No, I haven’t taken up smoking…

July 7, 2008

…but I’ve been collecting retro melamine ashtrays that make great brush/water holders for painting. And they come in great colors (I have bigger yellow and green ones at my studio.)

This is a small one, which is good for travel, especially on a boat where your brushes might roll overboard. The watercolor pencils roll also, but at least they float when they hit the water, so you have time to dive in and retrieve them.

Also for travel, I like using old watercolor tins to carry small brushes. They work better than anything new I can find, and add a nice flavor to the process.

Filed Under journeys, painting, process | 6 Comments

Boutique Hotel for Pets and other SF Adventures

April 26, 2008

I love staying at boutique hotels with flavor. This one is pet-friendly, and sorry that we couldn’t bring the pooch, when I saw this doggie-size vintage truck bed. It took traveling halfway across the country for me to realize my dog has been so deprived of art furniture, but this will have to be remedied upon the return home!

A quick stop at Japan town turned long, as usual, with lots of perusing of pockets of interest at one of our favorite stores, Soko Hardware. With pockets and bags weighed down from speciality Japanese tools and dishes, we toured the rest of the district, happily it looks much revived and alive compared to last visit.

Fancy cakes were tempting, maybe more for drawing than eating, but in the end, selected a Geisha Float by a Fake Waterful.

The day wrapped up with a fancy-pants dinner at the SFMOMA. Here’s a shot from looking up from the lobby, which is where the dinner was held. That colorful spot is “One Way Color Tunnel” by Olafur Eliasson on the fifth floor that is beautiful purple-blue-pink going one direction, and gray on the return. Mystery how it works, but I was a real chicken about walking on the grid five floors over space so didn’t take too long to consider it.

Filed Under journeys | 7 Comments

Mosiacs at Dallas International Terminal D

April 25, 2008

Never had much chance in Dallas to look at at art, but a three-hour layover gave me plenty of time to study a big collection of what they tell me is eight million dollars of public art installed at the International Terminal D.

I especially enjoyed a series of mosaics in the floor. These are photos of Jane Helslander’s “Floating in Space: A Waltz.” What is it about mosaics that are so intriquing? Is it the way the tiny fragments fit together to make a bigger image?

Here are some more photos on Flickr.

Filed Under journeys, other artists | 3 Comments

Annual Retreat 2008

February 16, 2008

I’ve been feeling kind of wordless lately, so here’s images from our retreat. Can you guess where these were taken? The full images are here on flickr. If you’re curious what our annual retreat is about, you can read more details on my blog from 2006 .

Filed Under journeys | 12 Comments

Mystery Trip

February 9, 2008

What do you pack when you go on a trip? This week the Illustration Friday theme is “Choose” so it seems appropriate that I’m trying to choose what to take. Whenever I go on a trip, I take waaayyy too much, and then when I get there, nothing matches, it’s the wrong season, or I spend most my time wishing I’d brought something else or shopping for something I’ve forgotten.

And what if you didn’t know where you were going? Tomorrow I leave on a mystery trip. I have no idea where to. I’d check the weather, but I don’t know were it is. The funny thing is, it’s kind of fun not knowing! Guess I should stop drawing and start packing.

Filed Under drawings, illustration friday, journeys | 14 Comments

Bemis Center Art Auction

December 6, 2007

I’ve been doing some small experiments lately to more closely bridge my drawing and work with cloth. This is a shoe I sat next to at the Bemis Center art auction a few weeks ago, a great place to see and draw lots of characters.

Based in Omaha, Nebraska, the Bemis Center is an artist-residency program in a historic downtown building with great galleries for exhibitions and community out-reach programs, and right across the street from Jun Kaneko’s studios and upcoming creativity museum ( a link to our visit there last year) and (and day two.)

The art auction was the slicked operation I’ve seen in a long time. It was packed, there was great food, open bar, and three sections of silent auctions, a buy-it-now room, and the live auction. It’s well supported by artists, because the artists can set their minimum, get 50 percent of the selling price (same as a gallery), and the Bemis provides education about the artist and unique creative experiences for many.

