This thread is for general discussions of arts, crafts, music, movies and hobbies. Caine is your curator.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
This thread is for general discussions of arts, crafts, music, movies and hobbies. Caine is your curator.
Birch trees in autumn. Very nice.
I have so much respect for textile artists–it’s a very time-consuming and difficult medium to work in–not for those who like immediate gratification. :-) Hours and hours of work. Few people understand just what goes into these things–we’re so used to fabric being whipped out by machines. Everything has to be planned so meticulously and then executed by hand. I’d love to learn to spin and weave a little bit someday. My hat’s off to this artist. Beautiful work.
I’d like to know if atheism, social justice and evidence based epistimology inform anyone’s art.
I’m lucky in that I write songs* so I can address those topics directly through the lyrics. It seems to me that visual artists have a more difficult time tackling those themes. Mind you, I’m sure that’s my ignorance talking.
*Not many, and not great describes my set list. Still working out how to not be preachy. :)
I don’t know much about art, but I know I don’t like it…….
I knit. Yeah, I know that men aren’t supposed to knit but I find it very relaxing. I’m presently working on a fisherman sweater similar to this (sleeves are different) which will be a Christmas present for a friend. This sort of thing takes a while but. as I said, it’s relaxing and I have a nice finished product.
Mr Holmes
recommended, even for nonSherlockians. The portrayal of an aging Sherlock coping with early signs of dementia, and passing his legacy on to the next generation is heartwarming. It is refreshing to see a different approach to the conflict between the person and the “fictional character” that Watson chronicled in what Sherlock disputed as not a “real biography, but a fictional portrayal, for which he (Sherlock) was just the inspiration” [paraphrasing]
to summarize. I am not Sherlockianfannish. I like Sherlock stories, as puzzles to try to discern before the reveal. This particular movie was quite moving, in an unexpectedly.
and kudos to McKellen for his exquisite portrayal of such a difficult character, that is so burdened with expectations, etc.
Freedom – Zenos Frudakis
Is often interpreted to have an atheist message although the artist himself does not mention religion at all on his website.
I have been struggling with trying to express the themes that FossilFishy mentioned in my own sculpture, but I have a very busy day today, so I will have to come back later and expand on my thoughts.
In the meantime, it would be really cool to see/hear others ideas of those themes expressed in sculpture.
(If this comment is out of line, please remove, disemvowell, or ignore.)
to continue movienerding:
Next recommendation is Me, Earl, and the Dying Girl
somewhere between “flik” and “artfilm”. I expected a chronicle of goofy teenager fiddlin with moviemaking that ends up pulling in a girl with a terminal disease. While that “succinct synopsis” is actual, it is far from accurate at describing the effect of the movie. The “goofy movie making” is what is know in Shakespeare as “comic relief”.
It is quite tempting to continue with a spoiler, that the movie spoilers from the very beginning, that the audience discounts as “joshin”, but then <SPOILER> actually occurs. The followup scenes are moving, profoundly.
This might be difficult to find, as this was a limited release movie. Recommend looking for it.
@Al Dente #5 – Knitting is an ancient occupation, with roots going back to ancient Egypt, Rome and Sweden. Modern knitting emerged in the 13th century, and by the 16th century, trade guilds had emerged to produce knitted items (women were forbidden by law from joining guilds, so the knitting guilds were all men.) For much of European history, knitting was done as piece-work, with the entire family — men, women and children — engaged in the craft. It did not become “women’s work” until the mid 1800s, when the Industrial Revolution and the invention of knitting machines capable of large scale production came into widespread use.
My dad’s mother, the granddaughter of Prussian immigrants who grew up on a farm in Nebraska, taught all of her children and grandchildren to knit and sew. Her philosophy was simple: if we knew how much work it was, we’d be more careful of our clothes. I prefer crochet, but my older brother has been a prolific knitter. He served for several years as a sonar tech in the Navy, and at one point had many on his boat knitting as a way to pass the time.
@3, FossilFishy
Well, I did make this one image that is fairly related to supernatural ideas, skepticism, and such.
And now I’m remembering this one surreal image I saw one time that was about a child who didn’t see the inequality in society. It was really good, but I don’t know how to find it. Maybe I’ll try again to find it after work today.
I wonder if anyone else’s perspective about art as changed over time, like it has happened for me? I’ve known since I was 8 or 9 that I wanted to be a scientist, and so I grew up becoming one. In my 20s I remember being quite dismissive of art, and anything else related to art. It was a combination of ignorance about the subject, and arrogance, I suspect.
In my 30s I re-read Arthur C. Clarke’s short story “The Star”. In it some humans find the remains of an old civilization, destroyed by a supernova. The members of that civilization had been killed many thousands of years. They were technically advanced enough to know this would happen, but incapable of preventing it. So they saved all their valuable creations in a fortified vault on a remote planet of their own system, and then died. All this vault contained was their art. Paintings, recordings, architectural records, plays and movies. This is what the humans found. Of notice, there was no science left in the vault: there was no need to record information about their chemistry or physics discoveries, obviously.
I wouldn’t say that short story changed my perspective about art, but rather it made me realize it had already changed, then. Art is what a civilization creates that’s unique to it. Science is universal. So art has a special value that’s different from science’s.
FossilFishy, I have only made a few sculptures, but they are strictly material, not representative of anything. The first was a tetrahedron of copper tubing and steel cable, the next was rods and cable again – not quite tensegrity, but when I saw https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Needle_Tower I stood in awed respect and recognition.
To me, taking basic items, like rod and cable, and using them to show what the laws of the universe are, is an expression of my atheism. There is no humanity to it, no expression of emotion, no story, no moral. It is like working out the laws of motion, and showing that there are no angels pushing things about. It is bending a rod to show that it flexes thus, because that is how it works, always. God isn’t in it.
Okay, I have just got another idea for a sculpture . . . gotta go sketch it.
Al Dente @ 5:
I’m jealous! I can’t knit to save my life. That’s bullshit, that men aren’t supposed to knit. Historically, as Gregory pointed out, men were very involved in all needlesmithing, including net and lace making, which are very time consuming and difficult.
That sweater is gorgeous! That looks like it’s pretty damn complex. Your friend is lucky to have you.
#6 slithy – thanks for the rec. I’ll probably see it thanks to this.
Okay…pardon the upcoming mess, your curator is rather out of it today. First, thank you all for the wonderful posts! I somehow didn’t mention books when saying what was under the discussion umbrella, but definitely books, too.
Some people will remember the blow-ups here over the Hobby Lobby policies, and that that represented a big problem for me, as an artist, because that’s the only art supply store I have access to here in ND. When I informed my clients that I would now have to order supplies online, eschewing HL, which meant prices went up and deadline times increased, I lost a fair amount of my client base due to many of them being fine with HL’s policies, so…
I’ve now moved completely into textile arts (and stock photography), so I don’t have those ethical problems to deal with anymore. Currently, I’m making embroidered lap/throw quilts (60″ x 60″), completely by hand – hand sewn, hand embroidered, hand quilted. The one I’m doing now is a tree, done in Candlewick and French knots, figuring it out as I go along. You can see that work here: https://needleprovocateur.wordpress.com/ I’m enjoying my move into textiles, and hopefully, I’ll be able to make some money doing it.
Having said all that, I haven’t had a great deal of time to spend being awed by other embroidery artists’ work, but I did a little bit of browsing a week or so ago, not long after the http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2015/07/29/you-mean-that-isnt-what-lady-history-is-all-about/ post and thread. I was bothered that the draw of mutilated women is still so strong that someone thought yet another Jack the Ripper museum was a great idea. So, that was on my mind when I was browsing embroidery art, and guess what I found a lot of? Women as mutilated objects. Yeah.
I’m not squeamish when it comes to art, and I know that sometimes a controversial or uncomfortable piece is a good way to make your point, but that wasn’t what I was getting from the various pieces I saw. It was more of a “yeah, women are really good as mutilated objects” thing. The most common depiction was a female body with no head, neck to feet, with the abdomen slit wide open (one depiction like this had the abdominal opening stuffed with flowers), and others which did include a head had either no face, or the face was obscured completely. That women are still so commonly seen as convenient objects to mutilate bothered the hell out of me. While there were plenty of depictions of mutilated women, it was not as if there were an equal number of depictions of mutilated men – there wasn’t even one. I don’t understand why this is such a commonplace theme, and while I thought a number of the pieces were beautifully done, I don’t grok the continued fascination with women as mutilated objects. It bothers me. A lot.
I also discovered that there are emartists who use their own skin as a canvas. Interesting stuff, that. I found Eliza Bennett’s work particularly interesting.
Caine @ #17,
Eliza Bennett’s work is both appealing and unsettling (as I suppose all good art should be.) I find irony in her embroidered hand insofar as I think the stitching renders the hand nearly unusable.
Caine, would the discussion of food as culture be appropriate here? Not posting recipes, but for instance, a recent article in the New Yorker about the history of and pointlessness and marketing ploys of wine criticism.
Morgan @ 19:
Yes, I think food is fine to discuss – fire away!
A few years back my wife reconnected with her cousin, who is a fabric artist. A group of five of us attended a bojagi show in Korea in 2012 and then traveled to the Naxi areas of Sichuan province. I found the experience extremely rewarding. I had never traveled with artists before and it was literally an eye-opening experience – they noticed and pointed out so much that I never would have paid attention to. I have found that the impact has not worn off: I still pay a lot more attention to color, texture and indigenous textiles when we travel. I am far too uncoordinated to sew but I have tried dyeing with native plants from our property and am fascinated by the process and by the simplicity and beauty that can arise from silk, well water, vinegar and leaves.
Caine, your embroidery work has inspired me to take up the needle again. When I was very young (mid 1950s) my mother was of the mind that all “young ladies” should excel in the “home arts.” To that end, on Sunday mornings she would dress my sisters and myself in our best dresses and march us next door to take “needle classes” from a very nice, very proper elderly lady. I got very good at it, but I bristled at the thought that this is what “well bred young ladies” should do. I wanted a telescope and a chemistry set and to go out and climb trees. It was however, preferable to Sunday School which was an activity abandoned very early on.
For the longest time my feminism got in the way of my pursuing textile arts. Both I and feminism have evolved past that restriction I am happy to say. That textile work is being seen less and less as a gendered activity is progress indeed. BTW, I loved your Toucan Tree quilt.
Opus @ 21:
That sounds like a fantastic trip and time, I envy that. I’d love to hear more about your experiences dyeing fabric.
Morgan @ 22:
Welcome to the class of Embroidery that doesn’t suck! You might want to check out Urban Threads – fabulous resource, and they are fine with people using their designs to make money. Mister’s in love with the Toucan Tree as well, a good thing, given it’s his quilt. :D
Opus, just looked up Bojagi and Su-Bo – amazing, beautiful work.
unless the art is expressly depicting religious themes I think it would be very difficult to determine any religious inspiration at least in painting and sculpture. Much of contemporary art is the expression of the artist and not sponsored by religious organizations ala churches, and temples/priests and kings. It would be easy to see non religious images or even anti-religious artist there were many in the 20th century. The works of Diego Rivera come to mind which is still preaching but distinctly none religious. There is much of contemporary art that is more personal expression and has a much more abstract influences that would not be obvious at first glance like the works of Chuck Close . A discussion of religion and other ideas which would include atheism in art if it included other non-western countries could easily extend to several volumes
uncle frogy
Here are a couple of Argentinean folk songs about God, made by atheists.
I could find this one, “Little Questions About God” by Atahualpa Yupanqui, with English subtitles. The song is slow, but well worth a listening in my opinion:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YoauQ8Cqv8s
The other is “Verses of Papa God” by Gustavo “Cuchi” Leguizamón, but I’ll just be able to post the lyrics. I’ll shorten the strophes so that the post doesn’t get too long.
If there’s nothing after life, I’ll go singing past it.
Once my shadow blossoms blue, its footprints will return.
—
Poor Papa God, always lonely and absent.
He’d die out of boredom if it wasn’t for people.
—
Poor Papa God, administering detriments:
poverty, death and oblivion; what a job!
—
If there’s nothing after silence, I’ll go singing past it.
In case the night goes to sleep, my song will illuminate the way.
—
Poor Papa God, he doesn’t even know how to sing;
without feelings or dreams, he has no God to protect him.
—
Poor Papa God. When will he learn to be a gaucho?
What can the poor guy know about love, without a wife or a horse?
—
If there’s nothing after nothingness, I’ll go singing, always singing.
How sad will be Heaven, at last, once it knows it’s been invented?
—
Poor Papa God, he doesn’t have a single friend left.
He’s always surrounded by sycophants who want to drink all his wine.*
—
Poor Papa God, with his hair so scarce,
his presence so short, his heart so bitter.
* best strophe ever IMO
Athiests Don’t Have No Songs
Steve Martin video
More on the Bojagi forum here: https://www.facebook.com/bojagiforum
Caine:
My directions, in their entirety, are below. I was really surprised by the total lack of correlation between foliage color (north Georgia dogwoods, sour woods, red oaks, etc.) and the fabric color.
Dyeing:
2 gal water with 1/2 cup vinegar (white)
put into a stainless or enameled pot or aluminum (color will vary with the metal content
… bring to boil, reduce heat to simmer/low boil
Add the fabric on boards or roll on PVC pipe …. simmer for 1.5 to 2 hours
(water will get really black) save it and reuse.. will add more color to subsequent a dye baths. Loraine has some really great color from the ‘really’ old dye bath water….
(to reuse… mix up vinegar and water in correct proportion, then add to the residual bath water)
Can add a piece of rusty metal… adds to the color…
I am going to ship you the boards that Loraine gave me…
———
use 3 boards
lay out fabric,
.. place leaves in space equal to the size of the board.
Place board on top
Fold over… (faric gets wrapped around the board)
then add more leaves,
fold over ,
this board will end up in the middle of your bundle
then put a board on the bottom and top.
Clamp into place (Binder clips work best, because can fold the ‘handles’ down) other clamps are ok if they fit into the pot.
or
leaves on the fabric, PVC pipe on top and roll up into a bundle…
tie with string
string will leave stripe marks… enhance design
if want stripe through out the scarf…lay a pieces of string on table, that are longer than the fabric
fabric on top
leaves on top of fabric
PVC Pipe, roll up.. string/fabric/leaves
Use the string that hangs out at the end to tie the bundle… and/or use more string
remember that the PVC pipe/boards have to fit into the POT…submerged.
May have to use rock on top to hold PVC pipe down under surface of the liquid.
Opus @ 29:
Wow. Thank you! The only dyeing I’ve done is tea dyeing. Opusanglicanum does medieval dyeing, which I find fascinating, and perhaps one day I’ll work up the courage to give it a go.
Nick Cave’s ‘Into My Arms’ is really a song about love rather than a song about God, and I don’t think he’s really an atheist, but the first line is “I don’t believe in an interventionist God”. ;) Beautiful song.
I find questions of the kind “Is it or isn’t it art?” (and, similarly, “Is it or isn’t it science?”) to be relatively uninteresting. They seem to me to come out of the reification of subjective category definitions. Much more fun to put those questions on the side of our plates and decide whether it’s exciting, powerful, intriguing, challenging, moving and so on.
re: davidgeelan @31
I’ve been looking for a reason to reference that exact song on Pharyngula for many years. A long time ago, probably back on sciblogs, there was a thread that wound up discussing music and someone dissed Nick Cave for using a lot of christian imagery. I’ve never been much of a contributor here so I let it go.
‘Into My Arms” is probably the closest that my wife and I have to something that could be considered “our song.”
re: Caine @16
My ex-wife had sketchbooks full of women with body parts missing, sometimes replaced with non-standard prosthetics. I think she had more in mind than just brutalizing her subjects but I never really understood it.
David @ 32:
I do understand that kind of thing, I’ve done it myself, although I did not objectify to the point of no head or face. I just don’t understand the persistent fascination with women as mutilated objects. I don’t understand why I’ve had my own times of fascination with it – something I need to think on for a while.
Kreator @ #26, Preguntitas sobre diós is just brilliant; long a favourite.
(You probably know this audio clip – great answer to the do-you-believe-in-god question: Gustavo “Cuchi” Leguizamón habla sobre la creación.
Changing the topic to film, i’ve been thinking recently of how downhill Atom Egoyan has gone of late…the technical brilliance and deliciously complex narrative of The Adjuster; the beauty and melancholy of Exotica and The sweet Hereaftet; the overall strengh of Felicia’s Journey and also the playfulness of his earlier works, now all seemingly gone……Ararat while interesting was a mess and poorly written, Chloe was a disgrace, as was awful The Captive….the skill, the style, the originality all gone
Morgan @ 18:
It made me think back to childhood, when there was a marked obsession with hands – all the adverts addressing dishpan hands, the ones stressing how young you could keep your hands (the Ivory “is it the daughter’s or mother’s hand?”), and how much a woman’s hands was a marker of class.
Caine @ 36:
Oh yes, holy crap. Who can forget Madge the Manicurist. Strange how persistent those ads are.
Damn, sorry – forgot that the link would embed ::headdesk headdesk headdesk:::
Opus, I tried replying, but couldn’t get an email through. Thank you so much, they were stunning, and I love, love, love the last one. I’ll have to get some silk and try this out.
FossilFishy, #3:
It matters at some level for me, but I mostly write non-programmatic music, with no lyrics or implied narratives or whatever. I guess math is sort of an external thing, and in some sense it has the biggest influence on the output. However, that’s not to say the point is to be really obscure or “intellectual” (I hate that it gets characterized this way, as if other things aren’t intellectual), and anything gets trashed/modified/repurposed if simply listening to it isn’t a fairly interesting experience for me. To the extent I can just listen and “forget” what I know about how/why it got to be that way (because most of that’s inaccessible to others), I can try to put myself in an epistemic state that’s a little closer to what another listener might have.
But after working on something for so long, it’s never like hearing it for the first time, without background knowledge about how it’s changed, my methods, personal history, and so on. It doesn’t matter what “the author’s intent” is in the end, and I want to make it possible for everybody to be on nearly equal terms so that listening and interpreting can be a more active process which they can see as their own work and their own responsibility. One goal is maybe to encourage better listening or something like that, and another is to make it not simply about relating to musical works that somebody made but also about evaluating their everyday experiences of the world (and other people) in a similar way — so, of course, you could make the connection that the world isn’t intended to be any way at all (not by a god, at least, just by people). Maybe it doesn’t help much, but that’s thinking of it as a sort of mental exercise, in an artificial setting, that sort of gets people into the mood or strengthens skills that they can apply to their lives in all sorts of ways. Still, I’d say any instrumental value it might have (i.e., it’s good for something else) isn’t necessarily the most important feature.
Also, it’s unavoidable that you have to think about how your part of the work fits in the whole process. I mean, forget “the audience” — there’s going to be a performer that interprets the markings in your score, or a computer that’s programmed a certain way has to use whatever you’re giving it. So there’s a problem that you generally can’t give all of the information exactly even if you wanted to, and they have to do the best they can with the “evidence” you’re providing. Even if you’re improvising or doing all of the interpretation yourself, it never comes out as an exact instance of whatever you might have planned ahead of time, because we just don’t have that kind of control.
I’m not sure how much any of that has to do with what you had in mind. My rambling above is not so much about addressing such topics with a particular work (like taking some kind of a position about them and communicating it to others that way), but more about how they’re relevant to doing any work at all.
Well, I suppose it’s generally easier to do with anything using language (songs, plays, movies, poems, stories, essays, etc.) because you can just outright say what an idea is, reason about it, tell a narrative, have a dialogue, make statements, ask questions, describe, explain, justify, and so forth. I’m making that sound way too easy. Anyway, when you take the lyrics out of music, the remainder is pretty abstract compared to the objects or images that a visual artist has to work with. Of course they don’t need to be representing anything in the world, but that seems much easier to do.
