Barbra Kruger's "r we having fun yet " SOLD

Barbara Kruger’s seminal 1987 Are we having fun yet?, a massive 12-by-8-foot photograph silkscreen on vinyl, sold for $700,000. It had been on long-term loan to the Dallas Museum of Art since 1988 but lately returned to the secondary market to find a new home.

Henry Hudson & Half Moon sailing to the Hudson River Maritime Museum

http://mvarametalandpaint.com/site/blog/

Henry Hudson - 114"h x 72"d x 60"w

Henry Hudson’s stolen Ship was re-built.

Over one year ago the Half Moon was stolen off Henry Hudsons Map in Kingston NY-

Henry Hudson and the Half Moon sculpture, was on display for the Arts Society of Kingston when the sculpture was robbed of the integral 18” Half Moon ship displayed on the map.

The sculpture is made of re-claimed metal, depicting references to the historical story of Henry Hudson and his adventure.
 2 years ago I hade been intrigued by the explorer called Henry Hudson.
His findings, his perseverance, the times and how he made things happen even through harsh adversity and successes. With this in mind I became driven to capture the man and the history thru sculpture. Henry Hudson is made from a years labor and hand picked re-claimed metal articles, welded together in a painted finish. The parts were chosen for their past life's function tying the story together with connotations of things left behind and new beginnings. The existing shapes were also a strong consideration for the subliminal story told. Such as Bicycles as his breast lapels - Henry Hudson was driven by simple travel. His eyes made of ships rings. The hats brim the nuts and bolts of his operation his mind. The Map Stand is a crate portraying the merchandise he was to deliver. And so on.

Now Artist miChelle M. Vara has re-made the ship and will be installing the sculpture on Thursday 17th at 1pm, to be displayed at the Hudson River Maritime Museum, 50 Rondout Landing - Kingston, NY.
She also has made 2 ships availble for purchase so that onlookers dont have to steal the piece to openly enjoy in there own life.

Rhinebeck Antique Motorcycle Meet

As always this is a don't miss fun weekend!
If you like old iron this is were it's exposed.

This man has owned the Vinsent since new and was a wonderful walk in history!

Saratoga Springs NY creates new venues for Outdoor sculpture Shows-

http://mvarametalandpaint.com/site/2010/06/saratoga-springs-ny-creates-new-venues-for-outdoor-sculpture-shows/?preview=true&preview_id=1133&preview_nonce=df9def86f5

miChelle with 5 other artist open this weekend 6/12/10 at – In conjunction with Saratoga arts Festival and Larac arts festival in Glens Falls. Family Events will be numerous.


Saratoga Train Station 26 Station Lane Saratoga Springs, NY 12866
Will be open for viewing for one full year. The Piece “Home Town” showing was inspired by the dialog with Glens Falls NY and just completed.

Saratoga Polo Grounds corner of Bloomfield Road Saratoga NY12866.

Will be open to the public during operating hours. miChelle is showing sculpture piece called, Pot’ ente – (Means Strong) The orange horse is found metals, galvanized and then finished in hand made paint.

Picasso Piece Sets Sale Record

http://online.wsj.com/video/picasso-piece-sets-sale-record/B9D6F317-DF10-42EA-9191-BD1DF856FCBE.html

Wow- looks like the ART MARKET returned quickly~!

Neon Flames on Race Snowmobile Cowl

miChelle Just completed, for a wonderful customer, now friend John, a screaming evil skull giving the subliminal finger. John said he wanted something that stood out from the normal. miChelle found out quickly John loves color and movement in paint, so miChelle ignited the project in a neon extreme way, using House Of Color product which fired the project up fine!
For the rest of the story go to-
http://mvarametalandpaint.com/site/2010/06/neon-flames-on-race-snowmobile-cowl/

A great loss in art Louise Bourgeois dies at 98

Louise Bourgeois dies in New York, aged 98Grande dame of American and European art, whose work was founded in childhood


(548)Tweet this (138)Comments (27) Adrian Searle The Guardian, Tuesday 1 June 2010 Article history

Louise Bourgeois was most famous for her giant spiders. Photograph: Christopher Felver/Corbis

Louise Bourgeois, the French-born, American-based artist best known for her sculptures of vast metal spiders, died yesterday in a New York hospital at the age of 98. Bourgeois, who only found widespread acclaim late in life, had suffered a heart attack at the weekend, a spokeswoman said.

With her death, American and European art has lost not only a tremendous and hugely influential artist, but a direct link between the art of the 21st century and belle epoque Paris, with cubism, symbolism, surrealism and abstract expressionism, and all that followed.

Born in Paris, on Christmas Day 1911, she recounted that the attending doctor had told her mother, "Madam, you are quite ruining my day." Her personality and her art were to match, and there are few artists who have claimed so outspokenly that their work has been founded in childhood and adolescence.
Her parents ran a prosperous family business devoted to the repair and resale of medieval and 17th and 18th century tapestries and textiles, living above the showroom in Paris.

As a child, Bourgeois had a talent for mathematics. In adolescence, she began helping in the workshop of the business, repairing the destroyed lower portions of old tapestries, sewing fig-leaves on to the genitalia of the naked figures on works destined for prudish American collectors. At about this time her philandering father introduced his lover, an Englishwoman called Sadie, into the household as the children's tutor. From her, Bourgeois learned English, as well as jealousy and hatred.

All of this became part of the Bourgeois legend and the engine of her art. As an emigre French artist who moved to New York in 1938, her career developed slowly. Critical and commercial success only came when she was in her 60s. Although it was not until 1982 that New York's Museum of Modern Art gave her a retrospective – the first it had ever mounted of a woman artist – she was by then already well-known, if regarded as uncategoriseable, marginal, even eccentric. The exhibition transformed her into the grande dame of American art.

In the same year, the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe took a number of famous portraits of Bourgeois. She wore a black coat of monkey fur and carried something under her arm as a sort of prop: a big, obscene black latex sculpture, resembling a gigantic penis and balls. She insisted it was not a phallus at all. It was, she said, her little girl. In Mapplethorpe's images, Bourgeois smiles mischievously for the camera. The image is immensely seductive.

Bourgeois made sculptures in all kinds of media; she made wonderful prints and drawings, created claustrophobic installations and fabricated little sewn dolls and giant metal spiders with equal care. She even recorded herself singing childhood songs, broadcast in an empty Venetian tower.

There were many-breasted creatures, beautifully carved marble hands, things that were sexual and strange and filled with secrets and barely suppressed violence. Refusing to describe herself as a feminist, she was one anyway. She has lessons for all artists alive now – inpersistence, commitment and individuality, and in the difference between art made as an adjunct to a career, and art borne out of inner necessity.

Bourgeois made great work and bad work, and didn't care to choose. She even published her insomniac bedside drawings.

"My memories are moth-eaten", she wrote recently, in a crabby hand, next to a beautiful, abstract drawing. We have lost a great artist, but the art goes on.



Adrian Searle is the Guardian's art critic.