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| The beads |
Yes, the wire is a mess, and no, I'm not going to fix it. It was just a fun way to play.
The kitten approves!
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| Mobile testing |
Showing posts with label mobiles. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mobiles. Show all posts
Friday, June 20, 2025
Another Mobile!
Thursday, July 7, 2011
Independence at the Portland Museum of Art
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| Calder mobile, Portland Museum of Art |
The John Marin, "Modernism at Midcentury," show at the museum is definitely worth seeing, although I confess, I lingered longer by the Magrittes upstairs in the main collection. I loved the cubist leanings of Marin's seascapes, geometry layered over natural ocean chaos. From a how-does-he-do/see-that persepective, it was immensely useful, an entrance into his vision.
Magritte's surrealism feels like a poem though -- the world explained by setting vision askew.
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
Customizing
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| Circle 1, Circle 2 David Smith |
Now I'm working within my own odd little framework, and happy with my hops and skips into changes and fun.
A few examples of how to skirt around some roadblocks:
- Bring a friend. As the interviews and collaborative poems on this blog suggest, I do more when I have someone nudging me forward, if I feel accountable to someone else. How did I finally get over the threshold anxiety of actually taking a class at the yoga studio? Asked a friend to come along. And it was a great class complete with a teacher with a fabulous New Zealand accent, and now that the seal is broken, I'll go back easily. How did I decide to finally commit to the expense of trying a discovery test flight flying lesson in a small plane? Asked around and found another budding pilot enthusiast (test flight still pending as we had to reschedule because of high wind).
- Go with your gut. Rather than slog forward with the first hospital I talked to about volunteering (where, for a laundry list of reasons, rational and not, I got a bad vibe), I said, you know what, there are options. I talked to another hospital volunteer coordinator yesterday at a place that is a much better fit on levels both practical and personal, and now I'm looking forward to diving into the experience.
- Details matter; change approach. After roundly ignoring my oil paints all winter, I finally admitted oil painting fails the smell test of fun activity, particularly if you live in as small a place as I do. So I sold some of the paints, and invested the proceeds into buying more acrylic paints, a more straightforward medium for me. They don't smell, they're easy to clean up, and woohoo! I'm painting again, in the brief fits and starts that acrylics allow way more easily than oils.
- Ask the experts. Obviously, in the interviews I've been posting, I've been asking about expertise in arts, and learning from others' art talents. In the future, in more of a healing arts bent, I'll be working with a friend who does nutritional coaching professionally (more on that later). Notably, however, her first point of advise was, work within who you are. I'm just not an eight-course meal vegan raw food chef with nine food processors and unlimited funds. That doesn't mean finding ways to eat a few more veggies wouldn't make me feel better.
- Just go! Last weekend, it poured rain all day on Sunday, and by 4:30, I'd run out of steam for any creative project at home. Claustrophobia was setting in. Sunday has traditionally been museum day for me, and so a quick check on hours led me to the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art. I could have decided it wasn't worth driving downtown in the rain for 45 minutes in the museum. But the thing is, having hustled out the door and gone, it totally was. Having default places that are quick, easy, free and inspiring -- that's a fantastic resource. If it's your local coffee shop or a garden or a museum, making the effort to push out into the inspiring space means meeting inspiration half way, meaning a happier Muse. As it turns out, the Gauguin exhibit had opened, and had I not zipped out, I might have missed all those self-portraits of a very unusual man.
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| Love that Calder |
No photos allowed at the Gauguin exhibit, but I got to visit one of my favorites, Kandinsky.
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| Improvisation 31 (Sea Battle) Wassily Kandinsky |
Sunday, October 3, 2010
Sandpoint, ID Art Days - Galleries & Mobile Making
So was I arty and mistakeful on vacation, you ask? Why yes, yes I was. My sister and I managed to make two of my five days in Sandpoint, Idaho, art focused.
Sandpoint is a small art town in northern Idaho ("the skinny part"), so twas easy to make a day of wandering around galleries. The most varied and lovely work we saw was at Art Works, a cooperative gallery run by local artists selling their wares. Jewelry, pottery, nature photography of the area, watercolors, the lovely if somewhat standard fare of a tourist retail store, but also interesting sculpture made of fired clay, wood and feathers, oil paintings of celestial lovelies, and a number of odds and ends that I was pretty sure I could make (e.g., beaded key chain fobs).
Sandpoint has a lot of glassworkers, as they used to have a local studio run by the town, now closed sadly, so there was a particularly heavy emphasis on fused glass, jewelry, clocks, plates, etc., in many of the stores. We also poked our heads into a painting studio, which, if I could find her business card again, I would add a plug for, as it was lovely, brightly colored, festive work. I strongly recommend ending any such day by having the baked brie and a glass of wine at the Coldwater Creek Wine Bar. Yum.