Yeah, sure, “musicians have it rough,” says the musician. Okay. But from my point of view, being at least fairly competent at music and not so at visual arts, I think I’d have an easier time simply getting started with the task of representing such things, using objects/images/video instead of audio. It probably wouldn’t be very great when I’m doing it, but it would be something. I could begin to think of ways those might have something to say about society or justice or whatever, while I (perhaps most people) don’t make those kinds of associations easily with sounds and rhythms, for reasons that I don’t really understand.
@FossilFishy, #3
I’m not an artist so the answer for me is “no,” but my younger son is. His art is heavily informed by social issues as well as ideas about gender and the concepts of beauty and ugliness.
A political cartoon of his.
His artists’s statement.
@Caine #16 You may enjoy some of his work. Unfortunately, the more controversial stuff isn’t online. There’s a ceramic torso in the room with me, with breasts and a chrome penis.
@ Uncle Froggy #25
I think you’re missing the modern equivalent. Coca Cola and other companies who commission artists and graphic designers to build their image – huge billboards, short movies depicting a transcendent image of the product, the styling of the packaging, etc. The artists are doing the same thing – exchanging money for creative ideas. It’s just the name of the employer who has changed. It isn’t the same as art for self expression.
Some random comments of randomness: I’m really enjoying all of this eclectic discussion of arts of all sorts. Thank you, Caine, for curating.
Caine, you are a true needleartist. Your work makes my little dinkings around look like, well, little dinkings around.
I’ve always been at the least, agnostic, but I borrow symbolism from everywhere for my little crafty things, especially when I’m making gifts. I like to add birthstones and (purportedly) healing stones and colors, special symbolic animals, things like that, personalized to the recipient. It’s fun and it makes the healing doll or fetish pouch or whatever more personal.
ArtK @ 41:
I do indeed enjoy it, Zane is very talented, and I liked his statement a great deal. I also think it’s good that he has a space to write that perception, because my feelings about art (my inner statement, if you will) has changed a good many times over the last 4.5 decades. If I had bothered to write such things down, it would have been interesting to see all the changes, and what drove them.
I’d have zero problem with that – I love sexually subversive work.
Anne @ 43:
Oh piffle. I have found that all the little dinkings by people to be very important, because they add a lot of happiness and kindness to the world. I once made hand-painted bookmarks for a group of people, with each bookmark having a charm on it, related to the painting. I’ve never forgotten one woman’s response. She told me she was having the most shit day ever, was angry and depressed when she stopped to pick up her mail, her last errand. When she opened my envelope, she told me she burst out in tears, and it was exactly what she needed, a reminder of her strength (hers was a dragon). Little dinkings, they make a difference.
As for my own work, I suffer from extreme insecurity. I look at what other artists are doing, and I feel inadequate and not very talented. This has been going on from day one, and all the decades passing hasn’t changed that at all.
opposablethumbs @ #34:
I actually hadn’t listened to that clip, so thanks for sharing! “Do you think that an orchestra so large as the human one, and that’s so out of tune, could have have a director?” Perfect words coming from a musician.
Pierre Le Fou:
Hi. I don’t believe we’ve met before.
:)
*raising hand*
I went to great lengths to avoid arts & crafts classes in high school and college; they seemed to be a waste of my time. (Music being a different kettle of herring, altogether.)
Boy, do I regret that now! All these images in my head—and little capacity to get them out. I just cludge my way through it, like a hippopotamus trying to ice skate.
It’s very frustrating.
–
Caine:
Oh, hell yes!
I have trouble thinking of myself and “artist” in the same sentence; it just seems ludicrous…even though I have arted, and have even been paid money for the resulting effluent.
Ice skating hippos.
–
I know how to sew, but have never really made any art pieces. I would love to learn to knit but apparently it is even slower than crocheting. I crochet many useful things like hats and blankets, and have finally gotten enough experience in the craft to be able to sit down with a stick, yarn, and an idea and have it actually work. I am especially entranced by the limitless design possibilities of tapestry crochet, and have been working up my own design for a bag with a skully pattern.
I think women, and their curvy bodies are deeply associated with art. I especially think of some of Frida Kahlo’s art. “A Few Small Nips” “What the Water Gave Me” “Without Hope” and “Little Deer” are all explorations of the themes of life and death and pain and love. In any case, thanks for starting and curating this thread. I am enjoying it very much. Hopefully an occasional off topic comment about birds will be allowed. (I have been deemed acceptable habitat by catbirds AND house wrens, and the cardinals and downy woodpeckers and chickadees all seem to have their babies stashed in my garden. I’m thrilled!)
I’m knitting again.
I forgot how much I enjoy it, even though I can’t just knit.
I need to have something else going on. TV, movie, conversation…
I’ve never thought of it as Art.
Just clothing.
@ llyris #42
I was not thinking about commercial art as such I was thinking of “gallery art” and “museum art ” trying to point to art that was not religious and some is down right hostile to religion and the established order. Diego Rivera was notorious for troubling his benefactors. who has not heard of “piss christ”
The question you posed suggests another thought was Leonardo da Vinci a commercial artist as we know it? he surely did art and design of all kinds
uncle frogy
What we do is not art by any stretch of the imagination. However.
I knit squares to make up rugs for charity. My mum does most of the actual assembly, sewing, organising someone to crochet edging for not-quite-complete rugs and then getting them to worthy recipients. From time to time, there are family disagreements about the way mum and I approach rug making. My sister – who happens to be the only one with any real talent for working with fabric though she doesn’t knit – thinks it’s daft to worry about how the rugs look when they’re completed. This worries both mum and me. Some of the squares that are donated for her to use in the rugs are absolutely awful, a lot of them aren’t the right size or shape, many of them are very poorly knitted and only dog knows where they got the ugly yard they used to knit them up.
But both mum and I think that it doesn’t matter that many of the recipients are so hard up they’d take anything they’re given. Mum takes the view that this is probably the only “decorative” item many recipients are likely to have, so they ought to be the best she can manage. (Originally we were making them to go overseas, but lost access to the free transport to get them to the depot in Sydney. Now we give them to local home nursing groups or to charity shops and similar organisations. One day I took mum and some armfuls of rugs to a Salvos warehouse and saw three of them walk out the door with a newly arrived refugee family and their three little kids. Good for the soul.)
We take the view that we should do the best we can with what we can offer. We go to a great deal of trouble when assembling them so that they can’t unravel or come apart or go out of shape – which is another reason why some of the squares are eventually rejected – they’re just not robust enough. I don’t see why rugs should turn out dull or ugly or messy when only a little effort will make them bright or pretty or patterned or whatever. Seeing as we must ensure that the rows/ stitches in adjoining squares go in different directions in order to keep the shape right, we might as well go that little bit further and look at the colours and patterns formed when we do that.
It’s a minor matter in the larger concepts of social justice generally. But I think it’s important to do the best you can and not dismiss the visual value of something just because it’s going to be used in a dirt floored hut or by a homeless person in your city or a person who’s shortly going to die and doesn’t take much notice.
I’ll admit it’s self indulgent on my part because I tend to make rugs as rainbows or other much larger patterns than just stripes or checkerboards just to please myself. But if it pleases me, it’s likely to please other people and they’re in more need of a lift of the spirits than I am.
Tethys @ 48:
Wow. I ended up reading that whole thing, beautiful work.
Chigau @ 49:
Aye, me too. I usually play old movies for background noise.
@Uncle Froggy #50
Yes. I mean we think of Michelangelo’s religious art as art, but only wealthy painters had the means to paint whatever they wanted. Like today, the majority of artists were commissioned to paint / sculpt / create particular things and they made their living doing so. Yesterday it was religious icons and portraits of nobles, today it’s coke.
I mean that yesterday’s commercial art is today’s gallery art to some extent. The obvious example would be Toulouse-Lautrec. He painted things he was interested in, but he also created commercial art and advertising. Possibly the big change there is advances in colour printing and mass production, so we recognise his poster art as commercial.
Leonardo da Vinci was brilliant enough and wealthy enough to pursue his own interests as well as making a living. I’m sure there were artists in the past who pissed off their benefactors too.
Today’s art links: Scientology and Naked Cruise Art.
Self-censoring museums have to be braver
The fear of public opinion or the hint of legal action can cause nervous curators and directors to cancel shows when they might not need to
The article at the second link made me think of one of my most favourite paintings, Amor Vincit Omnia by Caravaggio. This is a work that would not be done today.
chigau @49
A simple scarf or pair of mittens may not be art. But a well crafted sweater, tapestry or motorcycle cosy is art.
If anyone asked I’d say that I’m not really an arts kind of person. But when being a tourist somewhere for a week, I like to visit a gallery or two (or five).
Uffizi in Florence is of course magnificent, but I’m not as drawn to paintings as others seem to be. Or maybe it’s just the crowd, and if I could stare at Botticelli’s Primavera without dodging other people and their cameras, I would enjoy it much more. What I do enjoy with less reservations is sculptures and architecture.
I’ve been to Galleria dell’Accademia di Firenze twice now and it wasn’t just for David. He’s the most famous exhibit there, but I enjoyed the room with sculptures even more. Most are plasters of works done for various nobles around Europe, but all those works of art crowded in a single room… I’m not sure how to describe the beauty of that place, but of the two times I was there, I cried a little both times. There’s just something about the beauty being eroded by time, and yet staying just as magnificent.
But my favorite place in the whole world is this: Loggia. I could sit there for hours.
Caine, there’s plenty of Caravaggio in Ufizzi. I think you would enjoy it there.
Dyeing?
That’s synonymous with “Giliell makes a huge mess but doesn’t get results”, right?
Anyway, I’ve been making hats for the last week or so, exploring one and the same pattern over and over again:
The first batch
Second batch
I haven’t taken pics of the latest batch.
My craft blog* is generally in German, so feel free to ask me if you want to know more about anything, but tutorials are bilingual.
*What I hate: People who paint dismissing anybody whose art form is not classical painting or sculpturing as “not really making art, just craft”.
I love the hats, Giliell!
Giliell @57
I like your hats, even though I have no idea what you’re saying about them.
Giliell, #57
Woah, I didn’t know you made hats. They look amazing. Your first link doesn’t seem to be clickable, but I love the red one on the dog in the second link.
I dabble in photography on and off but I don’t think I’m at a level where I could call it art and worthy of sharing much. Just gotta start dedicating more time to it.
Anne, Al Dente, Saad
thanks.
Saad
The hats are actually a very easy sewing pattern. I felt the urge to do some sewing again and fell in love with the pattern.
Here’s the first link again. The one on the dog is mine. :)
Beatrice @ 56:
Oh, no doubt there. Just thinking about standing in front of the actual paintings makes me weak in the knees. It would be an overwhelming experience.
Giliell @ 57:
I share that hate. The main reason I keep myself distanced from the art world is because of the sheer amount of pretentious assholes. I also resent the reduction of craft to mean unskilled, not requiring talent. That’s not true at all, and that attitude bugs the hell out of me.
Saad @ 60:
Just remember that it’s more about your eye and your perceptions, rather than technical efficiency. I keep up with one photo blog in particular, Broken Light: A Photography Collective:
People are free to join and contribute. I think it’s important to remember and recognize how artistic expression can help when dealing with mental illness. It can help when dealing with physical illness, as well.
Families of men shot by Long Beach police unveil mural at museum of art:
I love the idea of this thread. I’d like to present poetry as art. I am not a huge reader of poetry, but occasionally I run into something that just smacks me upside the head, and the poem below is an example. The fact that it is more than 2000 years old makes it especially cool.
That’s Plato, BTW.
Caine
i don’t think it’S a coincidence that the line between “Art” and “mere craft” is conveniently drawn between the things traditionally the domain of white men and the things done by the rest of the world.
Tony
That’s powerful
Caine @65 You have a point, of course, but I think there really is a difference between art and crafts, but that lies not in the technique at all. Some crochet is art, some is craft. Some painting is art, some is craft. And the line between the two is damned nebulous sometimes, as are all lines when dealing with art.
And anyone who puts “mere” in front of craft gets a thumbs down from me (in know that wasn’t you, Caine). There is nothing “mere” about craftsmanship. I told a backhoe driver I was working with once that he was a craftsman. He thought I was nuts, but once I explained that craftsmanship was doing whatever you were doing as close to perfectly as you can manage, he got it. He said, “I have to sit up here all day, I might as well do it right”. I’ve had to explain that to my grandson, too, while he watched me tearing out about half of an almost-finished doily. I could have fixed the mistake well enough that it didn’t show, but I wanted to do it RIGHT.
Still more hats
This time bilingual
Giliell, your hats are wonderful. I especially love the orange design on the denim hat. It reminds me of the motifs that Shepard Fairey uses in his art.
Pierre Le Fou @12:
I think the science/art dichotomy is a false one. I love poetry and music, and I think the Dirac equation is one of the most beautiful and powerful works of art our species has created.
Giliell @ 67:
Those hats are fabulous, and what a great way to deal with old jeans, too. I like yours in particular. That’s the sort of thing I cannot do to save my life.
Otrame @ 64:
Beautiful, and poignant. I love poetry.
My photo for the day.
If anyone would like to co-curate, especially things like music or movies, I’d be thrilled. Those aren’t strong points with me, and I’m sure anyone else would be more suited to provide good material for reading and talk.
Sugar Skull Spoon. I must get one of these. Maybe two. Or three.
Interesting stuff:
A 17th-Century Stanchi Painting Reveals the Rapid Change in Watermelons through Selective Breeding
Donna Huanca, Muscle Memory
Italian Sculptor Carves an Impressive Dragon Head from a Watermelon
Photographer Stephen Orlando Captures the Movement of Musicians Through Light Painting
Tentacles, lots of tentacles!
Some of these images are nice-
Classic works of art reimagined using modern celebrities:
Her art features Leonardo Di Caprio mixed into Van Gogh art, Julia Roberts as Alexandra, Princess of Wales, Rihanna in ‘Woman in red embroidered shawl’, and many more.
I have always been fascinated by macro photography and this Polish photographer has done some incredible work:
http://www.livescience.com/15626-gallery-dazzling-photos-dew-covered-insects.html
Here’s a nice song with a retro futuristic video.
Oh that reminds me, the Canadian band Young Galaxy may be a bit New Age ish sometimes, but the video for their song “Come and See” seems like it would fit here. Some of their other music videos are quite good too.
This comment section makes me happy, lots of neat stuff :)
Caine – good to see you pointed out Colossal. I am always surprised by the art found there. I often wonder “What would lead someone to start down the path that ended with this?”
My own art is photography. I think the most fun I had was when I was actively doing animal stock photography, often underwater. Since then I have seen my work change and I only create for my own enjoyment any more and occasional sharing. For me, the biggest change has been to abandon “standard” ratios. In nature, the best crop is not always going to be some classic ratio. I would also like to make the case that photography is most certainly not instant art. From capturing the instant to working the highlights and shadows, adjusting all the variables to say what you want to say – that takes time and judgement. Ansel Adams would have just loved Photoshop.
Eidolon @78,
Would Ansel Adams have loved Photoshop? I’m not sure. I’d have to dig some to find the quote, but as I recall, when Adams was once asked how many exposures he took after doing one of his excruciatingly long and precise set ups said, “Only one.” I know that doesn’t preclude manipulation in the darkroom. Did he do much of that? I seem to think not, but now I’m going to have to go do some research.
opus @75
My interest in photography goes in the other direction. My most favorite astronomical photograph is the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field (XDF). Astronomers aimed the Hubble Space Telescope at an area one-seventieth the size of the full Moon. The exposure time was two million seconds, approximately 23 days. Every blob, every smear, every splotch is a galaxy. Some of the light in the photograph has been traveling for over 13 billion years. How is it art? It tells us: You are not the center of the universe.
Incidentally NGC 6503 is my current desktop wallpaper.
Art V Craft…
As a child I was told that women do easy (women’s) things like sewing. As I got older I realised there is actually quite a lot of spacial engineering involved in sewing a garment, especially if you tailor the fit or change the pattern, or make up a pattern using elements from other patterns and mashing them together (like I tend to do with my own clothes).
A few years ago I got into quilting. Because I was pretty experienced with sewing I just made it up as I went along and learned as I went. It’s fun. I prefer doing straight lines. I also feel like I’m not really ‘doing it right’ because I use a machine. I don’t have the patience to sit around forever hand quilting.
A couple of years ago I went along to a quilters club. What really confused me was the fact that only one person there had designed their own quilt. Everyone else used a bought pattern. (I was a bit bamboozled about how anyone could need a pattern for simple log cabin…) And I wondered what they actually liked about it, because I find that creating the vision inside my head is one of the most rewarding parts.
… on the other hand, I did a lot of drawing and painting as a teenager and young woman, and I guess visual creation has always been a bit of a driving force for me.
Al Dente @80
I like to DO macro photography, but my wallpaper is always from http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
NGC 6503 may deserve a turn soon. It is indeed gorgeous.
Morgan@ 79
Adams did a great deal of darkroom manipulation, and that is after he had very carefully processed the negative. I saw a documentary on Adams and I was surprised by the extent of burning, dodging, flashing, required to create the final image. This takes nothing away from the man’s visual creativity. He just used the tools of the darkroom to get on paper what he saw in his mind’s eye. He was the inventor of the Zone System of exposure which is still, to my mind, a key part of creating good images.
It is true that digital photography has certainly changed the art of photography. Fine art photography is still done with film and printing in the darkroom. At the same time, digital images open new avenues of creating images that were basically impossible for nearly all photographers. It still comes down to finding the photographic image in a scene that is waiting for the photographer to discover it.
http://www.kevinshick.com/blog/2013/4/revisiting-hernandez-nm
Caine @70
I need to look at Giliell’s hats, but one of the main things I do/used to do is re-purpose old denim. I swear, sometimes it seems my mission in life is the denim-ize the world. :o) My other is to Re-purpose All The Things!
I’d like to chime in on the whole ‘crafts being dismissed as trivial’ annoyance factor. Ugh.
I used to do a lot of scale miniatures, and other stuff, but that was a different life in a different income bracket. I never could learn to do any of the more traditional crafts people around me did, although those people did try to teach me, and I’ve tried to teach myself. Needle and sewing crafts, my mind and fingers just can’t go there, although I can manage a fairly passable mending seam in emergencies. So I had to put my weird mind to other outlets. Many different outlets over the years, but what became my main Thing is chenille animals. In my heyday with this, I was up to over a 100 different animals, plus many, many little costumes and scenes for them. Entirely self-taught, a happy accident discovery due to my then 4 year old (he’s 23 now) leaving a big mess after one of his crafty afternoons — although a couple years later Klutz Press did come out with a book…and I may have appropriated their mallard, but I had to shrink him, I can’t work as big as they do in that book. Most of my techniques were different though.
I’ve made my own storage units and furniture before. Not always very well, but one time bookshelves I made were mistaken for built -in. I am a sucker for power tools and excuses to use them, and filling spaces with units that utilize the space to full capacity.
Other than denimizing the world, and re-purposing, and melting AOL discs, this is what I do, if anyone wants to see. These are all old, but I’m dabbling a little again; DaughterSpawn bought me stems a couple times so she can hand out critters to kids when she cuts their hair. http://s283.photobucket.com/user/roachiesmom/library/Gemrys%20Forest
Giliell @57
There’s a dragon one! SQUEEEE!
Cicely @ 47 —
This. So much this. And um, an urge to design ice skating hippo critters now.
This level of blockquoting may also be an art for me.
roachiesmom, those are wonderful, and I love the set pieces that your miniature critters live in. I’d call what you do art.
Thanks, Anne!
I finally managed to send a 100 monkeys to a friend who plans to leave them all over Seattle over time, so anyone there, keep a lookout. You may randomly-encounter a very tiny monkey someday. :o)
Tethys
The design is inspired by Indian Mehndi designs, a style I greatly love. Usingi t in embroidery allows to add colour.
Caine
Thanks. I really re-discovered my sewing machine and now I’m getting the little one hooked.
So cool. While I’m personally not the most skully person, I love dia de los muertos designs and styles. Maybe it’s because usually skulls represent violence. If you think abuout Pirates and the Jolly Roger, that’s exactly what you get and how the motif has been used in the western world. But the dia de los muertos skulls are different. They stand for the circle of life, for memory, for your loved ones.
llyris
No shit, isn’t it?
