Ragamuffin Scrap Animals

Like I need something else to start and not finish...

I signed up for Carla Sonheim's online class to make these little darlings.  I always fall in love with her critters.  Here is one off her webpage.

 So far I have only gotten to the first critter which is an owl.  Here is a picture of some owls Carla made.

 

Here is a picture of my first owl.  Be kind, it is only child, orphan owl looking for a forever home.

Texture and Sculpture Tuesday

I found this quote on Belinda DelPesco's blog.  And yep, I got all those voices going on in my head when I look at one of my pieces in progress.  Did you think the artist who created the sculptures below had the critics in her/his head?

Art Quote

To keep his errors down to a minimum, the internal Censor to whom a poet submits his work in progress should be a Censorate. It should include, for instance, a sensitive only child, a practical housewife, a logician, a monk, an irreverent buffoon and even, perhaps, hated by all the others and returning their dislike, a brutal, foul-mouthed drill sergeant who considers all poetry rubbish. ~W. H. Auden

Okay, and now for the sculpture.  When we were in Auburn NY (I think that is where we were) we saw these fabulous sculptures in someone's vegetable garden.

100 Dresses

Have you heard of Crystal Cawley's 100 dress project?  I am participating in it although as usual I have put it off till the last minute.  Here is a picture of the dress I am submitting. It is about 10 inches tall and is glued to the paper provided by Crystal.

I made the dress by layering polyester organza and Lutradur. I would layer one organza piece over one lutradur sheet  and do some decorative stitching.  Then I did it again.  Then I stacked the two stitched layers, added an organza over them and stitched all 5 layers together.  Then, and here is the fun part, I melted it all with my heat gun.  The butterflies are from the second layer and were stitched as decoration into the organza; they did not melt.  I wanted to add a few more butterflies so they few already in the dress did not look so alone.  I burned the butterflies out of another piece of the organza and glued the butterflies to the front of the dress.  You can not see them well but I finished the dress with a few grommets to the bottom of the dress just to give it a bit more decoration, one more texture, and something that was shiny.

Catacombs under the Indianapolis City Market

The Indianapolis City Market opened in 1886 and  is listed in the National Register of Historic Places.  Then it was a farmer's market offering fresh produce.  Now it contains a wide variety of eateries, wine and cheese shoppes, and retailers.  Under the Market are "catacombs" which were originally the the basement and another old building that was built next door.  That building burned down and built over with the basement being sealed off until recently.  We toured the catacombs and here are some pictures.  Some of  them are blurry.  I kinda liked that it gave them a ghostly feel.

Some of the arches were filled in with brick to give additional strength when a new building was built above the basement.

Reflections

It was very frustrating trying to take pictures at the art museums. Many of the pictures were covered with glass that reflected me.  I finally decided to just love it.  These are all of the same photo that I photoshopped trying to make the image more obvious.  Interesting how different they are. I think the first is the original.  The picture in the image is a reflection of the artwork behind us and is merely reflected in the glass.

Schweinfurth Art Center

While in upstate NY we, of course, stopped at the Schweinfurth Art Center. It currently has an exhibit called "Transgressing Traditions."  It is the second annual juried member international show for the SDA. The show will still be up till the end of August so go and see it if you can.

Here are some pictures of my favorites, in no particular order other than my walk around the rooms.

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This piece has two layers.  You can almost see where the top layer is left loose at the top right corner to drape over itself. 

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As a printer and a crocheter I have to respect this piece. 

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Detail of Bittersweet.  Isn't that fabulous?

Many  more favorites to show.  I feel another post coming.

Light and Shadow

As I was taking pictures of patterns and textures, I started taking pictures of shadows including me taking pictures of me taking pictures of me taking pictures of shadows.  Here are some of my best shadows from my vacation.

me

my husband

Three More Mark Rothko Paintings

On my latest family reunion/ vacation Brownie and I went to visit 4 art Museums--Harvard's, Columbus OH, Toledo OH, and Cornell's.  What great art we saw and we saw including THREE more Rothokos.  In 2014 I posted some information about Mark Rothko after seeing one of his painting up close and personal.

The first new Rothko we saw was in the Harvard Art Museum.  It is from his transitional "multiform" period. "Rothko himself described these paintings as possessing a more organic structure and as self-contained units of human expression. For him, these blurred blocks of various colors, devoid of landscape or the human figure, let alone myth and symbol, possessed their own life force. They contained a "breath of life" he found lacking in most figurative painting of the era. " 

The other two Rothkos we saw were in the Toledo OH Museum.  I wish we had had  more time to spend there.  These are both in Rothko's later style of floating rectangular fields of light and color and is the style for which he is best known.

And some details of the Lilac and Orange over Ivory.

I am not sure  if you can see the drip marks on the picture above.  I would guess that they are the reason there was a problem about how to hang the piece.  The Toledo museum had some question about which way was up for the picture and had to verify it before hanging the painting.  Yes, the drip marks do run  up.  The drip marks are also an excellent representation of  Rothko's use of very thin layers of paint to produce a depth in his paintings--those drips are nearly transparent.

I clearly did not love Untitled as much as I loved the Lilac and Orange over Ivory since I did not take any detail pictures of Untitled. Well, I didn't take any detail pictures of the transitional piece either and I didn't even take a picture of the plaque for it.  If a picture is worth a thousand words then the number of shots taken of each Rothko painting visually demonstrates my excitement level in each of the three pieces.  However, I am truly thrilled to have gotten to see all three this summer.