Of course the top dollar part was the live auction. If attendees wanted to keep the party going, they could stay noisy in the buy-it-now room, and still watch and bid over a big-screen closed network. In fact all the key staff were wired for communication, and before the end of the night, the silent auction items were labeled and bubble-wrapped for taking home. (update: just found out the auction raised a whopping $440,000!)

We bought a James Surls linocut, and something really big that we’re going to have fetch with a truck, so more adventures coming….Thanks Russ for the photos. Since I was so busy drawing, I didn’t have time to take any myself, except for this one. Uh, make that a truck and a trailer!

Filed Under journeys, other artists, quilts | 3 Comments

Last Minute Halloween Costumes

October 30, 2007

A couple of years ago, we were headed to New Orleans for a conference, and I wanted an easy-to-pack costume for Halloween night. I took a wig, costume jewelry and price tags, and that evening put the price tags on the jewelry and all my clothes. I thought I was a shop-lifter, but everyone else thought I was Winona Ryder because that was the year she was arrested for shop-lifting.

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Kobo at Higo

October 25, 2007

Kobo at Higo was my favorite stop on the last trip. Located in an old Japanese department store in the International District of Seattle, it’s named for the Japanese word kobo meaning “artist’s workspace.”

The Kobo gallery features an eclectic mix of changing exhibits of Japanese and Pacific Northwest fine craft (although I also saw some New York artist’s ceramics on the shelves), traditional Japanese merchandise artfully arranged, contemporary stuff like UglyDolls, and great kid’s books. They have a display of old Japanese folk toys, and when I peeked behind the partitions that said “employees only,” I could see all kinds of Japanese tins and merchandise left from old times.

The whole place filled me with a kind of quiet reflection on the history of the Japanese-American evacuation during WWII, and a nostalgia for my great-uncle’s pharmacy in old Japan town in San Jose. Adding to that feeling, around the corner is the Panama hotel, now tea shop, that features photos of Seattle’s Japan town of the 1940’s.

Just two blocks over is Kinokuniya bookstore in the Uwajimaya village — a great place to immerse yourself in Japanese art and craft books and all those funky Japanese stationery supplies.

Filed Under journeys, other artists | 2 Comments

Tacoma Museum of Glass

October 18, 2007

These are the Crystal Towers on the Bridge of Glass, which was designed by Dale Chihuly and architect Arthur Andersson to connect downtown Tacoma to the Museum of Glass. Inside this dramatic tower that looks like the space shuttle crashed into the earth is the hot glass studio.

On the other side of the museum, the gallery held the exhibit Mining Glass, featuring eight artists who did installations using glass, including Kiki Smith. Here’s an interesting article about her use of craft to achieve fine art by Chuck Close for Time.

I couldn’t take photos in the exhibit, so instead I wrote quotes from the artists in my journal. Since some of them were diametrically opposed to how I think and work, I thought they were worth some reflection.

“It’s useful to think that you choose materials just way you’d choose words.” Kiki Smith

“I want the meaning to be embedded so to speak, in the material that I’m using. I choose the material as an expansion of a concept or sometimes in opposition to it.” Mona Hatoum

“Once I realize a connection between concepts, then it’s a matter of finding a visual form that fits the idea…that image then gets stripped down so that there’s just the merest suggestion of it.” Teresita Fernandez

Filed Under journeys, other artists | 11 Comments

Olympic Sculpture Park

October 16, 2007

Sunday was a beautiful day in Seattle. The last sunny day, my friend Susan told me, for the next nine months, so a great day to tour the new Olympic Sculpture Park. It’s a zigzaggy park that switches back and forth, up and down over reclaimed brown fields surrounding the railroad that runs along Elliot Bay.

Here’s one of Calder’s stabiles (as opposed to his mobiles.) Look at the little bird perched on the very tip of the piece, which happens to be titled Eagle.

Serra’s powerful Wake was designed using computers and a demilitarized machine that once made French nuclear submarines.

But my favorite of the day was artist/furniture-maker/architect Roy McMakin’s landscape installation called Love and Loss. It’s full of verbal and visual puns — L is the high bench, O is the table, S is the lower bench, another S is a stair-stepping sidewalk. Look closely, the painted bark on the tree makes the V in LoVe - a tree that seasonally blooms and loses leaves in nature’s cycles, much as our own lives have such cycles.