I mean, you take something that is flat and shape it to fit a three-dimensional body, and you are limited by the material,a nd you must take into account how it drapes and all that stuff…
Pfff, I’m human. Using machines to make things faster and easier is what we tend to do a lot. Not to diss hand-sewing or quilting. I am amazed by the patience people have. But I don’t feel bad for not having that.
roachiesmom
Almost no garment gets ever thrown away here. Those that can still be worn are donated to the refugee centre, those that cannot get turned into fabric. I have a huge stack of old Ts and jeans.
And your critters are gorgeous. So cute!
++++
Talking about fotography…
I don’t have enough time to really immerse myself in this, though I’d like to (one day I’ll take a proper class, I swear), but sometimes there are fotos where I really amaze myself. This one will end up on my wall, as soon as I have an empty wall.
+++
Aaaand, an artist I greatly like: Julie Dillion
She does mostly Fantasy and Sci Fi, but she paints diverse people, with diverse bodies. You can even see fully clad warrior women.
Oh thank Dog; I’ve had book recommendations I needed to tell people about for ages! I assume an Arts thread is an appropriate place?
Firstly, The Kingkiller Chronicles by Patrick Rothfuss, consisting so far of The Name of the Wind and The Wise Man’s Fear. They’re fantastic; kept me glued to the page. It’s about a young orphan who is a member of the Edema Ruh, a culture roughly comparable to Romany Gypsies, and the target of comparable prejudice, who through a long and complicated series of events joins the University to learn magic. The magic system is, by the way, brilliant; very well thought out, and without the capacity to make anyone all-powerful.
This is basically a coming of age story with strong themes of overcoming prejudice and adverse circumstances and upwards social mobility. It’s great.
Secondly, The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison. This was nominated for Best Novel in this year’s Hugo awards, but since it revolves strongly around themes of racial prejudice and social justice (and it’s actually a good book), we can safely assume it’s not one of Beale’s shoe-ins. It’s about a mixed-race disfavoured fourth son coming to the throne due to an accident, and his struggle to overcome his own lack of experience and other’s prejudice in order to rule well, while also trying to find out who killed his father and deal with the abusive cousin who raised him.
I am currently reading The Chalion Series by Lois McMaster Bujold. Think Game of Thrones but with more magic and less gore and rape. It’s a very good series, but not as good as the first two recommendations.
Ooh, love the pictures of people’s art (before I get sucked in to book recommendations) – I also enjoyed Patrick Rothfuss’s books and The Goblin Emperor (having signed up to a supporting membership this year, that ended up being my first choice for the voting last week, with The 3 Body Problem a very close second – I found The Dark Between The Stars unfinishable though), and would just like to say that if you’ve not read Scott Lynch’s Gentleman Bastards series, that would also seem to fit with the sensibilities of many readers here. I found the first book fun, but the second book in particular really allows for well-written diverse characters. In fact, there’s an interview with Scott Lynch in the edition of Lightspeed provided with the Hugo packet where he talks about how it was important to him to make sure he did that kind of thing in his writing (trying to be vague enough to avoid any spoilers for people who haven’t read the books yet).
I also just read Go Set A Watchman, and would really like to know what people here thought of it. In general, would this seem more relevant to this thread or to the racism one curated by rq and Tony! I feel like it could belong in either discussion.
If you like to read a lot of non-ficrion as a hobby, I strongly recommend “Killer of Little Shepherds” about the birth of modern forensic science a century ago in France.
One man -Andre Lacassaugne- played an immense role but is almost forgotten today. One time, a proper identification of decomposed remains prevented a pogrom against Jews. The case that dominates the book is a serial killer, brought down by modern methods in 1898.
You will also read about how the roaming unemployed -you might call them hobos in USA- were tagged as lazy, degenerate and “the criminal class”.
On the subject of books: I’ve asked this before, but no-one seems to have read any Greg Egan, anyway I’ll try in the arts specific thread. I was wondering what anyone thought of his approach to gender and equality. I think he’s better than a lot of male Sci Fi writers, but I would appreciate someone else’s opinion.
@katybe
I have been hearing more and more about The Gentleman Bastard series from commenters here. I shall have to give it a go.
Opus @ 75, I have seen those! Amazing work, that.
Eidolon @ 78:
I don’t know about that. Being knowledgeable enough and skilled enough to manipulate photos in a darkroom is not like using pshop, no matter how often someone might protest that they’re the same. I know a lot of people now who don’t care whether or not they get something right in camera, because they’ll just change the fuck out of it in pshop. I don’t care for that sort of thing myself, and limit any pshop stuff on mine to cropping and checking the levels. I prefer getting things right in camera – I’m a dinosaur.
Roachiesmom @ 84, those are adorable!
Giliell @ 88:
Oh, you can melt right into that! So beautiful.
Thumper @ 89:
Absolutely!
birgerjohansson @ 91:
Oooh, sounds interesting, thanks!
Bassmike @ 92:
I’ve never read anything by Greg Egan, so I can’t help you out. Hopefully, someone else has read him.
I’ve recently read everything by Fred Vargas, at least everything which has been translated into English. Love, love, love these books (the Adamsberg series and the Three Evangelists). I also think plog* should enter the lexicon as much as grok did.
*As Adamsberg explains, plog is like a drop of truth falling to earth, and it falls in exactly the right spot.
llyris @81
I’m a quilter and I was taught that machine quilting is “cheating”. It took me a long time before I even tried doing any machine quilting because of this silly idea. When I did finally try it I quickly discovered that it’s a whole lot harder than I thought it would be. It takes as much practice and skill to be able to machine quilt as it does to hand quilt. I’ve also realized that machine quilting allows you to use the quilting process in ways that you cannot use in hand quilting. With hand quilting, you are very limited on quilting over seams, so it makes double sided quilts very difficult. It also makes things like match stick quilting in straight lines impossible if you need to go over seams. So I’ve realized that hand quilting and machine quilting are two different techniques that can give you a variety of different results, and that neither is better than the other.
And of course, you can mix the two together to get some amazing results as well.
I am told that Greg Egan’s short stories are more readable than his novels. His novels are full of interesting ideas, but character wise they fall flat for me. (And of course the ‘observer effect’ doesn’t actually work like that).
My favourite books at the moment are the Liaden Series by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller. I’m also a fan of Pratchett (*sniff*) and loved the Goblin Emperor, I like Lois McMaster Bujold’s stuff as well and the second of the Chalion series is my favourite of that but her Vorkosigan series is also excellent.
And if you like graphic novels then you cannot go past the Hugo Winning Digger by Ursula Vernon (also available still in webcomic form, but a complete story so you have an end to aim for).
Oh, just remembered a non-speculative-fiction recommendation that might work for people here. 1222, by Anne Holt. Norwegian Scandi-crime, with a detective described to me as Miss Marple as a paraplegic lesbian bad-ass misanthrope. Really enjoyable, and as crime thrillers go, definitely on the intelligent side rather than the gory.
Jojo @ 95:
Jesus, it’s always something. Seems we humans can’t teach anything without handing down biases, too. I’m strictly hand needlework, including the quilting on my quilts, but that’s because putting me in the same room with a sewing machine is calling down catastrophe. A lot of textile artists are using a combination of free motion foot and hand embroidery to make stunning pieces. There are a lot of times I wish I didn’t have such a problem with sewing machines.
I think some people get the idea that using a machine makes everything super easy, and not work at all. That’s silly of course, and not at all true. A sewing machine is just a tool, no different from anything else in the tool box.
If anyone here is fond of military history AND dragons, Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series is wonderful. Alt history that takes place during the Napoleonic wars, with a white British male protagonist… and then Novik goes out of her way to include women in the military. And in subsequent books, the cast is increasingly diverse, as Temeraire (the dragon) and company pick up crew members from everywhere they visit! I love military history, but am often annoyed by the lack of diversity in military fiction, and Novik’s books are incredibly refreshing to me.
There’s also an interesting reversal of fortune that takes place, when a native American dragon spreads a virulent disease to European dragons with no resistance, and the European dragon population is suddenly and dramatically weakened. It’s some of the most interesting alt-history I’ve ever read, even if you ignore the fact that a hefty percentage of the main characters are literal dragons.
I can’t say how or why, but this remark revived memories of this fabulous stuff.
http://www.ted.com/talks/margaret_wertheim_crochets_the_coral_reef?language=en
I’ve never been terribly keen on crochet, but if I had any imagination/ creativity, I’d certainly give these corals a go.
Caine @98 My attempts at machine quilting made me realize just how much more practice I need to learn how to control my machine. But, it opens up some many possibilities, that I’m excited to keep plugging away.
Mindless self-promotion
A unicorn kills God.
Adam and Steve
True story of Noah.
Caine @94
I agree that the flexibility in Photoshop does allow a greater margin of error. That does not negate the importance of proper exposure for example. If the whites are at 255 or the shadows are at 0, no amount of jiggery pokery is gonna fix it. Camera fundamentals are still important. Sensor size for one. Lens quality and selection figures in as well. Then there is shutter speed selection, cropping, tripod/monopod/handheld to match the subject and the environment. Photoshop not withstanding, nothing beats a properly composed and exposed image, regardless of the post processing. Phones are not much of a camera, regardless of how many megapixels.
Digital has led to some very unfortunate changes to be sure. The shotgun approach of shooting 30 frames and hoping to get just one decent one. The “any image can be fixed” mentality is another. Fact is, the images that need extensive work are usually lacking in one aspect or another but are acceptable if standards are low enough. From some of the commercial photos from weddings and such I have seen, the standards are often very low indeed.
I think using Photoshop is like many other things – done by someone who really knows what they are doing it certainly looks easy. A look at “Adobe Photoshop for Photographers” by Martin Evening will give you a broader idea of just how large the variety of adjustments available as a photographer works towards the final image.
I don’t know much about sewing, but in a lot of ways, it seems like technology has added to my music troubles more than it’s helped. When writing a score, for example, computers speed up the process (for me, sometimes, I tell myself) and eliminate some of the uninteresting/repetitive grind that’s required, but that doesn’t really make it any easier. I still find myself staring at a blank screen, which might be a more frustrating experience than a blank sheet of paper. Plus, the more I think about it, people expect me to do a lot of work that would’ve been done by a fairly large group of people a century or more ago (or just a few decades ago). They need a nice, clear, beautiful score to give the best possible performance — not some error-filled scribbling that Beethoven (e.g.) would’ve given to his underpaid/unrecognized copyist to fix, which then gets shuffled around to an engraver, a distributor, a marketer, etc. There are still publishing houses and record companies, but computers and the internet have changed the rules of the game dramatically for most people (if they can still get anything for their work, what with the sudden influx of pirates). In fact, I don’t need anything printed now, because I could use a machine to do the entire process by myself, from beginning to end, which is more work for me that’s only possible because tools like these exist. Of course, when the machine (or programming) isn’t working properly, that’s a whole other level of headache I also have to worry about, if anything can even be done. But even when that goes relatively smoothly (often because I’ve already sorted out recurring problems), none of that’s easy and it certainly doesn’t look like cheating to me.
CR @ 104:
Thank you for explaining that, it’s a perspective I wouldn’t have thought about at all, being such a dinosaur.
Giliell, your hats are lovely!
–
Caine:
Indeed it can!
One of my SCA friends, who used to be very active in so many different pursuits, is now severly limited by her COPD—which she has responded to by really blossoming as a photographer. It’s almost as if the insects and flowers go out of their way to set up beautiful compositions, just for her.
–
roachiesmom:
Doooo iiiiiiit!!!
(And link us to the pics, of course!)
At your link…so much cute!
–
Caine:
YES!
If circumstances require me to drag out the Evil Sewing Machine—clearly invented by Horses, for the benefit of peas—The Husband knows to run for cover, ’cause it ain’t gonna be pretty. *chainsaws&napalm!* may be involved.
–
holytape, your first link at your 102, doesn’t. Which is a pity, because I’d quite like to see a unicorn kill God!
:)
I love your text for “True Story of Noah”.
:) :) :)
–
consciousness razor!
Would you please stop by here? There’s interest in having a dedicated philosophy thread, and you came up as a good choice to curate.
Cicely @ 106:
I love hearing about this sort of thing, it helps to expand the definition of art that most people carry in their heads.
I’m glad it isn’t just me.
cicely
Did I mention that I have TWO of them (though i have no space to put the second one up….
Giliell—keep ’em separated! You don’t want them to mate!
*visual of swarms of tiny sewing machines, sewing hate and frustration wherever they go*
–
Book recommend: Village Teacher by Neihtn. I came across Neihtn some time ago, and got his book from B&N, and it’s an excellent read.
My favourite bat photos:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1213851/Stunning-shots-thirsty-bats-swooping-lick-water-garden-pond.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2638706/Tripping-flight-fantastic-Stunning-images-agile-bats-hunting-moths-drinking-pond.html
Eidolon @ 103:
Oh, I don’t agree. I’ve seen absolutely stunning shots taken with phones. I tend toward Ken Rockwell’s view, that a good photographer is a good photographer whether they are behind the most expensive equipment, or the cheapest. Of course it helps to know what you’re doing,* but the most important bit is still the person behind the camera.
*And the rules, of course. Must know the rules, if for no other reason, to be able to break them properly.
Art show portrays children with rare diseases as ‘beautiful human beings’
Caine #113
Gad!
Tell me about it.
The SO and I can stand elbow-to-elbow on the same bridge over the same lovely stream with the same sunlight through the leaves…
his shot is perfectly framed and all pastoral
my includes the guy blowing his nose on the path beside the stream
Not because I’m making an artistic statement but because I didn’t see nose-guy.
I was too busy putting the stream dead-centre of my photo.
otrame (#66)
I see craftsmanship as being about designing or producing something with functionality in mind whereas artistry is about aesthetics. It’s a particularly relevant distinction to me right now because I’m finding that I have to apply a lot of craftsmanship when I produce art for use in the classroom. Unlike aesthetically-centered art and/or art that gives the viewer freedom in interpreting it, mine can’t be ambiguous. It needs to be charming (to draw the kids into learning) but also send a very particular message.
Fine Art Photography Awards
DSLR designed for astrophotography
Coffee Art.
A. Noyd:
Maybe it’s just how I was taught (professors spoke highly of craftsmanship), but I think of it very differently. It wouldn’t necessarily be about supposing there was some ideal of perfection that you should aim for, but still something like caring about the quality of your work in the sense of both the product and how you went about producing it. So I don’t think there’s any real difference between arts and crafts, or artistry and craftsmanship. They’re just different words for the same thing, and some people happen to have certain prejudices about them, which aren’t tracking anything in reality.
Let me give some examples. You could know that a knife is finely crafted, or making it required craftsmanship, if it’s useful for cutting stuff. And you can also know that because of how it affects your experiences: it looks good, the texture and balance feel comfortable, and so forth. The latter are aesthetic qualities if anything is, which don’t need to depend on any abstract criteria like freedom or ambiguity or whatever, just how something shapes your perceptual experiences.
Of course we all have different perceptions because we have different perspectives. And those can of course be criteria (or motivations) that certain artists/crafters have. However, what I mean is this: you can enjoy looking at a nice sunset, and that is simply what it means to say you’re having an aesthetic experience of it. But don’t let anyone tell you there’s a particular set of things that you can experience that way, which belong in a museum with the label “Art” slapped on it. You can experience all things that way, even a simple piece of silverware or a rug or a birdsong or an equation or whatever. It’s not something that belongs to arts/crafts.
Also, we can and do genuinely get something out of experiences like that, so it’s “functional” or “useful” in that sense, even if it’s not useful in a very limited sense that “this knife cuts things.” That’s a low bar to meet, and it’s not the only bar that can be met. So craftsmanship/artistry is basically just about a person doing good work, whatever that entails in different circumstances. They’re being careful and meticulous about the materials they’re using, how they’re refined, shaped, assembled, etc., with different tools or methods, in order to get whatever results they want.
Yes, I agree completely. My crochet skull bag is definitely more pretty than goth. It incorporates fair isle knitting motifs and some very pretty baby blue and rose yarns with the black and white skull and bones rows. I have been collecting beautiful art skull photos for another crochet project that has been percolating in the recesses of my brain. I want to create a beautiful crochet skull with various lace, geometric, and floral / leaf motifs. The skull appreciation society website is devoted to skull art of all types. I especially love this 3D printed sugar skull. and the Calavera line. I find this artists work particularly inspiring Hunter Stablers laser cut paper skulls
Oy, I do so hate it I use the same adjectives repeatedly because I edited and failed to notice BEFORE I hit submit. As far as photography, I have such a hard time with cameras because of extreme myopia. Using an Iphone lets me take photos that are actually in focus because I can see the darn thing. It takes some practice and fiddling, but they can take excellent photos.
Chigau @ 115:
Oh, I’ve ruined many a shot by being oblivious to elements in the frame.
Tethys @ 120:
One of the main reasons I continue to love my little coolpix – it’s great to see what you’re going to shoot on a screen. I wish I could do that with the D90.
Awesome. I don’t know why, but “skullappreciationsociety.com” is funny. Some pretty incredible stuff in there too.
The line between art and craft is often arbitrary. Shaker boxes and quilts are craft that is raised to art. The objects are both functional and highly aesthetic. However not all craft is art. I crochet dishcloths and hotpads that are nice but they aren’t art. I think the main distinction between the two is that art is a means of expression that communicates something, while craft is the making process itself.
I have one of those too. It works well for landscapes and portraits, but my model has a really bad early digital zoom. I can take much betters photos of small objects like flowers and insects with my Iphone and my gorillapod using the earphones as a manual shutter release. I still can’t achieve the same results as I could with film and my 35mm vivitar.
Tethys, that Skull Appreciation Society is nifty! I think your crochet skull ideas sound beautiful, and I look forward to seeing the results.
The distinction between art and craft is a touchy one in my circle. We have a friend (husband of very good friend) who was trained in art school and used to be an art director for a huge ad agency before everything went digital. He does paintings on commission, and has done some lovely murals. His personal preference is for watercolors.
A few years ago we got in a terrible tiff because I simply stated that Art (capital A) is about ideas, and Illustration is about painting pretty pictures. Some Illustration is Art, but not all.
My friend’s paintings are very good illustrations, but they are not in any sense about any ideas other than look at how well I can paint. I have tried to have the conversation about the ideas behind his work and it is a conversation he refuses to have. He merely gets angry and stomps off.
However, when introducing himself he very pretentiously calls himself a “Fine Artist”. He has a website and makes a point on the site that he is a “Fine Artist”.
The fact is that he is a very good artist, but what he means as “Fine Artist” feels wrong. His art is not about ideas.
I am eager to hear your responses to this.
I really can’t accept that either. Sometimes I’m not expressing or communicating anything. It may not represent anything in the world at all. It’s just a thing that you experience, which doesn’t mean anything more than a sunset means something. Literally nothing. And it’s not for anything except doing that.
On the other hand, some people do make music (and other arts) like that. Maybe they write an etude, which is literally for a student to study and develop their skills. Maybe they make it for a particular setting or event. Maybe it does mean something — because it tells a kind of story, evokes certain mental pictures, represents abstract concepts, or whatever. Maybe there are lyrics and those words have a particular meaning, even if the music itself doesn’t. But it certainly doesn’t need to be that way.
And I don’t think there’s anything inappropriate about saying “I’m crafting pieces of music” in the same sense that “I’m crafting a chair and a table.” You could also say “I crafted a sentence” which I think most would consider indistinguishable from saying you’re expressing or communicating that sentence. I guess I don’t understand what “craft is the making process itself” means. It would be idiomatic in English to say “I crafted this” while you wouldn’t say “I arted this,” but that’s just an odd feature of our language which shouldn’t necessarily indicate there’s anything substantial going on there. A person is still making/producing/crafting art, which is why it’s an artificial thing that requires processes involving artifice, as opposed to something which occurred because of non-personal “natural forces.” It might seem like an awkward or antiquated or unusual way to describe it (we use “crafted” instead of words like “arted” or “artificed”), but I don’t see how that’s getting to anything that’s actually different about them.