Throughout our wanderings, we were busy plotting our own projects. My sister had recently received five boxes of fabric from my mother, but wasn't feeling the quilting vibe for using some of it that way. And, of course, with my ugly mobile history, it seemed a natural extension to try making some fabric mobile prototypes a few days later.
My sister is infinitely more organized, so she wasted no time pulling out the fabric, selecting some pieces and quickly cutting shapes, and got me rolling on my own choices. She then ironed and I pinned shapes so that she could sew them on the treadle sewing machine. From there, she dug out the grommet tool she'd found at a yard sale (I had tool envy, until we ran into some design flaws, which made it less groovy), and after some failed experimentation, we got her husband signed up for putting grommets in all our shapes so they were easily hung.
And then there was the wire -- the fun part, in my opinion, particularly since I'm a metal junky. My sister had a role of electrical fence wiring lying around, which actually worked out well (except it came with somewhat alarming warnings about remembering to wash your hands after use. It may be coated in something awful).
What was interesting to me is how different Susie and I approached the random design aspects of mobiles. She found patterns online and worked to modify those for her needs. I pulled off a hunk of wire, found a place to hang it off the chandelier, and then connected other pieces willy-nilly, hoping to find balance points with the fabric pieces and lengths of wire. Sometimes, there were failures, and pieces fell off, sections collapsed. Susie had symmetry; I had random zigzag cheats built into my wire to help shift balances slightly without total reorganization, although in some aesthetic way, I was harboring ideas of a larger balance within the piece.
In any case, an enormous amount of fun.
And here are the results. Sadly, pictures don't do them justice, as they remove the movement...
Susie's prototype:
And mine, reassembled in DC - I forgot to photograph it in Sandpoint - so it's totally different than the last time I put it together.
As prototypes, there are, uh, issues, things that we would do differently, from choosing different shapes to finding less cranky grommets, to having cleaner edges and wire shapes, etc. More than that, however, it was a fabulous way to spend a gray day listening to 1980s pop music, singing and playing with wire. Successful art in my book. And perhaps the birth of an industry. You never know.
Sandpoint is a small art town in northern Idaho ("the skinny part"), so twas easy to make a day of wandering around galleries. The most varied and lovely work we saw was at Art Works, a cooperative gallery run by local artists selling their wares. Jewelry, pottery, nature photography of the area, watercolors, the lovely if somewhat standard fare of a tourist retail store, but also interesting sculpture made of fired clay, wood and feathers, oil paintings of celestial lovelies, and a number of odds and ends that I was pretty sure I could make (e.g., beaded key chain fobs).
Sandpoint has a lot of glassworkers, as they used to have a local studio run by the town, now closed sadly, so there was a particularly heavy emphasis on fused glass, jewelry, clocks, plates, etc., in many of the stores. We also poked our heads into a painting studio, which, if I could find her business card again, I would add a plug for, as it was lovely, brightly colored, festive work. I strongly recommend ending any such day by having the baked brie and a glass of wine at the Coldwater Creek Wine Bar. Yum.
Throughout our wanderings, we were busy plotting our own projects. My sister had recently received five boxes of fabric from my mother, but wasn't feeling the quilting vibe for using some of it that way. And, of course, with my ugly mobile history, it seemed a natural extension to try making some fabric mobile prototypes a few days later.
My sister is infinitely more organized, so she wasted no time pulling out the fabric, selecting some pieces and quickly cutting shapes, and got me rolling on my own choices. She then ironed and I pinned shapes so that she could sew them on the treadle sewing machine. From there, she dug out the grommet tool she'd found at a yard sale (I had tool envy, until we ran into some design flaws, which made it less groovy), and after some failed experimentation, we got her husband signed up for putting grommets in all our shapes so they were easily hung.
And then there was the wire -- the fun part, in my opinion, particularly since I'm a metal junky. My sister had a role of electrical fence wiring lying around, which actually worked out well (except it came with somewhat alarming warnings about remembering to wash your hands after use. It may be coated in something awful).
What was interesting to me is how different Susie and I approached the random design aspects of mobiles. She found patterns online and worked to modify those for her needs. I pulled off a hunk of wire, found a place to hang it off the chandelier, and then connected other pieces willy-nilly, hoping to find balance points with the fabric pieces and lengths of wire. Sometimes, there were failures, and pieces fell off, sections collapsed. Susie had symmetry; I had random zigzag cheats built into my wire to help shift balances slightly without total reorganization, although in some aesthetic way, I was harboring ideas of a larger balance within the piece.
In any case, an enormous amount of fun.
And here are the results. Sadly, pictures don't do them justice, as they remove the movement...