You can see all the sculptures in the park on a flash tour on the SAM site, which thoughtfully shows the full park overview and where each piece is located

Susan drove us around town in her bright red Mini, to Uwajimaya for fresh crabs and oysters, and to her house to eat them. Also to Kobo on Capital Hill. If you embrace wabi-sabi like Christine, check out their cool site. Today I’ll try to get to the other Kobo to see the exhibit of wax and ink drawings.

Filed Under journeys, other artists, sculpture | 2 Comments

Happy Landing in Seattle

October 14, 2007

After a happy landing in Seattle, (and it’s always happy thing to get off a plane early AND immediately see public art at the gateway –these little fish and leaves scattered across through the floors make herding runaway luggage almost fun) we found the hotel and then Wasabi Bistro in Seattle’s Belltown.

There’s nothing like fresh Japanese food with lots of wasbi and jalepeno to clean out the nasty feeling that too many airplane snacks leave. The food is art too — I can just imagine this conversation, “Artist, oh, what is your medium?”

“Carrot,” he said. Would make a great Bugs Bunny episode, don’t you think?

Russ is here for this public art conference. He’s working a new sculpture blog about it, so hurry up, Russ and give me the address so I can post it for everyone (and see it too!)

Filed Under journeys | 3 Comments

Steven Holl’s Bloch Building

September 18, 2007

We’re just back from Kansas City and the new Bloch Building, the long-awaited addition to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. Steven Holl is a genius! The addition was so much more wonderful than I expected. As this New York Times review reports, much of the enjoyment of the building comes from the changing light of the translucent building throughout the day, but most dramatic was the late night view — although it would have been much better if the Henry Moore sculpture walk had also been lit for a night-time stroll.

What’s also great is the play between interior and exterior spaces like this section of the Noguchi gallery. What you may not realize at first is big chunks of the museum are buried underground, so you can actually go out a door, around a path, and next you’re on the grassy roof-tops of this gallery looking out over the sculpture garden and Kansas City below.

The Bloch Building juxtaposes the classical architecture of the original musuem, but the best part, in a time when some trendy museums are made more for the architecture and less for showing art, the Bloch Building shows the art admirably.

For more amazing interior photos, go to this Inhabitat article.

Filed Under journeys, other artists | 6 Comments

Taping for Quilting Arts TV

September 10, 2007

Here I am, a little surprised to be standing by the effervescent Patricia Bolton (Pokey) of Quilting Arts Magazine fame for taping of a guest artist segment for the new Quilting Arts TV that will soon air on PBS. I say surprised because it was a scary trip, through a massive three-hour the-sky-must-be-falling rainstorm that almost made us miss our plane. Luckily Russ took that race-car driving class in the rain last fall and was able to avoid a terrible wreck on a bridge, and luckily I had lots of sealing tape in the car so I could waterproof my cardboard box of quilts.

And luckily, we got to Cleveland in time to visit the tv studio and unpack my gear AND attend a couple of art openings, the 125th anniversary show at the Cleveland Institute of Art and another one at an artist-run alternative gallery called Spaces.

But the next morning, I realize I’ve brought waaay too much stuff. Not wanting to follow the tried and true formula for a step-by-step project on camera as was suggested, I brought a big quilt to assemble live so viewers could feel the excitement of seeing a project come together. Before when I did a documentary with PBS, I just acted natural, and they edited it later. What I didn’t realize, this time the process was different. We had to do it right in front of the camera in real time. Yikes!

Though I had pre-camera jitters and all the layers of studio makeup made me feel a bit like a Kabuki actor, Pokey and the producer were able to help me streamline and focus. In fact with Pokey’s gentle cues, we did the whole segment in one take. Yay! Only thing that to be edited out was my mistake at naming a certain product that goes by the initials of W.U.

Since I went first, I had the rest of the day to enjoy watching the other artists do their gigs, and Pokey do her in-between bits.

I loved the opportunity to study closely the work of Mary Ann Tipple who brought her series of “Things Your Mother Warned You About” based on vintage photos of her mom (now 92 but still on a bowling team) and dad — collaged, painted, and stitched on cotton duck canvas. I think this one is called, “Drinking.”