I really, really hate casting-off.
So, my most recent piece sits, cluttering the table.
I need the needles.
Tomorrow.
I am pleased that others are enjoying the skull appreciation society. It really is quite a collection.
Thank you, I think it will be a winter project as it will be tiny steel hooks and thread I have all the main facial features figured out, but haven’t done the math to figure out how to make the back of the skull by modifying a doily pattern so it makes a 3D shape instead of a flat circle.
@Morgan
If something someone makes is beautiful, fascinating, or pleasing, then it can be called art.
Just because something is not your (or my) preferred kind of art does not mean it is not art.
I’ve tatted a sphere.
I could tat a skull.
probably…
Brian Pansky @130
I quite agree. The point is his reference to Art, capital A: Art that will survive due to some inherent quality. Does Art with a capital A survive because it elicits some emotional/intellectual/physical response from humans which transcends current culture? Does it illuminate a genre or culture in a way that resonates? I love my artist friend, and he is very good at what he does. But I think what he want to be is an Artist, and in fact what he is is an artist. This is no condemnation, just an observation. And we no longer attempt to have this conversation.
Morgan, I’m not surprised the conversation hasn’t worked out. I’m sure it is taken as a criticism, whether or not you intend it to be one.
As opposed to what? Extrinsic qualities? But meanings, expressions, communications, representations are extrinsic. Those are not inherently or intrinsically part of a thing, only about that thing itself, or how the thing is experienced. The are relational: you have the one thing that’s about some other thing. Yet that’s exactly the sort of thing some people are saying art needs, in order to be raised on a pedestal as “Art.” You even said it’s “ideas” (heck, why not Platonic Forms, so it’s guaranteed to be impossible?). But a painting is not an idea. It’s a physical thing that you look at, and maybe touch, taste, smell, hear…. You’re the one who’s coming up with ideas about it. That’s your job, and you can come up with ideas about anything you want, if it’s so important. If you don’t do that, don’t blame the painting or the artist for your failure to do your job.
CR
I don’t feel as if my desire to make a lace crochet skull is communicating anything, but rather as a way to express my creativity via a craft that I have practiced long enough to master. However, when I get into the process of actually crafting the object, it will evolve and I will find ways to incorporate various motifs and negative space in a way that will communicate something about being human. When I am done I might have art that evokes emotions. I may have an interesting object that teaches me enough to make an even better model.
This Thursday will be the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. I am amazed that this bit of art survived. Centuries-old bonsai that survived atomic bomb gets honored 70 years later
@Morgan
Ah, ya, if someone thinks a particular piece of art will be regarded by certain people as really good and really artistic, that is a prediction which can be wrong. Because it is a prediction about other people, not one’s own personal preferences.
chigau
I feel the same way about weaving in all the yarn ends. It’s a very tedious part of the process. If you do try to tat a skull, let us know how it works. I think tatting motifs would translate well into sugar skull style.
Wonderful!
It remindsm e a bit of a foto series I once saw of old people. The fotographer portrayed them with something they loved instead of the usual headshot. For some it was in their garden, or with their spouse, or playing chess. One person was hugging a pile of chocolate. The fotos were beautiful, the people were beautiful, they radiated joy.
A.Noyd
But that’s a pretty modern distinction, isn’t it? For most of what is now art history, the painter had a very clear task and a very clear message to tell. Because they were seen exactly as craftsmen who were paid to do a job.
To me, the distinction is very fluid. Not every thing I do is art. Menidng a shirt usually isn’t, but it can turn into art when I take the to-be-mended shirt and turn it into something different. The doodles I do on the blackboard are certainly not art. Right opposite of me is a picture my BIL painted. Is it pretty? Yes. Does it have a function? Of course it does! It makes the room nicer. It’S not strictly necessary for the function of the room, but it is a better room with it in it. Same with most other things. My embroidery isn’t necessary to make a t-shirt function as a t-shirt, but it’S a lot nicer with it.
Tethys
You need to visit me within the next 6 months or so. We’re having an exhibition “skulls as art objects” here.
Caine
That’s funny. I think we’re opposite people. The think I loooooooove about having a “real” camera again is that I have a proper searcher again. Although one of the reasons why I wanted the D70 was the monitor that you can turn so you can still take those “hold the camera over your head while balancing on your left toes” shots.
morgan
Does that mean that all the golden sculptures the Spanish stole in Las Américas and melted were not Art? Or the striking pottery that depicted heathen gods, rites and fun sexy times?
That’s a very western view, shaped by museums and exhibitions.
back to “cheating”
Seriously, what particular hang-ups do people have who call using a machine “cheating”? I mean, unless the task was “stich this by hand”. If the task is “make a beautiful quilt that you like”, then the way you take to do it the is your business. I can understand the value of a “do it by hand” exercise. With many things you should learn the slow way to get an understanding for the basics. Just like you don’t hand kids a calculator in first grade. I’m personally glad that I learned using a camera before the advent of digital cameras. I had to learn about blend, shutter time, etc. Hell, I even had a hand-held light metre. But that doesn’T mean using a digicam is cheating any more than using a camera instead of painting is cheating.
Ariaflame, BSc, BF, PhD @96: I agree that a number of Greg Egan books explore scientific ideas at the expense of character development. Ironically, to me, the most engaging characters have been in the ‘Orthogonal’ series and they’re not human! The series explores some interesting science, but also includes some equally interesting gender politics which is why I was keen to hear if anyone else has read any on the books.
Caine@113
I completely agree with the fact that great images can be created using a phone. This is because the central element in creating an image is the loose nut on the shutter release. Perhaps one of the most irritating things to hear is “Wow! Great photo! You must have a really good camera.” This is like telling a chef “Wow! Great dinner! You must have really good pots and pans.” My only point about phones is that they are limited tools and no, they will not do everything a Nikon D810 will, regardless of the ad copy.
Learning to see beyond the subject and evaluate the entire frame is an important skill that I have found only comes with practice. I find I almost have to ignore the subject and mentally step back. Sometimes a small change in position does the trick and sometimes you realize that no amount of fiddling is gonna make this scene a good image. Now – when taking photos of wildlife as in underwater photography, it is much harder since you and the subject are moving in 3 dimensions and you are trying to frame and dive at the same time. I have a decent shark image in which I managed to just clip the tip of her caudal fin. Still a nice image, but not what I wanted.
As one photographer put it, the key to successful photography is “f8 and be there.” By all means, people need to keep seeing and shooting. Nobody expects a musician to be skilled without practice, why would photography be different? Keep looking at other people’s work – there are always amazing new photographers and their work out there. So many different ways to see and communicate about our world.
Giliell @138
I think it’s about purity. Traditionally, quilting was done by hand, it was a labor of love, so I think the people who feel that way may feel it’s taking a shortcut and doesn’t represent the tradition or the sacrifice that hand quilting requires. What I always found interesting was that the same group would use tea dying and fabrics that appear aged to make their colonial quilts look like antiques. I have no problem with that, but if you don’t want shortcuts in one area, you probably shouldn’t take them in other areas.
As for the discussion on art and craft. Craft for me is the collection of skills needed to produce something and the process of producing. I have very good craftsmanship skills in needlepoint, cross stitch and quilting. However, I mostly use other people’s designs or traditional designs, so I’m not responsible for all of the aesthetic qualities of my products. Those items are not art. I have one quilt that I designed myself based off a flash of inspiration I had while running in the park in the fall, and it probably comes close to art. But for defining art, I don’t think I could do it. I will say that I don’t think art needs to be pleasing. Some of the most powerful art I have seen would not be considered pretty or pleasing. It’s a pretty slippery thing.
I wonder if the “purity” thing is another form of that odious nostalgia for the good old days when women cooked from scratch, did all the cleaning by hand, and generally kept to their proper place?
Personally I have no shame – if it’s easier done with the sewing machine, I’ll set up the sewing machine. I’d rather embroider by hand, but that’s because I find the process soothing, especially when I can sit in my comfy chair and listen to the radio or TV while I work. Maybe that’s one of the positive aspects of considering myself a crafter rather than an artist – sometimes I just don’t care, as long as it gets the job done.
jojo
I’m not so sure. Do you choose your fabrics, colours, etc. yourself? There’s a lot of creativity and artistry involved in that. Personally I think that especially the visual artists have convinced the rest of us that we’Re somewhat lacking for too long.
Anne
That’s my hunch as well. But I’m from a family where my grandpa bouht my grandma a good sewing machine on credit so her life would be easier. Same was true for all the other labour intensive parts of housework. I guess that spolied me.
The best camera is the one you have with you is what I’ve been told.
Giliell
Yes, I do pick and arrange my own fabrics. But even that touches on a controversy in the Modern quilt movement. Most quilting fabrics come out as a line of coordinated fabrics by one designer. Some people even complain about those of us who chose to use a single line instead of mixing and matching various fabrics from different lines. It doesn’t bother me, I just make what I want for the people I care about. But some people get pretty worked up about trying to control other peoples choices.
@ Morgan # 126
My art teacher at high school said that good art ought to elicit an emotional response. I disagree that art has to be about ideas. I think it often is, but from my own experience it is sometimes (often) about expressing emotions that you cannot express in words. I’m not surprised that your friend is offended; you are making a judgement about his emotional investment in his work, and you might be wrong. Of course you might be right, and he might be offended because he is a pretentious windbag.
What I mean is that there is no clear “idea” behind a picture of a sunset, for instance, but it may still be considered “Art” and people may feel an emotional connection to it.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Streeton#/media/File:Arthur_Streeton_-_%27Still_glides_the_stream,_and_shall_for_ever_glide%27_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg) Arthur Streeton – considered one of Australia’s more famous artists. I feel emotions when I look at it, but not clear, obvious ones. Maybe a longing for warmer weather and a wanderlust.
(http://nga.gov.au/nolan/) Sidney Nolan – Also a famous artist, but not one I want in my lounge room. While this shows more clear ideas I find it personally less emotional than the Streeton above, just a bit unsettling.
(https://writingthegirl.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/napalm.jpg) – Picture of Vietnamese children fleeing napalm. Is it art? Or is this called “journalism”?
llyris @146:
That approximates my own use of the word, although I never assume that’s how other people use it. Very roughly – Craft : Art :: Hmm : Wow. Very subjective.
Well, not the everyday combinations of words, maybe. And the line between ideas and emotions is often blurry. These lines from Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” have stuck with me for decades;
Idea/emotion stew!
Indeed. :) Perhaps the reason it is so impossible to draw many meaningful distinctions about what qualifies as art is that most art is non-verbal. I can feel the same sense of appreciation for well done dance or acting as I do with poetry, or any of the visual arts.
jojo
I think quilting is very different here in Germany. Not because of quilting, but because of attitudes. I guess that might come from the fact that it only became popular here long after the advent of sewing machines. OTOH, given it’S history, I find “getting upset because people choose their own fabric” quite hilarious.
@ Hyrax #99
Pretty much all I read is historical fiction and fantasy. Temeraire sounds right up my street :) thanks.
@ Morgan #126
I think art is creating something in an attempt to communicate ideas, concepts and emotions in an indirect way (i.e. not just sitting down and explaining it in as linear and concise a way as possible), regardless of the medium. Paintings, music, writing, textiles, poetry… they all fit this definition, I think. Generally speaking, artists don’t just try to create something beautiful for the sake of beauty, but even if they do, surely that just counts as an attempt to communicate beauty?
Craft is creating as a hobby, without necessarily attempting to communicate anything. The creation is the end; the point of building a model plane is to build a model plane.
I think. Both are nebulous concepts at best.
@ Ilyris
Yes! Art attempts to communicate emotion and concepts. Good art achieves that.
I think I’d have liked your art teacher. I distinctly remember my GCSE Art teacher expressing disapproval for a series of anti-BNP pieces I did, because “Art shouldn’t be political”. Which I think may be one of the most ridiculous things anyone has ever said to me.
Morgan @ 132:
Oh boy. I disagree with all of this, and as far as your friend is concerned, I have to come down on his side. There are plenty of people who would refuse to call me an artist, although they could perhaps grudgingly condescend to calling me a textile artist, placing me in a lower subcategory of ‘artist’. I’m an amateur photographer, and there are people who would refuse to even consider my photography, but if I mention to said people something like “I took first place in a photo competition in London”, their attitude changes immediately – it’s one reason I don’t trust people in the art world. As I mentioned upthread, I avoid the art world as much as possible, because it is stuffed full of pretentious, obnoxious assholes, all of whom ooze their poisonous attitudes onto everyone and everything.
Capital A art is not about beauty, or feeling, or any inherent quality. It’s about money. Frinst., see Arthena. That’s what it’s about, and it’s people with money who decide what constitutes great art, fine art, or collectible art. And yes, there are works of great beauty and feeling in museums all over the world, but it’s good to keep in mind that the majority of people on the planet are never going to see even a fraction of such art. It’s as well to remember that works which are considered classic today were generally subjected to intense criticism at the time they were done, and many styles were disliked and treated with disdain. The majority of artists are never going to be catapulted into the moneyed world of Capital A art, either, however, that doesn’t mean they are not artists. Most artists are fucking thrilled to find themselves in a situation where they can gain clients and actually bring in cash on a somewhat regular basis. Artists feel driven to create, and you need to do what ever you can to keep a roof over your head and to be able to continue to create.
I’m in a quandary. I lucked into some vintage supplies, and while a part of me is screaming to stash and keep them, another part is wanting to use a lot of this on the Tree Quilt I’m currently working on. If I do decide to use it, should that be mentioned upon sale, and should the price adjust up for having used it?
Caine
I think you should use it.
Unless you’re thinking of a specific other project.
…
I haven’t a clue about pricing.
How do you artists (generic ‘you’, anyone can answer) usually decide what to charge?
Caine, if the threads are the best colors for your quilt, you should use them, that’s what they’re for. Maybe add a note that they are vintage threads and should be treated carefully? I don’t know from pricing, though.
I am all too familiar with the urge to hoard in case I never see its like again – I do the same with beads and Japanese washi paper, not to mention vintage bits of this and that.
Thumper:
Except that they don’t all do that. Maybe you aren’t aware of these works that aren’t “an attempt to communicate ideas, concepts and emotions in an indirect way” but they do exist, which means in fact they don’t all fit your definition.
Is that a question or a claim? What do you have in your mind that such an artist is doing? What would it be if they’re not attempting to “communicate beauty,” whatever that means?
They can simply create something, which you can then simply experience. If it’s ugly to you, that’s an experience you could have, and if something about it is beautiful to you, that’s also an experience you can have. That depends on you and how you think. But I don’t understand how you concluded something is being communicated. The artist may think they’ve made something ugly, and you haven’t gotten their “communication” (because there is no communication), so you think it’s beautiful. That lack of communication wouldn’t force us to conclude the thing isn’t a work of art. However your experiences turns out, it is something a person made, so it is a work of art. It’s artificial, required artistry, and so forth.
People were even saying such “ambiguity” (or subjectivity) was somehow necessary, to exclude things which don’t count as art, such that it would not be the case for a work of art that some unambiguous thing is being communicated somehow from one person or another (so it isn’t just a subjective feature of your own mind). So that’s either inconsistent or we’re changing the subject here. Does this communication happen, how does this communication happen, and what if it doesn’t happen?
And some say what’s important (what’s valuable) for art, as distinct from non-art, is something intrinsic to the work. That’s an interesting idea. But it turns out that what some of them actually had in mind were extrinsic things about how it relates to something else, not features of the thing itself. Again, there’s an inconsistency, maybe confusion about what some of these terms mean, how they can be applied in the analysis, or something like that.
I don’t see any need for this stuff. Why are we trying to “raise” art on a pedestal, give it some special sauce that “crafts” don’t have, or whatever this is about? It’s just a human activity like anything else, which is great and useful and not something we should dismiss or disparage. But it can happen a lot of different ways for different reasons, which maybe you’re not familiar with or that you don’t like very much but which in fact are artistic. It doesn’t need to meet criteria like it “communicates ideas, concepts and emotions.” Those seem like sort of intuitive assumptions to make as a first pass, I guess, but we don’t have any good reason to insist on that, to exclude or erase certain things because of those assumptions. They might turn out to be the wrong kind of assumptions.
You can clearly explain why you have ideas, emotions, etc., about art or anything else, but you want to be careful not to put those in the wrong place. If you’re able to say there’s such a thing as bad art, art you don’t understand, art that doesn’t work the way you assume it should work, art that isn’t made for the reasons you want it to be made, etc., then you have to leave these sorts of hidden evaluations out of the picture, so you can state clearly and factually what general thing it is that you’re talking about.
Chigau:
Well, I decided that the next quilt will be the 1941 Laura Wheeler Peacock I lucked into, and I could use a fair amount of the vintage thread in that as well as in the current quilt. Fuck, I don’t know what to do. I will probably use several of the browns on the tree quilt, they are too pretty not to use.
For me, depends on the labour involved, but that still usually comes out to 1 to 2 bucks an hour.
Anne:
Yes, and yes. I have to fight off that miser in my head, though!
CR:
Attitudes and ideas about Art change greatly from one century to the next. There was a time when most artists could be employed as a portraitist, because portraits were the photographs of that era. The idea wasn’t great Art so much as it was people wanting a record of themselves, their families, and sometimes, certain events they were involved in (or that an ancestor was involved in).
If humans are still around in four or five centuries, could anyone say with certainty what they’d consider to be Great Art?
Yes and Yes and Yes, presuming that it doesn’t price the quilt out of the range of its market.
As for using such nice things instead of keeping them, there’s a youtube artist I really like, Yanghaiying. She has a video that I keep marked for such encouragement, here. Pertinent bit: “Treat ourself with respect. All these inks – if you have, use them. Do not save them. Their life is in using. Look at these beautiful inks. I have bought them one year or so, I have never used it, because I just feel maybe I don’t deserve it, or maybe I should save it. But why should I do so? Why should I not use it immediately? Use it. Use it! Use the best thing and enjoy the thing that you deserve.”
Indeed, some of what I’ve got in mind is the uproar over abstract or nonrepresentational art, ever since the turn of the 20th century. People thought painters should (or must, somehow) paint pictures of objects in the world. You need a person in it, or a still life, a landscape, etc., even if it’s a portrayal of a mythological figure in an imaginary scene (or a statue of Zeus, for example). And well before any of that became an issue because artists were making things that didn’t fit that mold, the idea was very well entrenched that it’s always an “imitation” of reality in some sense. Arts like pottery, weaving, etc., were apparently left out of consideration, but it’s not obvious what they were even thinking or why they were drawing these lines in the sand.
Anyway, it’s a funny historical fact about a narrowly-selected group of visual arts, literature, drama — but for music generally, it seems like that was obviously unnecessary a very long time ago. It didn’t have to be representing some other stuff or about some other stuff. It’s actually very difficult to even try that, given its limitations as a medium, as I was saying before, if that’s something you wanted to do in the first place, which you may not want to do. The most general thing you can say is that it’s just a thing you listen to, which doesn’t need to be about some other thing that you could also have an experience of by listening to that.
I have been thinking about art and symbolism a lot lately and I have a perspective on it that I wonder if anyone else thinks about. It has to do with how writing manifests as art. My interest has to do with how my Tourette’s Syndrome manifests in my writing, but I think the general category is “things in your head/emotions that make you feel like you have to do things in writing with pattern and presentation”.
My writing, like it is for many (most?), is in a lot of ways a struggle to find places where the things I feel are connected to society. I have some elements that I can articulate, below is an example where social OCD meets Tourette’s Syndrome. There are other things that pull on my language, but I don’t yet know how to articulate how that plays into how I interact with symbolism (my sensitivity to conceptual/symbolic polarities like right/left and east/west for example, TS is weirdly specific like that).
It’s a strange thing for me to want to bring up because growing up I did not connect with writing as an art form beyond things like sci-fi and fantasy literature (comic books count but not quite in the way I’m thinking about this connection, but I do think about iconography, “picture/word-stories” and even “image macros” which often simply get called “memes”). Maybe the fundamentalist, religious upbringing had something to do with that. Poetry never connected with me, but that is the category that most closely connects with the sorts of things I have as examples when I think about it (feels a little hypocritical somehow). Creativity in text symbols at a strangely “basic level” (if that is even a distinction that is generalizable here).