Susie's prototype:
As prototypes, there are, uh, issues, things that we would do differently, from choosing different shapes to finding less cranky grommets, to having cleaner edges and wire shapes, etc. More than that, however, it was a fabulous way to spend a gray day listening to 1980s pop music, singing and playing with wire. Successful art in my book. And perhaps the birth of an industry. You never know.
Saturday, May 22, 2010
NYC #3 - MoMA: Willliam Kentridge, Picasso, Lee Bonecou, Marina Abramovic
I know everyone from DC says this, but still, it throws me: you have to pay for museums in NYC. Let me just say, it was so worth the $20 to get into MoMA. To avoid museum burnout (the glazed over eyes that no longer see), we only moseyed here and there, making no effort to see everything. What I saw inspired. If you're in NYC, go to MoMA. Right now.
First, check out the William Kentridge exhibit. The sketches are riveting, many self portraits, and quite a few of another figure, a woman in glasses. But the most absorbing elements of the exhibit are the short films. Some are animated sketches that grow in process to complete pictures, then evolving to other images, landscapes growing, figures marching with burdens weighing them down, disasters and wars in some movies, other more fanciful, e.g., trips to the moon. If you click on View Video in the link, you can see an example of what I mean. My favorite area was the room where eight or so different films played at once, some featuring the artist, some shapes in motion, all playing around with time and gravity (e.g., running film backwards so he appears to magically catch papers behind his back). The effect, if you turn slowly around in the room and catch bits of each film running all at once, is of being inside a busily creative mind, ideas flying in all directions.
It'd be wrong to go to MoMA and not see some Picassos. So do that. There are the classic asymmetrical features-all-over faces of women that you would expect, along with more realist work. The range of his experimentation is stunning. I was particularly curious about his prints, having recently learned more on the process from sorting Karen Laub-Novak's work. KLN, with her horsemen of the Apocalypse, would likely have enjoyed his progression of a print, each print adding another layer to create a more and more defined and complicated horse.
One piece that knocked me down, and was, in fact, the only photo I took while in the museum, was by Lee Bontecou. According to the signage, she worked on it for 17 years. She has a focus on time, mechanical, and astronomy elements, so it's no surprise it appealed to me. It flew off in a many directions with wire and gold, dimly reminding me of the guitar strings in the the Ugly Mobile 1.0.
Lee Bontecou: Untitled
Finally, a performance art piece was in process at MoMA. Marina Abramovic sat on a chair in the middle of a large, cordoned off square across from another chair. Gallery patrons could wait in line to sit in silence in the chair across from her for as long as they felt like staying. When we arrived, one woman who had clearly been waiting for a while was walking out to sit in the chair. The vibe off her was almost hostile after a while, like a staring contest, trying to prove something. She was there for quite a while, as we circled the area, taking in other parts of the museum. After her, a dark-haired man sat in the chair, and his vibe was much more relaxed, sitting in companionable silence. It's hard to say how I know how I felt about the participants. Marina kept her face as expressionless as possible, and so did the participants, and yet they clearly put off differences that were easy to read. Everything was being filmed from several angles, so I'll be curious to see how she presents the expressions through the editing of that film. When I did a yoga teacher training, one exercise we did was sitting in silence and looking another person in the eyes for several minutes. It's a weirdly intimate experience, and as such, initially uncomfortable, and then too comfortable, as if you're now best friends forever with someone with whom you have only a passing acquaintanceship. It amazes me how we're wired for eye contact, body language, connection with our species, how we interpret what we're not even conscious of most of the time. As with lots of performance art, I did have the sense of this one taking itself just a wee bit too seriously – would it kill her to crack a smile, just for a moment? And what if she needs a break to go pee? How is that arranged amid all the silence? But at the same time, I found the concept, and for the most part, implementation compelling. Finding the links for this blog entry, I thumbed through some portraits taken of people that sat in the opposed chair. It did not surprise me to find that some people cried. Being present means being vulnerable. Hence, the piece's title, The Artist is Present...
For more information on Marina Abramović, click here.
First, check out the William Kentridge exhibit. The sketches are riveting, many self portraits, and quite a few of another figure, a woman in glasses. But the most absorbing elements of the exhibit are the short films. Some are animated sketches that grow in process to complete pictures, then evolving to other images, landscapes growing, figures marching with burdens weighing them down, disasters and wars in some movies, other more fanciful, e.g., trips to the moon. If you click on View Video in the link, you can see an example of what I mean. My favorite area was the room where eight or so different films played at once, some featuring the artist, some shapes in motion, all playing around with time and gravity (e.g., running film backwards so he appears to magically catch papers behind his back). The effect, if you turn slowly around in the room and catch bits of each film running all at once, is of being inside a busily creative mind, ideas flying in all directions.
