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Posts Tagged ‘artist’

Amtrak Artist Residency

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 16, 2014| 10 Comments »

Amtrak-trains-Boston

I love Amtrak, and I love writing, but I don’t think I am ever going to do an Amtrak Artist Residency, so I am passing along the info so you can apply. It sounds like fun. Just glimpsing the exposed backs of houses along the tracks with their hints of the private lives lived in them is inspiration for a ream of stories.

William Grimes writes for the NY Times blog ArtBeat, “The wheels have begun moving on Amtrak’s plan to offer writers a rolling residency aboard their trains. … Up to 24 writers, chosen from a pool of applicants, will be given a round-trip ticket on a long-distance train, including a private sleeper-car room with a bed, a desk, and electrical outlets. …

“The idea was born in December when the novelist Alexander Chee, in an interview with the magazine PEN America, casually mentioned his love for writing on trains, and added, jokingly, ‘I wish Amtrak had residencies for writers.’

“When Jessica Gross, a writer in New York, echoed the sentiment on Twitter, Amtrak arranged for her to do a trial residency on the Lake Shore Limited from New York to Chicago. She agreed.

“Her account of the trip, ‘Writing the Lake Shore Limited,’ published by The Paris Review in February, grabbed the attention of The Wire, The New Yorker and The Huffington Post. Soon after, Amtrak decided to turn the trial run into a full-fledged program.” More on when and how to apply.

Even before that series of events, there was the Whistlestop Arts Train, you know. I blogged about the rolling public art project by Doug Aitken last July, here.

Trains for dreaming. Holiday model train layout at Amtrak’s South Station, Boston.

model-trains-Amtrak-S-Station

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Swap Clothes with Grandpa

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on February 26, 2014| 8 Comments »

My husband likes to watch Link TV, which brings random news programs from around the world into our living room.

That is where he learned about Rojak Site, a funny website that collects offbeat stories. We loved this one about swapping clothes between generations.

“Artist photographer, Qozop, asked Asian youths to swap clothes with their relatives who are generations apart. It’s interesting to see how the older generations can still be found dressed in traditional clothing while the youths have opted for more modern Westernised fashion.

“Speaking about his work, Qozop said: ‘Basically, this idea for Spring-Autumn came about from a notion that though Asia has become westernised to a large degree, it is still possible to witness its traditions and cultures. And as an Asian society, our cultural beliefs are often reflected in our dressing. Fashion (other than wrinkles) is one of the best telltales of how old a person is.’ ” (Rojak’s source, here, was the Daily Mail in the UK. Click to see more photos.)

Our grandchildren will have to grow up a bit before we can discuss swapping clothes. The oldest is not yet four. (When Suzanne was four, she asked if she could have all my clothes when she grew up. One thing worried her, however: “You don’t have much shorts,” she said. She is more than welcome to my old clothes now that she is grown up, but for some reason, she never asks for them.)

Photo: Qozop

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Weekend Arts

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 23, 2014| 2 Comments »

Maser-Flanagan-quilt-Concord-Library

This was a weekend for looking at art. The quilts on the left are by Valerie Maser-Flanagan and are on display at the Concord Library. My favorite was the one with the vertical stripes.

My husband and I also visited Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum, back in action after being threatened with extinction by a president who lost his job over the ensuing uproar. I must say, the Rose presents some pretty inaccessible stuff, but the weird films by Mika Rottenberg were the highlight of the visit for me today. Mesmerizing.

The films carried me back to Kenneth Anger’s and Andy Warhol’s experimental movies in the ’60s. I didn’t understand those films either, but I was fascinated. Rottenberg’s kooky stories also was reminded me (my husband, too) of an offbeat video Asakiyume lent us recently called Cold Fever, which we loved. (Saying it was about a young Japanese businessman getting lost in Iceland in winter — on a quest to honor his dead parents with ceremonies he doesn’t believe in — hardly does it justice.)

Sebastian Smee at the Boston Sunday Globe has more on Rottenberg’s videos, and he covers the other exhibits, too.

Also this weekend, I stopped in at a gallery I like in Lincoln. They were featuring several interesting artists, including the photographer Leonard Freed, below. And they have other great work coming up March 4 — take a taste here.

Photo: Leonard Freed
From “Black and White in America” exhibit at the Clark Gallery in Lincoln. See review by Mark Feeney in the Boston Globe, here.