So I’m wondering about what people here do when it comes to how you might pattern and present your writing? I’m open to neurotypical and neuroatypical perspectives, the neuroatypical is just how I’m connected right now.
Example: typing as my “demon”.
I worry a lot about biases I might have and how they might affect (and effect) other people and I started writing in two stylistically distinct voices to express different ways that I relate to the subject matter. One is meant to be “me” as I might talk to people “normally and casually” (which is complicated all by itself at a general human level). It appears as white, left justified text on a black background.
The other is my “demon” which started as a means of simply expressing my personal emotional impressions of and connections to the things I was talking about. It appears as red, center justified text in brackets on the same black background. It’s a thing that is evolving in terms of what it was intended to be and what it is and what it might be. (I think some of the modifications were unconscious attempts to accommodate the color blind).
The original idea for the “demon” is a kind of honest, personal, intense, simplified, emotional commentary based on personal experience. It was a way of separating a “forest view”, more objective description that could be as applicable to everyone as possible, from my personal emotional experience of the subject matter. If I learn to do that right it shows people where I stand with respect to the material and is honest about how I might be biased so someone can ask questions if they want or need to. It is also a convenient means of making me take the idea of my own bias seriously since it is practicing mental separation of kinds of emotional content (I’m not pretending that the “me” is unemotional, it’s differently emotional and I’m trying to understand the difference for myself).
But I can’t pretend it is going to stay that way and I’ve been wondering about what else I’m connecting to it. It is an emotional focus for Tourette’s related emotions. I also can’t and don’t pretend that the “me” is “me” or objective, unemotional… it’s differently emotional and I’m trying to understand the difference for myself as this progresses. Does anyone experience anything like this?
*I’m also doing trying to do something with modeling brain anatomy in plastic, colored wire and beads that is meant to accurately depict how the brain functionally computes, but I’m a little lacking in motivation on that at the moment. It’s also another post and I want to see what people are doing with crafts above.
Going back to earlier comments about atheism in art:
I wonder if atheism is harder in the visual arts because it is difficult to represent the absence of something? There is a lot of art about the effects of religion, but I dont think using religious imagery in that context is purely atheist art… as such.
As for music, Gary Numan (remember him from the 80’s? …anyone…?) reinvented himself around the year 2000. His music became louder, more industrial, aggressive and bluntly atheist. If you like Nine Inch Nails you will know the style ( it is pretty apparent they have been inspiring each other over the years ) Two CDs, Pure and Jagged, are almost completely devoted to the subject… and very angry too. His latest, Splinter, touches on atheism, and the effects of depression.
I haven’t come across another musician with such a large body of work focusing on the impact of religion from an atheist viewpoint. Or at least, in such a demonstrative way…
…and… thank you Caine for curating this thread! It is really nice to read you here again.
I don’t. As I mentioned before, it’S one reason I didn’t turn my passion into my profession. With the dismissal of “craft”, people are usually not willing to pay. Take those hats I made: Even if I work quickly, it takes about 2 hours to make one, from cutting out the pieces to finishing the last seam. That is without adding any fancy embroidery or communicating with a potential client about what they want. If i were an employee, the minimum wage would be 8,50€ plus benefits. If I wanted to earn at least minimum wage, which is NOT enough to get you permanently over the poverty line, I’d have to charge at least 20 bucks for a hat. Now, funny enough people are willing to pay that much for a sweat-shop made product of mass consumption it it has a fancy label, but not for a custom made unique item.
So I decided to get that college degree and get a job that pays the bills and simply give away things.
Word. Originally painters were NOT considered artists, nor were the masons and glas blowers who created the amazing windows of gothic cathedrals. that’s why I mentioned upthread that currently the line is neatly draw around the traditional domain of white men.
BTW I’m of the opinion that you cannot NOT communicate, so every thing you create says something about you. IT’s just that it’S not always the deep trandescending meaning people ascribe to certain items. It may be as banal as your preference of blue, or your passion to crochet.
caine
I’m with carlie. Use the things. i once saw a documentary about a woman who had inherited a box of hand-made lace from her grandmother. But she wasn’t into sewing or lace making. She was a goldsmith. So she created a process by which she could “stamp” the lace into silver rings and bracelets. But the lace is destroyed in the process. MY first reaction was no-no-no-noooooooo, the laaaaaaaace!, but then I realised that she used something that was no good to her sitting in a box and turned it into something stunning.
CR @ 162:
Oh yes. Nordau’s Degeneration came out in 1892, and he had a whole lot to say about degenerate art, and of course the classification of degenerate art was greatly enlarged, and saw the destruction of many works.
Carlie @ Giliell, thank you both, I will be using my lucked into treasures.
Gobi’s @ 164:
Aww, thanks. It’s good to read you again!
Oh, and Gobi’s, are you still drawing / painting? Anything new?
This is tangential to the topic as I understand it, but as music is an art form that is included in this thread by Caine’s definition, this is the only place I know to put out an idea and see if it has merit.
What about a Discuss: Making Music forum?
In particular, what about all that talk of a Pharyngula house band? What if each thread was free-form-ish, but also had as its focus the creation of a new piece of music?
The curator picks a few things like a key and a time signature and a lyrical topic, then others record themselves playing suggested themes/melodies. Maybe multiple people make attempts at writing lyrics or maybe the lyrics are picked in advance by the curator to help things hang together, (e.g. “This effort will put the e e cummings poem, ‘next to of course god america i’ to music in the key or keys of E / Cm”). The curator or another volunteer pieces together tracks – some of which might only be a few bars long, if one of our musicians wants to throw some clarinet in the bridge or provide some extra percussion before the song gets going, etc. At the end, we have an honest to goodness new piece of music created by the Horde.
This provides the touchstone to come back to the thread, but while you’re there you can of course talk about anything music-related you like.
Does this have merit?
Does anyone really want a Pharyngula house bad to produce real music?
Inquiring minds want to know.
If it was successful, it might reduce the scope of Caine’s space just a bit, but I think it would add something really unique. I would love to feel more connected to the people here, and I remember the sense of accomplishment in creating Crystal Clear Consent together.
What if we regularly created new art together? Wouldn’t that foster the positive, loving community that has characterized Pharyngula at its best?
I don’t have ideas about how to do this with visual art forms, but we have some awesomely talented writers here. I could see something similar done with fiction: A curator posts the new thread’s theme/central idea. We brainstorm a plot-outline together. Different people write up character sketches and throw them into the mix. Volunteers take certain sections of the outline, using but not limited-to-using characters sketched. The story is pieced together as a quilt. Suggestions are made on how to improve connection and flow between the various parts. These are incorporated to varying degrees according to the amount of consensus, but with a serious effort made to preserve at least some of the original language of each of our volunteer writers and **always** preserving some of the ideas, emotions, character development and plot development of each writer. Finally one or a few editors are chosen from among those folks willing to volunteer. Ta Da! There’s an actual short story or novella produced.
Along the way, people can talk about the craft of writing and the business of writing, etc. Of course, we can also discuss things that would otherwise be in Caine’s bailiwick (“I just read this new book and it’s terrible/great/mediocre”) but the focus would be on writing – I see more relevance in topics like how to get an agent and when working with pencil serves creativity better than working with a keyboard, and vice versa, &c.
Caine could also curate these, or they could be one-offs (The next Discuss:Art could have an additional Making Music theme, etc.) but if people think that these are ideas worth pursuing and Caine is supportive, I’d be willing to curate either the Making Music or the Writing threads, or both.
CD, as I said upthread, I’m not up enough on music (or knowledgeable enough) to bring up good discussion, provide links and all that.* If someone wants to take up curating music news, reviews, and general chat in this thread, great, please do it. Otherwise, you need to put your proposal here, then directly to PZ.
My time is limited, so I’m only willing to curate this thread. I do think that writing and composing could happily fill up a specific thread, and I’m fine with that being separate, as there would still be considerable intersectionality.
*I did recently discover Geoffrey Oryema, decades after everyone else, of course. Enjoy his work greatly.
CD @170,
I think group authorship of a piece of music or prose is an excellent idea and could be grand fun, although whomever takes on the curating of such projects would have their work cut out for them. I vaguely recall there was a novel some years ago authored by a group of published novelists which was hilarious and actually got published, I think. Need to look this up.
I unfortunately have zero musical skill or knowledge. The clarinet lessons of my youth were for naught. I would be pleased to contribute to a prose effort, but curating is a thing a don’t have time for, or enough skill for, truth be told. We could call it “The Perils of Social Justice, or, A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To Democracy. Just a thought.
I’m still thinking about Nordau. He, along with many others, was distressed by Fin de siècle, and even more distressed that art was becoming accessible to the rabble. There was a pervasive fear of Art escaping a rarefied sphere of rigid definition, and I think many of those fears, ideas, and attitudes were bequeathed to consequent generations, which leaves all of us with rather befuddled notions when it comes to art.
I have thoughts on the “what is art” question.
It’s at least 500,000 years old, unless one counts things like the symbolic value of a predator scratching on a tree (maybe proto art?).
When I think of art I think of a created thing or work that is symbolically invested with the artist’s emotional meaning. That can be simple meaning, complex meaning, shallow meaning, deep meaning, personal meaning, social meaning, specific meaning, vague or general meaning, positive meaning, negative meaning… It’s amazing to me how otherwise arbitrary arrangements of lines, patterns, colors, actions, sound and more can be communication and meaning.
This does not require an audience. Art is often simply for the artist’s purging emotions related to something (or other personal meaning). Many don’t understand (no implications on any specific people) just how intimately our bodies are parts of how our minds function. Emotions are in many respects felt representations of anatomy. When I think about how the meat computer does it I want to appeal to synesthesia to understand how emotions and senses can mix.
Creating invests that effort with the emotions related to the symbolism and it can help someone to understand how they feel about what they are emotional about.Expressive writing is the simpler example. But any sort medium that accesses any of the senses can work based on what is meaningful to the artist and their intentions.
Individuals and cultures will become attached to particular kinds of art that let them express their culture and values. So people often become protective of how that art is expressed. This is not a straightforward thing because that art is often important for a group of people that need it’s symbolic value. If a culture’s art is used to harm another group I have less sympathy. If a culture is a dominant and powerful one I have less sympathy. Art is how we do sociopolitical communication and even conflict.
I’m sure it’s lots of other things I did not think of as well.
I like art collaboration! Though I’ve never done it over the internet before, nor in a very large group. Also, I’ve thought about starting something around where I live, and wondered if there’s a potential community benefit in that idea.
Giliell @ 165:
Yep, painters were painters, not artists. Long ago, I self-identified as a painter, but gave it up after people would always ask “art or house?”
Books: Birger, thanks for the recommend on The Killer of Little Shepherds, it’s a fascinating read. I’m a bit surprised by interest and excitement in the Eyraud / Bompard affair, especially the ongoing fascination with Bompard, with a recent book published, Little Demon in the City of Light.
People interested in CD’s idea, or other discussion threads, please copypasta to http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2015/07/31/the-tyrant-taketh-and-the-tyrant-giveth/
Thanks!
An interesting blog post on the nature and practice of art, from an art journals:
http://dianatrout.typepad.com/blog/2015/08/practice-art-a-coup.html
I think she has some good points, and I need to think about this some more.
I don’t know quite what I did wrong, but since my first attempt to post got eated, here it is again. Link to a blog post about the practice and nature of art, from the viewpoint of an art journaler:
http://dianatrout.typepad.com/blog/2015/08/practice-art-a-coup.html
Um. One more attempt to post, this time without a link at all.
Okay, apparently including one link gets me eated. The blog is Diana Trout’s Blog, the post is her most recent, Practice Art: A Coup. It’s interesting thoughts on the practice and nature of art from the viewpoint of an art journaler. Google it, I think it’s worth a read.
Anne @ 178:
A commenter had this line in their comment: If it’s not going into a museum, it’s not art. That was a bit of smack, because I’ve heard that many times, only in the “your work should be in a museum!” way. It’s meant to be a compliment, I know, but in the end, it’s demeaning. Some of my work, I’ve wanted it to have a wide audience, some of it, not so much. I think most artists have pieces that were done just because they had to be done, it’s a necessary self expression. A lot of times, a piece is the result of experimentation.
I’m not familiar with the term or idea of practice art,* so I’ll have to look into that a bit more, before I say too much and make an ass outta myself, but I will say that it seems there are, once again, people who are struggling to find a place for themselves under the contentious label of “artist”.
*Now I’m wondering how this relates to experimental art…
On the topic of determining a price for your work. I’ve done the same thing as Giiell, I work full time, do my craft in my free time, and give away my quilts. I’d rather give them away then sell them for less then they are worth.
Twin sized hand quilted quilt pricing:
Quilt shop quality fabric, batting, thread and other materials- $250
Labor for piecing and hand quilting – 135 hours * $7.25 (minimum wage) = $979
Total = $1,229
Working 40 hours a week, I could make 15 quilts a year for a total of $18,435 a year. And I don’t think I could find 15 people willing to pay that much for one of my quilts. Not a realistic business model.
My most recent distraction: History Today. I’ve subscribed, and I really need to stop reading and get some work done.
Caine, sorry about that. When I recommended the post, there weren’t any comments yet. That one is way off, and, I think, the opposite of what Diana intended. I’ll go take another look.
Oh, I see. She’s quoting what people say to her about her art, and I think disagreeing with them that it’s only art if it goes in a museum. At least I think so.
What about costume museums? If things that were made to be worn end up in a museum, does that make them art instead of apparel? Gah, my brain hurts.
I’m thinking that “art” is pretty much what we say it is – weapons and boats and baskets and dishes can all be considered as art, I’ve seen them at the Bowers Art Museum, and those are all utilitarian things. Perhaps it’s the level of expertise?
I’ve been trying to locate a particular article about how to price pieces, without much success. It is by an Etsy seller who primarily does knit and crochet hats, and her experiences with the psychology of pricing. When she started she was pricing her hats in the $ 20 range, and she had some sales. After figuring out that using a conventional pricing formula resulted in her making less than minimum wage she raised her prices into the $30 range, and saw a modest increase in sales. Then she investigated the psychology of advertising and decided that paying herself a profit for her hand made highly skilled labor was likely to increase her sales. She now sells her hats in the $45 and up price point, depending on size and materials, and sales exploded. Hand made goods should not be sold for the same price as a mass produced factory product. Luxury goods are expected to have luxury price tags, if the person wanted a cheap mass produced hat they would be shopping elsewhere. Champagne costs more than beer, and the greater expense is actually part of why the buyer wants it in the first place.
Tethys @ 187, yeah, I can confirm the psychology aspect of buyers. People resent buying art of any kind, but if they are going to buy it, they want it to be very expensive, exclusive, doncha know?
Anne @ 186:
Yep, I think so. I was thinking about Art Practice yesterday, being a practitioner of art, and I rather like that. Art without the pressure.
Interestin’ Stuff:
The Death of Pixel Art? http://www.wired.com/2015/08/geeks-guide-pixel-art-is-dying-along-with-old-school-videogames/
Biological Artist Wanted: http://www.ocregister.com/articles/art-676643-center-exhibition.html
Sydney artist wins Aboriginal art award for work inspired by police shooting. Tony Albert also did Pay Attention Mother Fuckers, which is worth a look. Glenda Nichols won the Victorian Indigenous Art award this year.
More Stuff:
The Brave New World of Art PR.
Fuss over colouring books: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/experts-warn-adult-coloring-books-not-art-therapy-323506
Ferguson art and activism: http://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/ferguson-artists-blur-boundaries-between-activism-and-art
Nona Faustine’s White Shoes Series, beautiful and powerful: http://blackgirllonghair.com/2015/07/black-woman-artist-poses-nude-at-former-new-york-slave-trade-sites-including-wall-street-and-city-hall/
My latest shots: The Art of Decay: Wood
Anne brought up an excellent point about dead trees – they are very important ecologically. I won’t cut down dead trees on my property unless it’s absolutely necessary, and years ago, we started piling up any deadfall, so that we now have a very large thicket, home to a variety of wildlife. Those of us who spend time watching birds know the importance of dead trees, as a food source, shelter, and nesting, especially for cavity nesters. Dead trees are also hosts to a variety of life.
I think I’ll have to spend some time on a dead tree photo essay this year, not only to highlight the beauty of dead trees,* but their importance as well.
*I think if people would look at dead trees as sculpture, there wouldn’t be so many people insistent on cutting them down and clearing deadfall.
Chris Pollack does some evocative work with wood.
Bob Ramsak has a fabulous mannequin photo series.
Zombie poetry.
@ Caine
re: Embroidermation
I think you can really apreciate what went into this:
http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/nina-paleys-embroidermation.html
The Art of Decay: Flora
The Art of Decay: Flora, continued
Theophontes @ 196:
Thank you, thank you! I’ve adored Nina Paley for ages – I still have some of her Xmas Resistance stickers.
That is bloody amazing! Such work…
Erm, I meant the little goat at Nina’s blog: http://blog.ninapaley.com/2014/07/16/chad-gadya-embroidermation-progress/
Uhhhhh, and the embroidery files are available for free
Giliell @ 201:
Nina has always been an advocate of CopyLeft.
@Caine 169
I am still *trying* to draw but work has been getting in the way a bit. Mind you, I am not complaining – having work is a good thing.
Need to work out this life/work balance thing…
Also… Commenting is a little difficult due to that whole time zone thing – curse you celestial mechanics! Will try harder!
Baby Brown Thrasher.
Gobi’s @ 203, aaw, I’m sorry it’s so tough for you to comment more, but please try, I’ve missed you! Yes, work is good, but so is play, gotta have both.
Fibonacci sequence, awry. Haven’t seen a malformed sunflower before, glad I noticed.
Caine, that’s neat!
That reminds me, and speaking of using nature for inspiration, of a class I took a while back. We took photos of natural objects and converted them into embroidery designs.
https://anne-d.dreamwidth.org/107643.html
I am color blind but the colors i do see in these peaces attract me to this Bio-Art: https://www.etsy.com/shop/artologica?ref=shopsection_shophome_leftnav
Caine I like your idea of dead trees being like sculptures, and I like your tree photos. :)
Anne @ 206:
That is absolutely gorgeous, Anne! I particularly like the Jacaranda pods, so pleasing, those. All the different patterns I see when I’m out and about leave me dazzled and wanting to do a thousand things or more.
John @ 207:
Beautiful stuff, there, John, thanks for sharing! Reminds me that Corvus Tristis has some lovely patterns based on viruses – they are much prettier than one would think.
Brian @ 208:
Thanks, Brian! I’m going to have to make time to travel gravel and get shots of whole dead trees before winter hits, and they all look dead.
Thanks, Caine!
Sunflower Season, Magnificent Malformations – or, if you like a slideshow: http://caine.zenfolio.com/p510870658/slideshow
Every year, I continue to be astonished and delighted by sunflowers. If anyone knows anything about the interesting malformations (mutations?) that happen to sunflowers, I’d love to know about it.
Caine @ 212
Wonderfull sunflower photos. The bulging inflorescences have a human-face-like quality.
Ice Swimmer @ 213:
Yes, they do. It’s one of my fascinations with them, that in near to endless fields, they look different from one another, just like us. So, I got no work done at all today, but it was a day well spent. :D What have you been up to lately?
Caine:
I’ve been learning Python rather intensively by doing an app for Raspberry Pi and simple home-made hardware for the last few weeks with the idea of improving my job prospects. I hope I’ll finish the thing soon and can get back to making music. Before the coding run, I mainly spent time with music, building a piece of furniture (which turned out ok despite the fact that I’m not very good with my hands and don’t have all that many tools) and settling in to my new place, a flat near a university campus.
The RasPi thing does get somewhat artistic. I’m building the system in an wooden cigar box.
Hit send a bit too early…
I plan on decorating the box when the system is done with stylized starlings or such.
