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Better Flock To David Tomb's Next Art Show: Birds Of The Sierra Madre


David Tomb
February 22 - March 22, 2008
Opening Reception: Friday, February 22, 6-8pm
Electric Works of San Francisco

David Tomb, the SF/Bay Area artist critically acclaimed for his figurative painting, has a new show at the Electric Works Gallery of San Francisco next spring and the subject matter is.... birds.

Now given all the bird "crap" out there, this may come as no surprise. But what IS surprising is that these are a wonderful departure from most of the 'cutesy cartoon' or 'Victorian' style bird art and crafts that proliferate galleries, the internet's indie art sites, and even retail home decor stores these days.

Using the same interesting style he often employs in his figure paintings, Tomb (rhymes with bomb) mixes detail with innuendo and energetic strokes with precious attention. His birds, colored in an almost Audubon-like veracity sit again half rendered backdrops which both show off the birds and create space that seems boundless, like that of a real birds' habitat.

Suffice it to say, I just love them. And they're nice and BIG. (you really need to see them in person for their detail)
Clearly I'm not the only since many have sold and the show doesn't actually open for 5 months!

Below are the images listed on the gallery's site. The names and descriptions are taken from there as well.


Mob Scene: Steak-backed Oriole, Blue Mockingbird, Yellow Grosbeak, Ferruginous Pygmy-Owl,
2007
Gouache, colored pencil, graphite on paper
Overall Dimensions: 30 x 44"


Blue-crowned Motmot, El Triunfo, 2007
Gouache, colored pencil, graphite on paper
Overall Dimensions: 44 x 30"
Sold


Black-throated Magpie-Jay, 2007
Gouache, colored pencil, graphite on paper
Overall Dimensions: 44 x 30"


Ringed Kingfisher, 2007
Gouache, colored pencil, graphite on paper
Overall Dimensions: 44 x 30"



Bat Falcons, 2007
Gouache, colored pencil, graphite on paper
Overall Dimensions: 44 x 30"
Sold


Resplendent Quetzal, Chiapas, 2007
Gouache, colored pencil, graphite on paper
Overall Dimensions: 44 x 30"
Sold


David Tomb
Birds of the Sierra Madre
February 22 - March 22, 2008
Opening Reception: Friday, February 22, 6-8pm
Electric Works of San Francisco



So, if you're anywhere in the SF/Bay Area in February, be sure to stop by and see the show .
Attend the opening reception and tell David Laura Sweet sent you!

Better yet, snap up one of his paintings before the show has sold out! See more of David Tomb's work by clicking here.

Hotel Chevalier by Wes Anderson:
Free on iTunes






If you've got itunes, you can view Wes Anderson's Short Film, Hotel Chevalier, starring Jason Schwartzman and Natalie Portman. This is a prequel to the upcoming movie in its entirety.
Click here to view.

Funky Find Of The Week: Love Hate Gloves

LOVE & HATE knuckle tattoo gloves!

Wanna look tough?
Like an ex-felon or gang member without permanently marring your skin?
Or without the pain of having a needle repeatedly pierce your knuckles?

Then get these gloves that have love and hate tattooed on the knuckles for you!

Then when the cops show up, you can just take them off and voila! Back to your old, non-gang-member self.

By William Warren for Design Against Trend


buy them here.

Luxury Pubs Continue To Grow- Offline.

For the Rich, Magazines Fat on Ads
By DAVID CARR for the NY Times

The rich will always be a good bet in publishing. First, they have the money, at least most of it. Second, they have the time, which is the by far the biggest luxury of our age.

So until the rich hire other people to read for them, a magazine is a good way to get their attention. Particularly now, it turns out.

Last week, a new Trump Magazine was announced by Ocean Drive Media Group. The week before, The Wall Street Journal announced Pursuits, a magazine supplement, which will compete with the baldly named How to Spend It from The Financial Times and the cryptically named T magazines from The New York Times.


Above: Trump at his magazine launch party, Sept. 25, 2007

Forbes, a publication that would seem to know a thing or two about rich folks, began publishing ForbesLife Executive Women last month.



Condé Nast Publishing is currently investing many millions in Portfolio, a business-inflected lifestyle magazine that suggests that the rich and powerful like to read about the rich and powerful.

