It is an odd feeling recognizing that the entirety of my work day is captured in the above photograph. Granted, it wasn’t a pedal to the metal sort of day. There was sunshine: I walked in it, sat and sewed and spoke with friends in it, dallied at the mailbox, chatted with the neighbor. But still, I sewed diligently and this is the little plot of textured surface I created.
I used to get Ranger Rick magazine as a kid. The back cover always had a selection of extreme close up photographs which readers were encouraged to guess at. What plant or animal are you looking at? Go ahead, make a guess.
I just hung work
At Territorial Vineyards tasting room on 3rd and Adams. It will be there through the month of March. Bring your honey, bring a pal, have a glass of wine, have a look around.
nervous me
I give my artist talk at LCC in one hour. You think I’d jump at the chance to talk about myself for a full 90 minutes, but really, I’ve been a bundle of nerves about it all morning. Last night I dreamt I decided to wear a monkey suit for the presentation. I couldn’t find the tail so I was in the process of hooking a black umbrella to my rear end when Josh woke me up. Hopefully things will play out better than that possible scenario.
a hundterwasser wonder
This office building makes me smile.
meet Friedensreich Hundterwasser
Hundterwasser was an Austrian painter, architect, and an early environmentalist. In the commentary for the painting (1971) pictured here, he wrote “Only when the DIVINE respect of GREEN POWER, only when the love of VEGETATION becomes part of us all, only then can we improve step by step our dying environment.” His paintings are a flurry of intense color, repeating shapes, dense line work... His buildings are organic in form, often featuring living rooves, undulating surfaces, and even holes to accommodate pre-existing trees. In his late years Hundterwasser dedicated himself enthusiatically to the environmental movement. He was a huge advocate of the composting toilet.
meet Lars Vilks
This Swedish artist’s driftwood sculptures are a mixture of skill (the man knows how to wield a hammer) and abandon (the shear energy and focus it must take him to collect and assemble these driftwood behemoths leaves me dizzy and excited). Vilks somehow circumvented Swedish building codes for these babies by selling the art to a private collector and declaring them a country unto themselves (not sure how that worked, I prefer to imagine Vilks standing at the top of one of his sculptures, waving a flag, and yelling “behold, I name you Landonia”.) Anyway, that is what I’ve know and liked of the Lars Vilks story. What I didn’t know, until my recent interest in controversial art, is the story of Lars Vilks the cartoonist.
In 2007 Vilks displayed a series of cartoon drawings of the Islamic prophet Mohammed with a dog’s body. People were angry! Since then he’s had multiple threats on his life, including one Iraqi organization’s $150,000 reward offer to anyone willing to assassinate Vilks. WOW!
more on controversial art and artists
I am preparing to give a talk in a fiber arts course at LCC this month. Although I’ve spent plenty of time at the front of a classroom, I am typically engaging humans under 11 years of age (a notoriously accepting and enthusiastic bunch). In an effort to better prepare myself for the more discriminating gaze of the adult collective, I went yesterday, to Wendy Huhn’s talk in the same course. She is a fibers and mixed media artist who (unbeknownst to me, but oh so appropriate after last week’s angry mother incident) consistently uses disturbing, often confusing, and sometimes controversial images in her work. She eventually removed one piece from her LCC show last year after multiple students raised objections to her image of a “zulu baby”. Although I am not particularly drawn to her work, I was interested in what she had to say about her process and image choices. It got me thinking about the artists I am drawn to and influenced by. I’ve started reading up on a few of them and found “controversial” was a surprising thread connecting many of them. More to come in my next few blogs!