Tag Archives for art

True/False

Every year, my friends and I return to Columbia, Mo., like the salmon of Capistrano for the True/False Film Fest.

For the most part, it’s all documentaries and because it was started by a couple of guys out of a theater called the Ragtag, it’s always been scrappy and weird. I love this fest. I started going in my sophomore year and I’ve gone back every year since.

In the beginning, it was just a wee little fest, but now that it’s hit its 10th year it’s started to attract some big films. I saw about 10 (I think – things start to go fuzzy after your eighth movie in two days) great documentaries, from a chilling one about the Afghanistan war called Dirty Wars to a wonderful doc about back-up singers called Twenty Feet From Stardom. I like seeing tiny docs filmed on a shoe-string budget, but the nice thing about seeing big films is that I know they’ll actually get a theater run and other people will be able to see them and love them, too.

This year, I got to participate in the fest a little. I submitted a design for a T-shirt and it was accepted! I nearly died when I got the email, I’m telling you.

The T/F box office on Friday. The theme of the fest this year was (among other things) “the collective architecture of the impossible.”

My T-shirt design! Those are bower birds.

These are just a few of the marchers in the March March on Friday. It’s a scheduled impromptu march that anyone can join. This year there were fire-twirlers!

This was part of the T/F scavenger hunt put together by my friend Lauren. I understand that it’s making fun of hipsters, but I still unabashedly enjoy participating in some of the things on that list. The big question among our group: How much flannel is gratuitous?

Usually, there are Q&As with the directors and subjects of the films right after the show. Here’s one in the lovely Missouri Theater.

Ushio “The Boxer” Shinohara rocks a punch painting outside the Missouri Theater after a showing of his film “Cutie and The Boxer.”

Noriko Shinohara, awesome artist and the “Cutie” in “Cutie and The Boxer,” wore my shirt to her Q&A after the film. Pretty much a highlight of my life so far.

Here’s a photo of my favorite T/F tradition, the Buskers’ Last Stand, when a bunch of bands that played all over town for the fest get together to rock out one last time. That’s the lead singer of Run On Sentence right there. You should go check them out, if awesome music is important to you.

Wild geometries

Here are two prints I did in 2009, while I was living in Michigan’s upper peninsula. I was taking an art class at a little local community college, which turned into an independent study, which led to me being part of a committee to start a gallery in the college’s basement.

I moved on from that town, but being on that gallery team was great. We wanted to paint a room, put up lighting and host the kind of art displays we’d always wanted to see. We were a little judgy – this town needed some high-class art, and we were obviously the people who were going to bring it to them. But we were also just excited. We wanted to have a space open for people to try their own thing, a stage for music, maybe a projector for movies. Heck, we even kicked around the idea of a coffee shop.

I moved before it got past the planning stages and I wasn’t sure if it ever came to anything. But it turns out the group kept on. They opened the gallery about a year ago with a student exhibit of charcoal sketches. Very, very cool. I’m glad I moved, but I wish I could have been around for that gallery opening.

I did these two paintings with watercolor and Sakura micro ink pens. The gallery committee was talking about doing an exhibit that embraced the place where we were living, with its pine forests, deer and wolves.

It wasn’t all idealized wilderness. The deer had a bad habit of treating speeding cars like long-lost family members they wanted to hug and half the town was lobbying for the right to shoot the (endangered) wolves on sight. But if you let go of the gritty day-to-day reality, you remembered that there was a reason you couldn’t look away from these animals when you saw them, or get enough of hiking in those woods.

So deer, wolf. The extra lines are part of how I draw, and I thought they added a little movement. Then I added some geometric shapes, because, I don’t know, this was supposed to be a high-class gallery, and nature and geometry are a fancy pair because juxtaposing, or something?

I’d like to think that when professional artists are asked to explain the things the make, they sound as incoherent and full of nonsense as I do. But that couldn’t possibly be the case.

But I’m not a professional artist, so I don’t feel bad about saying: I think that deer painting would look great writ large on a T-shirt.

The case of the terrible garden

The garden still exists. But we’re currently in the middle of a drought in southwest Michigan, so my garden goes through droop-normal-droop periods. I’m hoping the fact that the plants all look pretty dead before I revive them with water doesn’t do permanent damage. It probably does.

