Category: other people’s art

leaves that were green

November 6, 2007


Nov 6
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

Like I said before, I think of fall containing leaves with bright colors, while brown is for later, or trees that aren’t really trying. But, once the leaves drop, they turn brown, frequently a nice color and with a lovely crunch and smell. I can’t quite quilt the smell, or the crunch, but I think I did get the color.

Alice is working on turning a lump of rock into a bear shaped lump of rock. This entails a fair amount of sanding and rasping and results in a pretty good pile of dust.


amorphous bear

I think she’s been imbibing Andy Goldsworthy as well, because this is what showed up on the camera:


Alice’s spirals

In family circus, Al and I both managed a (painful and not really graceful, but a milestone) move called a Hip Key in fabric. We have documentation:

Al_hip_key_1
I_can_hip_key

Al was so cute: he kept his toes pointed through the whole thing…

silver eyed woman

September 18, 2007


Sept 18
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

I should listen to my own childrearing advice. I routinely tell people that kids should be allowed to become bored so that they have experience of getting themselves un-bored, developing skills in getting interested in things.

I have been home, bored, waiting for Alice and me to get better, and I’ve had this amazing surge of productivity even with feeling logy and dim. Maybe it is because of feeling logy and dim? I’m harder to distract, and can only think in a very slow and linear fashion… or something. So I have postcards lined up waiting to be made, work accomplished on two months of quilt journal pages and (ahem) two backgrounds for a group I am only vicariously involved with.

Dandelion_background_1_1
Dandelion_background_2_1

I waver between feeling like a poseur and an overachiever with these two backgrounds. The group is Twelve by Twelve, and they are making 12"x12" art quilt squares on a theme every two months. The first theme is Dandelion. I love dandelions. I love picking them and making big, fat braids with the stems. I have a picture I adore of Aerin and some neighbors peeking around the corner of the house with dandelion crowns on. Really I am delighted with the theme, and at the moment I am secretly delighted with my two backgrounds. I am thinking they will be up close looks at the fly away part,  (thinking originally about how to make a dandelion that was not yellow and green) although I may use the second background for the yellow part after all. But – it isn’t my group. I’m just playing along on the sidelines…

And yet, I am loving the size and the shape, and the new ideas that keep popping up.

I am also thinking I need to form my own group.

Anyone want to join? I think I am looking for creative, artistic people willing to form a group to inspire each other to take their work to the next level. Must be open to new ideas, critiques, and collaboration. If you fit the bill, or even better, if you are interested, drop me a note.

Cornell, dimly

August 19, 2007

On Friday Aerin and I stopped at the Peabody Essex Museum, nowhere near on the way home but closer then that at any other moment of the summer. It used to be Peabody Marine Museum and have lots and lots of good boat stuff in it, now it is mostly art that was plundered brought back from various exotic locales during the time Salem was a world trading power. I wanted to see the Joseph Cornell exhibit, because he seems to be a Very Important Person in the development of collage and assemblage.

Like Mimi, I found it hard to get into. I thought it might be Aerin’s increasing impatience with the place, or the (astonishing, to me) crowding, but it occurs to me in retrospect that if it had been more interesting it would have been difficult to drag her away. It was dim, to save the art. The organization was not clear to me, although there did seem to be some kind of thematic underpinnings relating the various kinds of work to times and places in his life.

I didn’t find much of the work I saw terribly compelling. I can see how he is an important source to people working in collage and assemblage. He drew from many varied sources and did rather paste everything together.  I usually play the game "Which one would you steal buy?" and I was surprised that I didn’t find any particular piece that I really lusted after. I liked a couple collages, two made me smile, two more made me stop and look harder, but on the whole, I was underwhelmed.

On the other hand, down two floors and over one gallery, I was itching to touch, borrow and steal one out of every three pieces I saw in the Origami exhibit. So many really interesting and compelling images and shapes and such a great deal of cleverness wedged together in one place made me a little dizzy. There was a Pangolin in particular, that I wanted for my very own. It was folded from a single sheet of 6 foot square paper, and had all the lovely scales along its back and the sweet pointy nose and lightly bronzed edges on all the scales… stop here and imagine, for a moment, a piece of paper 2 meters on a
side. Now imagine folding it precisely, to make a creature that is
roughly 45 cm long, extravagantly detailed, and blackly/charcoally
gorgeous. Makes my head spin. Clearly it really spoke to me.

In family things, Alice seems to have had a fine time at Pony Farm, and is even now recreating it for three dolls and four stuffed horses all over the kitchen floor. The girls have fed the ponies, cleaned stalls, and are now being run through their riding lesson, later they have been promised swimming with the ponies. There is a steady monologue of songs and encouragement for dollies and ponies. I feel I am watching Alice’s past week unfold, possibly with editing to make it funner.