Rotten Beauty

"The pieces are made by using rotten fruits.Casting them helped me to capture and save their extraordinary textures just at the time when they are the most beautiful..." Karmen Saat

...and so much new

A)

New Kintsugi, gold repair from Humade on Vimeo.

"Next to a piece of pottery’s earthen-colored clay, the kintsugi gold cuts through, providing a sporadic action that arrests the eyes. Gopnik describes it as “a tiny moment of free jazz played during a fugue by Bach.”...In a modernized twist on this tradition, designer Lotte Dekker encourages people to break pottery in her workshops. Dekker has created her own kintsugi-style repair kits..."(more)

B)  "what a cup of tea: mending our brokenness"

C) "In Kintsugi, Thomas Meyer has written an intimate elegy for his partner of nearly four decades. As Robert Kelly observes in his foreword, this is “a text written in and through the very death it mourned.” (more)

 

Hundreds more of this theme...an old idea hardly forgotten...so many latching on to an idea, a philosophy of mending...why is that?  maybe we feel that for some reason we need it.  it resonates because it awakens a very human desire...to fix, to repair, to mend, to keep, and to continue.

old

TEABOWL (chawan), 15th century, Tokoname ware (yobitsugi-repairs with 18th century porcelain), H.: 2 1/4 in. (5.9 cm), D.: 6 1/2 in. (16.4 cm

TEABOWL (chawan), 16th century, Karatsu ware, H.: 2 5/8 in. (6.8 cm), D.: 4 in. (10.2 cm

kintsugi:  "to patch with gold" or kintsukuroi: “to repair with gold”

read more here

past tense

Barbara Shapiro

"Mended Turnings"

collaborative work with Chuck Quibell. "Artists are profoundly aware of the preciousness of natural materials...some of these pieces were destined to be burned, and I wanted to save them..."

those artists and their cats...

 (Felix Gonzalez-Torres)

(Gustav Klimt)

george ohr

 Crinkle top pot, 1897-1900, 7 5/8 inches high 

 Organic Vessel, 1897-1900, 4 inches high, 6 inches wide 

 

 

(from left to right: george ohr, mad hatter)

kiki smith, tattoos, and someone named tift

"somehow the combination of the beauty marks and the ink on her body, I thought I could tattoo her beauty marks onto me.  And then I was at another artist’s house and they had a little bit of paint on their fingers.  And I thought, I could take a mark from somebody else’s body and put it on my body and then I would remember. That way you would have this weird little reminder to them..." 

(go here to hear the beautiful little snippet of a conversation)

click 'listen' in red above photo on website

Michelle Taylor

 "Duchess"

"Chintz" detail

"The starting point for my art practice is influenced by a personal childhood narrative of maternal loss. The need to repair and restore the damaged and the broken in order to preserve memories and existence are paramount in my work. I am interested in the memory bearing aspect of objects, their connections and associations, and the emotional attachment we may have with them.  I use the juxtaposition of ceramic and textile to explore emotional themes relating to memory and loss..." (read & see more)

Cai Guo-Qiang

terry fan

Cloud Watching

Tune Up

to see more of his fabulous illustrations, go here

Beili Liu

Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison

 "Passage"

 

 "Burn Season"

"Windmaker"

"These works feature an ambiguous narrative that offers insight into the dilemma posed by science and technology's failed promise to fix our problems, provide explanations, and furnish certainty pertaining to the human condition..." (to read and see more, go here)

jamie bardsley

Palm Prints (2011)
hand built porcelains

"The memory of the clay reveals the lines from my hand and records the making of each intimate piece. The folds became a driving force, the pieces themselves began making me..."

-jamie bardsley

cheshire cat

Alice: but I don't want to go among mad people
Cheshire Cat: oh, you can't help that.  most everyone's mad here

pity this busy monster, manunkind,

not. Progress is a comfortable disease:

your victim (death and life safely beyond)

plays with the bigness of his littleness

—- electrons deify one razorblade

into a mountainrange; lenses extend

unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish

returns on its unself.

                         A world of made

is not a world of born —- pity poor flesh

and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this

fine specimen of hypermagical

ultraomnipotence. We doctors know

a hopeless case if —- listen: there's a hell

of a good universe next door; let's go

-e.e.cummings

time

"I work from the deepest source of inspiration for an artist - my passions.  Anything else would be a waste of the finite moments that comprise my life.  Time is the only thing that we truly possess while we are on this planet, and for an artist, time is also a tool, another material with which to work.  An artists's greatest gift and privilege is to spend his or her time making art"

-Richard Notkin

fight or flight

margaret meehan

the pugilist (jab) - 2011

(i'm still learning from you.)

I Have Seen the Future

 

 Norman Bel Geddes' Costume Designs for The Miracle (1924)

 Float for a Macy's parade, Oct 12, 1926. Pencil, ink, gouache, and watercolor on paper.

