two kitties

Woman With A Cigarette: Fernando Botero

Colombian-born artist Fernando Botero is famous for his paintings and sculpture of, well....fat people. This is "Woman With A Cigarette". I'm about to go get a massage, which made me think of this one.

The photo was taken in Singapore, but the piece is now installed, along with eight other large-scale Botero bronze, at the Grand Wailea hotel in Hawaii.

Stephanie Metz and Louise Bourgeois: Fabric Sculpture

I stopped somewhere on my internet travels - not sure where - and found a photo of Stephanie Metz' felt sculpture.

 

It reminds me of sculptor Louise Bourgeois' pink fabric series. My favorite from that group is Bourgeois' "Untitled, 2002."

 "The Observer's Paradox" marked 300 posts on this blog. If you're reading this, (is anyone reading this?) and you'd like the chance to win a $25 gift certificate from Barnes & Noble, leave me a comment....by end of Friday.

Thomas Allen: Uncovered

Twenty-one percent of Americans surveyed in a 2006 BBC news poll said they received more spiritual guidance from Oprah Winfrey than the leader(s) of their respective religious communities.

I'm not sure about THAT, but I loved the Thomas Allen illustrations in this month's O Magazine. This photo is a scan from the issue. Worth a few bucks just for Allen's art, which graces a whole section on memoir. Perhaps my favorite piece was the one written by Lorene Cary.

Allen creates three dimensional collages from books found at thrift stores. The work is then photographed and printed on 4 x 6" paper. The photo is as important as the thing, in other words. Kind of like the way Andy Goldsworthy approaches his work.

You can purchase Allen's book, Uncovered, from the Aperture Foundation. Allen worked with long-time collaborator Chip Kidd on the cover design of his own book.

More Heidi Rettig Art.

Here are two more from the "ghost town" series that I've been working on. These are digital photos I shot in Bannack, Montana, then printed on transparent fabric using an inkjet. The fabric is layered over antique letters mounted on reclaimed pine boards.  Each collage was altered with watercolor and, finally, sealed with encaustic wax. It's the wax that gives it that dreamy look - and it smells just like clover honey. Art that you can sniff? Good art.

I'm liking the way these media mix together - a blend of the new, new, new, digital photo and fabric printing technologies and the old, old, old, of the antique handwriting and the ancient technique of encaustic painting.

 

Creativity by Committee: The Public Art Projects of Smaller Towns

I hate murals. I also hate 99.99999% of all other public sculpture projects funded by small arts councils. Now, mind, I'm not talking about the street art of  Philadelphia or Pittsburgh, I'm talking about Bend and Spokane.

By the time the concept has been fabricated for the street, it's been stripped of anything that might be deemed controversial by the constituents of local officials. Art like this is expensively, expansively, uninteresting. And more often than not, public art is poorly cared for. Neglected after installation because of limited city budgets, sculpture deteriorates under the elements; it's aesthetic sometimes simply expires.

In Bethesda, Maryland, where I used to live and work, there was a piece I actually kind of liked. I would pass this forest of aluminum "trees" just outside the metro stop each day. The piece, by William H. Wainwright, had holographic leaves that creaked in the wind though I think they were supposed to be moved by water pumped through the trunks. It was almost pretty. It could have been, if the fountain had been clean and filled with water. It really says something when even the photo on the artist's website shows a dry, empty, pool.

This week, while visiting Spokane, I spun past this David Govedare sculpture in Expo Park. I wouldn't say that I love this piece, or even like it, but driving next to it in a car, you did get the feeling that the runners were moving. That's something, at least. You can take a virtual walk through Spokane's sculpture garden here. I'd love to hear what you think.

Farragut Naval Training Center: Brig Museum

Today I found myself touring the Brig Museum at the Farragut Naval Training Center in Athol, Idaho. Don't ask. My life sometimes brings me to strange places.

I've always loved the creativity of small museums. For some reason, small budgets and limited space often equal a more detailed presentation - though it seems it should be just the opposite.

So I tried to see the Brig Museum through that lens. This one, a living diorama of a prisoner in a cell...it's SCARY-WACKY.

But cool, right? With the sheet over his face? And the prison food tray on his lap, ready for the tater-tots of the next life? It kind of reminds me of this painting.

