Paintings by famed chimp to go on sale

Congo the chimpanzee learned to draw at two years old when his owner, artist and ethologist Desmond Morris, gave him a pencil and a piece of card. He soon noticed that the ape could draw a circle and had a basic sense of composition. Congo made around 400 artworks during his lifetime, and rose to fame in the late 1950s as the star of British TV show Zootime.

A painting by Congo

His abstract, expressionist paintings have previously caught the interest of Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso. And now Desmond is selling his collection of the chimp's artworks at London's Mayor Gallery. The 55 paintings, which will be priced between £1,500 ($1,850) and £6,000 each ($7,400), will be on view from December 3 through 19.

From artnet:

"No other apes were controlling the mark making and varying the patterns as he was,” Morris explains in a statement. "I originally picked Congo out as one of the more boisterous at the zoo and felt that his strong personality would respond well to focused periods of working together."

What started out as scribbly lines and splotches of paint soon turned into carefully crafted compositions that demonstrated a formal logic without having an obvious analog to the real world. Just as Pollack, de Kooning, and Kline were exploring the limits of pictorial abstraction, so too was a three-year-old chimpanzee.

Congo died at ten years of age in 1964 after suffering from tuberculosis.

Comments

The Joy of Logarithms

Toby 'Tibees' Hendy is an Australia-based educator who uses social media to spark young people's interest in science and math. This year, her YouTube subscribers surpassed 250,000, and her videos have been viewed almost 25 million times. In this clip, Toby gives a lesson about logarithms in the style of legendary artist and TV host Bob Ross.

On knockoff toys, bootleg action figures, and nostalgia

LEGO and Transformers action figures are some of the toys I really wanted as a kid, but never got. Boy or girl, every child wanted a LEGO. My older cousin had a couple of LEGO sets, but didn't really let me play with them. So, I desperately asked my rich Japayuki ninang for one. Instead, she gave me a knockoff—like the ones sold at sari-sari stores near public elementary schools. Every year, I looked forward to birthdays and holidays with great anticipation, but I never got the real thing. During the height of their popularity in the 80s, many people were convinced that their Autobots and Decepticons were actually smart investments, and that the shape-shifting alien robots would one day be worth thousands. More than 30 years after the original Transformers TV series first aired, its toy franchise remains one of the most popular in history. My mother gave me one when I was 7. Unfortunately, what I got was a funny counterfeit Starscream from Divisoria that looked like a malnouris...

Katy Ann Gilmore is my new favorite on Instagram

Katy Ann Gilmore is a Los Angeles-based visual artist who specializes in making extraordinary illustrations on paper and large scale murals using micron and gel pens. Her elaborate line work is painstakingly methodical, layering strokes of the pen in varying directions to create amazing shapes and topography that look like they are covered with intricate mesh netting. I was wondering how many pen strokes does it take to complete just one of these drawings, so I did some research and found out that her small 5 in. by 7 in. illustrations typically take a few hours, while an 11 in. by 14 in. picture can take anywhere from 10-25 hours. "My hand does hurt a bit after marathon sessions, but never anything too crazy," she told Lisa Congdon. "I try to rest my eyes/hands/brain every once in awhile by looking away from the drawing, dropping the pen, and taking a breather." Katy received a BA in Mathematics, Art, and Spanish from Greenville College in Il...

finding cain

Search This Blog