art

Heart Made Of Sound

Posted by hil

Were

I came across a lovely stop motion animation yesterday, the Softlightes Heart Made of Sound. It’s directed and made by an Australian animator, Kris Moyes, who has done some other cool videos, including (Wolfmother’s White Unicorn (defaced), and the The Presets’ Are You the One?.

Presets

This caused me to revisit Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer, which I just loved at the time. It was made in 1986, but it still stands up pretty well; not too surprising considering Aardman’s successes since then.

Sledgehammer

It’s one of those classics you assume everyone knows, but I’ve been realizing the older you get the less likely that is to be true! The other day I posted Jan Lewis’s Execution Row (postcards of the hanging), a current and clever borrowing of Dylan’s Desolation Row, at my local discussion forum, and the only response was someone young saying they hadn’t heard the song before but I liked it…

Some thoughts on make and craft

Posted by hil

Back in September I made a late comment in a discussion thread on Shelley Powers‘ post, Craft/Make. I just want to pull it out and publish it here, and perhaps also on my OPML blog, because I don’t want to lose the thoughts in it.

‘The swap-o-rama-rama and the computer-related stuff were equally exciting at the Maker Faire. It was precisely that they were treated equally as cool exemplars of the DIY ethic that made this juxtaposition
so interesting. It wasn’t about gender, it was about the maker impulse, and all its forms.’

— Tim O’Reilly

‘It wasn’t about gender, it was about the maker impulse, and all its forms.’

I’m a maker for the performing and theatre arts, and I appreciate this reasoning. But using the swap-o-rama-rama as an example of making Maker Faire more gender-inclusive, and describing Craft magazine as having a more ‘female spin’ seems to me to turn that statement around, because there is an underlying assumption there about what females are interested in. In a banner at the Renegade Craft Fair, Craft Magazine has the by-line ‘Hang it, Stitch it, Wear it, Light it’: the assumption is still that women are primarily interested in decoration, sewing and fashion. While that may be stereotypically true, working on that
assumption is preserving and encouraging the status quo, (and making money from it), rather than challenging it and acknowledging that there are women out there whose skills and interests within the making and
craft world go well beyond those traditional interests expressed in a modern way. I also think there is a danger of diminishing craft by defining it in this way, just when it seemed to have broken lose from being a lesser creature by being included in the broader term, make.

As an aside, I’m also watchful about the new craft movement being somewhat bound up with retro and the 50’s, and I wonder if it means some of the social attitudes about gender from that time are also being revisited. I get worried when I see apron-making contests. Many craft bloggers are women with small children, and it must be great to have the community and connection of blogging if you are a stay-at-home mother. But I wonder if it also means that craft is still largely in the realm of something a woman makes for, or as a reflection of, her
domestic world, for love or pin-money, while the kids are small. There is nothing wrong with that seen for what it is, essentially a hobby and social activity, but it might mean the new craft movement is not so new
after all.

— Hil

Yesterday Shelley wrote that O’Reilly’s company could do much to ensure that Craft attracts a good audience of men and women, and to encompass and encourage a broader less-gender-specific view of craft. My feeling is that the creation of Craft, in addition to Make, is essentially a marketing decision to diversify and increase their business domain by capitalizing on that ‘female spin’, and its therefore more likely to rely on preserving the status quo, as I said above. If it makes good business sense to divide Make and Craft in this way, I doubt Craft will go down the road that Shelley optimistically suggests.

Oona Tikkaoja’s sculptures

Posted by hil

oona

I love the look of the sculptures that the Finnish visual artist Oona Tikkaoja makes, in particular her wolf creature (fourth pic along) and lizard robot killer. They are soft sculpture.

I also think her wooden horses are spectacular. They are beautifully jointed, and immediately conjure up thoughts of the mythical Trojan Horse. Take a look at the photo showing the construction, with all the clamps!

(via Extreme Craft)

Updated links 2015

Colour-in Canberra: The Suburban Duck

Posted by hil

The Suburban Duck

Fox close-up

Crow

At the moment I am painting two traffic control boxes in the Urban Services project ‘Colour-in Canberra’. The first one, The Suburban Duck, is on the corner of Yamba Drive and Kitchener St in Garran, just across the road from the Canberra Hospital. It tells a story from my back garden: about how foxes are an ever present danger to ducks in the suburbs, while crows have the place staked out and steal their eggs given half a chance. Its been really enjoyable painting out in the sun on and off the last few weeks.

The Salmon-Thirty-Salmon

Posted by hil

The cost of painting a king salmon on the fuselage of an Alaskan Airlines 373 has been roundly criticized, but the image is pretty cool. The designer was Mark Boyle, a Seattle-based wildlife artist who is also a recognized leader in the livery design of commercial aircraft. Alaskan Airlines has some pictures that show the painting in progressive stages, which took a crew of 30 painters 24 days.

Salmon

The image above was taken by Ted S. Warren for Associated Press, and shows airbrush artist Chris Coakley at work on the painting.

