First Week's Art Experiments

This is the first week of Amelia Critchlow's Experimental Art Course and we've been very productive. I took the class in the Spring, but was too busy to do many of the assignments. With school being out, this is the perfect time to try again and to involve the kids. We've sat down to work on the assignments each afternoon before dinner and just played around with the materials. It's been very calming for all of us. Everyone gets very focused and excited by what they or someone else at the table is doing. Here are some of our creations.

doodle #2, Carter

doodle #2, Elizabeth
food coloring with straws and paint brush

Carter was very quick to tell me where I went wrong with my doodle. I started brushing on the purple and Carter "Mom, you shouldn't have done that." I think he was right and it somehow doesn't sting as much when your kid tells you matter0of-factly that yes, indeed, you've gone too far.

doodle #2, Olivia

One of the great things about the course is that Amelia introduces interesting materials to use for our experiments. We didn't have to go out and buy any fancy art supplies. We've been using left over ceramic paints from a birthday party, poster paints, old pastels and chalk, colored markers, ink pens, pencil, eye make-up (which the kids loved because it's usually off limits and also the texture made it a fun material to play with), tea, dirt (we have a lot of that), old magazines, paper towels, and I even pulled out my old water color set from costume design class (a few were dried out, but were easily revived by breaking open the tube and adding water).

staining #1, Olivia
passionfruit tea, decaf chai - using drinking straws

painting #2, Marshall

staining #1, EHS
tazo decaf chai tea, tazo passionfruit tea, water color, collage, ink, paper towel, tea leaves - using paint brush, fingers, cotton, & drinking straws.

The kids approach these things with an admirable fearlessness. They don't over-think things. They just do. I'm learning from them and having great fun.

I'm Not Going to Give You Ideas Now, But...

What's the Big Idea?

Thanks, T.

A Starting Place #2

John Baldessari: "I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art," 1971

A Starting Place or Learning To Let Go and Mean It

A man in our society is not left alone. Not in the cities. Not in the woods. We must have commerce with our fellows, and that commerce is difficult and uneasy. I do not understand how to live in this society. I don't get it. Each person has an enormous effect. Call it environmental impact if you like. Where my foot falls, I leave a mark, whether I want to or not. We are linked together, each to each. You can't breathe without taking a breath from somebody else. You can't smile without changing the landscape. And so I ask the question: Why is theatre so ineffectual, unnew, not exciting, fussy, not connected to the thrilling recognition possible in dreams?

It's a question of spirit. My ungainly spirit thrashes around inside me making me feel lumpy and sick. My spirit is this moment dissatisfied with the outward life I inhabit. Why does my outward life not reflect the enormity of the miracle of existence? Why are my eyes blinded with always new scales, my ears stopped with thick chunks of fresh wax, why are my fingers calloused again? I don't ask these questions lightly. I beat on the stone door of my tomb. I want out! Some days I wake up in a tomb, some days on a grassy mound by a river. Today, I woke up in a tomb. Why does my spirit sometimes retreat into a deathly closet? Perhaps it is not my spirit leading the way at such times, but my body, longing to lie down in marble gloom, and rot away.

Theatre is a safe place to do the unsafe things that need to be done. When it's not a safe place, it's abusive to actors and audiences alike. When its safety is used to protect cowards masquerading as heroes, it's a boring travesty. An actor who is truly heroic reveals the divine that passes through him, that aspect of himself that he does not own and cannot control. The control and the artistry of the heroic actor is in service to his soul.

We live in an era of enormous cynicism. Do not be fooled.

Don't act for money. You'll start to feel dead and bitter.

Don't act for glory. You'll start to feel dead, fat, and fearful.

We live in an era of enormous cynicism. Do not be fooled.

You can't avoid all the pitfalls. There are lies you must tell. But experience the lie. See it as something dead and unconnected you clutch. And let it go.

Act from the depth of your feeling imagination. Act for celebration, for search, for grieving, for worship, to express that desolate sensation of wandering through the howling wilderness.

Don't worry about Art.

Do these things, and it will be Art. - John Patrick Shanley, preface to the The Big Funk

Pina Bausch

I've been thinking about this poem all day since I read about the death of Pina Bausch and watched clips from her work on youtube.

The Summer Day
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life? - Mary Oliver

You can see the rest of this piece here.