Encaustic Collage Art: Heidi Rettig

Hymns for Now II, 4" x 5", digital photo on inkjet fabric, antique letters, watercolor, and encaustic medium on reclaimed pine.

A piece from a new series I've been working on. I've printed my photos of Western ghost towns on inkjet fabric and used each as a layer within a simple collage.  The fabric gives the print a lovely, transparent quality when the wax hits it. This photo was taken at the old Methodist church in Bannack, Montana.

Jennifer Greenburg: Photography

Mr. Mysterious and Mamie, 2004

Today, my cousin, the photographer Jennifer Greenburg, is getting married. It is an afternoon ceremony, outside at Berkeley Plantation. This will be my first ever visit to an old, Southern plantation.

Jennifer Khoshbin's Art from Vintage Books

I just spent a week slicing up old books and nothing like this ever occurred to me. I love it! Jennifer Khoshbin has many more beautiful pieces on her website. Check it out!

Cyanotype: Beach Four, Kalaloch Peninsula

Good work came out of the art studio last week, and even after Debra went home to Pittsburgh, I kept going in a fever. I collaged with books, cyanotype prints and encaustic until, finally, my wax griddle started to smoking noxious odors from within.

The image above is a photo of one of my favorite prints from the week. It is a photo of Beach Four, on Kalaloch Peninsula in Washington State, where Mike and I spent our honeymoon.

Using a computer, I reversed the image to make a negative, then printed it on Portico transparency film. (You need this special film to get the job done - don't skimp!) I put the negative over papers treated with cyanotype chemicals that I bought in a kit and mixed in the laundry room with the aid of a night light.

The negatives were exposed outside under bright sunlight, and Debra and I spent many happy minutes chatting in the grass while we waited for the paper to turn from acid green, to dark blue, to gray. We gave them a one minute wash in regular white vinegar to bring out the beautiful blue mid-tones, washed the prints in water, then dried them flat on newspaper.

It wasn't as easy as I make it sound. We experimented quite a bit with different papers and wash times, with plenty of frustration mixed in. The fancy Crane's paper that came with the kit gave me the most disappointing results. It couldn't stand up to a vinegar wash and a water rinse. At least I can use them "as a base for collage." That's a Debra-ism, and translated from her language to my sister's, it also means, "Man, those are ugly."

Some of my favorite cyanotypes are the prints we made on book pages - using photos from a winter visit to a ghost town near Dillon, Montana. Here is one cyanotype from that series:

  

Cyanotypes on Pages Torn From Books

Things have been busy here. On Saturday, Debra and I converted my laundry room into a darkroom so we could make cyanotypes.

For the first wave, we collected natural materials from the woods and used them to print on pages torn from books or cut up prints Debra made at Carnegie Mellon.

Last night, I made a series of digital negatives from photos taken during a visit to the ghost town, Bannock, Montana. As soon as the sun is strong enough, I'll be printing these on pages torn from books. Debra is making line drawings on transparencies and printing them directly onto found images.

I painted the cyanotype solution over the book pages and left sections of text uncoated - so I'm hoping that the printing process will reveal a new story, that I can stitch together in an artist book.

Debra Tomson Williams: Feel Better (2008)

Mixed-media artist Debra Tomson Williams arrives today from Pittsburgh. Here she is preparing "Feel Better" for a recent exhibition.

Gallery visitors were invited to take home one of these hand-crafted plastic tissue boxes. In exchange, Debra asked them to tell her about a time when they needed a tissue and didn't have one. Those memories will be made into an artist's book - possibly this week!

Debra and I met in 2000 at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. She was my roommate and my classmate in a Josef Bajus' fiber workshop. We email several times a week, but I haven't actually seen her since 2003 when we met in Baltimore to catch a show at the American Visionary Art Museum, a museum of "outsider" art.

She'll spend a week here at Paradise Ranch, working with me in the art studio. Or not working, depending on what we feel like doing.

Fabric Collage

collage 3, originally uploaded by thisisloveforever.

I love this fabric collage from thisisloveforever - I wish I had seen it before it sold. I have a growing letter H collection in my art studio. I also love to use images of the heart in my own collage. Sigh.

