Friday, May 25, 2012

Cutting Up




I cut up my BIG Circular Statements piece, from which I will now make one 8x8 foot piece and a variety of smaller pieces, still in progress. Here's a piece I'm playing with, that uses two 4x3 foot pieces, overlapped. Obviously the mounting system needs some work...

Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Wine Foils ABC

I'm still having fun with wine foils, and I've always had a passion for alphabets, so I'm seeing if I can make an alphabet with these funny little images (using scans of the originals). Three of those originals have already been sold, and the rest are now going down to Provincetown with a gallerist who loves them. So I guess I can keep playing with wine foils until I get to Z!
 








Sunday, April 22, 2012

More Wine Foils


I'm back in the saddle making collages with wine foils. There's something restful about making these things; it's like my found object sculptures -- the pieces offer themselves, ready made in many cases, already suggesting the figure that they become. I know they're a bit fluffy and lightweight, but I think they're humorous and engaging.

  


There are five in this grouping, each 12"x9". I had them scanned at the copy center, but because the backgrounds are white, I think they had a hard time finding the edges to crop them, so the images are a bit different in their widths...


I'll have them on exhibit at my studio during the SPA Bash on April 27.

NOTE:  I made a funny follow-up piece to the big Pandora's Box installation that's in the silent auction that finishes on May 27 called Pandora's Naval Ring. Come on over and bid on it!
 

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Jesús Rafael Soto

Jesús Rafael Soto (June 5, 1923 - January 14, 2005) was a Venezuelan artist known primarily for his kinetic sculptures. I have just discovered him through a series of bilingual books called Conversations, published by Fundación Cisneros.

Here's a wonderful tribute to his work on YouTube.

Sunday, April 1, 2012

West Collection

So I finally put in an application to the West Collection. It took a few hours, and was kind of fun to do. You have until midnight tonight if you want to apply.

Friday, March 30, 2012

Travels in Spain


From March 11-27 I was in Spain, staying in a small village called Acequias, about half an hour south of Granada. Our friends Dusty and David Haller have the use of a wonderful three-story house in the village, and invited me and my husband and Karen Thomsen and Harold Ryan (old friends from Denmark) to stay with them there for a few weeks. As Karen said, "we're all old friends from the 70's, and now we're almost IN our 70's!"

In exchange, we did some work in the house, which was really great. I like participating in the life of the places where I travel. Here's a shot of me putting cement plaster on the wall out near the street.

One of my primary objectives during this trip was to go back to the small village, Otívar, where my mother had lived for about a year, in 1980, when she was a bit younger than I am. I had visited Spain with her about 12 years ago, and we went together to Otívar for a few hours. My mother died a year ago, on March 29, and I wasn't sure if I could find the people she was connected to. My husband, R.D. Eno, and two of our friends drove with me there, and I took with me a photograph I have from the time my mother lived in the village there (the photo on the left below).

I met a woman coming out of a bar and showed my photograph and said I was looking for anybody who had known my mother when she was in the village. Amazingly, she went next door and brought down Ana and Jose Perez. He was the son of the man in the photograph. They very generously brought me up to their living room and gave me wine and tapas, and we talked about the time my mother had lived there. Later R.D. took a photo of us in the same place (actually a bit to the left of it, as there were cars parked in front of the other window).


Saturday, March 10, 2012

Window for the Green Mountain Film Festival

I've put up a rant about the film Lost Bohemia in the window of Capitol Copy in Montpelier. This film, for which SPA is a Community Sponsor, will be shown at the Green Mountain Film Festival on
  • Friday, March 23 6:00 pm @ City Hall Arts Center
  • Saturday, March 24 10:30 am @ City Hall Arts Center
Here's part of my text:

OK, so here's the question I want to ask: what's the purpose and importance of an arts center, and are artists themselves a critical -- or even a valuable -- part of the picture? Of course, we all understand that art, dance, music, and theater can't be made without the creators of art, but it is certainly possible to stash them away in isolated, cheap digs, like cows in a barn, and just milk them and bring the "art" product to market. Or we could just keep recycling the products of dead artists and not need to be bothered with contemporary work...




And now I'm falling down and going out of town for two weeks!