Tag Archives for arts

That’s not a goldfish

Riusuke Fukahori goldfish from thisiscollasal.com

Riusuke Fukahori goldfish from thisiscollasal.com

It’s a painting. Japanese artist Riusuke Fukahori paints goldfish in layers of resin. This Is Collosal did a feature on him last year and they’ve got a video of his process on their website. It’s amazing how delicate they look. Even in the photos, the fish look like they’re moving. Painting on resin is something I’ve always wanted to try, but after seeing Fukahori’s sculptures, I’m just like, “Nope, that’s done. He did it the best. No point in anyone else doing it.”

by Riusuke Fukahori, photo by Dominic Alves

A Cup of Flower by Riusuke Fukahori, photo by Dominic Alves

If you want to see more, Dominic Alves has a ton of photos of Fukahori’s London show, Goldfish Salvation.

Felt owls around the world

My parents are traveling at the moment, probably because they enjoy making me shake my fists with jealousy. My dad knows how much I love felties, so he sent me this.

Dad: “In Estonia, felt, or wool, animals are selling for a pretty penny.”

These little owls are cute and creepy in nearly equal amounts, just like real owls. I shall now move to Estonia, to pursue my dream of felting owls full-time.

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.

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.

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.