Art On Crutches

1. by all means necessary, 2. Photocopier /Printer, 3. Best name for an art store ever, 4. Steamcleaner Punk, 5. Slide madness, 6. Figure 5.4: Tripod Specimens A and B., 7. Short circuit, 8. Book Mountain, 9. Simon Cowell

The power went out the other day while I was working in the studio. This happens more often than you might think.  We have one line running south from town and all it takes is someone to crash a car into a utility pole or a dead tree to take down a power line. 

In this particular instance, I happened to be rubbing some crayon on a photo printed from my inkjet. I was curious to see what would happen to the crayon if I blew my heat gun on it - would it give an encaustic effect?  But then I remembered I couldn't use the heat gun - no electricity.

So I busied myself with some other projects. As the minutes ticked by, I realized I wouldn't be able to iron the fusible interfacing to my fabric book. And on this rainy day it was a little bit darker in the studio than I like it. My frustrations gathered. Intensified.  I wasn't going to be able to make art on an otherwise appointment-less Saturday. It is the year 2008. And I had NO ELECTRICITY.

And then I had kind of a grand-mal moment when all my excuses stepped out of the shadows - the light switched OFF so to speak - and I could see how I was using things - materials, equipment, space -  to enable my creative insecurity. In the dark, I made a list of my crutches:

1. Scanner Crutch: "I'd like to use this image of an apple in my collage, but I want to scan it first, in case I want to use it again and develop a theme." It never gets scanned, and of course, the original is never used either.  I have mountains of images I am 'saving' in this manner. What's worse, is I have the project already sketched out in my head. So the images can't be used for new projects either. Kind of like saving seats in the school lunchroom for a friend - you send away all the other people that also want to sit next to you.


2. Photocopy Crutch: "Before I can wax this image, I need to print it using thermal toner." I must pass the UPS Store about ten times a week but never seem to make it in the door to copy the images I have set aside. Or I fret about the kind of toner and process the UPS copiers use and whether or not it will be friendly to encaustic. Even though I know it is thermal and I haven't heated up my wax in nearly six months.


3. Photo Crutch: "I would submit this piece to the show if I had slides." I used to say I didn't submit my work to gallery shows because I don't have a slide portfolio. Now everyone accepts digital images, so I use the excuse that I don't have a consistent body of work. Which matters most if you're seeking gallery representation, but even so, is a little more than lame as excuses go.


4. Sewing Machine Crutch: "I really want to do some freehand embroidery on this book before I call it finished." I bought an expensive machine to use for mixed-media and fiber art projects. Instead, I got totally high sewing stuffed sheep for, like, a year. And that's fine, I love them, and the sheep love me. But I get hung up on an art piece thinking I need a certain color thread, or wishing I had a particular fabric that it is in the closet at my other house in Oregon. 
   


5. Art Supply Crutch: "Before I finish this, I need to get some beads/pigment/astroturf/resin/thread/paper/gesso." Shopping for art supplies is not the same as making art. I'm always buying supplies and never using them. When I clean my studio I'm astounded by the interesting stuff I have in there. Quite frankly, I don't even know what I have in there.

You see where I'm going with this?

It is a kind of perfectionism, and in my case, it's a fear of finishing. Once things are finished, they will be judged. And when it comes to criticism of something I've put my heart into, I'll admit I'm weak. Even though the business side of me knows that what I see on artists' websites are the best examples of their work - not the work-in-progress, the experiments that resulted in failure, and the simply ugly that happened along the way.

My goal for summer is to finish the projects I have started. This one. This one. This one. This one. And that's just a start. It is an ever-growing mountain of unfinished art. And if I can do that, I will have enough work to photograph and submit to shows. No excuses.

Tiny Paper Houses

A collection of small, but inspiring, paper buildings.

"Pizzetta" from blog.tinybuildings.com.

Tiny stamp houses, from heatherdonohue.wordpress.com

Vintage cardboard "putz" house. I started collecting these dimestore Christmas decorations a couple of years ago.

Try your hand at making a cardboard house using this pattern, or this one.

The Modified Accordion Book Evolves

I'm still working on this book, little by little. I don't have a theme or a plan in mind, I work on it first thing every morning, no expectations. So far, I haven't written any text and I don't think I will. There is a kind of narrative present in each vignette.

This is what the book looked like, as I closed up the studio on Friday. First the "front", then the "back", then the book, partly folded. Its working title is, "What You Can't Tell By Looking."