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Hanksy Spoofs Banksy

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 19, 2014| 4 Comments »

Kai the World Traveler and Titan of Industry knows the kind of story that catches my eye. He sent me this one from the New York Times about a street artist who spoofs Banksy, Tom Hanks, and a lot else.

John Leland writes, “This is a story about art in the age of social media …

“In April 2011, a law school dropout in Bushwick, Brooklyn, newly arrived from the Midwest, had an idea that he thought might make a splash. He admired the street artist Banksy; he grew up on the movies of Tom Hanks. Why not mash up the two?

“Using simple computer software, he downloaded a Banksy painting of a rat holding a paint roller, then added an image of Mr. Hanks’s face. The whole thing took 10 or 15 minutes to create. He printed a cutout and pasted it on a wall at Mulberry and Kenmare Streets in Little Italy, signing it Hanksy. …

“He photographed the wall for his Instagram and Twitter accounts, and emailed it to the Wooster Collective, a popular street art website. Then he went to sleep.

“ ‘And then it just went viral,’ Hanksy said the other day …

“RJ Rushmore, who runs the street art blog Vandalog, said he was among many who initially dismissed Hanksy as an opportunist. ‘I thought it was not art, not brilliant, just taking the stupidest ideas and presenting them in ways that were very friendly for Tumblr and Instagram,’ Mr. Rushmore said. ‘It’s not art in the sense of a graffiti writer who spent 15 years developing his style.’

“Mr. Rushmore has since warmed to Hanksy, for comic relief in a scene that sometimes gets too serious. ‘He makes the best cat videos,’ he said. ‘That’s still something to be applauded.’

“Ellen Lupton, senior curator of contemporary design at the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, said more was at stake in Hanksy’s visual gags.

“ ‘It’s more than a pun,’ she said. ‘Banksy’s work is hypermasculine and serious about its underground, tough, outlaw image. And Tom Hanks is just not that guy. So the humor is putting that identity on this hyper-butch material. It’s the revenge of the nerd.’ ” More.

Photo: Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times
Street artist Hanksy merged Banksy’s famous rat with Tom Hanks.

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A Surprise at the DeCordova Biennial

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 17, 2014| Leave a Comment »

2014-DeCordova-in-winter

On Sunday, my husband and I decided to see what’s new at the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln.

A favorite in the biennial show of New England artists was Laura Braciale of Manchester, NH. It took me a minute, but when I realized she had displayed everyday objects along with what they looked like once she had turned them into art, I thought, Yes, art really is in everything if you look.

The blurb about her says, “close observation reveals subtle differences between the three-dimensional structures and their two-dimensional renderings. …  Her works engage a question concerning representation—which image is more ‘real’? As both her items and her illustrations occupy the same physical reality, however, Braciale’s work suggests that neither is more real than the other.” (Sigh. I’m not really fond of the way museums write.)

In a different DeCordova exhibit we saw three tintype photo portraits by the late David Prifti, Suzanne’s high school photography teacher. (A solo show in Winchester, Mass., goes through March 2, here.)

The biggest surprise was a documentary about Laos, a country we are interested in largely because of the the mystery books of Colin Cotterill. (Read one of my posts about him, here.)

The film, Route 3, shows a small mountain town that, having been leased to China for 75 years, was utterly destroyed to make way for casinos, hotels, entertainments, and jobs for Chinese people alone. Hard to imagine selling a part of your country like that, but Laos is desperately poor.

The documentary was by Patty Chang and David Kelley, who live and work in Boston and Brooklyn.

The DeCordova says on its website, “Blending the genres of documentary and road trip films with surrealist cinematic passages, Patty Chang and David Kelley present a compelling trip through the physical and psychological landscape of a community in transition. … Enlisting the help of tour guides and local entrepreneurs in this tightly controlled area, the artists immersed themselves in this community to create a unique portrait of a changing society.” More information on the artists here and here.

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Artist Shows Her Work in Lowell

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 15, 2014| 2 Comments »

Artist Susan Jaworski-Stranc is having a show she’s calling Water Blues at Centro Restaurant and Bar in Lowell. The exhibit, which includes oil paintings and linoleum prints, runs to March 17 at 24 Market St.

If you can get to Lowell on Sunday, Feb 23, there’s a reception where you can meet the artist, 1 pm to 3 pm.

My husband and I have been to a number of art shows in Lowell, which is quite a creative community. Our favorite Lowell artist is a former boss of mine, Meredith Fyfe Day, who held down a newspaper job while she was artist in residence at the Whistler House. I worked for her at the Harte-Hanks community newspaper chain in the early 1990s.