It'd be wrong to go to MoMA and not see some Picassos. So do that. There are the classic asymmetrical features-all-over faces of women that you would expect, along with more realist work. The range of his experimentation is stunning. I was particularly curious about his prints, having recently learned more on the process from sorting Karen Laub-Novak's work. KLN, with her horsemen of the Apocalypse, would likely have enjoyed his progression of a print, each print adding another layer to create a more and more defined and complicated horse.
One piece that knocked me down, and was, in fact, the only photo I took while in the museum, was by Lee Bontecou. According to the signage, she worked on it for 17 years. She has a focus on time, mechanical, and astronomy elements, so it's no surprise it appealed to me. It flew off in a many directions with wire and gold, dimly reminding me of the guitar strings in the the Ugly Mobile 1.0.
Lee Bontecou: Untitled
Finally, a performance art piece was in process at MoMA. Marina Abramovic sat on a chair in the middle of a large, cordoned off square across from another chair. Gallery patrons could wait in line to sit in silence in the chair across from her for as long as they felt like staying. When we arrived, one woman who had clearly been waiting for a while was walking out to sit in the chair. The vibe off her was almost hostile after a while, like a staring contest, trying to prove something. She was there for quite a while, as we circled the area, taking in other parts of the museum. After her, a dark-haired man sat in the chair, and his vibe was much more relaxed, sitting in companionable silence. It's hard to say how I know how I felt about the participants. Marina kept her face as expressionless as possible, and so did the participants, and yet they clearly put off differences that were easy to read. Everything was being filmed from several angles, so I'll be curious to see how she presents the expressions through the editing of that film. When I did a yoga teacher training, one exercise we did was sitting in silence and looking another person in the eyes for several minutes. It's a weirdly intimate experience, and as such, initially uncomfortable, and then too comfortable, as if you're now best friends forever with someone with whom you have only a passing acquaintanceship. It amazes me how we're wired for eye contact, body language, connection with our species, how we interpret what we're not even conscious of most of the time. As with lots of performance art, I did have the sense of this one taking itself just a wee bit too seriously – would it kill her to crack a smile, just for a moment? And what if she needs a break to go pee? How is that arranged amid all the silence? But at the same time, I found the concept, and for the most part, implementation compelling. Finding the links for this blog entry, I thumbed through some portraits taken of people that sat in the opposed chair. It did not surprise me to find that some people cried. Being present means being vulnerable. Hence, the piece's title, The Artist is Present...
For more information on Marina Abramović, click here.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Junk Art - The Ugly Mobiles, 1.0 & 2.0
Ugly Mobile 1.0 had the most interesting parts, that's for sure. They included:
parts of a black metal lamp, broken guitar strings, the spiral cord of a phone chargers, parts of the inner workings of a mouse (computer, that is), 70th anniversay pin of the Soviet Union, a blue plastic turtle, the wire cap of a champagne cork, pieces of agate, amethyst and petrified wood, plastic beads, Mardi Gras medallions from 1990, metal towel racks, a plastic silver dollhouse teapot, yarn, paper drink umbrellas, magnets (including one that lights up), a broken compass with a frog design, a Canadian maple leaf xmas ornament, a homemade ornament prototype, a cloisonne bracelet, and seashells. Sadly, I never got a good photograph (imagine!) but you get the idea.
Ugly Mobile 2.0 is not as ugly, and has fewer parts. The moral of the story might be symmetry and repetition are components of artistic design. Parts: black metal lamp parts (from UM1.0), crystals from a disassembled chandelier, the metal towel racks, plastic beads (some from UM1.0), goldtone bells, blue metal plumbing pipe, and a little guitar string.
parts of a black metal lamp, broken guitar strings, the spiral cord of a phone chargers, parts of the inner workings of a mouse (computer, that is), 70th anniversay pin of the Soviet Union, a blue plastic turtle, the wire cap of a champagne cork, pieces of agate, amethyst and petrified wood, plastic beads, Mardi Gras medallions from 1990, metal towel racks, a plastic silver dollhouse teapot, yarn, paper drink umbrellas, magnets (including one that lights up), a broken compass with a frog design, a Canadian maple leaf xmas ornament, a homemade ornament prototype, a cloisonne bracelet, and seashells. Sadly, I never got a good photograph (imagine!) but you get the idea.
Ugly Mobile 2.0 is not as ugly, and has fewer parts. The moral of the story might be symmetry and repetition are components of artistic design. Parts: black metal lamp parts (from UM1.0), crystals from a disassembled chandelier, the metal towel racks, plastic beads (some from UM1.0), goldtone bells, blue metal plumbing pipe, and a little guitar string.
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