December 21, 2010
December 20, 2010
Supermodel tips for toned behinds
What I really wanted to post about today was the progress made in yesterday’s mural workshop. But I spent the evening at the Partners In Education in Newark (PeNewark) Forum at Arts High on the role of arts and culture in education. It was one in a series of conversations the organization is conducting to try to determine the best use of the one hundred millions dollars Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg gave to the city’s schools. Now back home, I still have a number of things to do. [So] I will save the workshop report for another day and exploit one of my drafts to make short work of posting.
With this post I unveil two new categories: “What You Live With” and “In the dictionary this whole time.”
Both predate my blogging by many years in the form of filed (that is, actual paper) archives. “What you live with” is an archive of remarkably disturbing but not very serious (?) cultural expressions. These expressions are news items that briefly illuminate some overall trend which makes me anxious. I wouldn’t venture to characterize exactly what that trend is; suffice it to say I began the file when I had it in mind to rewrite MOBY DICK as a novel about a monomaniacal visual artist seeking doomed revenge on the leviathan of pop culture. (Clearly autobiographical.) Melville, in seeking to “comprehend the whale,” pursues the real creature from every imaginable angle. The result of his quest is a paean to the numinousness of all actuality. Something like this is intended by my amassed file of reports and details from media culture, of which the title of this post is butt my first example.
“In the dictionary this whole time” is a much less mysterious category. Every now and then a day comes along when I find I’m making multiple trips to the dictionary. The discovery of one word’s definition leads to questions about another’s and I read and read. (Friends better educated than myself chide me on this habit. In response I do my best to make sure some portion of my searching is done in an actual etymological dictionary.) Very often this question about another word’s definition involves the word immediately following the word I have looked up. In this inaugural instance of this category, the first word I pursued was “calligraphy.” Learning that “kallos” was Greek for “beauty” I read further to discover other “kallos” beginning words. And in that manner I learned a new word that sorts well with the title of this post.
December 19, 2010
December 18, 2010
Marie was my secret Santa
So at the Project U.S.E. holiday party, Marie P was my Secret Santa. Which means I was guarranteed a gift that was hand-crafted and super-thoughtful, lovely, clever and fun. It was especially nice because it was all of these things and personalized for me. It was based on conversations we’d had. It was a very pleasant surprise in the middle of the party.
She made me fortune cookie fortunes. We’d had a conversation about her history with fortune cookies when I showed her the blog posts here that had to do with real and fake fortunes I’d gathered to myself over the years. I like putting very important messages on fortune cookie paper. Apparently I am not alone.
She’d asked me if I was planning to make the cookies as well. A valid question which I had to answer shamefacedly in the negative. In high school she’d made thousands upon thousands of fortune cookie fortunes with fortune cookies wrapped around them for a fund raiser. Super cool.
She also made me fortune cookies. Plenty enough to go around at the office party but I wasn’t sharing! Very tasty cookies = not for sharing. No, that’s not true. I wanted to make sure this package arrived home more or less intact so that I could share my good luck and warm feelings with Maya.
Marie also made the box in which she put the cookies in which she put the fortunes. Cloth-lined and cloth-clothed, one of the fabrics for the box, she said, was from an old skirt. You know, recycling, sustainability, that’s how Marie rolls.
Besides that Project U.S.E. is an extraordinary organization with which I am lucky to have become associated, one of the great gifts I received in the last year has been getting to know Marie. She is a marvelous, super curious, wonderfully creative person. Happy Holidays, Marie.
December 14, 2010
December 12, 2010
Another Positive Sunday Workshop
The Leaders of the Future at Project WOW! worked for two hours turning their silhouettes of Ball Categories into dynamic wall decorations for the mural. These will eventually share wall space with a special iconography they are developing and some sort of (possibly verbal) history of Project Wow!
We also started to talk about experimenting with colors in relation to the success of designs. Here’s a demo I worked up before the workshop. Weeks ago, after watching SENSOLOGY by Michel Gagne and MIGRATIONS by Alyssa Sherwood, participants tried to visually evoke beats they like. The first mural we are doing is for the drop-in center’s entry way and they are trying to create a welcome. Bashir — where are you Bashir? — said after watching the films that she’d like to try to use the techniques we saw to catch the spirit she feels upon entering Project WOW!: “Pump the Beat!”
These first drawings were experimental and didn’t generate too much enthusiasm. I played with a bit of this one by Midget (self-styled) to show how playing with colors, borders and ground colors could bring out what was potential in first efforts.
December 10, 2010
The Goofy Shoed Buddha
Friday of a long work week! Spent all day on something for publication so I can’t even post what I accomplished. And all those long hours today, and all those possibilities, I had plenty of thoughts about the variety in visual expression and the difference between an imagining and a finished drawing. But, as I said, long work day, too tired to say something worth reading. Slated for tomorrow is finishing the demo for the second workshop activity based on Nick’s drawing (first one is here).
For now, the first of my placemats to be posted. And I’m ashamed to say it’s not even a diner placemat. I’m from Jersey, so if you’re from Jersey you know what I’m talking about, if not, I can’t explain. This placemat is from the ice cream shop Friendly’s. We spent dinner every Sunday there the whole summer of 2007. And I can tell you, they have the best crayons out of anybody.
December 8, 2010
Collage Coloring Page
“The deeper the influence of the formal, decorative element upon the method of representation, the more probable it becomes that formal elements attain an emotional value. An association between these two forms of art is established which leads, on the one hand to the conventionalization of representative design, on the other to the imputation of significance into formal elements. It is quite arbitrary to assume a one-sided development from the representative to the formal or vice versa, or even to speak of a gradual transformation of a representative form into a conventional one, because the artistic presentation itself can proceed only on the basis of the technically developed forms…”
— Franz Boas, “Representative Art,” pps. 82-83 Primitive Art (1927)