer’s technique is an act of denigration, I was struck by how willfully they miss the point. Jenison makes no bones about being a dilettante,… See more →

The year is 2020. Summer is giving way to autumn. COVID-19 will have killed a million people by the year’s end, a fifth of them Americans. Unemployment is soaring. Millions have taken to the streets to protest police brutality and its disproportionate effect on Black people. The west coast is engulfed in the fiercest wildfires it’s ever seen. The sky is orange.

In the face of all this, the President of the United States denies… See more →

Hard to overstate how much Mort Drucker and other Mad Magazine artists made me want to be an artist and make people laugh. RIP ❤️ twitter.com/f_francavilla/…

RIP Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, an artist as unadulterated as they come.

Indulging in a pricey collector’s item is a rare occasion for me, but this LeWitt work is an obsession of mine. cubes-revisited.art

Finally found a copy of the book from Sol LeWitt’s original 1974 Incomplete Open Cubes exhibition that cost less than my rent!

My immune system didn’t do me many favors in 2019. I was sick on five or six separate occasions in the first half of the year, including an obnoxious bout of bronchitis that lasted the entire month of February. Luckily that didn’t stop me from having an adventurous and fulfilling year, and for the first time in my four years at ProPublica, I used every single one of my vacation days.

Projects

My first three… See more →

I finally read @scottmccloud’s Understanding Comics and frankly I’m offended that no educator ever required me to read it.

Can anyone recommend tattoo artists who do architectural designs? Preferably in NYC, but I’ll travel to work with the right person.

Reich Richter Pärt is a pair of collaborations between the American composer Steve Reich, the German painter Gerhard Richter, and the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. I’m an admirer of all three men, so this event was a no-brainer for me, and since I knew Frank would be into it too, I invited him along as a belated birthday gift.

The first performance pairs Pärt’s 2014 choral piece, Drei Hirtenkinder aus Fátima, with wallpapers and tapestries… See more →

“To me, that combination of many things — of not being tied to one particular tool — is where the power often lies.” brendandawes.com/blog/youarenot…

Everyone please continue making colorful geometric confections and I will continue admiring them. thisiscolossal.com/2019/02/new-pi…

A lot happened in 2018. The ruinous Trump administration continued doing its ruinous thing. I finally deleted my Facebook account. I had a stressful couple of months caused by something that rhymes with “head hugs,” which I would gladly trade the life of any loved one to avoid going through again. I visited the UK for the first time. I published 33 blog posts, including several well-received posts on design and development.

Projects

Let’s check in… See more →

Best part of the God’s Not Dead trilogy so far is when they Photoshopped Adam’s junk out of the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

Hello, dear reader!

November is gone, but its links remain.

I published a couple of nerdy blog posts in November: one about how I’m using my Letterboxd data to address my cinematic blindspots, and one about a common convention of editorial design that’s currently incompatible with CSS Grid.

Lots of interesting stuff in the links this month; for what it’s worth, my favorites are Earworm’s series of videos about jazz.

As usual, you can get many… See more →

3. A giant mechanical minotaur and giant mechanical spider wandering around Toulouse, France, by @lamachinefr. thisiscolossal.com/2018/11/46-foo…

1. Gorgeous, abstract impasto portraits by Joseph Lee (via @Colossal). josephleeart.com

Hello, dear reader!

October is gone, but its links remain.

I was mired in personal matters throughout October, so there wasn’t any activity on my site apart from the horror extravaganza that is Robtober, which was thankfully not disrupted. I finally finished a project that had been in the works for a few months: a custom-designed story with ProPublica Illinois about a family’s heartbreaking experience with an ill-conceived psychiatric clinical trial.

This round of links… See more →

Hello, dear reader!

September is gone, but its links remain.

It was a big month for me, as I finally finished the project I was preoccupied with for most of the summer: Incomplete Open Cubes Revisited, inspired by Sol LeWitt. I also wrote about why and how I did it.

This month’s newsletter is a few days late because I wanted to include Robtober 2018, my annual deep dive into horror films which always takes… See more →

What I Did on My Summer Vacation twitter.com/robweychert/st…

Here’s how. v6.robweychert.com/blog/2018/09/r…

Here’s why. cubes-revisited.art/about/

I made something. cubes-revisited.art

The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.
—Sol LeWitt, Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, 1967

I felt the first rumblings of the obsession a little over a year ago. I’m a big fan of Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings, and on a pilgrimage to MASS MoCA’s sprawling retrospective exhibition of them, I glimpsed some curious cube structures by LeWitt scattered around the museum. A short while later, in a used bookstore in Philadelphia, I stumbled… See more →

Leah and I recently returned from a great week in Brighton, England. The impetus for the trip was Ampersand, a one-day typography conference, but since neither Leah nor I had been to the UK before, it made sense to tack on another several days for a vacation.

We rented a decent Airbnb close to the beach near the indistinct border between Brighton and Hove. The first thing I did upon arriving at around 2 a.m.… See more →

Hello, dear reader!

May is gone, but its links remain.

The only thing I published on my site this month was a brief, snarky review of a 69-year-old movie (nice), but if all goes well in June, I’ll have a couple of substantial posts about creative projects (new and old) coming your way.

The links below include some meaty reporting on politics and a triptych of opinion pieces on our culture wars’ state of discourse.… See more →

Anyway, it was pretty fun to unearth and share this stuff 25 years later. Thanks for watching!

I was so excited to see what was possible, and I was determined to master it (and apparently to broadcast my @MST3K fan bonafides).

The early 90s’ nascent digital creative tools were still pretty inaccessible, so Mario Paint felt like nearly legit means of production.

All joking aside, Mario Paint was an important stepping stone for me in the world of digital art and design.

When I keynote Mario Paint conferences, I use this seminal work to outline the fundamentals of the form. (Spot the @alyankovic reference?)

This was the beginning of a long and fruitful career making wildly successful video comic books with Mario Paint.

Good news, everyone: It’s Friday, and the VHS tape of the video comic book I made with Mario Paint in 1993 has been digitized.

For no apparent reason, I used non-Micron pens for the past three years. That shit is over and I am reborn.

Hello dear reader!

February is gone, but its links remain.

My site was pretty quiet in February, up until yesterday when I published the final post in a series about the process behind my redesign. This one is about color, and the recent revelations I’ve had about how to work with it.

This month’s links have the usual range of topics, with the highlight for me being a treasure trove of interviews and demos on… See more →

I love how @brendandawes documents his creative process in small books compiling Git commits, screenshots, and more. brendandawes.com/blog/gitbook

Loving @mSutters’s illustrations in @kevinmhoffman’s new book, Meeting Design, which promises to be excellent. rosenfeldmedia.com/books/meeting-…