Here’s a painting: Dream Messengers III by FrodoK.
Nomad Shamira Muhammad aims to launch illustrated novel and travel web magazine:
Here is the Ma’Ati site. There are some amazing images there.
A Kickstarter campaign to fund the Ma’Ati project reached its goal of $10K.
Apologies if this is doesn’t fit the theme of this thread. I figured that since it was heavily art oriented that it was applicable.
Anne
Your embroidery is gorgeous
Caine @202
I don’t expect artists to give me anything for free, but I’m very grateful if they do.
BTW, if you’d like to turn them into hand embroidery, you could get Wilcom TruSizer (that’s free) and print them out (I don’t remember if the Tru Sizer also has a “convert into JPG function)
+++
Book tip:
Harry Connolly, The Great Way Trilogy.
I got it via the Kickstarter HUmble BUndle and was pleasantly surprised. I admit that I have more or less sworn off “mediavalist fantasy written by white dudes” because, well, you know why. But I didn’t mind getting a big bunch of books for cheap especially since there were some I’d definitely buy, so I though “why not”.
Yep, your usual sword and sorcery BUT, he has believable female characters who take up much of the story and have internal lives. And some of them are even not white. And even the archetypal warrior hero has development and insight and stuff. So if you’re looking for some fun summer reading where you don’t have to grind your teeth too much, I really recommend it.
Hong Kong from a different angle….
https://youtu.be/BnnoD5r4OXI
Oh shit. That appears in the window. :(
I found out that Nina Paley (famous-ish for her animated work “Sita Sings the Blues” (a retelling of the Ramayana; beautiful but full of all the original misogyny)) did an animated embroidered Passover story-song: Chad Gadya.
How embarrassing – I just looked up and saw that multiple comments had already referenced Nina Paley’s work. Sorry about that.
Nina Paley is currently working on an animated film called sedermasochism
I love her sense of humor and how she applies/uses music. She is posting bits as they are completed.
@Morgan!?, #224:
sedermasochism is a good but old joke. May more people get the word through Paley.
While looking for info about the Pompeii exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum (I’m going tomorrow with my niece), I came across this art exhibit and thought it might be of interest: Worn: Shaping Black Feminine Identity by Vancouver based craft artist Karin Jones is the first contemporary art installation presented as part of the Of Africa project. This site-specific installation was selected through a public call for artists, who were invited to reflect on the position and representations of African Canadians in the nation’s historical and contemporary narratives, in dialogue with the historical holdings of the ROM’s Sigmund Samuel Gallery of Canada. Jones’ beautifuly crafted piece, a Victorian mourning dress made of synthetic hair, evokes the complexity of African identity when shaped by forces such as imperial rule, slavery and alienation.
I like the whole meta, multilayered idea of it. I hope I have a chance to check it out while I’m there.
Browsing through Nina Paley’s pages, I found a new joke: Passover Satyr. Because mishearing and puns. And probably old misunderstandings of Moses having horns (and perhaps all Jews as well? I recently read a comic about Harry Houdini, who joked with the policemen checking him for lockpicks when he was about to perform an escape from jumping in the a river (I think the Charles, in Boston) about checking his head for horns).
CD @225,
Yes, I know the old joke, I married into a Jewish family. I even have Paley’s Passover Satyr tee shirt and threatened to wear it to one of those seder dinners. I did discover that although there is no such thing as Jewish haute cuisine, I do like gefilte fish with red horseradish. Go figure. Matzo balls… not so much.
I think I may have missed a couple people I need to comment to, but jumping back in….
Tethys@187
Mostly just using this as a jumping off point, but I have problems pricing the critters. I usually go with a dollar for a plain one and $3 for dressed ones. When I was making them all the time (and even now when daughter-spawn commissions me for some to hand out to her clients) I often make them when I am out places — waiting in lines, sitting in fast food places with wifi and free refills. It’s a good way to cope with, well, having to be out places, and this way if people decide to talk to me, they are usually distracted by what I am doing, and blurt out questions I can cope with better instead of insisting on eye contact and inflicting social-scripts on me. But I can’t even count as high as the number of times I’ve been asked in what seems like interested voices “Do you sell these?!” and I give that answer, and I get stuff like “Oh, you expect money for these?” or “Good luck then” or they just walk off no longer as interested.
Maybe I should price them out the ass, and see what happens? Jeez. Usually for pricing, I try to go with a materials+time@ $5.00 formula.
@Tony
Speaking of nomad artists (of color, I might add) that reminded me of Onyx Ashanti, who created his own musical instrument and makes futuristic avant-garde tunes. He also had a gofundme or something to make copies of the instrument for other people. Here’s an interview when he had an older version of his instrument.
hmm I thought I saw Onyx being called a “nomad cyborg” somewhere but I can’t find it now…
@ Hyrax
I’ve just started the second book in the Temeraire series. The first one was fucking fantastic, thank you so much for recommending them!
In return, if you enjoy historical fiction, may I recommend The Saxon Chronicles by Bernard Cornwall? This is pure historical fiction, not alt-history, but it’s my favourite series. It’s brilliantly written and very engaging, and I’ve learned a lot about the formation of England simply by reading it.
Ice Swimmer @ 215:
You’ve been very busy! Best of luck with the job prospects, and getting back to music. What kind of furniture? We’ll be venturing into that next week, putting a cutting table together for me. Not exactly our forte. I never used to mind moving, but now the thought of doing so fills me with intense weariness. Oh, I love cigar boxes! I’d like to see that when it’s finished, sounds fabulous, and starlings are a great decorative choice. Starlings are gorgeous, and have been my photographic bane for years, never could get a decent shot of one. Early this year, the starlings and the grackles had a war over the most popular roosting tree, and the grackles won, so I didn’t even get to be frustrated by them this year.
Brian Pansky @ 217:
How beautiful! Thank you for linking those paintings. Dream Messengers reminds me of some of the art in Medieval Bestiaries, there’s a similar line flow. A great many medieval bestiaries have been placed on the ‘net now, which I’m grateful for, not having the chance to ever see them in person. I was looking because I had an idea for a quilt, then got utterly lost in them (as usual), and was quite struck by some of the art work, in particular the backgrounds to animals like panthers or deer. The way that ground and hills were depicted had beautiful flow, colour mix, and unusual colours, too. Dream Messengers also reminded me of birds as psychopomps. FrodoK’s work is great, and I’ll be looking at more of it later on.
Tony @ 218:
Oh my, I’ll be spending time there when I’m able, lots to take in there. Thank you!
This thread is probably as close to a general chat thread as we have here. Art, culture, hobbies, books, movies, and so on, is all well within the fit here, and more. Please, don’t be shy!
Giliell @ 219:
Oooh, thank you, thank you. I’m in near constant need of book recommends. (Movies too, my netflix queue is pathetic.) I looked up Connolly on my tablet, and was going to buy the first book of the trilogy, when I was entranced by the cover art of one of his other books. (I’m terribly susceptible to cover art, and end up with a fair amount of bad books that way, but I get gems, too.) I also like the title, A Key, An Egg, An Unfortunate Remark. The protagonist is an old woman, which I loved, being an old woman myself, so I bought that book first, and I’m enjoying it tremendously! I’ll get the trilogy next, so thank you again.
Theophontes @ 220:
WOW. That gave me chills, what a wonderful way to see other parts of the world.
RoachiesMom @ 229:
It won’t hurt to try, because I’ve found that people will ignore artists completely who don’t have a confidence that yes, their work is worth money. It strikes me that you could also market your critters as coping tools for those who have problems with social situations. Might take a bit of thinking and work to do a proper write up, but that would strike a cord with a lot of people, including many parents, I’d think.
****
About Nina Paley – she came to my attention with her movie The Stork.
****
Ibis3 @ 226:
That exhibit sounds utterly fascinating!
Chord. I know how to spell. Really.
Some random thoughts on the topic of “Is it Art?”
A. Noyd @ 116
“I see craftsmanship as being about designing or producing something with functionality in mind whereas artistry is about aesthetics.”
I am not sure that I agree with this. Sometimes functionality can be achieved so well that the purely functional item becomes art. One example is Shaker furniture.
In #29 I posted the ‘recipe’ I used for dyeing silk scarves. One of the early efforts is
here .
I am not sure if this is art, by almost any definition of the word. Is it art if one is just trying a new technique to see what happens? To me this is analogous to photography: early efforts were experimentation and only after there was some level of mastery could practitioners begin to create art.
This is a photograph that I took a few years ago in
Busan
Is it art? Probably closer to art than the scarf above, since at the point I took it I was thinking of it as a statement about the difference in the way male sexuality is portrayed in different cultures.
This is a photograph that I took this spring:
daffodil
To me it most assuredly is art. It is not good art, since there are technical shortcomings, but I set out with a specific vision: to put on the screen what a daffodil looks like when photographed at night, lit only a fireplace and candles.
Oops. Not sure what happened with the text but it looks like the links work.
I’ll be gone for a bit, my wireless unit is brokt, and won’t be replaced until next Tuesday. Have fun, everyone!
Caine @ 233
About the furniture :Nothing fancy, just a large display stand for watching stuff from the sofa (0.84 x.0 .80 x 0.30 m or 3.5 x 3.3 x 1 ft) with a top (where my extenal monitor and treble speakers reside), a shelf in the middle (for the subwoofer) and a “trough” in the bottom for balance and to serve as my paper recycling bin.
It is made of glulam birch and the surface is treated with a few coats of linseed oil laced with polyurethane laquer. I applied the mixture with a rag. Untreated birch is a light coloured, almost grayish wood, but the oil/laquer mixture brought reddish yellow, light brown and light orange hues and made the growth ring patterns much more visible. It’s not perfect, but it’s made of more or less real, good looking, wood and not particle board (ie. sawdust glued together).
The cutting table: Are you going to treat it with oil or oil and shellack or something else?
As for the RasPi thing and starlings, getting RasPi to sound great requires a USB sound card, which I’m getting at some point, the analogue audio port is quite noisy.
This summer a group of starlings was often feeding on the lawn in front of my window. It was fun to watch them.
I think this photo essay is beautiful. 17 celebrities that identify as gender-fluid. I wish that M Cyrus wasn’t in there, but I freely admit to finding her vacuous, and not particularly talented. YMMV
The subject of art ( Art! ) came up at work the other day…
My take home point of the discussion was: you don’t get to decide what is art for other people.
I am connected again! A quick drive-by right now, I’m still in the middle of re-organizing my studio, and boy, do I have a lot of work in front of me. I’ll be back later on today.
Goldfinches. Black-capped Chickadees. Re-purposed jeans. And…Hats:
http://www.brentblack.com/pages/best_02.html
http://www.brentblack.com/pages/styles_cost.html
This is a cross-post.
15 Heartbreaking Drawings Capture the #LastWords Spoken by Black Victims of State Violence, updated version.
Also a cross-post:
Kinfolks: a journal of black expression – Vol. 1 / Issue 3 – there’s a new Clint Smith poem inside, plus an array of other black authors. And you read it like a book on your screen!
It’s certainly worth returning to.
draider2
Social Justice Wizard of Oz, Gold Bricker of Yellow Roads
I am starting to think you are in a similar position, mentally, to Mabus.
Mabus truly cannot help himself, and I’m pretty sure he goes on and off his meds. The maladjustment of this current loser is more like the whiny/bully tactics of hoggler. Lie, obsess, stalk, repeat. You would think after so many years of the cycle the fools would understand that there aren’t any mods here. Oh well, some people just need to be assholes.
Holytape! I haven’t had a chhance to mention it, but I like your work. One of your images has been my wallpaper for a week or more. Thanks for posting.
There is progress, but I’ll still be gone for a few days, too much to do!
Je déclare c’est fini! Things should be returning to normal soon, for a given value of normal and all that. Gave Pearl a pet for Chigau and gave regards from Anne.
Caine, that looks marvelous! Congratulations on an accomplishment that will allow many more accomplishments.
I was moving bookshelves today, and wishing that I could take them home. That was at a school-district supply center – they do have surplus auctions.
One of the guys was saying that he makes those eye-in-a-hand figurines as good-luck items. He did say that he tries to make them look good, so I guess that is art.
Friday Feathers #2, sleepy baby.
Ice Swimmer @ 239:
Oh, that sounds really nice! Birch is a lovely wood, dense and fine grained. When I wanted a much larger top for my drawing table, Mister went straight for the birch.
Nothing like that at all – the idea was very cheap, and minimum labour. I had half a closet door hanging about, which was perfect size for a cutting table, 77″ x 36″, anchored it to two cube storage shelves, so it’s 38″ high, and done! (See links @ 253 and 254.)
Menyambal @ 255:
Thank you! Oh, bookshelves. Yes, I share your desire to take the bookshelves home. There are never enough.
Sure. That’s rather old folk art, is it not? I know the type of thing you mean, but I don’t know much about it. *Searches* Yep, very old indeed, and definitely art.
Caine, thanks for the Google. Those are indeed pretty, and certainly are art. I shouldn’t have said they weren’t, but I had been moving bookshelves all day.
By the way, Craigslist free stuff often includes heavy desks. I picked my latest off a curb, which is one advantage of driving around in a little pickup truck. It is in my garage, now, as a work surface, but may make in into the house, yet.
Menyambal @ 258:
That’s something I miss, not being in a city anymore. Waaay back when the dinosaurs roamed, in Long Beach Ca, you could spend a couple hours going through The Recycler, and find whatever you were looking for, often free. I’d *love* to pick up a heavy desk or three, they make fantastic work tables.
Speaking of bookshelves, there was a good post about decorating with books at Why Books?
I hafta say, I’d never seen colour-coordinated bookshelves before. My books are lucky if they find a shelf upon which to perch. Having colour coordinated books never occurred to me.
There’s nothing like having to spend 6 freaking days cleaning and organizing to make me pathetically grateful to be back at work.
Holy fuck, I got a photo of Pearl. I’m amazed.
The names of embroidery thread colours can make a person turn to chocolate. I’m working with several different mochas, a couple of coffees, and two different cocoas. I had to break off a piece of my Green & Black’s Dark Chocolate bar.
Caine:
Color coordinated books, that must be the triumph of style over substance as long as paper books are actually read. I suppose you could play with colors of an encyclopedia or some other long series of large books with relatively little effort to make a style statement.
The cutting table looks fine, a lot of usable workspace and a lot of storage space.
Now, I’ve heard about cargo pants but your storage pants look both practical and beautiful, Everything is visible and neatly in its place.
Here in Finland, they have started to use more birch in boutique musical instruments (for example drums and parts of electric guitars*), in addition to furniture, carpentry, plywood, firewood and pulp. 80 years ago birch was considered a weed tree with no value by the forestry authorities. Luckily they didn’t manage to make it extinct.
__
* including gorgeous tops and fingerboards from figured (flame) birch.
Caine @ 262
Is it the light or has her hair gone more white?
For those of you in the western USA this morning’s CBS Sunday Morning focuses on Design. Interesting segments on Shaker furniture, Savannah, Charleston and architecture.
Yeah, I was in a thrift store’s book area looking for good books to read, and two women were looking for handsomely-bound books to fill a lawyer’s bookcase. They never gave any thought to content, or even titles, or what anyone would think who realized the library was just for looks. They never expressed any doubts about their mission, or anything to indicate that the lawyer actually did read books.
So maybe that was art?
Now, there’s one mechanical point that comes to my mind: A few full shelves of books make a bookshelf more stable. At least it feels more solid.
Ice Swimmer:
Thank you! That was one of my better ideas, as it’s much more helpful to me to be able to see all the colours at a glance, rather than digging through a pile of thread.
I had no idea that any Birch was considered to be weed value. A fair number of Birch varieties are pretty prized in the States. I’m glad they didn’t hit extinction.
! Ohhhh, so gorgeous, it looks like it was made of honey.
Pearl’s lost a bit of her apricot blush, but I had to use a flash to get the shot, so probably a bit of both.
Monday Mercurial #3
Bluejays!
Interesting reading here:
Windows into History
A journey through history via forgotten books
I have a lot of old books myself, and enjoy the contrasts in time and knowledge.
Menyambal @ 267:
Um, I don’t think so. I know the whole ‘books as decoration’ thing has been going on for a long time, and I’ve long despised it. The ‘books in designer colours’ thing was new to me, and I can’t say I like that either. If you’re not interested in reading, I don’t much see the point of having books in your house. Mine is stuffed with books, I’m stone out of room for them, and I’ve read them all.
I seriously dislike people playing pretend with books (oh, look, I have serious looking books, I must be replete with knowledge) while promoting obscurantism.
There was an just-off-Campus bar here called The Library.
Their decorations consisted largely of books. It was part of the ‘joke’.
Student 1: Are you going somewhere to study?
Student 2: Yeah. I’m going to The Library.
I can’t imagine what this would do for a lawyer’s office.
The Last Bookstore in downtown LA has a Labyrinth of used books upstairs. The $1 books are arranged by color as part of the art installation – scroll down through the page, there are photos. You can, of course, buy them, too. It’s a good place to shop, not to mention just wander. I really should get back down there, one of these days.
Chigau:
That’s on the scary side.
My favourite multi-labyrinthine bookstore is Sam Weller’s in SLC. Great place to get lost.
I would love to organize a visit to The Last Bookstore in downtown Los Angeles. I am about an hour and a half from there on a good traffic day. (On a bad traffic day it can take twice as long.) Taking the train in, and/or carpooling with however many like minded SoCal bibliophiles, wandering in the bookstore and galleries, having a bit of a nosh and some good laughs sounds grand. If there are any SoCal people interested in such an excursion you can email me: Morgan Meeker without the space using the google thing.
When I lived in NYC I would spend hours and hours in The Strand bookstore. It was especially nice if the weather was cold and beastly outside.
Has anyone else seen The Magic Sword (1962)? Watched it recently, and that is one bad movie. Very bad. And intensely silly.
Caine,
Somehow missed The Magic Sword, but I did see Attack of the Killer Tomatoes when it was produced in 1978. And I can still sing the theme song. Silly beyond compare, but great fun.
Ah yes, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. As I recall, I was fair stoned when I saw that way back when. :D That was just silliness, whereas I got the idea that The Magic Sword was meant to be a good flick, but missed by a thousand miles. From reading at IMDB, It seems that all of Bert I. Gordon’s movies were on the bad side, with this particular one apparently being his best. Or so it’s said. Basil Rathbone, Estelle Winwood, and Merritt Stone all gave it their best, and they were fun to watch, but they sure as fuck didn’t have much to work with. And the special effects! Oh, they were special, alright, and not in a good way.
I will have to watch The Magic Sword. My problem with viewing things that are so bad but meant to be good is that I get that horrible feeling of embarrassment for the performers.
But, another intentionally silly movie, produced in 1996 is Joe’s Apartment. From IMDB: “A nice guy has just moved to New York and discovers that he must share his run-down apartment with a couple thousand singing, dancing cockroaches.”
And really, I never inhaled.
Ah, classic, ah, art… well, for certain values of “art”… Foamhenge, Stonehenge’s unholy twin, guards its mystery in byways of Virginia:
The mildly deranged penguin is now searching the Clonehenge site for Cheesehenges.
(And, it turns out, there are quite a few, such as this one.)
Morgan:
Oh yes. You’ll get that with The Magic Sword. I hope everyone involved got a nice, fat paycheck for it. There were a couple of fun Star Trek tie-in moments: When you first see the King (Merritt Stone) in the throne room, he’s watching a belly dancer (and seriously fondling his scepter), and the music is the same music in the Trek episode Wolf in the Fold, which also features belly dancers. Then there’s Liam Sullivan, who plays Sir Branton – Sullivan played the sadistic Parmen in the Trek episode Plato’s Stepchildren.
Yep, that’s a good one. Going to watch men in seriously tight pants in sword fight clinches while exchanging risqué reparteé – Captain Blood, Tower of London, and The Mark of Zorro. Oh, speaking of bad movies, The Last Days of Pompeii (1935) is absolutely awful. Bad acting, preachy, preachy, preachy, lots of Jesus, and in the end, the supposedly great special effects are of a bloody earthquake. At least The Magic Sword is fun.
