Madrid’s Gran Vía Digital Humanities Project

Brief video introduction [created with Camtasia 2] explaining a student-produced Digital Humanities project investigating Madrid’s Gran Vía [created with Omeka / Neatline].

This way of approaching DH work is particularly conducive to urban-scaled projects, and does not require extensive data mining or GIS components – although these approaches could certainly be integrated. (I will be presenting this project alongside my colleague at a June conference in Charleston titled: Data Driven: Digital Humanities in the Library.)

Explore the map-interface of the actual DH project here.

Antonio López García’s Everyday Urban Worlds (and prezi)

My new book Antonio López García’s Everyday Urban Worlds: A Philosophy of Painting is entering production with Bucknell University Press – it should be available in August 2014 (appearing on amazon at present for pre-order).

It represents rather a new form of writing for me – inspired by the meandering and philosophical style of Spanish author / civil engineer Juan Benet’s El ángel del señor abandona a Tobías (1976) where he mixes a range of disciplinary questions together, using the famed painting of the same name by Rembrandt as a point of departure.

Here I’ve devoted a chapter each to specific paintings (Gran Vía, Madrid desde Torres Blancas, and Madrid desde la torre de bomberos de Vallecas…), which I use as points of departure to fold Spanish literature, film and urban planning together with larger interdisciplinary and philosophical, geographical questions.

If you CLICK HERE you can see a ‘prezi’ that I’ve used with a lecture focusing on an excerpt of the second chapter’s Madrid desde Torres Blancas (visuals only).

003 – Madrid – Fraser on Antonio López García’s Everyday Urban Worlds [Book Teaser] – Urban Cultural Studies Podcasts

UCS 003 Fraser on Antonio López García’s Everyday Urban Worlds: A Philosophy of Painting   (6 August 2013) [BOOK TEASER] The author reads a concise draft introduction for a book in progress on the famed Spanish painter. Topics include art history, other Spanish painters (from Velázquez to Goya to Picasso, Dalí, Gris and M iró), Madrid’s urban space, temporality, and the book’s structure and interdisciplinary method (incorporating urban studies, geography, architecture, literature, cinema and more…). Born in Tomelloso in 1936, López García is an internationally recognized ‘hyperrealist’ painter, and in recent years his work Madrid desde Torres Blancas set an auction record at Christie’s for the sale of a work by a living Spanish artist.

Madrilenian Urban Painter’s Work Auctioned

[I’m currently working on a book whose second chapter deals with this painting, specifically — fascinating; read the article in its original context here; but I’ve pasted it below — dated from 2008?]

Antonio Lopez Sets World Auction Record for a Living Spanish Artist at Christie’s

Antonio Lopez (b. 1936), Madrid desde Torres Blancas; signed and dated `A. Lopez Garcia, 1976-82′ (lower left), oil on board, 57.1/8 x 96.1/8in. (145 x 244cm.) Painted in 1976-82. Sold: $2,760,803. © Christie’s Images Limited.

LONDON.- An early highlight of this evening’s auction was Madrid desde Torres Blancas by Antonio Lopez (b. 1936) which sold for £1,385,250 / $2,760,803 / €1,744,030, becoming the most expensive work by a living Spanish artist sold at