Fractured Fairy Tales: Not Quite Happily Ever After

We knew it couldn't be true, didn't we?

Didn't we?

Some day la la la la...

...la dee da la dee da la dee da da da.

Well...maybe some of us didn't.

I thought about this picture this morning when I realized that several of the women in my exercise class look remarkably similar. As in I couldn't tell them apart. As in even after I stared at them for several minutes. Which makes me wonder about the aesthetics of plastic surgery - does each doctor have his or her own personal signature? You can tell a Rembrandt from a Da Vinci, no? So taking into account the limitations of the materials themselves, every doctor would presumably have an individual style based on his or her surgical skills and personal aesthetics and of course, of course, taking into account what the client wants. But I'm just wondering, ultimately, whose vision gets realized?

The photo is part of Dina Goldstein's Fallen Princess series. You can see more of her work here.

The project was inspired by my observation of three-year-old girls, who were developing an interest in Disney's Fairy tales. As a new mother I have been able to get a close up look at the phenomenon of young girls fascinated with Princesses and their desire to dress up like them. The Disney versions almost always have sad beginning, with an overbearing female villain, and the end is predictably a happy one. The Prince usually saves the day and makes the victimized young beauty into a Princess. - Dina Goldstein

White On White: The Pilot

White on White: The Pilot
(just like being there)
Eve Sussman & Rufus Corporation
Winkleman Gallery
New York
May 15 – June 20, 2009
Opening: Friday, May 15, 6-8 PM
Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 11-6 PM

Nick Cave: Sound Suits @ YBCA

Not that one. This one.



Nick Cave Soundsuits Collaboration
YBCA Galleries
May 28 - 31

Amy Krouse Rosenthal

Planning on taking the kids down to Hicklebee's in San Jose to see Amy Krouse Rosenthal this afternoon as she continues her Spring Tour. I read Encyclopedia of An Ordinary Life 4 years ago (that long ago!) and loved it's off-the-wall humor and observations. Cookies: Bite-Sized Life Lessons is also a family favorite. Check out 17 Things I Made, The Beckoning of Lovely, and The Story So Far. I'm very inspired by this work right now as I think about the kind of art I want to make and how I want to engage with my community.

Written on the Body

A body becomes an index of passing time. Skin reveals how bones shift, muscles loosen, freckles and wrinkles form, and bruises appear. I am interested in this as a fashion of skin, including the way a blush decorates one’s cheek, freckles form constellations on an arm, or hair creates sheen on skin’s matte surface. Skin also protects us while revealing internal emotions, offering a translucent space for adornment.

My skin is very sensitive and I blush easily. I have dermatographia, a condition in which one’s immune system exhibits hypersensitivity, via skin, that releases excessive amounts of histamine, causing capillaries to dilate and welts to appear (lasting about thirty minutes) when the skin’s surface is lightly scratched. This allows me to painlessly draw patterns and words on my skin, which I then photograph. Even though I can direct this ephemeral response by drawing on it, the reaction is involuntary, much like the uncontrollable nature of a blush. - Arianna Page Russell

Dressing
Magnan Projects
317 10th Avenue in Manhattan
Through May 16th

(via Mighty Girl)

Possible Inspiration for Picasso's Guernica

Several experts from the world of art have stated that there is an extraordinary likeness between the figures that appear in the Guernica painted by the artist and those in a Mozarabic Bible from the 10th Century, which is housed in the Cathedral in Leon, to the point where it has been discarded that it was fruit of a coincidence.

This Bible was exhibited in Barcelona in 1929 and in Paris in 1937, a time when the Cubist genius could have discovered the expressionist drawings that appear in the medieval text, according to the head of the Cathedral of Leon Museum, Máximo Gómez Rascón.

Several experts consulted by news agency EFE arrived at the same conclusion and base it on the relative aspects of the double view, in front and to the side, of the figures in the painting, as well as in the horse and the bull.

In this way, the director of the museum, has explained that the similarities are seen especially in the bull, which in the Bible symbolizes Saint Luke and which is “almost exactly” as the one that Picasso painted on Guernica.

(h/t hyde or die)

Tip Toland: Melt, The Figure in Clay

Thank you, Dorothy, for introducing me to this artist. More info here and here.