Blf @ 282, oh, thanks for Clonehenge, that’s very cool! I think Foamhenge looks pretty good.
Me @ 283:
And Gary Lockwood, of course, who is the hero of The Magic Sword, and the helmsman who turns into an ESP god in the episode Where No Man Has Gone Before.
Discovery of ancient cave paintings in Petra stuns art scholars:
US student is rescued from giant vagina sculpture in Germany:
Chocolate with your Bacon? Tate Britain offers feast for the senses:
The “bacon” is not the edible stuff, but Figure in a Landscape 1945 by Francis Bacon.
The mildly deranged penguin suggest Vault Formerly Containing Cheese Now Ventilated with Penguin-Shaped Holes 2015, but the Sensorium curartors didn’t like her suggestion it be viewed whilst Daleks exterminated peas.
Wednesday Random – there’s a bunny! :D
That’s dinner sorted then. And for dessert, Edible masterpieces: copies of great artworks you can eat — in pictures.
Ancient Greek palace unearthed near Sparta dates back to 17th century BC:
(Oh feck,
Previewhas stopped working. Yet again, again…)Links to the CBS stories mentioned above.
http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/shaker-furniture-clean-by-design-2/
http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/sweetgrass-basket-weavers-2/
Blf @ 290:
That’s fun!
I spent a bit of time poking about there, and the Positive Exposure program is amazing, and that is truly great and helpful work. I’ll be donating when I’m able.
Opus @ 292:
I’ll have to watch that when I’m able, I always have a braid or three of sweetgrass in the house.
For certain definitions of “art”, this is, ah, art… Woman downs whole bottle of cognac at Beijing airport security control: “Woman drank contents of bottle after being told she could not carry it in her hand luggage, only to be prevented from flying because she was too drunk”.
Ah, life in Frogland… A Parisian baguette shortage? Quelle horreur!: “Bakeries in the French capital have had their holidays regulated for years. Now, a new law gives them freedom to shut when they please — but will the bread really run out?”
Not sure I’ve ever tried (or even seen) this, but it sounds intriguing, Garum sauce: ancient Rome’s ‘ketchup’ becomes a modern-day secret ingredient: “Also known as colatura di alici, the centuries-old condiment of fermented and salted anchovies adds a sharp, savory flavor to simple pasta dishes”.
A photo I did of the Atlanta skyline recently.
Saad, that is stunning!
Saad, please don’t tell me you did this astonishing photo with a smart phone. :-)
Saad, that photo is beautiful.
Saad: details please!! Camera? Lens??
It is indeed gorgeous.
Thanks, everyone. :)
opus, #301
That was shot with my Olympus E-M1 with the 12-40mm. And that’s after some heavy post-processing of course. I wanted to give it a moody feel without making it look too ridiculous.
Here is the SOOC image.
Foz Meadows has an outstanding post on the Hugos: Hugos & Puppies: Peeling The Onion
Saad:
Damn! That is one lovely photo. Great work!
I found something stunning.
I don’t know how comprehensive the project is – if they in fact can list all the dead.
From the About page:
‘Mack the Knife,’ with the edges softened:
Speaking of the slower non-pop original version, I found this performance, Kurt Weill: Mack the Knife — Baritone, harmonium, Pleyel piano, some time ago. The enunciation is excellent and you can really hear and understand just what that song is about.
Friday Feathers #3.
Oh, I am having a bad blogging day. This is the correct link to Friday Feathers #3. Brown Thrasher and Mourning Dove.
Brecht also wrote the Threepenny Novel in 1934. It is brilliant and terrible and, being a novel, is able to go into way more detail about the economic and social situations of more characters, interacting with each other on many different levels.
South African black doll breaks the Barbie mould in style:
An Artist Turned An Abandoned New Orleans Complex Into A Tribute To Black History
Oodles of powerful art.
Kermit the Frog’s new girlfriend is younger, thinner — and blander:
The mildly deranged penguin has always liked the Cookie Monster: He’s a useful diversion, and never wanted any of the cheese anyways.
Lego space mission: Denmark’s first astronaut gets toys for company:
Tinfoil hats, everyone! ISS will be hurtling down bricks, and if they miss, lighting and thunder. Maybe a few hammers.
The best bit, in the comments: “F#(%ing migrants!” Reply: “Vote for Donald Trump, he’ll build a wall around the ISS to keep the foreigners out.”
Art from nature, in three different links:
From Above (National Geographic link);
Spaceship Earth (Ars Electronica);
And I think my favourite, Layered winds (Lori Fenton’s blog), a great shot of Mars.
More art from nature, for certain values of “art”, “from”, and “nature”, Top shearer called in to trim overgrown sheep found in Australia:
Some of the better comments:
● I suppose the only question remaining is, is if/when the sheep is executed after escaping, the foolish Ned Kelly of an ungulate.
● You say it’s a sheep, but could be anything under there: Chupacabra, Donald Trump’s fleeing hairpiece, map of Atlantis, Kanye’s excess ego storage space.
Young embroidery artists are busting barriers and conceptions of what this formerly “domestic” craft is about. Warning: NSFW
ArtFido
And some more art from nature, for certain values of “art”, “from”, and “nature”, Ape millimetre: chimpanzees smash camera drone:
Performance art! See nasty big bug. Swat it. No bananas. Bugger…
Ms Tushi displayed more intelligence than the entire thug Kandidate Klown Kar combined.
In her next performance, she will be presenting her reinterpretation of one of Shakespear’s plays, as soon as it’s finished being typewritten.
A while ago I searched for ‘ambient short film’ on youtube and found this:
OMEGA
Friday Feathers # 4. Sorry for the neglect, hopefully things will be better next week.
On movies – recently watched the 1939 movie serial Mandrake the Magician. Terribly silly, and very easy to figure out the identity of The Wasp, but quite fun.
Morgan @ 316:
Those are fabulous! I was just looking at Spitzner’s waxes* again (I couldn’t remember if the sleeping Venus was clothed or not), and ended up looking at many other anatomical waxes of the time, and there’s a fair similarity there. More on all that later, I have to get some fucking work done.
*If you go looking, keep in mind that the model of a woman having a cesarian section is creepier than fuck. (Attractive woman, dressed in virginal white, conscious, arms above head, wrists and ankles bound, abdomen sliced open, held open with hooks, with the ever notorious three disembodied (male, natch) hands around the opening.
Caine @ 320:
I was unaware of Spitzner’s waxes. The Morbid Anatomy site demands more investigation. I saw the original Body Worlds exhibition in Los Angeles in 2005. The “plastination” process of preservation is disturbing to many. You won’t forget your anatomy lessons after viewing these models. And yes, they are real. I recommend seeing one of the exhibitions if you get a chance.
Are video games “Art”?
Well, here I am, late to the party. This is my first comment , and I have to say that I have really enjoyed this thread. I always love getting recs. And I was amazed by the talent shared both by the commentators on this blog and the art from other artists. I would like to share a drawing based on Navajo folklore. http://ashteldar.deviantart.com/art/Coyote-Kept-One-Star-95828817 – I hope I’m doing this right.
For movies I would like to recommend “Stranger Than Fiction’ and more recently ‘Woman in Gold” and “The Hundred Foot Journey”. The first about fiction and reality, the second about the rescue of an iconic painting stolen by the Nazis and the third about food as art.
As for books, anything by Terry Pratchett of course, C J Cherryh, Elizabeth Moon, Sherry Tepper, Historicals and fantasy by Barbara Hambley, urban fantasys by Patricia Briggs, Ilona Andrews and Jim Butcher and Michelle Sagara.
@chigau
Yes of course!
Brian Pansky #324
I knew that!
But the wanking on the feminist frequency thread made me doubt.
Dreamstone @ 323:
Watched The Hundred Foot Journey a while back, charming film. I’ll get the others on the ol’ Netflix queue. Thanks for the recommends!
Oh, that’s lovely! Beautiful work, there’s a distinct air of difference, of observation there that is quite poignant. Please, share as much as you like.
As for books, I recently read The Good Suicides by Antonio Hill. An author who doesn’t mind leaving a fucktonne of loose ends in the least. I haven’t decided if I like that or not. Still, it was a good read.
Chigau:
Fuck if I know.
Young. Beautiful. Mean.
Latest on the Tree Quilt, which is [k]not a helluva lot. I’ve been so restless lately, haven’t been able to settle, so I’m gonna throw paint and ink at an innocent piece of fabric today.
Oh, holy fuck, I really, really needed that. I’m half covered in paint, and quite happy.
Art, of the gastronomic kind, African Americans shake up wine industry stereotypes:
blf @ 330:
Yes, along with the image of everything else.
Perhaps, but in numerous cases you have to go searching for connection to “old white guy”. Sunflowers, for instance, don’t provide me with such an image, unless I recall Vincent van Gogh’s famous paintings, who was certainly a “white guy” albeit not that particularly “old”.
Stir-fry does not remind me of a white guy, old or otherwise, although I presume it is possible to conjure up a connection.
The Great Zimbabwe, the Egyptian Pyramids, Angkor Wat, Amerindian burial mounds, pagodas, and numerous other artifacts and structures, also do not, although it is undoubtedly possible to find a connection.
Aboriginal rock art and prehistoric cave painting do not, albeit some of the later are, presumably, the work of by-now very old people, possibly white, possibly male.
The sands, plains, dunes, mountains, craters, and so on of Mars do not, though there is a connection of sort: The Maritain Chronicles was written by an old white guy, and the staff behind the robotic missions are, very probably, predominately white and male, and lead by older individuals. Yet that is not what I am reminded of when I see the photographs or read the books, articles, and essays.
And now for some more of the gastronomic arts, and, admittedly, one which very much does remind — and involve — older white guys, along with younger people, people who probably don’t describe themselves as white, even cootie-carriers, but surprisingly (since a lot of cheese and, presumably, MUSHROOMS!, is involved), no penguin, mildly deranged or otherwise. Yep, it’s time for World Pizza Championships: where dough-obsessed divas battle it out:
blf @ 332:
Ah, everything is so context dependent. Sunflowers are most definitely connected to “white guy”, old or otherwise, for me. I live in farm country, and sunflowers are a major crop here.
Caine
:D I would be very happy with your final result too, it’s stunning! I’ve also been extremely restless the last few days. but I’ve been blaming it on the awful, sauna like heat and humidity. I cannot work on the shawl or poncho WIP’s because I ‘m already melting, and the pain in spine from impending thunderstorms are making me feel twitchy. Can’t wait, they are going to be intense storms.
Tethys @ 335:
Thank you! I are happy. I don’t know if it’s weather or not, but the effing heat has not helped. Had a minor storm yesterday, but it was mostly leaden sky, very hot air, and little water. I wouldn’t mind a good thunderstorm or three. Pain levels have been serious high lately, so all my empathy on that score. I think I’m getting hit with “fuck, winter” restlessness now, even though it’s early for that kind of twitchy. I want to be outside, head raised to the wind, feeling the sun. (But I don’t want to bake to death, either.)
I was wondering where the fuck all my birds were – the feeding stations have hardly been touched, and so far, they’ve been dealing with the heat okay. Then I heard the peeping…yep, a Sharp-shinned Hawk on the hunt. Got a couple of shots before he took off, and about 3 minutes later, all the birds starting coming out of the woodwork, so to speak. Most people never hear raptors, and would be really surprised, I think, by the squeaky peep most of them have.
Fotos!
Sunrise over the Mediterranean
Clownfish
Shark
Casa Batlló in Barcelona
Ah, the raptor was a juvenile. He may have been hanging out for days.
The mildly deranged penguin perks up. She’s got a few cheesebeings to reanimate — don’t worry, nothing from any graveyards (the cheeses tend to pout and get a bit too wormy) — and is hoping she can set up a basic “electrocute the poor sod strapped to a table” rig in your backyard / rooftop / kitchen…
(I’d suggest saying “no”. The last time she tried this — well, you know all those asteroids between Mars and Jupiter (the planets, not the sky faeries) that supposedly never formed a planet — um, well, let’s say there is a reason Sol is a not binary star system…)
Giliell @ 337:
Those are gorgeous! I’m looking at everything – I *love* the shot of the chameleon.
Oh gods, the Seahorse Tree! That is fabulous, Giliell.
Thanks, Caine
Last year at the Aquarium I was grumpy and said i needed a decent camera.
Guess that turned out right.
Now I need to take a class on how to use it. Some day when I’m no longer working nights…
I’m seriously glad I learned taking pictures back in the old days so I know a lot of basics, like ISO, shutter time, etc. My first camera had a hand-held seperate lightening metre…
Giliell @ 342:
Yes, that really does help. I didn’t have any of that when I got the Nikon D80, so I spent time looking through every single thing on the menu (and man, is that an exhaustive amount of stuff they cram on now), referring to the manual, and doing a lot of reading at Ken Rockwell’s site.
That’s a nice camera you have, too. I’d love to have a Canon as well, because the one thing that Nikons suck at is low light.* If I had much money, I’d no doubt want a whole lot of different cameras.
* Yep, I know, different lenses, all that. They are still sucky in low light.
Barcelona? I still remember this night. Gaudi truly was a genius.
http://i300.photobucket.com/albums/nn16/Opus017/Small%20card%20-%20%20end%20of%20trip%20055_zpsxb1bjewp.jpg
‘Archaeology on steroids’: huge ritual arena discovered near Stonehenge:
The mildly deranged penguin vaguely recalls that concert. It was an early-ages gig by Disaster Area, and they hadn’t quite yet mastered the, um, art, of exactly how to build bunkers for the audience, or, critically, just how far away from the stage to build them. This one was only a few kilometres from one of the speaker stacks, now quaintly called “Stonehenge”. Why the remains of the foundation are so interesting has always baffled her, although it was later colonized by the now-totally-deaf surviving hosts…
TalesBlogs of Interest:https://dincturk.wordpress.com/
https://damiology.wordpress.com/
https://everyphototunity.wordpress.com/
Monday Mercurial #4 (Hawk!)
Another blog of interest: http://joshidaniel.com/ Joshi is an amazing photographer, his work is exquisite.
And another fantastic photographer: http://throughopenlens.com/
I can’t seem to get myself together today. More tea.
Opus @ 344:
Oooh, beautiful!
Caine
Thanks!
It’s really a neat allrounder. I got to try a friend’s one and immediately fell in love with it. Now to stock up on lenses and filtres and a tripod…
opus
Gorgeous! We couldn’t stay until dark as the kids were exhausted already. I love, love, love Barcelona.
Giliell @ 350:
I finally found a tripod I was completely pleased with, extra tall and extra heavy (always windy here), and it ended up being attached to Mister’s telescope. I hafta get that back, because it’s not like he uses the telescope.
It’s cloudy and cool today. Tethys, I hope you get your thunderstorms. I sure as fuck wish one would hit here today, and put paid to the Labour day “celebrations”.
While browsing books, I came across one with this synopsis:
I don’t think so. Nope.
lol wow Caine that book description. Could be a masterpeice :P
Anyways, just now I was thinking about different art mediums. Like, it’s difficult to hide things in music, because it’s basically one dimensional (time). On the other hand, a lot can be hidden within a movie, because you can’t look at every part of the screen all at once. Meatspace and video games can take this even further, having all three dimensions of space and also the dimension of time.
Of course I could also go on about how many different senses are involved in each medium…
Caine
The front did spawn some severe storms, but I only got a few sprinkles of rain. It is much better now that the low pressure is over thanks, and the drop in temp and humidity is also quite welcome. My commiserations on your obnoxious loud neighbors. When did every single summer holiday become an occasion for fireworks?
Brian @ 354:
The bit that keeps amusing me is Vatican officials are caught on television cameras arguing with robots. There’s definitely a story in that somewhere.
I am terribly ignorant when it comes to music (all I do is listen), but it seems to me that music can be astonishingly complex, and can effectively ‘hide’ whole strings of sound, until you listen to it enough to pick up all the different strands, and are finally able to listen to the whole without missing anything. Or maybe that’s just me. I listen to music when drawing or painting, and I seem to pick up particular strands of a piece of music, while relegating the rest to background, then pick up a different strand, and so on.
Tethys @ 355:
No rain here, but it got very cool over night. The sun is up now, looking bright, hopefully, it won’t be deathly hot. Fireworks, oy. I hate the damn things anymore. There’s one family in particular, they must have a fucking fireworks store in their garage or something. Last year, they were setting off fireworks every. single. night. for. months. Not regular ones, the ones that sound like a fucking bomb going off – shaking windows, the whole nine yards. Finally, the mayor had a word, but they had an excuse this weekend. *sigh* I’d really like to see the damn things outlawed except for professional shows.
http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/sep/08/lost-genius-the-other-mozart-sister-nannerl
xposted to Feminist Lens thread.
@356, Caine
Same! Especially how it says “caught”. What is it about “arguing with robots” that they would want to hide? And why robots, specifically, not humans? The whole sentence sounds like something you would hear someone say in a dream.
Ya, you’re right.
The juvenile Sharp-shinned Hawk was back, with a kill this time. If you don’t want to see a sparrow being shredded, please don’t click.
Brian:
I don’t know why robots, but I’d love to know the answer (just not enough to read that book). For anyone who writes sci-fi or fantasy, there’s a good idea in that.
Blogs of Interest!
Juju Films | Cutting edge Multimedia Programming
nadiaharhash | Living in the shoes of a woman
Simple Thoughts About Life & Stuff
Fighting BED | Positivity, Creativity & Finding Happiness is the goal…the journey however is far darker
Light touch | Just wondering at the miracle called LIFE.
A poem du jour:
School Prayer
by Diane Ackerman
In the name of the daybreak
and the eyelids of morning
and the wayfaring moon
and the night when it departs,
I swear I will not dishonor
my soul with hatred,
but offer myself humbly
as a guardian of nature,
as a healer of misery,
as a messenger of wonder,
as an architect of peace.
In the name of the sun and its mirrors
and the day that embraces it
and the cloud veils drawn over it
and the uttermost night
and the male and the female
and the plants bursting with seed
and the crowning seasons
of the firefly and the apple,
I will honor all life
-wherever and in whatever form
it may dwell-on Earth my home,
and in the mansions of the stars.
“School Prayer” by Diane Ackerman from I Praise My Destroyer. © Vintage Books, 2000
That’s lovely, Morgan.
Hollyhock.
Escape art! Um, that is, the art of escape… Russian five-year-olds dig their way out of nursery to buy sports car:
Typical art critic.
Caine, I love hollyhocks. They are so dramatic!
Morgan @ 365, so do I! Beautiful flowers, fabulous, hairy seedpods, and beloved by bees, moths, and butterflies.
Caine @ 366
… and snarky, giggling little old ladies.
Stunning macro photos of delicate butterfly wings look like shimmering petals:
multiple gorgeous photos at the link.
I’m not quite sure what category this goes into, but decided to put it here because the woo-woos were presumably seeing lots of pretty lights whilst some sort of music played. Which is art, for certain values of “art”. Mystery surrounds hallucinatory chaos at German homeopathy conference:
The comments are full of people pointing out that whatever happened, it wasn’t homeopathetic. For example, “This must have [been] the first time the homeopaths took a tablet with anything in it.”
Friday Feathers #5
Well, I lost most of yesterday to overloading my wireless and watching Gregorian in concert. So naturally, I’m taking the day off. I have a house full of animals to feed, including myself. Hopefully, back to work Saturday.
Poem du jour:
“Kindness”
by Naomi Shihab Nye
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.
Very nice, Morgan! I’ve had this impending sense of…je nais se quoi, so:
De profundis clamavi (Out of the depths have I cried)
Sole Being I love, Your mercy I implore
Out of the bitter pit of my heart’s night,
With leaden skyscapes on a dismal shore,
Peopled only by blasphemy and fright;
For six months frigid suns float overhead,
For six months more darkness and solitude.
No polar wastes are bleaker and more dead,
With never beast nor stream nor plant nor wood.
No horror in this world but is outdone
By the cold razor of this glacial sun
And this chaotic night’s immensities.