Here’s the other artists in the lunchroom — Laura Cater-Woods and Wendy Richardson — with guest artists like this and Pokey’s infectious enthusiasm, the show’s going to be a good one. Hiding in the back is Russ, the photographer of most all these photos. Thanks Russ! I wish Judy Perez who is also going to be on the Pictorial quilts episode with me could have been there, but she doesn’t tape until Tuesday.

Best of all at the end of the day, my quilts were in front of the camera and I was behind it — which I much prefer. But get a look at this camera — I felt like I was in some spacey sci-fi studio with that big camera zooming up, down, and close-in to animate across my quilts.

Filed Under journeys, media, other artists | 16 Comments

Upside Down

September 6, 2007

When I was a kid, I used to practice reading books upside down even though the other kids in my fourth-grade class thought I was weird and made fun of me. You see, I had read somewhere that to be a spy, you needed to be able to read well upside down so you could covertly read papers on someone’s desk while you were sitting on the other side.

Since I never got that spy job, I haven’t used that skill too much. But this week I’ve been practicing making a quilt upside down, because on Saturday I will have to do it in front of some tv cameras for the new Quilting Arts TV that will be broadcast on PBS starting in December. So now it’s time to take this project on the road.

Filed Under journeys, media, process | 7 Comments

Niki in the Garden

July 20, 2007

Occasionally a show comes along that so exciting and full of life, color and joy that it’s difficult to fit it into a simple blog post. This is true of Niki in the Garden at Chicago’s Garfield Park Conservatory. Over 30 larger-than-life sculptures by Niki de Saint Phalle are installed in the already wonderful greenhouses and gardens of the park.

Besides designing sculpture parks and theatre sets, she was also an actress and model. In a video of her life, she is shown doing a series of large assemblages with paint enclosed in plaster — she used a shotgun to shoot the plaster so the paint would explode across the surface of the piece. What a crazy lady! (and as always, I use the term ‘crazy’ with affection and admiration!)

Phalle is know for her multi-colored Nanas that boldly dance and sometimes even spout water. An exhibit placard explained Phalle’s inspiration, “Nanas are like goddesses to me, even superwomen of the sort, primitive tribes idolized. Perhaps they’re aggressive — that’s what some men think. They certainly know what they want, but they are warm, not mean.”

In addition to Nanas, there are huge totems, alligators you can climb, cats in which you can cuddle, man-chairs for sitting, and an amazing skull lined with a mosaic-mirrored interior complete with bench and delicious pearly teeth.

Phalle’s work is covered with seductive surfaces that are delight to examine closer because the materials are so well composed and crafted.

(click on any thumbnail for a larger view) After just seeing Cloud Gate at Millenium Park, I was intrigued by the coicidence that Phalle’s “Large Firebird on Arch” had a similar, and yet totally different effect. Like Cloud Gate, Phalle’s mirrored surfaces reflect sky and land, but in a fractured, more complex way. (far left detail above)

A couple of pieces in a quiet corner of a garden caught my eye. These pieces are not volumetric like most of the show, but are almost linear sketches in air, filled with small toys, symbols and objects. As in all her other works, Phalle shows a judicious use of color and detail.

Phalle says, “When my lungs were severely damaged by working with polyester, air came into my life. I had to learn how to breathe again, breathe deeply. The Skinnys reflect that change.”

If you have a chance, run, don’t walk to Garfield Conservatory before this show ends on Oct. 31. Plan on not only seeing wonderful art, but pack a lunch (or buy a hotdog for a buck) and enjoy the whole day.

And I haven’t even posted all my photos of the exotic plants and flowers. I’ll leave that to your imagination….

Filed Under Inspiration, exhibitions, journeys, other artists | 19 Comments

keep looking »

No, I haven’t taken up smoking…

Boutique Hotel for Pets and other SF Adventures

Mosiacs at Dallas International Terminal D

Annual Retreat 2008

Mystery Trip

Bemis Center Art Auction

Last Minute Halloween Costumes

Kobo at Higo

Tacoma Museum of Glass

Olympic Sculpture Park

Happy Landing in Seattle

Steven Holl’s Bloch Building

Taping for Quilting Arts TV

Upside Down

Niki in the Garden

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