But! There are other, worse culprits than an abundance of heat and a lack of water. Exhibit A: My planter of broccoli seedlings. Full of life when I stuck them on my porch and now leafless. Just sad green stems sticking out of the dirt. There was a little depression in the soil, almost like a comfortable little seat that a small creature might dig for itself before laying into the feast I planted for it. Last week, I caught said creature in the act.

So, here it is, one of the several reasons behind my failing garden.

Noooooooooo, tiny chipmunk, why?! There are so many other plants for you to eat. Well, there were, before it stopped raining.

So I guess my garden is keeping the neighborhood’s small adorable rodent population going during these hard times. Yaaaaaay I am so happy about that (that was written mostly with sarcasm, but there’s also a part of me that is legitimately okay with providing rodents with food. Don’t judge me).

I have more Garden Failure sketches coming up, because there have been (sigh) many more garden failures.

I’m sorry: Here’s an apologetic pen

I know I said I’d put up some pictures of my trip to the deer farm, but I’m not going to do that. I know, I know, you all were just dying to see them. Literally sitting on the edge of your seats, desperate to see pictures of me feeding crackers to deer. But I kept putting off writing the post, which is a pretty clear indication that I thought those pictures were boring as heck. Chances are you would, too, so bullet dodged for you guys, I’d say.

Instead I’ll show you a little drawing I did, part of a series I call Anthropomorphized Inanimate Objects, or AIOs for short. I’ve got a whole mess of ‘em!

Making of: I did a pencil sketch, scanned it into my computer, then opened it in Photoshop. I used a layer for the black line drawing and another for color. I’m just terrible at harmonious and/or interesting color schemes, so I googled “color schemes” and found colorcombos.com to help me out a little bit. I can’t remember if I actually used a color scheme off of it, but I know that it was great for zapping my poor, grayscale brain full of ideas.

Palm reading

Here’s a print I made about two years ago, when I was in the middle of a phase of randomly doodling henna patterns. The original is pencil and ink, which I scanned, then added a paper texture and orange screen background and painted the lines white and yellow. I think the henna patterns turned out, but the hands are a little hard to read.

Here’s the original. Clearer, but without the fancy paper texture and color.

Community art

St. Joseph, my current hometown, and Benton Harbor, it’s neighbor across the river, have many, many incredible public art displays.

It’s kind of a surprise, because these are not big cities. They are so tiny that when people call them the Twin Cities I have to stifle the urge to say, “Yeah, but not the real Twin Cities.”

The real Twin Cities are Minneapolis/St. Paul.

I try not to say that very often, partly because it’s rude and mostly because people don’t actually care.
But despite the fact that St. Joe and Benton Harbor’s downtowns are only about five blocks long, sculptures are everywhere.

It’s mostly thanks to the Krasl Art Center, an art museum in St. Joe, though both communities have come up with displays of their own.

My boyfriend lives near the Krasl, so I park in their overflow lot all the time. A few weeks ago, this appeared.

Title: Camper Top
Artists: Alex Gartelmann and Jonas Sebura
Location: Krasl Art Center, St. Joseph

When you park in the same place every couple of days, you stop really noticing it. So when this showed up — not there one day, there the next — it was like it just grew.

I kind of love it. It’s so otherworldly and weird. Like a house from an alternate universe where everything is just like here except 50 percent more whimsical.

It’s empty and I really want to put things in it, like small brightly colored pots and bird figurines, or something else strange.

St. Joe is a small, pretty sleepy town most of the year. It’s a vacation town. But every time I see this weird little house I’m happy to be here.

But what’s that blue thing on the right in the picture up top? That’s one of those things that you stop noticing when you see it so often. And that becomes part of what’s delightful about it.

Title: Connectors
Artist: Micki LeMieux
Location: Krasl Art Center, St. Joseph

This strangeness is just another part of my background. How great is that? My life is so full of weird sculptures that they can become as familiar to me as my own house.

This next one is right on the sidewalk outside the parking lot. Whereas Connectors and Camper Top were part of the Krasl’s Biennial Sculpture Invitational, I think this one’s just on loan. The artist is from Japan.

Title: Construction of the Breath
Artist: Kanri Nakani
Location: State Street, St. Joseph

I think I’d like to make a regular feature of St. Joe and Benton Harbor’s art. Krasl has 26 new sculptures set up all over the place just with this latest biennial invitational, so I’ve got a lot of material to choose from. Just wait until I get to the giant metal hippopotamus.