 

San Francisco Recycling & Disposal's Artist-in-Residence: Casey Logan

Box Vortex by Casey Logan

If you've spent any time at all with me in the art studio, you'll know that I find garbage kinda inspiring. Give me an empty box, a plastic package with holes in it, or a rusty house number and you will leave me, and it, utterly transformed.

 It wasn't always this way. I was introduced to the use of "found" materials in art when I spent two weeks at the legendary Haystack Mountain School of Craft. I was there to attend a fiber workshop with Josef Bajus, but somehow found myself "dumpster diving" with a whole bunch of other artists at the county dump.

Though I rarely get down and dirty in a dumpster, I always have my eyes wide open for cast-offs. I found some wood studio trimmings in a "bonfire" bin at Anderson Ranch last summer, and made them into what I call, da da blocks. A box containing three miniature whiskeys was appropriated and made into the still unfinished Eye Box .

There are probably no fewer than five active cardboard box projects in my art studio at the moment, and stacks and boxes full of materials just waiting to see the light of day. If you open up all those tidy white boxes, it's really pretty crazy in there.

If you're interested in seeing work from other artists who reuse and recycle materials, you might want to check out the website.The San Francisco Dump has a sculpture garden and has hosted an artist every year since 1990.

I fell in love with Box Vortex, pictured above, by 2008 Artist-in-Residence Casey S. Logan. It reminds of this pool at Yellowstone National Park.

Prayers to the Wind

Prayers to the Wind, originally uploaded by louise.stringer.

Brush away all the fluff around what I do for money and you'll find that, at heart, I'm a cultural anthropologist. My degrees confirm it, too, but I don't do fieldwork for a living - at least not really.  I still do fieldwork every day though. I can't help it. It's my second nature. I'm always looking, always observing and finding patterns.

Lately, I've been making notes about the ways that people make prayer physical. I came across Louise.Stringer's photo on Flickr of a prayer tree on a Russian island and it reminded me of one I see here in Montana. My husband and I like to drive up to the east side of Glacier Park, the side that borders the Indian reservation near Browning.

There is a 'prayer tree' in a grove of aspen just off the back road headed for Two Medicine. The grove is at the edge of a cow pasture filled with wild, untamed grass. Stretches of dry, golden prairie in the background rather than big, tall trees like you find on this side of the park. It's lonely there. Windswept and almost abandoned. I often think about this prayer tree and wonder if it is one pilgrim - or many - who visit there. Next time I go by, I'm definitely going to take some photos.

There are other ways I've noticed people making their prayers physical:

I've read about a cowgirl that ties a piece of paper to a tumbleweed and lets it roll in the wind.

In the movie, Lost in Translation, Scarlett Johanssen's character visits a shrine in Kyoto and ties a prayer to a cherry tree.

In Falling Angels, the third daughter - the fat one that everyone ignores - takes up home improvement. Before she nails the final wood panel on the wall of the rec room, she crafts a shrine to her dead baby brother  - the one no one talks about - and hides it in between the studs.

Tibetan Buddhists hang prayer flags and spin clicking prayer wheels as they walk along the street.

The writer Anne Lamott uses the drawer in her nightstand as God's "Inbox." She writes a prayer down on a slip of paper and "files" it there. 

If you know of other good examples, drop me a comment!

Protection from Modern Life: Designers Nacho Carbonell and Mary Hale

Spanish designer Nacho Carbonell has created a chair-pod where you can, quite literally, curl up into a ball and escape the stress of every day life.

Carbonell's piece is part of the upcoming "Joe Colombo - Design and Invention of the Future" exhibit at Kunsthaus Graz.

Mary Hale, a graduate student in Architecture at MIT designed Monumental Helium Inflatable Wearable Floating Body Mass for a course in Visual Design at the University.

Hale sees Body Mass as a tool for mental escape, a soft physical barrier that envelopes and protects the wearer with a cushion of personal space. There are times in my life when I wish I would have had one of these:



The course, called "Give Me Shelter" featured clothing and accessories designed to help wearers negotiate the gap between work and home, self-confidence and unease, and over- or under-stimulation.

Art from Miami: Jen Stark

Miami artist Jen Stark layers and cuts cardstock into paper sculpture. I love the intense color in this piece.

