Wegman World

Wednesday's Postcard

Wednesday's Postcard

Thanksgiving, solved

Are you worried about what to cook on Thanksgiving? Here is a fool proof recipe, from WW:

William Wegman, from The Field Guide to North America, 1993

While on Hold...

Seeing Stars, by Simon Armitage

Earlier this year Alfred A. Knopf published Simon Armitage's  "Seeing Stars" , a new book of poetry. We were very pleased when asked if one of WW's works could illustrate the cover. Below is the cover, and one of our favorite poems from the book. 

My Difference
by Simon Armitage, from "Seeing Stars" 

I’ve been writing a lot of poems recently about my
difference but my tutor isn’t impressed. He hasn’t said as
much, yet it’s clear that as far as he’s concerned my
difference doesn’t cut much ice. He wants me to dress my
difference with tinsel and bells and flashing lights, or sit it
on a float and drive it through town at the head of the May
Day Parade. “Tell me one interesting fact about your
difference,” he says, so I tell him about the time I lost my
difference down the plughole in a Bournemouth guesthouse
and had to fish it back with a paperclip on a length of
dental floss. He says, “Er, that’s not really what I had in
mind, Henry.” Basically he needs my difference to die in a
crash, or be ritually amputated in a civil war. Then he
shows me a prize-winning poem (one of his own in fact)
about a set of twins whose difference were swapped at
birth by a childless midwife, and who grew up with the
wrong differences, one in the bosom of the Saudi Royal
Family and the other beneath the “jackboot of poverty,” and
who met in later life only to discover that their differences
were exactly the same. He wants me to lock my difference
in a coal cellar until it comes of age then take it outside and
reverse over with a ride-on mower, thus making my
difference very different indeed, or auction my difference in
the global marketplace, or film it getting a “happy slapping”
in a busy street, or scream the details of my difference into
the rabbit hole of the cosmos hoping to bend the ear of
creation itself. I tell him I once swallowed my difference
without water on an empty stomach, but he isn’t listening
any more. He’s quoting some chap who went at his
difference with a pair of pinking shear. He’s talking about
such and such a poet who threw his difference in front of
the royal train, or had it beaten from him by plain-clothed
officers and rendered down into potting compost or
wallpaper paste, or set fire to his different on primetime
national TV. And when I plead with him that no matter
how small and pitiful my difference might seem to him, to
me it makes all the different in the world, he looks at me
with an expression of complete and undisguised and
irreversible indifference.

William Wegman, Twins with Differences, 1970

 

Wednesday's Postcard

While on Hold...

Kids' Art!

 

Photo by Augustin, 12, featuring Sapa the German Shorthaired Pointer

 

Do you know a child who loves William Wegman? We post kids' art inspired by WW on the blog. To be included, leave a link to where your child's art can be seen (flickr, facebook, etc) or tweet us @WilliamWegman.

From the archives...

William Wegman, Honest Balls, 1987

November 29, 1987

William Wegman: The Artist and His Dog

By AMY HEMPEL

In William Wegman's studio in New York's Hudson Valley, the blond floors appear to be stenciled in an abstract floral pattern. In fact, after prolonged efforts to keep his dog out of the way of workmen during construction, Wegman took a different tack: he painted his dog's feet green and let her loose inside. It is an example of what Wegman means when he says of his work in painting, drawing, video and photography, ''I pay a lot of attention to what the format is actually doing rather than what I want it to do.''

Finish the article here.

Wednesday's Postcard