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.

small little drawers and paper foldings

One day I started playing with book pages- staining them with tea, cutting them up with an exacto knife, making origami and folding paper swirls. I had just got this jewelery box at a rummage sale and it was waiting to be transformed by something and, viola, suddenly it was spilling with small bits of paper everywhere! Next time I am going to try with colored paper, like one of my favorite Cornell boxes (above)

the thing with feathers

(birds by kiki smith)

Found! Judy Pfaff's potential inspiration for one of her works entitled "the thing with feathers"! 

"Hope" is the thing with feathers

by Emily Dickinson

"Hope" is the thing with feathers--
That perches in the soul--
And sings the tune without the words--
And never stops--at all--

And sweetest--in the Gale--is heard--
And sore must be the storm--
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm

I've heard it in the chillest land--
And on the strangest Sea--
Yet, never, in Extremity,
It asked a crumb--of Me.

dust of snow

These swirling snow sands are actually a frozen over lake-desert. My small and remote Europe Lake freezes thick enough to walk out and different snows have left beautiful patterns on the ice. Some years the ice freezes so clear that you can see fish moving underneath, but this year the snow makes a perfect sheet of white, and the wind conjures the white grains around as if guided by some magnetic force.

if i had a room

I would fill it with wonders like Judy Pfaff.

Judy Pfaff has been a huge inspiration to me. I'm obsessed. Her way of working with materials to create space is magical. I love her craft and attention to detail. If I had a room, a blank studio, I would probably doubt myself. I would assume that paint could be no more than paint and charcoal charcoal. But when I look at Judy Pfaff's work I see the malleability of material and its power to create worlds. Wire and steel, wood and string, paper and glue transform into this familiar yet unexplored place.

Her most recent exhibition was "Paper", held at Ameringer & Yohe Fine Art in New York. This is an excerpt from the press release:

"Previous exhibitions at Ameringer & Yohe, Neither Here nor There and Buckets of Rain, illustrated her command of a wide array of media ranging from wire to neon, from blackened tinfoil to entire tree systems stripped bare of bark, all reinvented for her own creative purpose. In much the same way, Paper rewards us with Pfaff's talent for concoction and repurposing. While it is tempting to term her newest efforts "collage", the word leaves too much out. Judy Pfaff creates worlds with paper Small delicate drawings celebrate unfolding, expansive ideas. Large works (8'x8') wrestle to compress entire Pfaff installations into low relief. The viewer is invited to journey through a myriad of creative suppositions and baroque space"

Here are some images from the show!

The colors and textures are so rich and beautiful and I love the way that everything quietly but poignantly unfolds. Its a sort of gentle explosion. I also especially like the name of the last one, "I dwell in possibility".

"nature does not knock"

"the thing with feathers"

"konya"

"I dwell in possibility"

clarity, perhaps

(reflections in our front door. the only editing I did was to color correct or enhance, it really looked like that with the fog!)

fresh year. new planner. goal lists. blank pages.
and yet here I am again, starting out the year with....blurry edges.

Its one of those times when art tendencies reflect life tendencies. Ah, those moments.

People sometimes ask me why I like blurry pictures. Aren't they imperfect? Out of focus?

In the pages of my mind, blurry pictures are like the underlined paragraphs with dog eared pages and correlating ideas written in the margains. They are the aha moments when you feel assured in your gifts of discernment and decision making that last just long enough. See, and even those two sentences didn't make much sense.

They are the moment your eyes fog up, but never quite let the tears out. And everything sort of swims fiercely around in your head and in and out of this smudgy scene, whatever it may be. Usually a road at night for me. The headlights just sort of melt past. Life seems so simple and so complicated at the same time.

Juxtaposition. One of my favorite words. When you put two things together for a contrasting effect. They really seem endless. Nature and Machine. Motion and Stillness. Organic and Geometric. Sacred and Profane. Tension tension tension. Its what makes life interesting, what makes it worth exploring, what keeps me seeking.

Well, welcome welcome two thousand and ten. I shall use this rare moment in time to look back and reflect, learn, and put all of this positive motivation into color coding my new planner and being a better email responder. For this moment, yes, I will put my life into resolutions. But though they may seem clear cut, I know me better. The edges melt into each other and drip off the page.