Wacom recently released a (somewhat) affordable version of their Cintiq drawing tablet, which allows you to draw and paint directly on the screen. Today we picked up the smallest version, with a 12-inch screen.

After playing with it for an hour, I can safely say that I don't regret a penny I spent (though I'll have to get that back by selling some stuff on eBay!).  If you're like me, your greatest enemy is yourself – and you often find yourself paralyzed, pen poised above paper, terrified of screwing up. The Cintiq frees you of that neurosis, while retaining the tactility, immediacy, and joy of drawing on paper.

And that means you can work more freely, and much faster -- I did the above sketch in about 15 minutes, maybe 3 times as fast as my pen-and-paper productivity.

The Cintiq won't make you a better artist.  If you tend to draw guns that look more like hairdryers, as I do – well, you'll still draw hairdryers. But at least you have the freedom to draw increasingly more gun-like hairdryers, without wasting an entire pad of paper.

I'm a digital media geek who likes to say things like "Print is dead." But Penguin's new "Great Ideas" series forces me to eat my words. These little paperback gems are printings of a small catalog of landmark works of philosophy  – I picked up Kirkegaard, Machiavelli, Marcus Aurelius, Rousseau, and Plato – and each one is designed with a loving meticulousness that is rarely lavished on the humble paperback. The cover designs, which mostly rely on elegant  typography (none of the usual crappy stock images of marble busts), are letterpressed – letterpressed! – into a wonderful ivory coverstock with a cold-press texture like watercolor paper.

Academic publishing has long been a godforsaken bastion of terrible graphic design – poor typography, stock images dating back four decades, all printed onto cheap, smudge-prone paper. Being both a philosophy major and a graphic designer, I've often been pained that the books dearest to my heart are so offensive to my eye. I'm glad to see that a publisher is finally giving these great thinkers the handsome faces they deserve.

Micah Ganske chooses only the most banal of subjects for his floor-to-ceiling paintings: a young couple standing in front of an SUV, a hatchback abandoned in a flood. These lackluster subjects are treated with an incredibly meticulous process that verges on mania. Ganske's method is totally unique, and of his own invention: he stains unprimed canvas with highly diluted acrylics, applied meticulously with fine brushes. The resulting milky colors and razor-sharp detail look like the product of a 4-color-process print, yanked out of the printer before the 4th color pass is complete.

Viewing each work is like swimming through a Notre Dame built of vanilla pudding, the exquisite meticulousness of the technique contrasting weirdly with the flat blandness of the subject.

On display at Deitch Projects, 76 Grand Street, through Nov. 3. 

Just stumbled on this Rome-based artist via Flickr. His style inhabits that twilight place between portraiture and abstraction that no one has explored this well since DeKooning.

Computer-generated art has definitely arrived.

More on his portfolio site.

A Brazilian designer named Diego (hi, Diego!) who stumbled on my previous blog entry about reverse-graffiti artist Paul Leeds, turned me on to Alexandre Orion, who's been doing something similar in the transport tunnels of São Paolo. Orion has taken the medium one step further, using it to generate awareness around auto emissions levels in the city.

If you haven't yet blown a week's paycheck on some of the stunning volumes from Berlin-based art and design publishing house Die Gestalten Verlag, start saving up. The house's catalog of publications is tiny (about 250 titles so far), but curated with razor-sharp taste. The lush collection of art and design monographs includes work from such luminaries as WK, FriendsWithYou, and Non-Format. Also worth the hefty-ish pricetags are indispensable design resources such as  Neubau Welt, Stefan Gandl's volume of ultrasweet vector art. And then there are the occasional glinting gems of unsurpassable delightfulness, such as The Smallest Book in the World. Measuring 2.4 x 2.6 mm, this little leather bound volume is produced with maniacal attention to detail, each page featuring a single letter from an collection of faces designed by German typographer Joshua Reichert.  You'll never have to feel uninspired again.

A marine stationed in Iraq, usernamed Dreamcrusher, got bored and started posting some photos on this YayHooray thread.  In spite of shitty software (he's resizing in MS Paint) and long upload times, he's continued to post at regular intervals.

The photos, while not professional in quality, are striking in their earnest and unstudied depiction of everyday Iraq – more so, in fact, because they aren't editorialized by the polish and poise of a professional's work.  Equally interesting are Dreamcrusher's accompanying notes, delivered in spare, unpunctuated prose:

In other posts, he relates how difficult it is to maneuver a camera while wearing a flakjacket, rifle and helmet;  how nice the locals are, except that they keep asking him for weird things like soccer balls and gloves;  how he's learned to "sleep through a small firefight in my humvee."  He signs off with lines like, "well i am going to head off and eat my haliburton dinner."

Dreamcrusher has formed a little fanbase of YayHooray users who await his next upload with bated breath, and who genuinely seem to be concerned for his welfare and safety.  On one occasion, he promises to upload his next batch of photos straight away, then goes silent. Worried YayHoorayers post, "That was 5 hours ago... you think he's okay?"  (He turns back up in a few hours, having taken a break for food.)

In his own way, Dreamcrusher is doing what mass media and the Washington PR machine are failing to do: provide a thoroughly honest, matter-of-fact view of the war, and a sympathetic portrait of the people fighting it.

Here's a brief and wildly over-generalized history of art:

Once upon a time, art had a simple purpose: it imitated life. The Mona Lisa, the self-portraits of Rembrandt, the Death of Marat – pictures of the world, of life. Then art started to veer off course a bit. The Impressionists began to blur the boundary between the depiction and the act of depicting. Then the Cubists started taking some serious liberties with form, the Fauves with color, the Futurists with time. This all came to a head with the Abstract Expressionists, who finally flattened the picture frame and squashed out of it any lingering hint of depiction. (A Pollock isn't a picture of anything, except paint.)

For decades afterward, the art world carried the Abstraction stick up its butt. This meant that the imitation of life wasn't something an "earnest" artist could do anymore. Any type of depiction that followed was of the Campbell soup-can variety: really another kind of abstraction, just on a meta-level. So for a long time, it seemed nobody knew how to depict life anymore, except in a "been-there, done-that" kind of way.

And just in time to save the day, comes Tim Hawkinson.  Emotor, shown above, is a self-portrait sliced into pieces and rigged up to a series of motorized wires. The resulting portrait is in constant motion through a series of captivatingly weird facial expressions. The eyes wink and widen, the lips sneer and smile, the eyebrows arch and flatten, in a fluid and creepy ballet that is an imitation of life, but somehow more than that: it's an imitation of being alive.

Much of Hawkinson's vast and wacky ouevre imitates life, but never in the classical sense. Pentecost  features a series of hanging figures that drum out a syncopated rhythm with their bodies against a massive tree-like structure. Blind spot is another self-portrait, depicting the parts of the artist's own body that he can't see – his face, back, shoulder-blades, and anus – sewn together into a single contiguous surface, forming an entirely new species of creature.  Signature Chair is a plodding and faithful mechanical creature, which tirelessly signs the artist's signature on a piece of paper, drops it on the floor, and starts over with a fresh piece.

None of these pieces are depictions of life in the pre-Abstraction sense, but something altogether new: they explores that weird, wonderful, and genuinely innovative place where the imitation of life becomes something alive in itself.

A beautifully-executed site with a powerful message. Titled "Ik zie ik zie wat jij niet ziet" (which translates as "I see I see what you don't see"), this campaign against child neglect and abuse was executed flawlessly by the Dutch agency Achtung!.