"I Have Seen the Future: Norman Bel Geddes Designs America" on view at the Harry Ransom Center (UT Austin) until January 6, 2013. He designed, predicted, dreamed up, and rendered some amazing things...an artist indeed.

glass books

well Austin Kleon, you are right again.  look around, or look back in history and chances are...you'll find that your totally uniquely yours idea in fact has a history. 

such is the case with glass artists' books:

 Tom Virgin "Your School"

8 in x 45 in x 3 in (open)        artist’s book    2012
“Your School” is an accordion structure book created from fused glass and cut copper drawings, bound with multiple ply waxed linen thread, and text printed on bands of Hahnemühle Ingres with a Vandercook 3 Proof Press. The book employs the metaphor of keeping a low maintenance pet (a fish) to examine multiple challenges that schools, and especially young people, are currently facing in Florida and Miami. This book is an edition of two with the second book being sewn with a codex binding.

This book came from my admiration of a friend’s creative use of non-book-like media to create a book. The glass process was enhanced by the advice and guidance of Gail Dahlberg at the Anderson Center at Tower View. The color and glass inclusions fused into window glass created a transparent structure for a very opaque situation, the state of schools. The fish metaphor came from a continuing collaboration with Michael Hettich, a “gringo Magical Realist” poet from Miami.

Bobbette Rose "Fleeting Memories"

 

The glass book called "Fleeting Memories" actually ended up relating to "Faint Glimpses," although I didn't make the connection until they were both done and in the gallery. "Fleeting Memories" is a book made up of seven thin sheets of glass that I dipped in wax. So they also have this translucent feel to them. I then wrote a journal entry on each waxed glass plate with a stylus–my private, stupid, profound rants on different days as I was making the book. I pushed paint into the etched words so, at one point, the words were quite legible. I then attacked each page with a heat gun. The color and the wax began to flow–the words coming apart, re-forming, dripping down and fading. To me, the vulnerability of the words was key. Where once they seemed so clear and organized, they reveal themselves finally in this fused state of ambiguity. It seemed like an appropriate way to describe the fragility of my own life-story. Not in a negative, falling-apart way but in this poetic dance-through-time sort of way that reveals the things you think are so understandable and solid one day can be so fluid and fleeting the next.

So as the book of my life, written in my own words, moves in and out of focus, so too, the ancient "book of life" has its own mysterious translucency to me. I realized, as I looked at these two pieces, that I'm vague in my understanding about alot things these days. And its funny, but that has brought a new type of clarity to my thinking.

And then the Glassbook Project, which does a good job of not allowing theft of images.  Go here to view the project, website, and images galore.

function vs. dysfunction

 

(Bryan Hopkins)

just working

Those who ____, teach.

"Those who instruct, who nurture, who hope patiently and lovingly each and every day understand the quotation is really, "Those who can, teach."  Those who can, find joy in walking into a room with open minds.  They teach.  Those who can, take students from "I can't" to "I can." They teach.  Those who can, counsel and dispense positive discipline, while staying well after school hours with students.  They teach.  Those who can, struggle with self-doubt but endure.  Those who can, worry about their lesson plans and whether a particular student will have enough clothing to wear, or whether there will be heat in that student's home. Those who can, teach and they do it everyday. I am lucky enough to be one of those who "can."

(from The Colors and Strands of Teaching" by Melinda Pellerin-Duck)

similar

(but different, as m would say)

I mostly see these things as cheating, but as an educator it's a legit point to consider.  If we truly believe art can be for everyone, then how easy is too easy?  Putting the money-making aspects of these ideas (products) aside, when we teach the "real" way to do it...are we excluding people simply due to their lack of time or ambition? 

What does "art for everyone" mean?  a) do we truly believe this and b) if it is, how do we then approach products like these?  if it's not, what does it mean to be an educator that doesn't believe in every student?

Eva Kwong

 "Bobtail" (2006)

Acalephoid Series

Stoneware, salt glaze, colored slips

23 x 13 x 13

 "Energy Vibrations" (2008)

Noetic Moments Series

Thrown porcelain

60 x 110 x 7

"Bacteria, Diatoms & Cells" (2006)

 Stoneware, earthenware, salt glaze, glaze

180 x 180 x 5

Self-Portrait [with Skull] (1977) - Warhol

Polaroid Polacolor [reprint]

 4.25 x 3.375 in.,  The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh.

Kim Rugg

Cool Hunting Video: Kim Rugg from Cool Hunting on Vimeo.

ocd

"Tumor and Temple" (2012)

"The purpose of my art is to call attention to our distorted perceptions of individual experiences...In Tumor Hive, a room-sized arc form of cloth in pinks and reds interprets the enormous emotional impact of an excised lump of cells gone amok. I share the experience of illness, but with bold shapes and visceral colors that draw in the viewer. Temple Hive, a large sculpture which viewers are meant to spend time in, is an idealization of the act of building a blanket fort in childhood. The work becomes a monument to a lost act and invites the audience to participate in the idea. They share in a moment of childhood interpreted with the skill of adulthood..." Monica Vidal

"bowl"

 "crespina" - Antonella Cimatti (2006)

slip cast driping, porcelain paperclay, 40cm x 40 cm x 40 cm

 "crespina" - Antonella Cimatti (2006)

slip casting mold, porcelain paperclay, 10cm x 30cm x 30cm

 "Blossom-Ruby Brilliance" - Eva Kwong (2005)

thrown, electric oxiation / painted slips, earthenware, 4.5 x 20 x 20

"Pink Greenware" - Bethany Benson (2006)

white stoneware & Adobe CS2 PS, 14 x 24 x .5