Yeondoo Jung: Wonderland

For the "Wonderland" series, Korean photo artist Yeondoo Jung photographed scenes he [re]created from drawings made by young children.

I like "Nap."



 I think it would be kind of interesting to try this at home. To pull out some of my more sinister looking childhood drawings and ask Mike's many relatives to act out the scenes? Maybe that's too scary.

Modified Accordion Book: Work In Progress

I know the last few weeks on the blog have been relatively art and craft free. Since we returned to Montana I've been completely absorbed by watching the cherry trees come into bloom and racing the dog down to the beach. I've baked cookies, planted my garden, and bought new bedding and chairs for our room. I've finished a great book and started an average one. I returned to my Wednesday knitting group and saw a few movies with my husband.

I've always been a big city girl, but this house is a kind of retreat for me and it is a luxury. No lunch meetings, no dry cleaning, no manicures. I check my email and then walk up the creek to my studio each morning for a few hours of art making. Four years later I'm still getting used to the idea that all this space is all mine to enjoy - I used to just make art at the kitchen table, after all.

So that's a long way of saying, sometimes it may seem slow on the blog, but lots of things are happening. I've been playing with book structures for a few weeks now, and this is one that I have been adding to each day. It is a modified accordion, that folds and opens in several different ways. The collage is just free form, whatever inspires me, and has been layered with crayon and paint. I think it's about half done. So far, I'm calling it, "What You Can't Tell By Looking."

What I Was Wearing the Day I met Mike.

Since we're friends, I can admit that I've been more inspired by my garden this week than art or craft.

To get my mind going, I headed over to Miranda July's site, "Learning to Love You More" to accept one of her 60-odd creative assignments.

I chose #55: "Photograph a Significant Outfit." The idea being that the outfit became significant because of an unexpected happening. Not a photo of an outfit you chose on purpose for a special event.

So this is what I was wearing the night I met my husband. Very ordinary.  A white shirt, Lucky jeans, and some suede sandals my sister bought me at Marshall's in Chicago when I didn't have $20 on me. Never did pay her back.   

Mike and I met four years ago on a Friday night at Smith and Wollensky in Miami -  where we both were living at the time. We chatted for awhile, then agreed to meet on Sunday morning for a walk on the beach. That was the beginning of our story, and this is what I wore.

Mark Montano's Baby Head Paperweights.

I like the way they turned out. Kind of creepy. Kind of Jeff Koons.

Mark Montano Crafts: Making Baby Head Paperweights

It's official. The rainy season in Montana is underway. I don't mind it as much as some. A decade living in Scotland taught me to enjoy life, regardless of weather.

And rain means good things to come: lots of water down our creek, carpets of wildflowers on summer hikes and (hopefully) not as much smoke from forest fires during the dry months of July and August.

Bad weather is a good time to catch up on projects around our place. Remember this one?

Baby Head Paperweights from Mark Montano's book, Big-Ass Book of Crafts. These are actually headed for the sculpture garden that I am planning around my art studio. (Well, ok, maybe this is the only project I'm "planning", but I hope there will be others.)
 

This morning, I filled seven doll heads with plaster-of-paris and added a kabob skewer - which I hope will help keep them upright in the garden.

To get that mottled, kinda drunk-fake Rococo look, I'll finish them up with black and gold spray paints, as Montano instructed.

As always, I had help from my trusty art assistant, White Kitty. He seems to know the difference between the sound of me doing laundry and the sound of me doing something really pretty weird in the
laundry room. Just one of the things I love about him.

Rauschenberg is Dead.

Three years ago, I worked on a Merce Cunningham project, and that's how I want to remember Rauschenberg.

The work I most appreciate the most  was from the early years - what we now call the "New York School" of the 1950's. Materials and money were scarce, but the contemporary art scene in the city was authentic and alive - the way it hasn't been since.  But that's another post.

Rauschenberg was part of a phenomenal creative partnership with dancer Merce Cunningham and composer John Cage. Just one of the lifelong, enduring partnerships born at Black Mountain College in North Carolina.

This piece was a set for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company performance, "Minutiae" and was completed by Rauschenberg in 1954. Merce never offered Bob aesthetic direction for any piece. Merce believed in the connection between creativity and "chance"; the dancers would respond to the work as Rauschenberg made it.