I was just then reminded of this wonderful image of Aragorn. It takes a second to work it out. It appeared on the side of a NZ Boeing as part of celebrations around the release of the last of the Lord of the Rings trilogy of movies.

Updated 2015: broken links. Also, there is a second version as of 2012, called the Salmon-Thirty-Salmon II:

Night/Baby

Posted by hil

This is beautiful.Thanks so much, Mimi. I also love this new one. What is it with me and insects at the moment?

Calendars, Georgia O’Keefe, and Nicola Bayley

Posted by hil

This year I ordered a Georgia O’Keefe 2005 Calendar online, having been a slowcoach and letting January slip by without getting a new calendar for the year. It arrived last Friday, and it’s beautiful:

Iris1_1

I do love her paintings, particularly her later more abstract landscapes.I used to like getting a UNICEF wall calendar each year, the kind that has drawings done by children from all over the world, but they were all gone. So was everything except dog or cat breed calendars, and even for half-price, and if I were obsessed with siamese cats, I don’t want to look at everyday siamese cat photographs all year. In fact I’ve never really understood why so many calendars have so little visual variety, except that I suspect they provide an easy avenue for Christmas shoppers, who can think ‘Oh, Auntie Mary loves cats, this will do for her’.Calendars that feature artistic interpretations of a single topic stand a better chance of being interesting, as long as you particularly like the style in which they are done, or there is some variation of style in the 12 illustrations. For example, in 2003 I had a calendar I loved, a cat calendar by Nicola Bayley. Its selection includes drawings from Bayley’s books The Necessary Cat: A Celebration of Cats in Picture and Word, Fun with Mrs Thumb, Katje, the Windmill Cat, and The Mousehole Cat, and although there are cats in all of them, and they all show Bayley’s exquisite attention to detail and the decorative, they tell so many different stories.

Bayley2

Nicola Bayley’s drawings have been a favourite of mine since my children were small; we had two of her books: The Mouldy, and The Patchwork Cat (written by William Mayne). When I was the illustrator for the Republic of Pemberley in the 90’s, the cat drawing that I did for the Portrait of our Community board was inspired by those in The Patchwork Cat.

Paulus Berensohn: Deep Ecologist and Crafts Artist

Posted by hil

I’ve been sculpting with clay the last few days, a favourite activity. I love the feel of it, and how malleable yet solid it is. These days it always makes me think about an interview with Paulus Berensohn that I heard a while ago on the ABC’s Earthbeat program. Berensohn is a Deep Ecologist and craft artist, and he is best known for his book Finding One’s Way With Clay. I was taken with some of the things he says in the interview. Here are a few examples:

“But I started in my late teens as a dancer, and was a dancer until I was 30 and then one night in the middle of a performance, at a climax in the dance where we then had to freeze, a voice in my head said, ‘This is dancing on a stage, what does it mean to dance in life?’ And very shortly after that, I was taken to a picnic, and there was a great American potter there, and I watched her throwing on the wheel, and I made that connection that the act of throwing clay on a potter’s wheel was a kind of dancing. And I was just enchanted, and wanted to learn that dance”…

“I mean I personally think that the craft arts isn’t about an alternative way of making a living and filling museums and galleries with gorgeous objects, I think it’s the clay and the fibre and the metals and the wood saying ‘Listen, listen to me. Put your hands on me, and you’ll make contact with a living world.’ “…

“The word ‘art’, if you go back into its etymological roots, it’s not a noun, it’s a verb, it’s a doing, an acting, and it comes from the root for ‘to join’. So one is behaving artistically, one is in a state of intimacy and communion with the activity at hand”…

“We have in our DNA the memory of having fur and a memory of having whiskers that connected us to nature”…

“The first time I ever encountered an Aboriginal Australian, was in New Mexico, and they had invited an Aboriginal elder to come to speak to the native Americans and he was, I wish I remembered his name, he was wonderful. And he came with slides of stones and sunsets and sunrises. He would show a sunrise, and he would say, ‘This is a sunrise in Australia; you must watch the sunrise every day, it is a blessing for Mother Earth’, and then he would show a sunset, and he would say, ‘You must watch the sun set.’ “…

“So one of the things in journals you can do is keep lists, and one of the lists I keep is Who else is here? Who else is participating in this life? So like in these months that I’ve been on Tasmania, yes, here’s one I wrote: 2 Huntsman spiders, one on the lid of the compost toilet. The other was inside a straw hat of Peter’s which he wore for five minutes before he felt something crawling on his head. Luckily he took of his hat before it bit him. It was at least four inches across. Four possums by the side of the road as we drove home late from Hobart last night. Red tide in Nubena threatening the salmon farming pens. Gustav says they are dinoflagellates and that what Peter and I saw my first night here as a phosphorescent tide is the same as the red tide. See, I never knew that”…

“It’s the artist’s work to sing up the earth, to praise and thank and to express gratitude. Well that’s what I think art is. That’s why I think art is a behaviour, to sing up the earth.”