new website

I don't really use this blog anymore, but have a new website as well as tumblr which is less my art and more a place to archive my ideas. they are here:

http://cargocollective.com/kimmytolbert

http://trifektas.tumblr.com/


also check out my wedding photography !

http://birchblue.blogspot.com/

thanks :)

urban archaeology

Mark Bradford makes some amazing work. He collages pieces of billboard and print advertisements to create multi-layered collages that he gouges and melds to echo urban America. I love artists that take junk and trash and make stunning new works out of them, especially since his work has quite the same feel as where it came from, some like cities, buildings, or streets.

little space guys made of ice

These pictures are weeks old, but in my winter art slump they have stayed on my camera until just today, when the sun has pulled me outside to take pictures and I was reminded of these from this cold day.
I love the way the lake changes in winter. It gets these crusts of ice that morph and melt and tower and crash and change all the time. I like looking at the progress as it goes through its stages. As I carefully crunched through the snowdrifts and icedrifts and sand-ice-snow drifts, the waves kept crashing against the ice-mountains that had formed at the edge. Bursts of thick grey water with chunks of ice exploded into the air. I found a snow fort, and also these funny little ice forms that looked like bowls tilted on their sides. Or a vast army of snowball space men.

stories of american majesty and wandering

new music tuesday! new month of me trying to be better about blogging. Really don't know what happened to March (March? March?! I see you in my dayplanner but on this blog space of creativity and free time you are nowhere to be found. sigh). It was certainly quite eventful, I got a second part time job as an Interior Design Personal Assistant for a wonderful designer. I took many pictures of snow on te beach. I took some holga, drew some drawings, and have been designing away.

But regardless! Today I blog. About a discovery from last night....

Thank you thank you Josh Ritter for not only being one of my absolute favorite singer/songwriter/preformers but also for having me stumble upon www.daytrotter.com! seriously. go right now, make an account.
free music. beautiful music. good bands. easy downloads!

my first few downloads...an interesting little impulsive mix.
josh ritter
au revoir simone
bon iver
high places
horse feathers
the low anthem
the morning benders
peter bjorn and john
the tallest man on earth
yeasayer

sometimes you just have to draw

Its true. A good drawing session is like a good run. It just has to get out, sometimes. These are from oh, probably before Christmas sometime, but I have yet to put them up!

paradise regained

This weekend, for Valentine's day, in the spirit of love and beauty, I at last caved to Anthro's latest round of markdowns and bought myself Tim Walker's Pictures book. The cover is a Vogue shoot of a pin-up model wearing bunny ears, sitting on a pile of chairs, surrounded by white (live) bunnies. It seems glam, glossy, and contemporary. However the cover underneath the book jacket, embossed with silver ink on blue, reveals a more intimate view of the heart of his work. Its letters are hand-drawn, its border covered in drawings of fairytale ships, roses, beds hanging from branches, umbrellas, a goodnight moon. For Tim Walker, despite his impeccable sense for fashion, style, and brilliant success with the world's forefront fashion magazine, is, at heart, one who infuses dreams, fashion, reality, and nostalgic English countrysides filled with brown bunnies, ponies, and chickens.

From his forward, "daydreaming":

"When I think about it, photographs, to me are really a kind of dream state. It's not about a good dream, or a bad dream...its more important that your day hazes and your mind drifts towards only being concerned by your imaginings....and, as you tour your imagination you want to photograph what you are seeing...BUT...the only way you can do this is by BELIEF...really utterly absolutely passionately firmly believing...you see, you are SO very keen to show what you've seen that somehow it becomes true, and the picture you end up taking becomes a souvenir, a piece of proof brought back all the way from the daydream. "
-Tim Walker, London 2008

Perhaps I love these because lately I have been having vivid, crazy, sometimes-like-movie-stills dreams. Perhaps it is because I grew up making fairy houses out of leaves in my backyard. Or because there are still some of us who cannot keep going foward into modernity without taking a good look at how things used to be. How things could be. It is a bit idealistic and unrealistic to live in the clouds of our imaginings everyday, but it is far more creative than turning on the tv, for it demands us to be the agents of change not just the watchers. Tim Walker works primarily for Italian and British Vogue, and has been recreating British identity through his photographs. I wish he would do the same for America, too, sometimes. Because it's true, we can only cling to what is true by belief, and belief is what allows what is true to become real to us.

lately, late

last week disappeared somehow, maybe under all the snowdrifts, and all that is left of it is some ticket stubs and change at the bottom of my purse.  And a few photos. I love snowdrift/light photos because I think it makes the lights look even more bright when they are surrounded by a cushion of snow. They become softer. It makes me want to sleep on the snow.