I envy the most humble beast that ease
Which brings dull slumber to his brutish soul
So slowly does my skein of time unroll.
– Charles Baudelaire
Poetry seems to be the appropriate response to this annual notation of loss.
Yes. I think I’ve had an internal alarm going off after the seriously high temps, how bloody cold the nights have become. I think this winter is going to be a bad one. I don’t normally feel like this, though. I love the slide into autumn, but something is pricking the back of my mind.
I think I may understand what you are feeling… something askew… a few degrees out of phase. I too love the slide into autumn: It is, paradoxically, my “come alive” time of year after the torture of summer. (I do not do heat.) I suggest that our bodies and minds may be reacting to climate change. Yes, humans are hugely adaptable, but that does not mean we do not sense changes in visceral ways. There are changes in the subtle but familiar patterns of the seasons, and the disruption of patterns is unsettling.
Walkabout
Morgan @ 376:
I agree. I think that’s exactly what’s going on. Something’s coming, just don’t know what yet.
Mauvaise douleur. With that, I’ll probably be gone a bit, I’m seriously paying for that walk.
Sorry if I come across like an intruding philistine, but there’s something I’d once again like to ask about action/adventure fiction, particularly in video games. People here and elsewhere have brought up how the heroes of action/adventure stories tend to mow down entire armies of the villain’s henchmen without much concern for the fact that they’re extinguishing dozens of human lives.
The problem is that action stories need to have a sense of danger in order for the story to have stakes. There need to be obstacles for the hero to overcome in the form of antagonists. I don’t think that the answer is to simply not have action-oriented stories, so how exactly are writers and game developers supposed to get around this?
I have a few ideas:
– In games, you deal with a smaller set of antagonists and avoid having huge numbers of faceless goons.
– Make the cannon fodder antagonists disposable robotic drones or animated rocks, rather than thinking, feeling, sapient creatures.
– Have the hero take non-lethal approaches, encouraging the player to sneak around enemies, disable them without killing them, or simply run away from large groups of enemies, with lethal force being a last resort.
Anyone have any other suggestions?
Is there something inherently wrong with having the hero of a story kill off entire armies worth of faceless thugs, even if the story offers justification for it? Or am I worrying about something for no reason?
Poem du jour:
Look It Over
by Wendell Berry
I leave behind even
my walking stick. My knife
is in my pocket, but that
I have forgot. I bring
no car, no cell phone,
no computer, no camera,
no CD player, no fax, no
TV, not even a book. I go
into the woods. I sit on
a log provided at no cost.
It is the earth I’ve come to,
the earth itself, sadly
abused by the stupidity
only humans are capable of
but, as ever, itself. Free.
A bargain! Get it while it lasts.
“Look It Over” by Wendell Berry from New Collected Poems. © Counterpoint Press, 2012.
Beautiful work:
The Raven’s Nest (Don’t miss anything here, it’s all a lovely gift.)
W.H. Sim Photography
For anyone in this part of the world, this looks like great fun: Midhurst Camera Club
Monday Mercurial #5
***
I’ll be at the pain clinic on Monday, so hopefully things will skew more toward normal soon. Right now, I can’t sit for long, which isn’t helping to get anything done.
There is a wonderful 1911 Singer book, free to download, instructions for doing art embroidery with a machine.
Singer instructions for art embroidery
The mildly deranged penguin observes that this is not how one attracts wandering cheese plants, The Broad review — supersized cheese grater hits LA, unless, I suppose they like the sort of art there (“what is widely regarded as one of the most important collections of postwar and contemporary art in the world”) or have come to marvel at “the city’s medieval public transport system”:
blf @ 384
I plan on visiting the “supersized cheese grater” the next time I venture down the mountain onto the evil flatlands. The thing about Eli and Edythe Broad, they promised for years to bequeath their collection to Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), of which Broad is a lifetime trustee. When their egos got the better of them and they announced plans to construct their own museum, there were some indignant ripples in the art and culture circles of Los Angeles. Oh well… “The rich are different from you and me” (abridged, with apologies to Fitzgerald).
Fashion and Fab Photography: http://ramonacrisstea.com/
Experimental Moss. Does it work, or no?
blf @ 384:
It’s not startling, but it is ugly. Just what LA needs, another ugly building.
About Los Angeles architecture……. TimeOut LA did an article in October of last year on what they judge to be the ten ugliest buildings in Los Angeles. I have opinions on all of these, but I am wondering what other architecture mavens have to say about this. Have a look.
The same publication subsequently did an article on the 30 most beautiful buildings in Los Angeles. Some of them are really questionable, especially the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. What a monstrous pile that is. You can see the pics at the same link as above.
Friday Feathers #6
Interesting article in The New York Times, An ‘Otello’ Without Blackface Highlights an Enduring Tradition in Opera:
Cooking with a Wallflower
Morgan:
1100 Wilshire: Ugly
Eh, the big blue building is fine, just have to get rid of the fucking scientology garbage.
Palms Motor: I like it, could do with a paint job. A good one.
Macy’s Plaza: Ugly. Boring.
Convention Center: Hated it from the moment it was being constructed in ’71. (Gimme the Pantages any day.)
I like the Visconti.
Hollywood Galaxy: Eh. Boring.
8500 Melrose: I like it.
Beverly Center: Hate it more than the convention center. Awful.
Hollywood & Highland: Eh, standard American ugly. Boring.
http://fakeormistake.net/
Here is my vote for the ugliest, most pretentious building in Los Angeles. It is called The Tower, located on Westwood Blvd. near the UCLA campus. It is colored the deepest black and putrid yellow and I suppose tried to be Egyptian.
Let me try that link again. The Tower
Absolutely stunning embroidery art.
I usually hate to invade someone’s privacy by posting candid street shots, but in this case I couldn’t resist. She was so very pregnant, and so radiant, that I think it’s worth it.
Art to piss on! A long history of toilets in Ukraine museum (quoted in full), there is a link to a video:
Well, I’m still making hats like there’s no tomorrow, but I switched to something more suitable for the season
Giliell @ 400
So, the season of mists (no bilingual pun intended) and mellow fruitfulness is also a season of cuteness. And the long bill of the cap will cut glare from the low-hanging autumn sun. Nice caps.
Leaves.
I recommend that people should watch Upstream Color, it’s a great movie :)
I saw it on Netflix here in Canada, hopefully it’s available there for other people wherever you are.
Caine
Seeing your photos I always think we’re kindred spirits. I temd to get really excited by Leaves! Trees! Plants! Interesting Light Patterns! and take a bazillion pics and my family (except for my sister) looks at me like “thank goodness those are only taking up disk space”
Friday Feathers #7.
Opus, your link is brokt!
Giliell @ 400, oh, gorgeous, beautiful hat! Love those colours.
Giliell:
So many people simply don’t see what’s there. The most mundane things are often blazingly beautiful. I long ago came to the conclusion that it doesn’t much matter if others don’t see the same things I do, and every once in a while, I can get other people to see. There’s a lot to be excited about out there!
Interesting Peoples:
Jenna’s Conservation
Aniket Sharma Photography
Marceline’s Art
Modern Abstract Painting by Artist Mark Brereton
kmvicenal | know me more
Interesting Peoples continued:
Visual Atelier
Illustrated Poetry
1,000 Days
Jacob Reux
Typfy
Interesting Peoples continued:
Recycled Salvage Design | Recycled Salvage Design Artist Raymond Guest
Capture Canada
Snapshots for Sore Eyes
Petals Unfolding | The Embrace of Love
The Weddington Adventures | Peace!…with 2 fingers;)
The title is not illuminating, perhaps even misleading, unless, I suppose you know who Julian Cope is (I didn’t), but the article is actually rather fascinating, Julian Cope on Celts: my wild romance:
Pearl.
Caine, I’m so sorry about Pearl. Our wee beasties never live long enough.
Thank you, Morgan.
Caine:
I am so sorry. She was gorgeous!
Opus, thank you. Yes, Pearl was very beautiful. All of them were, and I miss them terribly.
Super Blood Moon
http://earthsky.org/?p=211809
http://earthsky.org/tonight/total-lunar-eclipse-blood-moon-hunters-moon-september-27-28-2015
Since it is fall and several people have commented that they like leaves, here are some fall photos. Most taken a few years ago.
http://ashteldar.deviantart.com/art/Golden-Autumn-360683107
http://ashteldar.deviantart.com/art/Brilliance-101765039
http://ashteldar.deviantart.com/art/La-Plata-River-October-361591538
http://ashteldar.deviantart.com/art/Aztec-Pond-at-Sunset-2-360685969
http://ashteldar.deviantart.com/art/Autumn-Road-2-141351338
http://ashteldar.deviantart.com/art/Autumn-Walk-100581592
http://ashteldar.deviantart.com/art/Blue-and-Gold-102524377
And 1 color pencil drawing.
http://ashteldar.deviantart.com/art/Autumn-Road-96536852
Thanks for looking.
Dreamstone @ 418:
Beautiful shots all, and that’s a superb drawing.
dreamstone
Beautiful pictures. I think I like “Brilliance” the best.
And a beautiful drawing.
I just noticed that my link didn’t work earlier. Reposted:
I usually hate to invade someone’s privacy by posting candid street shots, but in this case I couldn’t resist. She was so very pregnant, and so radiant, that I think it’s worth it:
http://s300.photobucket.com/user/Opus017/media/street%20candid%201_zpsg5sakqav.jpg.html
Opus, oh, she is so beautiful! That’s a stunning shot.
Messing around with dye on a rainy Georgia afternoon.
Briar plants on linen:
http://i300.photobucket.com/albums/nn16/Opus017/Native%20briar%20on%20linen_zps2h2lb2xh.jpg
Briar plants on cotton:http://i300.photobucket.com/albums/nn16/Opus017/Native%20briar%20on%20cotton_zpsy1nzaaiy.jpg
opus
Pretty!
Reminds me of grandma’s china (and that’s a compliment)
+++
I brought you the moon
I really, really, really need a tripod. Taking shots of the moon while holding the cam is really tricky.
Monday Mercurial #7.
Bad Moon
Opus, love the briar print on the linen!
Giliell @ 424, you did much better with the moon than I did!
Caine
Thanks. In retrospect I should have thought about taking pictures before 4:30 am, because that wasn’t a good time to figure out the best configuration…
And, I went picture hunting today
Brought home two little girls today, Sappho & Leto. Hopefully, I’ll get pics in a day or three. Sappho is a pale and dark cream, Leto is grey. So far, Sappho is the primary explorer. Leto is hiding out, waiting for nightfall, I expect. I’m hoping I might be able to see the perigee moon tonight, as last night, most of what I saw was heavy cloud cover, no moon.
Photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier was awarded a MacArthur grant:
http://www.latoyarubyfrazier.com/photography/
Impressive work!
Giliell @ 428:
Oooh, lovely! I particularly like sunlight and painted.
All grown up. (Rabbit).
‘They are barbarians’: meet the man defending Syria’s heritage from Isis (The Grauniad’s current style is to use the name “Isis” to refer to daesh):
I have been listening to Bastille for way too long. I have got to learn to stay the fuck away from Utube, I’m not getting anything done at all, not even watching the rest of Batman and Robin: The Serial (1949), which is great fun – the ‘batcar’ is a convertible Mercury, and Batman gets into costume in the back seat, a lot.
Another interesting photography website: The Encyclopedia of Forlorn Places.
http://eofp.net
Introducing Sappho & Leto.
France and Netherlands to jointly buy rare Rembrandts:
Art, for certain edible values of “art”, Adam Liaw’s 10 dishes you should be able to cook by the time you’re 30:
● Scrambled Eggs.
● Roast chicken.
● Pancakes.
● A stir-fry.
● Something vegetarian.
● A pasta that isn’t bolognese.
● Soup. (Speaking of which, I’ve got a made-from-scratch Oxtail soup simmering away as I
starvetype…)● Fried rice.
● A good stew. (He has a very board definition of “stew” and, e.g., includes dishes like vindaloo — I approve!)
○ A signature cake.
“Cook” a cake? Maybe that’s why I’m incapable of baking one, I’ve been doing it all wrong.
The mildly deranged penguin’s list is much simpler:
● Cheese.
● Moar cheese.
● And cheese.
And speaking of cheese, That Stinky Cheese Is a Result of Evolutionary Overdrive:
The mildly deranged penguin has just run off to apply for a job there.
The mildly deranged penguin has always complained what cheese molds are misnamed, and should not be Penicillium _____ but Pengium _____. I’ve suggested she should be known as the moldy deranged penguin…
The moldy deranged penguin is going to Paris via Wales so she can chase after great clanging bronze beasties, Iliad review — Homer’s epic is the theatrical event of the year (5 / 5 stars):
The improvised stage is made from “slabs of MDF”, not moldy deranged penguin. And it’s Homer, not Horace.
Nor sure this is art, for any value of “art”, since it’s mostly about French “pop” “music”. Several of my French friends here in France have told me it is crap — that’s the word they used, crap — and I don’t disagree in general. (I have an especial hatred of French “rap” “music”, which should be banned under various arms limitation treaties.) Anyways, Quotas killed the radio star: French DJs rebel against prescribed playlists:
Friday Feathers #8.
A follow-up to @411: The title is appalling (more on this at the end), The Celts: not quite the barbarians history would have us believe:
Only an ill-educated headline writer could believe for even a moment that the Celts were uncouth or somesuch. The comments quite robustly roast the eejit who wrote the headline for writing utter claptrap.
Many yonks ago I visited Venezia specifically to see an exhibition of Celtic treasures / artwork. The skills and intricacy of what was on display was amazing.
Indian Art from the Edge
Gorgeous pieces.
++++
I live in old celtic territory. They made metalwork that’s still looking for its equal today
Monday Mercurial #8
Brought home two more rats today, a baby girl, Grace, all of five weeks old (Leto’s thrilled, Sappho not so much), and a rescue, Demonax, an older, very large, black rat, who was taken from a home and dumped at the city pound. He’s trauma’d out, and has a nice habitat to himself for now, in a quiet corner of the studio.
Grace. Oh, and I forgot to mention that Demonax was given to us, the woman there in charge of the pocket pets was only interested in getting him a home. She wanted to take him herself, but she and her boyfriend, who breeds rats, were worried about putting him in with seven well established rats.
From CBS news this morning:
http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/artists-intricate-creations-enjoy-long-walks-on-beach/
Have these been mentioned here before? Anatomical dissections in knitted form. Get your dissected frog or rat without the awful smell!
Sappho, Leto, and Grace.
Just saw this posted on upworthy
http://www.upworthy.com/this-16-year-old-artist-uses-fallen-leaves-to-create-stunning-paintings?c=ufb1
Friday Feathers #9.
I finally found a video I had seen in 2013.
Technically it’s just a trailer for a longer short film, but it’s so wonderful on it’s own!
And the full version was very unsatisfying. It had poor pacing, didn’t develop it’s ideas, and stuff. Of course, most short films I find on youtube are highly un-enjoyable to me, except stuff like that “OMEGA” I posted earlier in this thread.
Demonax!
Dreamstone:
I hope she goes into science, we could all benefit from such an interesting thinker.
Brian @ 452:
That was a fab short. It would take a great deal of work to make it longer and keep the same sense to it. The universe shots…oh, there just aren’t words.
Right now, I’m watching (and listening) to Re-imagining Vivaldi, Max Richter. One of my favourite pieces, and I’m really liking this version.
I went hunting again.
look at my fat loot
Giliell @ 456:
Oooh, pretty pretty! I love the rich colours this time of year. The first shot, are those pasque flowers?* We call them windflowers here, the first flowers up, they often break through snow. So beautiful, and they are declining here, because prairie keeps getting plowed under.
*Pulsatilla patens
Monday Mercurial #9. Autumn colours all over.
Caine
Those are Autumn Crocuses, whose name in German is “Herstzeitlose” Autumn’s time-less.
Yes, autumn colours are simply spectacular and we’ve had some gorgeous sunshine over the last weeks, with rain at night. I went mushroom hunting with the cam yesterday, so expect more pics.
Also, your robins are not the same as my robins….
A cross-post from the feminism thread, because I’m loving a book so much I have to start telling people about it!
This morning I started reading Do It Like A Woman, by Caroline Criado-Perez, and it’s fascinating. She’s interviewed a whole bunch of women in all sorts of different fields who are trying to change the world, and is divided into sections entitled Doing It…, Speaking…, Leading…, Advocating… and Choosing Like A Woman. I’m delighted to be introduced to so many great women doing incredible things, and really loved the section on Afghan women’s poetry groups – I’m intrigued by the 2-line landais they’re writing as a form of rebellion! Not quite read half of it so far, but feel it merits a recommendation anyway. Oh, and if her name rings a bell – she’s the woman who started the campaign a couple of years back to get a woman on British bank notes, and subsequently attracted abuse and threats.
Katybe @ 460, thanks for the book recommend, it went straight on my list.
Just a quick reminder that Criado Perez’ definition of “woman”‘s a bit narrow. Doesn’t mean it’s not a good book.
Annnd, I finished: The Birthday Dress
Giliell:
Thanks for the warning. That sort of thing can really throw me off when I’m not prepared for it.
Wow! Fuck, I want that dress, that is all kinds of gorgeous.
Caine, you and me both. But I’ll definitely make me a skirt because I really didn’t want to take it off again…..
Sorry about that, Gilliel – it’s something I hadn’t realised from just reading the first part, but looking at the index now, it does seem decidedly light on mentions of anything that obviously tells me she’s writing anywhere about non-cis or non-straight women, although she does quote a study that looked at the experiences of “female-to-male transsexuals” in terms of the way their colleagues treated them. There doesn’t seem to be any equivalent discussion of the opposite. But she seems to be making a lot more effort to be intersectional in terms of feminism and race. Oh, and that dress is stunning,
Multimillion-dollar photo of Billy the Kid playing croquet was $2 junk shop find:
The mildly deranged penguin says that is not a croquet mallet, but a cheese-stunning hammer. Some cheeses get a bit, ah, overexcited whilst in the caves, and need to be calmed down least they develop a undesirable taste and texture. A good WHACK! with by a trained cheese-stunner does the trick. It also helps tenderize them(the cheeses, not the cheese-stunner, until s/he misses and hits her/his thumb…). The rest of the equipment visible in the photograph looks like standard kit for training and practicing the art of cheese-stunning.
Mr McCarty, she says, wasn’t a very good cheese-stunner. He tended to get annoyed and shoot the cheeses, which is inadvisable in a stone cave, with the ricochets and cave-ins and so on. Worse, it tended to rouse and excite the other cheeses, and soon you’d have a riot. Lots of WHACK!s are required, which is a problem when someone keeps shooting, it’s hard to convince any cheese-stunners to enter the cave…
No wonder the cheese-stunners drank like thirsty fish in a desert. With “Billy the Wild Cheese-Stunning Kid” shooting, rioting cheeses, and cave-ins, and it even really was a desert.
Playing photography hopscotch across the web:
Started here:
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/gallery/2015/oct/13/wildlife-photographer-of-the-year-2015-winners-in-pictures
Which led here:
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2015/oct/13/the-lost-women-forgotten-female-photographers-brought-to-light-in-pictures
And ended up here:
http://www.birgitpuve.com
opus
The wildlife pics are stunning
+++
Well, not quite as stunning, but I uploaded some more autumn pics
The sunset is from the same day as the sunrise before….
A small project for the little one’s birthday
Friday Feathers #10
From CBS Sunday morning:
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/celebrating-the-hudson-river-school-of-art/
The art of making birthday cakes ,)
part I
part II
Erf…Monday Mercurial #10 and Friday Feathers #11.
Some absolutely gorgeous fabric art:
http://elizabethbunsen.typepad.com
I can’t let this one pass unnoticed:
http://www.theguardian.com/culture/gallery/2015/oct/23/beautiful-bacteria-winners-of-the-2015-agar-art-competition-in-pictures
Twitch is currently showing all of the episodes of “The Joy of Painting” by Bob Ross. Great landscape art and very calming personality/music.
http://www.twitch.tv/bobross
Friday Feathers #12