Eideard

The art expert
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission – from the Denver Police

A 36-year-old woman was accused of causing $10,000 worth of damage to a painting by the late abstract expressionist artist Clyfford Still, a work valued at more than $30 million…

A police report said Carmen Tisch punched and scratched the painting, an oil-on-canvas called “1957-J no.2″, at the recently opened Clyfford Still museum in Denver and pulled her pants down to slide her buttocks against it.

Tisch was charged with felony criminal mischief on Wednesday and has been held on a $20,000 bond since the incident in late December, said Lynn Kimbrough, spokeswoman for the Denver District Attorney’s Office.

Kimbrough said Tisch urinated after she rubbed up against the canvas, but whether urine got on the painting was still under investigation, she said.

The coppers couldn’t tell?

Born in North Dakota in 1904, Still was considered one of the most influential of the American post-World War Two abstract expressionist artists, although he was not as well known as others such as Jackson Pollock.

Still died in 1980, and the city of Denver worked for years with his widow, Patricia, to secure the single-artist museum. She died in 2005, and her husband’s collection was bequeathed to the city.

Everyone’s a critic. Right?

Turns out we aren’t that different from other apes after all. Our primate cousins at a handful of zoos love to use iPads to combat boredom just as much as humans. Zookeepers say that the device is perfect for orangutans, and many have been taking part in guided touchscreen interactions with all sorts of apps, including music, games, movies, cartoons, art, painting, drawing, photos and videos.

The orangutans have been playing with the iPads for the past several months, and now a U.S. charity is hoping to round up more of the tablets so the apes can Skype with orangutans at other zoos.

“They like many of the free apps that I think children would like – they like the free apps where you can fingerpaint, they like the apps where you can use the drums,” says Trish Khan, Milwaukee County Zoo’s orangutan keeper. The iPads help provide a little extra enrichment, physical and mental stimulation for the apes living in captivity….

The group’s Richard Zimmerman told the BBC they’re not yet comfortable just handing the tablets over to the apes, even with a protective cover. “As soon as we hand them over to the orangutans, we figure the lifespan could be as little as 15 seconds – whether they meticulously take them apart or just snap them in half.”

Some possible solutions include developing a new protective case or affixing the iPad to a wall – the image from the tablet could then be projected elsewhere for zoo visitors to watch.

Orangutan Outreach is accepting donations of cash or gently used iPads to get more tablets in the hands of apes and their zookeepers.

The Paul Gauguin masterpiece that was attacked Friday by a woman at the National Gallery of Art “sustained no damage,” the museum said Monday, after conservators examined the canvas.

A museum visitor, identified in documents filed with the D.C. Superior Court as Susan Burns, 53, of Alexandria, grabbed the painting by its frame and attempted to pull it off the wall. She then hit the painting, which was protected by a plexiglass shield, with her right fist, the court papers said.

Burns, who was handcuffed and detained, has been charged with attempted theft in the second degree.

According to court papers, Burns told an investigator: “I feel that Gauguin is evil. He has nudity and is bad for the children. He has two women in the painting and it’s very homosex­ual. I was trying to remove it. I think it should be burned. I am from the American CIA and I have a radio in my head. I am going to kill you…”

According to a witness, Pam ela Degotardi of New York, the woman tried to pull the painting from the wall while screaming, “This is evil.”

“She was really pounding it with her fists,” Degotardi said. “It was like this weird surreal scene that one doesn’t expect at the National Gallery.”

Burns is scheduled for a “mental observation hearing” Tuesday, the court documents say. She has been arrested in the past on charges dating back to 1998, according to Virginia court rec­ords. She was convicted of assaulting an officer in 2005 and served more than two years in jail. In 2006, she was arrested for conspiring to commit a carjacking and served more than six months in jail.

Laughing on the outside, crying on the inside…make believe is all I do.

Poisonally, I think the KoolAid Party should take up her case.

Liu Bolin’s amazing camouflage artwork

At first glance, this may look like a photograph of shelves in a supermarket. But look more closely and you may see a man painstakingly painted to blend in with the colourful background. Chinese artist Liu Bolin has become world renowned for his camouflage art. Liu uses a team of two assistants to paint the camouflage onto him to make him invisible, and each photograph can take up to ten hours to set up. In some cases, Liu has his assistants paint his body and then he remains extremely still until an unsuspecting passer-by happens to walk past.

Click on the photo to see a photo gallery of his work.

A dusty old painting stored behind a family sofa could be a Michelangelo worth up to $300 million and potentially one of the art finds of the century, according to an expert.

The unfinished painting of Jesus and Mary has long been in the family of US Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Martin Kober, who lives in Buffalo, New York.

He and his relatives nicknamed it “The Mike” because of a family legend that it had been painted by the Renaissance artist.

The painting had hung in the Kober home but was knocked off the wall by a stray tennis ball 27 years ago, so it was wrapped it up and put behind the couch.

In 2003 Mr Kober decided to research the origins of the 25in by 19in work and eventually took it to Antonio Forcellino, an Italian art restorer and historian. Mr Forcellino is convinced it is a genuine, painted depiction of the Pieta, Michelangelo’s famous sculpture of the body of Jesus on his mother’s lap, which is housed in St Peter’s Basilica…

According to Mr Forcellino’s investigation, a letter in the Vatican library points to the painting having been done by Michelangelo for his friend Vittoria Colonna in around 1545, nearly half a century after the young artist sculpted the Pieta.

The painting later belonged to a German baroness who left it to a lady-in-waiting, who was the sister-in-law of Mr Kober’s great-grandfather. It arrived in America in 1883.

Cripes! We haven’t anything more than dust bunnies behind our living room sofa.

On buttons, posters and Web sites, the image was everywhere during last year’s presidential campaign: a pensive Barack Obama looking upward, as if to the future, splashed in a Warholesque red, white and blue and underlined with the caption HOPE.

Designed by Shepard Fairey, a Los-Angeles based street artist, the image has led to sales of hundreds of thousands of posters and stickers, and has become so much in demand that copies signed by Fairey have been purchased for thousands of dollars on eBay.

The image, Fairey has acknowledged, is based on an Associated Press photograph, taken in April 2006 by Mannie Garcia on assignment for the AP at the National Press Club in Washington…

The AP’s director of media relations, Paul Colford, said in a statement. “AP safeguards its assets and looks at these events on a case-by-case basis. We have reached out to Mr. Fairey’s attorney and are in discussions. We hope for an amicable solution.”

“We believe fair use protects Shepard’s right to do what he did here,” says Fairey’s lawyer, Anthony Falzone, executive director of the Fair Use Project at Stanford University and a lecturer at the Stanford Law School…

A longtime rebel with a history of breaking rules, Fairey has said he found the photograph using Google Images. He released the image on his Web site shortly after he created it, in early 2008, and made thousands of posters for the street…

The image will be included this month at a Fairey exhibit at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and a mixed-media stenciled collage version has been added to the permanent collection of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington.

Frankly, I come down on the side of the artist. Even selling an artist’s impression of the photograph is legit as far as I’m concerned. The artist has a right to interpret and reproduce what he sees – even if he’s looking at a photograph.