San Diego Part 2: Seaweed

Yes, seaweed gets its own post. I've seen seaweed before, but never like this. This here is legit SEAweed, from the freakin' ocean. None of this lake business. It looked like aliens. Or sea spaghetti with a goiter. But it was quite pretty. There was a tropical storm that hit the day we arrived in San Diego, and I guess all the wind caused crazy waves which carried all this seaweed onto shore, and it was lying around in huge heaps everywhere on the beach and there were these giant trucks and fork lifts going around cleaning it up. It looks like it misses being underwater. It's not used to gravity.

San Diego Part 1: Art Stuff

Here is some of the awesome artsy stuff I saw during my week-long stay in San Diego:

By Leonardo DaVinci. We went to the DaVinci exhibit at the Air & Space Museum in Balboa Park. They had a bunch of models of his inventions set up for the main exhibit, but I was more attracted to the series of sketchbook drawings put up in one of the corners.

Awesome. Seen at Spanish Village Art Center in Balboa Park. I forgot the artist's name. It was something Russian-sounding. I'm so bad about writing things down... Sorry artist, your work is excellent!

This is a not-so-excellent photo of the small hot shop area that was set up at Spanish Village Art Center. No one was using it because the lady who ran it was ill the day we visited (go figure), but it's used to give introductory glassblowing lessons.

And here are a few corners of one of the galleries in Spanish Village. (Spanish Village Art Center is pretty sizeable. There are tons of little galleries to check out, and multiple artists per gallery.)

This piece was one of the ones that particularly struck me. I used to work mostly in 2 dimensional mediums, and this was a nice example of drawing in something that is normally a 3-d medium. I just appreciated it. Yeah, glass powder!

And here is a glass that I gave my brother for Christmas one year that I drank out of while I was there. That was nice. I love that I can give people functional things like bowls and glasses that I made myself and can actually be used on a daily basis, or at least frequently.

December '09 Alfred Senior Art Shows

Yesterday I worked a six hour morning shift, after which I returned home for approximately 14 minutes (my goal was 10) before jumping in the car again and heading down to Alfred to see the three art shows of the graduating seniors. I was not disappointed - the shows were stellar. Three of the five individuals showing were my classmates and friends in varying capacities, one of them was in my class, right from Freshman Foundations, and all of them are excellent people.

The first show I saw was Zac Weinberg's. The photo above includes his "Redundancy Lamp." I really admire his glass and neon work. He not only has the craft and the concept of his work really solid, but also the way he presents it. There were two girls, one of whom I knew by face but not by name, who were singing and playing the guitar with a neon sign behind them that flashed "Applause" after a song ended. (And they were really good musicians! I couldn't believe the singer's voice. It was fantastic.)


Obviously there were more things in the show(s) than I have photos of, but here is one of "Animal Goblets For Animal Cans" (I may not have the title exactly right since I'm recalling it from memory but it was something to that effect).


Next I saw was Bill Warner's show, which consisted of roughly shaped and beautifully textured ceramic work. The colors made me happy. And so did the raised-slip line drawings that stood out of some of the pieces! That was something I hadn't seen much of, if ever, before. They depicted outlines of people in various poses, my favorite being of someone in mid karate kick, which I didn't get a non-blurry photo of, but you can kinda see it in the bottom right piece two photos down.


Finally, I reached the excellent show of my excellent friend Wunetu Tarrant. She used lots of different materials in her show - cast glass, giant thrown-looking and hand-built pottery, cast bronze and iron, wire pieces, drawings, moss and rocks, to name the ones that are coming to mind. The giant pots/trees were crazy and larger than life, and even though she had many objects made from a lot of different materials in a limited space and her pieces varied drastically in scale, her show still felt unified. It was a visual feast!


Congrats Alfred BFA seniors! Your shows were killer!

Magical Felt

Check it out. I made some arm warmers out of a wool sweater I found at Goodwill, and they actually came out okay. I got the idea when I went into the city to check out some craft fairs (namely the holiday sale at More Fire Glass Studio and the Second Storie Indie Market at the Visual Studies Workshop) and there was a vendor selling things she'd felted from thrift store sweaters. Since I'm broke, naturally, I told myself "I could totally do that." And so I did!

The cut ends are not straight enough for my satisfaction yet, so I'll even those up soon, but these arm warmers are indeed very warm and cozy. It was hard to get a decent photo by myself, so bear with the not-so-great picture. But back to the process of felting... it's magical. I know I don't really have cause to be so mystified since the process makes a lot of sense - basically you just agitate and heat the knit wool until it's matted into felt, but it was so cool to just pop the sweater in the washing machine and 30 minutes later, BAM. Felt.

My next pair is going to have thumb holes.

Scissors & Glue

Things I have been cutting up: magazines from the 50s (Better Living), papers from my 2nd and 3rd grade box, and current science and art magazines. I really like the images from the 50s though, too bad I only had five magazines. My room is a mess again. Didn't take long. :P

Don't know exactly what I'll use any of the cutout images for yet. Just building up a stock of things to use should I want them, I suppose. Also, I found a bunch more fabric that would look awesome covering books. There is SO much fabric around! In the garage, in the barn, in my relatives' attics and basements - and I'm usually able to find things that are relatively old and sort of dated-looking, which I love. This latest fabric I found is a deep blue and rusty brown tie dye-looking fabric, with the dye-less areas being white. It probably looks a lot cooler than I'm describing it, it doesn't look like your run-of-the-mill tie-dye really. It's quite striking and almost African-looking. Anyway, I bought some board today to use for more hardcovers. I was using a bit of leftover board from a bookmaking class I took junior year, but that's all pretty much used up. The last of it went into the blue floral book in that last photo.

I really enjoy making these books, especially since I'm using cloth that isn't boring to cover them with. The only drawback is that I don't have an awl, which makes it a bit painful to put holes in the quires of paper (pages nested together). I use six sheets per quire, and shoving a sewing needle through them all six times with my bare hands gets irritating. Gnarly calluses, here I come! I think the normal number of sheets per quire is eight or twelve... but my poor fingers wouldn't do very well if I added another two or six layers of resistance. I gotta get an awl.