In earlier days, Merce Cunningham Dance Company toured the country in a Volkswagen Bus, with "Minutiae" strapped to the roof. I saw the Rauschenberg Retrospective at the Met a couple of years ago, and this piece was the first thing you saw as you entered the exhibit. A line in the sand, the publicly accepted birth mark of the artist.

In the studio I'll offer up something to Bob today. A dumpster-diving-kind-of-prayer, giving thanks for found objects, printing on cardboard, painting on old quilts.

Spokes.

Bike Wheel in Cemetery, originally uploaded by smwarnke4.

I've been working pretty steady in the art studio the last few weeks. Not exactly marathon sessions, but at least a couple of hours each day, and I'm making art, more than craft.

I've been working on two handmade books this week. I find that I am obsessed with bicycle and ferris wheels - a thread picked up from some work I did a few years ago but hadn't looked at until more recently.

Some of the structures were inspired by work I saw in Esther K. Smith's book. She does beautiful work. It's hard to keep going when I compare my work to hers.

Sometimes I wish I had a printing press, but then again, you can do many things with a piece of office paper and a color photocopier. I went to a workshop back in 2000 that was entirely about how to use the photocopier in the construction of artist books.  The two day class was taught by British artist Sue Doggett at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts.

Many of the photocopy techniques are published in Doggett's book, along with other ideas for making artist books. (Did you know you can preview entire chapters of books on Google?)

Andy Goldsworthy: How to Use Your Spring Dandelions.

It may not be cool to love weeds, but I love dandelions. I love their intense color, the way they smell, and the way they change from a hot, damp, yellow to papery-dry, transparent, white.

I have good memories of dandelions from childhood. My sister and I chanting, "Mama had a baby and it's head popped off!"   Then FLICK! It's yellow bud instantly decapitated. Or making a wish and blowing on the the fuzzy white seeds - if you could blow them all away, we believed that the wish would come true.

I think the artist Andy Goldsworthy sees what I see. The bright pop of dandelion yellow like a river down this field of blue bells. It's more complicated than it looks. He's pinned them with thorns to stalks of grass, and held up the chain with forks made of brush.

Beetle Wing Embroidery of Michael Cook

This 19th century mat is decorated with beetle wings, gold braid and gold thread. It was made in India and I found it in a random search of the museum collection at the Embroiderer's Guild in the UK. (Photo credit: Stephen Brayne.)

I fell in with the piece, and that love led me to the contemporary work of fiber artist Michael Cook. This is a person I so wish I could have dinner with. Below is a detail shot of one of Cook's beetle wing pieces.

Now you're feeling it, aren't you?! They are so beautiful - like living jewels. Not even mentioning the deeper, more disturbing thing about stitching a wing - a flying thing - down forever.

Michael Cook sent a very kind email answering all my questions about beetle wing embroidery. I first wanted to know what it is like to work with the wings. He replied,

"...the wings are actually quite sturdy, like a fingernail...[fiber artist] Victoria Z. Rivers taught me the best way to pierce them. The wings are steamed in a colander for five minutes over boiling water, then pierced with a needle held in a pin vise. A cork behind the curve of the beetle wing will protect the wing and your fingers. Be sure to pierce from the shiny side to the dull side, if you do it the other way, it will split..."

Cook stitches the wings to fabric using a small #10 needle and silk embroidery thread spun from his own moth colony.

You can find more of Michael Cook on his website. He has published a wealth of information about silk manufacture and culture. There is a great online article about beetles in textiles here. For general information about the history and techniques of beetle wing embroidery, Michael recommends checking out this book by Jane Nicholas. Can't wait for mine to come in the mail.

Digital Textile Printer

Over the weekend, I flipped through my April issue of Print magazine, and found an article about the Center for Excellence of Digital Inkjet Printing of Textiles at Philadelphia University.

Just week, I wrote about digital textile printing and Nicole Brunklaus' Blond Curtain. I thought you might like to see what the Center's digital inkjet textile printer looks like. (Photo: Chad Muthard)

British designer Julie Haslam uses this technology to produce her Domestic Bliss home goods collection.

These napkins were inspired by the handwritten recipe and craft files that belonged to Haslam's grandmother.