Here’s the intriguing artist statement from Jaworski-Stranc: “I am a printmaker, specializing in the creation of linoleum block prints. After each successive printing of a color, the surface of the block is reduced while at the same time the printing surface is built up with multi-layered colors. Born from one block of linoleum, my relief prints have the nuance and rich textural surfaces of an oil painting.

“Although Picasso coined this method of working, a ‘suicide print,’ I rather think of this printmaking process as emulating the journey of life. While creating my prints, I am never able to re-visit past stages. I can only proceed forward with the acceptance of all good and not so good choices which were mediated and acted upon with the hope and joy of completion.”

When Asakiyume and I met in December at the Worcester Art Museum, there was an exhibit on printmaking that showed what prints looked like at each of the layering stages. Challenging work. I love that Jaworski-Stranc sees the printmaker’s role as accepting each previous stage and working with it. As she says, “The journey of life.” Another good topic for a poem.

Find out more about Susan Jaworski-Stranc here. And thank you, Vyü magazine, for the lead.

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Enter Your City-Improvement Idea

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on February 13, 2014| Leave a Comment »

congress st nook

The City of Boston has a nice opportunity for folks with ideas about making cities more livable.

The City says, “In Boston, a third of the land is open to the public. We invite you to reimagine that space. How can our streets, plazas, sidewalks, street furniture, and public buildings better serve people?

“The Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics Streetscape Lab is sourcing ideas from designers, makers, artists, and engineers to improve Boston. We are asking members of our vibrant creative community to submit project ideas to make our public spaces simple, intuitive, and literally awesome. Project ideas can be entirely new creations or a new way of using an existing product. The City will review the submissions and may select up to six ideas total to implement in the following categories:

“The Streetscape: sidewalks, streets, medians, plazas, and our other civic front porches. What improvements would you make to space? What is the next iteration of our classic street furniture? Look at the sample locations to get you thinking.

“Boston City Hall: rethinking the indoor and outdoor space, signage, improving service delivery and the user experience. These designs may help inform future improvements to the building.

“Random Awesome Designs: great ideas that defy classification or location.” Guidelines here.

I see no reason you have to be an artist or an engineer. What’s to stop you from sending in a good idea? Go for it.

Dewey-Sq-_farmers_market

providence author lovecraft

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Art Consultant Keeps Track for You

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on February 3, 2014| 4 Comments »


Lately, I have been following a very artistic art consultant on twitter called Liz Devlin.

Here is what her website says about her: “Since launching FLUX. in 2008, I have provided an online resource for local artists and Arts enthusiasts in the Boston area, and beyond. Through weekly event coverage, artist interviews, Open Studios recaps, and educational posts, the site enables readers to feel informed, engaged in, and connected to the pulse of Boston Arts.”

Here’s the part that floors me: “My 9-5 is in the corporate world as a Financial Analyst.” Gosh, how can she possibly have time for it all?

She continues, “My downtime, in-between times and restless nights are spent actively pursuing and supporting creative endeavors.”

A reason to follow her on twitter is that she keeps up on everything in the Boston arts scene for you. You can also check out weekly lists of events — with commentary — at her website. For example, here.

I especially like the nostalgic, off-kilter look of this piece in the current  Montserrat exhibit.

Art: Andrew Houle’s “Leaving East Gloucester.”
Montserrat College of Art Galleries, 23 Essex St., Beverly, Mass., through February 14

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Art the Tide Will Wash Away

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on February 1, 2014| 2 Comments »

Photo and Art: Andrés Amador

Much obliged to Paul for posting about this sand-painting artist on Facebook.

Andrés Amador, of San Francisco, creates lovely designs with a rake. He maintains that his work is “more about the process and less about the result.”

The website Viral Nova explains that Amador “uses a rope as a guide so that he can make the geometric patterns. … By raking up the wet sand at low tide, he is able to make contrasting sand colors.”

And he apparently takes orders — for marriage proposals (“Love Letters in the Sand”?) and even for corporate team-building exercises.

If I lived in San Francisco, I might ask Amador to create a message about something — maybe peace or kindness or helping the homeless. Some year, a sand painting could be my donation to the San Francisco-based Homeless Prenatal Program, an outstanding organization that Suzanne told me about.

Check out the collection of Amador’s other works is at Viral Nova, a site that bears watching.

