SND (aka Shana Nys Dambrot) is the luckiest girl in the world. Growing up in Manhattan, she studied Art History at Vassar and worked for Leo Castelli, Larry Gagosian and the Guggenheim Museum before moving to LA in 1995 in search of more open ranges, and since that time her fine art & design reviews, features and interviews have appeared in scores of publications including Modern Painters, Art Review, ARTnews, Whitehotmagazine.com, Kotori Magazine, tema celeste, Angeleno, Art Asia Pacific, Intersection, TimeOut LA, Juxtapoz and Coagula Art Journal, and she is currently the LA Managing Editor at Flavorpill.net and a Contributing Editor at its affiliate publication Arkrush.com, as well as at west coast bastions Artweek and Art Ltd.
SND thinks of herself as a fresher, more modern kind of critic than the stereotypical elitist didact. Her goal is to inspire a love of art in a broad an audience, using as little impenetrable artspeak as possible. See, the world is full of very smart people who never took an art class; they have the yearning and the capacity to bring art into their lives but don’t know where to start, and SND wants to show them. Her blog at Uber.com/snd is the most powerful tool in her arsenal to date; giving her a platform to share a kaleidoscopic range of interpretation, discovery, adventure, curiosity and behind-the-scenes access to the hardy and heady LA art world that has given her so much.
My colleague Christa from Taschen has a theory about Lucian Freud and I’ve been investigating it ever since we had coffee on Wednesday. It goes like this: the size of your head in his portrait of you is a reflection of his personal opinion of your intelligence. Women in general have smaller heads, just look at Kate Moss! Even Queen Elizabeth got the treatment, half her head is the crown.
Kate Moss by L Freud
L Freud Queen Elizabeth
And look at the portraits of Frank Auerbach and Francis Bacon! Lucian fairly worships his fellow School of Londoners and their circle apparently – just look at the size of their heads.
L Freud Frank Auerbach
L Freud Francis Bacon
I don’t know who that person is up top there but he must have been terrified of them… The only person ever to look handsome in a Freud portrait is the art dealer Rex Irwin… other than himself of course. Hmm… thanks for the food for thought, Christa! I just wish Lucien’s grandpa was alive to add his two cents to the theory.
I had so many great images, I thought they deserved their own page. So visit this site: http://snd.uber.com/images, or click on the My Websites tab, and peruse...
don't tell me you think she'd have voted against it if she were the nominee! that's just naive. anyway i plan on renewing my ACLU membership again this year and also on answering my phone, "F*ck George Bush" every day until Obama is inaugurated.
I've heard that argument. Just as I've heard that he would have voted for the invasion of Iraq if he had been in the Senate. Maybe to both. Maybe not. But he did promise to filibuster FISA and didn't. I'll still vote for him - McCain is a short fuse and should be kept from any triggers, but I've been sending $$ to ActBlue. Anybody decent running against Pelosi and Feinstein will also give a few dollars from me.
I guess I was hoping I was wrong and he was in fact different. Oh well.