Coming on top of magazines like The Robb Report, which is full of impossibly expensive goods, magazines like Gotham and Hamptons from Niche Media and the Modern Luxury chain of moneyed local publications, it would seem that while the rest of the industry is scrambling to fight off the Web and irrelevancy, there is a bull market in wealth.


Above:NEW YORK - NOVEMBER 15: Vanessa Trump and Donald Trump Jr attend the launch party for the holiday issue of Hamptons Magazine on November 15, 2006 in New York City. (Photo by Bryan Bedder/Getty Images)

During the 1990s, magazines like Money, Fortune and Red Herring got fat on wealth how-to’s, but the current crop skips that icky middle part about actually earning the money. Look for other publishers to cash in on the already arrived: maybe there’s still room for magazines called Lucky Stiff, I’ve Got Mine or Born on Third Base.

And it’s not just the guys. As reported in The New York Times, a recent study by a professor at Queens College pointed out that women in their 20s working full time in many American cities earn more than their male counterparts, creating a more gender-neutral wealth base that certainly has helped luxury women’s magazines. Pity the poor mail carriers who have to deliver Vogue, W, Elle and Harper’s Bazaar, which all put out huge September issues that seemed to weigh more than models in them. Vogue weighed 4.9 pounds and had 727 advertising pages, a 16 percent increase over last year; W was 4.5 pounds with 477 pages of ads.


Above: The UK's special Swarovski Studded Harper's Bazaar Magazine Cover

“Luxury continues to be a lush tropical island in a sea of complaints in the publishing industry,” said Reed Phillips, a media investment banker.

What gives? And, more important for the magazine business, will it last?

There is, as has recently been noted in The New York Times, no shortage of swells. The number of millionaires rose by 26 percent from 2000 to 2005, a total of more than 303,000, which is a lot of rich people.

America used to have a corner on wealth, but Russia and China are minting millionaires by the day, and they covet luxury in all languages. And it is worth remembering that much of the advertising that is jamming American luxury magazines is coming from foreign brands that find even the most expensive advertising buy can look mighty cheap given the feeble American dollar.

Part of the flight to luxury magazines is simple me-too, the most persistent trend of all in publishing, and maybe that alone should tell us the end of the boom is near. But luxury also represents one part of the business that will not succumb to the Web anytime soon.

Luxury is all about sensation, about touch, about look. Advertisers may look for efficiency in all of their buys, but in the publishing world, it is all about environment. They want to smell the money coming off the pages.

An aesthetic is being offered, one that suggests, as Mason Cooley did, that the rich are just naturally happier than we are because, well, they should be.

But it is not just about rich people. Luxury has been defined down any number of ways. “Sex and the City” is now in wide syndication, which means that most of the country now knows that Jimmy Choo is not a kind of beef jerky. BMW is introducing the 1 Series next year with a lower point of entry for the aspirant. Even if you can’t afford a baby Beemer, you can express your taste in finery in everything from coffee to chocolate. And while other teenage magazines folded, Teen Vogue proved that brand aspiration can be baked in at a very young age.


Above: the BMW Series 1 Coupe, set to launch in 2008

“It’s true that there is a small percentage of people who continue to become wealthier and wealthier, but just underneath that, there is a very large percentage of people who are completely enamored with luxury goods,” said Robert Burke, a consultant on luxury in New York. Mr. Burke said that the surge in desire for precious things is not unlike what happened in Japan 15 years ago. “People want those things that give them a feeling of luxury in all sorts of products and at all kinds of income levels.”

Even with the sub prime mess and question marks over big merger deals, the ferocious and fundamentally undemocratic concentration of wealth still seems unstoppable. But the French Revolution proved that it is difficult to preserve epic economic imbalance.

The skeptics might point to other cultural indicators that the luxury boom has topped out. The ka-jillionaire Mark Cuban appearance on this season’s “Dancing With the Stars” comes to mind, as does Damien Hirst’s $100 million diamond-encrusted skull, a totem of an excessive age that was snapped up at the end of the summer.


Above: Damien Hirst and his Diamond and Platinum Skull

Excessive wealth is providing fuel for an otherwise impoverished industry. Like fossil fuels, it is bound to peter out at some point, but no one knows exactly when. In the meantime, let them eat Coach.---DAVID CARR


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