art – Page 2 – Jessica S. McKenzie

Audubon: How Xavi Bou Makes His Mesmerizing Portraits of Birds in Flight

Tree Swallows, Grand Teton. Photo: Xavi Bou

“I don’t want to show a bird flying,” says photographer Xavi Bou. “I want to show a flight.”

Although Bou has dedicated years of his life to photographing birds, someone encountering his work for the first time could be excused for having no idea what his subject is. In a project called Ornithographies, he creates mesmerizing images by taking many photographs per second and stitching up to 3,500 or more of them together. The results are beautifully abstract, capturing the energy of flight, whether in the chaotic squiggles that result when Alpine Swifts dive and swoop for insects, or the smooth, even undulations of a gull flying over the water. They may not be moving pictures—although Bou uses a cinema camera that takes 60 frames a second—but they have movement.

Tenderly: Patricia Highsmith’s Uncommon Empathy for Animals

Patricia Highsmith, the novelist best known for creating the diabolically charming character Tom Ripley, was a notorious misanthrope. An editor once characterized her as “a horrible human being” and a fellow writer described her as “an excellent hater.” But, at the very least, she loved animals. When she came across spiders inside the house, she would carefully carry them to the garden outside. She had a particular affection for snails, and kept some 300 of them as pets when she lived in a cottage in Suffolk, as well as for cats, with whom she was often photographed. Her feline relationships, a biographer wrote, were “often counted as her longest and most successful emotional connection.”

The L Magazine: Going Guerilla With the Founder of Williamsburg’s Street Museum of Art

Yet another museum has arrived in Brooklyn, only this one claims to be unlike all those that came before. The Street Museum of Art (SMoA) is completely free, open at all hours and publicly curated (one might say crowdsourced). If you live or work in Williamsburg you might already have stumbled across some of the exhibition, which launched 6 weeks ago, although parts of it have already been dismantled and replaced because the streets don’t have security guards. SMoA’s online description has the intriguing words “guerrilla” and “illegally” in the online description, so of course we had to find out more.

The Founder and Director agreed to an interview but only via email in order to safeguard his or her anonymity. Read more…