april fool!

what better way to get back into the swing of things than to publish on april fools??
i have been swept away from art making by LIFE!

mostly work and school.

tho getting a new computer and moving stuff from point a to point b has also been in the mix!

i am in the process of getting a masters in counseling; something i've wanted to do for years. so now i need to counsel myself to get back to making art too!

i have been taking a few photos and doing some sketching. filling the well.

a couple of weeks ago my niece and i made a trek back to the chauvin sculpture garden. we each took lots of photos, and commented that there were things we hadn't noticed before.

it wasn't till we got back home, downloaded them and looked back at old photos we had taken that we realized, much to our surprise, that the sculptures had been re-painted.

??? thus ensued the debate: is it "right" to have done that? is it ethical to have redone them in that manner? or should they remain as they were when the artist walked away?

pros and cons on both sides...

what do you think??

neither one of us remembered noticing this before. looking back on old photos we realized it had pretty much blended into the background before.

you can see the faint image just to the right of the jazz band...

finally

yes, it's been a while. not much art making going on here lately. but lots of living. many of you have inquired how we did with the storms so here's a better late than never update:

gustav got us pretty bad here in houma. lot of wind damage. tree limbs, roofs etc.
i was lucky personally - just had a lot of tree limbs down. mess. a few shingles missing. nothing major. i evacuated and was gone for a week, and was even lucky enuf to have someone go to my house and clean out my fridge and freezer so i didn't have to go home to that mess and stink.
i did pack my van full of quilts and assorted art when i left, because i really believed my house would flood. i am not far from the intracoastal waterway and the predictions are that a rita sized storm surge would create flooding from here to thibodaux - about 17 miles away. not a good thing. luckily, it didn't.

the area in general sustained a lot of damage. there are blue roofs everywhere and the tree damage is appalling. my old neighborhood got hit really hard. lots of little tornadic bursts go thru so you'll see pockets of really severe damage here and there. the sight of 100 year old live oak trees, snapped, still turns my stomach.

i have not taken many photos. too close for comfort? deja vu all over again? images seared into my brain making the need for documenting them pretty useless? probably a little bit of all of the above.

then we got ike. which i watched blow thru from inside the local docinthebox as the gustav crud i had even before i left town flared up again a few days after returning home. as a little aside, i spent the week i was evacuated with little to no voice. i am guessing my fellow evacuees were grateful for that fact..;-) so ike passed in a blur of fever, and antibiotics. it flooded the usual areas below the intracoastal , and frankly, got too close for comfort here as well. i do know many people whose homes flooded for the second time. or more. my heart goes out to them.

i was out of town a couple of weekends ago and it was SO nice to be somewhere with no mess and destruction. didn't realize how stressful it was till i was driving home. as i got closer to home, i could feel the knot in my gut rising.

i haven't gotten back to making art yet, and i swore i was done with hurricane art but i think gustav and ike have convinced me otherwise. it's just a matter of getting the
time to get back to it...


the worst part is this just added to the constant chipping away of our coastline.the gulf is encroaching . it's just a matter of time.

meandering

in between cutting grass and the day job i've been working at getting back to art.. mind you, with all the rain we've had lately, keeping the grass cut/weeds down has become a major pre-occupation! in order to avoid heat stroke, and lightning, there are maybe 45 available minutes left on a good day lately! the day job is a little more predictable!

have started thinking about, and sketching some new pieces.. mostly 3-d vessels in various forms and media.. ready to take them to the construction level... can't wait to get started.

in the meantime i've been doing a little exploring... which seems to lead back to the same place in spite of myself...

finding art in unusual places

have come across art in the most unusual places over the last couple of weeks..
just discovered this reverse graffiti artist tonight. what an interesting way to work!



then there's this set of images on flickr which just goes to show that anything can be artfully designed..

multiples again

art material that is...

as i discussed a few posts ago, multiples of ANYTHING = art supplies. little did i know what would wander by my computer a few days after that...

now, i have to say - i work with nurses. those of you who are nurses or who EAT with them know what their conversation can be like during meal times. yum. you'd think it would be the greatest weight loss incentive known to man. (sometimes it comes close!). you would think NOTHING could possibly faze them, right? well that's what i thought. till i showed this to one of them ~ and much to my surprise ~ she was spooked. dare i say ~ finally grossed out.

now ~ before you click the big red x at the top of the page, let me show you what i am talking about. frankly i find it awesome:

yes. these are bones: skulls, etc. ok ..i'll admit, it is just a tiny bit macabre, but after reading the backstory, not so much...
frankly, i think they are visually very appealing..

essentially they are found objects.

essentially this is assemblage. it could even be argued (imho) that it is a wonderful example of outsider art. they were put together by a wood carver who, i would guess, had no experience or indoctrination in using these materials in his day to day work. maybe that argument is a little farfetched, but i still think it's a masterful public art project...

what do you think??

drooling!

while this isn't fiber art related it is absolutly inspirational. one of the daughters of some of my closest friends and her fiancee are on a 6 month trip of a lifetime. they have a wonderful website that her brother built for her and have been posting the most delightful descriptions of their adventure and photos that are drop dead gorgeous. they started out in africa, and are in egypt now. the photos are priceless. i sit here every few days and just drool. if this keeps up i will need a new keyboard soon!

check them out here. i've taken the liberty of grabbing one of today's shots.. which makes me laugh everytime i look at it!

i went to see the bucket list over the weekend and of course loved it. just watching jack nicholson alone is entertaining as all get out and of course you can't watch it and not think about making your own bucket list. so far i've got a list of museums i want to see that's embarassingly long! lots of travel: greece, egypt, rome, turkey, to name a few... and an assortment of other random things...

and right now i'm checking out this site *43 things* to eavesdrop on others' lists.

so what's on your list??

finding fun in the weirdest places

went on a *field trip* at work yesterday. the mission was to go check out a couple of warehouses that someone has in a little town near here. the deal is we clean them out, sell the stuff, and keep the profits... and i have to admit, it was just the tiniest smidge hard to stay focused on the actual task at hand when confronted with all of the fun stuff in there. yes, there was rusty stuff everywhere. =) i got sidetracked left and right when coming upon nice little piles of things that just screamed ART MATERIALS!!! hell... we could certainly make some $ from selling this stuff... unfortunately, i think much of it could well come from me!!

as we all know, just about anything in multiples = art supplies....

well i came across a box of these....

if i am remembering right, these are some sort of brick ties... (ok so i'm a little vague on that....) i grabbed a handful and brought them home.. and have been generating all kinds of ideas of what to do with them... in the meantime, i thought i'd play with the image a bit in photoshop and print out the results to make a screen with... so here is the image after fiddling with it..

at the same time, i had rusted a blank silk tie that i had come across before leaving for cleveland. loved the way it came out. but ms can't leave well enough alone just had to tweak it a little bit.... and a little bit more... so i printed over it...

and ick... i think i ruined it...

well....maybe it's not as awful as i

thought it was. since it's too late to turn back now, i figure i just as soon keep going with it and layer a little more printing over it. no, i haven't done it yet.. but i'm thinking what better thing to print on a tie than a tie???

stay tuned...

no telling what it will look like tomorrow.. if nothing else i will have another good example of what NOT to do!