Photo and Art: Andrés Amador
I caught my breath when I saw the inevitable happening to this painting. With sand art, it seems that “Ars longa, vita brevis” becomes “Memoria longa, ars brevis.”

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Swedish Artist, 1882-1918

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on January 10, 2014| Leave a Comment »

Photo of John Bauer: Wikimedia Commons

When I was poking around the web for art to illustrate my post Iceland Has Elves, I found a lovely picture by John Bauer.

I didn’t know anything about him. But Stuga40 wrote in the comments that he was Swedish. She knew where he had lived before his untimely death in 1918 and said she grew up on his fairy stories.

I decided I wanted to know more.

Wikipedia says John Bauer is “best known for his illustrations of Bland tomtar och troll (Among Gnomes and Trolls). Princess Tuvstarr and the Fishpond  [is] perhaps Bauer’s most notable work. …

“Bauer’s early work was influenced to a large extent by Albert Engström and Carl Larsson, two contemporaries and influential painters. Bauer’s first major work was commissioned in 1904, when he was asked to illustrate a book on Lappland. It was not until 1907 that he would become known for his illustrations of Bland tomtar och troll, the yearly fairy tale book.”

A contemporary story collection called Swedish Folk Tales uses Bauer’s illustrations and is available here. Also, someone posted a bunch of his illustrations on Pinterest, including a sweet Santa Lucia.

John Bauer art showing a boy and a troll: Wikimedia Commons

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Iceland Has Elves

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on December 22, 2013| 7 Comments »

Jenna Gottlieb of the Associated Press has a great story about elves.

“In this land of fire and ice,” she writes, “where the fog-shrouded lava fields offer a spooky landscape in which anything might lurk, stories abound of the ‘hidden folk’ – thousands of elves, making their homes in Iceland’s wilderness.

“So perhaps it was only a matter of time before 21st-century elves got political representation.

“Elf advocates have joined forces with environmentalists to urge the Icelandic Road and Coastal Commission and local authorities to abandon a highway project building a direct route from to the tip of the Alftanes peninsula, where the president has a home, to the Reykjavik suburb of Gardabaer. They fear disturbing elf habitat and claim the area is particularly important because it contains an elf church. …

“It’s not the first time issues about ‘Huldufolk,’ Icelandic for “hidden folk,” have affected planning decisions. They occur so often that the road and coastal administration has come up with a stock media response for elf inquiries, which states in part that ‘issues have been settled by delaying the construction project at a certain point while the elves living there have supposedly moved on.’ …

“Terry Gunnell, a folklore professor at the University of Iceland, said he was not surprised by the wide acceptance of the possibility of elves.

” ‘This is a land where your house can be destroyed by something you can’t see (earthquakes), where the wind can knock you off your feet, where the smell of sulfur from your taps tells you there is invisible fire not far below your feet, where the northern lights make the sky the biggest television screen in the world, and where hot springs and glaciers “talk,” ‘ Gunnell said.

” ‘In short, everyone is aware that the land is alive, and one can say that the stories of hidden people and the need to work carefully with them reflects an understanding that the land demands respect.’ ”

More.

John Bauer 1913 illustration found at nordicculturespot.blogspot.com

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Classic Poems Meet Graphic Art

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on December 11, 2013| 2 Comments »

I’m adding Julian Peters to the blog roll on your right. He’s a genius. A graphic artist from Canada who has chosen to illustrate some of the greatest poems ever. At least, some of my favorites.

Matthew Gilbert did a spread about Peters and his work on T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock” for the Boston Globe. Illustrations that could break your heart. I am in Matthew Gilbert’s debt for this gift of happy-sad. Read his essay, here.

Below are a few frames from Peters’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” by Keats, a poem I can’t read without hearing my father’s voice choke up on my cassette tape.

Go to Peters’s website, here, and luxuriate.  

Art: Julian Peters

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Steel Sculptures at Arts Center

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on October 12, 2013| Leave a Comment »

The other day I was walking past the Emerson Umbrella and saw some new sculptures  on the lawn. I thought one, the graceful bent metal below, looked like two people dancing.

Geoff Edgers of the Boston Globe came to town to watch the installation and interview the sculptor, David Stromeyer.

“Stromeyer, a Marblehead native who splits his time between Vermont and Texas, has had his work shown at, among others, the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., and the University of Vermont’s Robert Hull Fleming Museum, in Burlington. Stromeyer also has a connection to Concord. His sister-in-law, Mimsey Stromeyer, is a painter and mixed-media artist who is one of 54 artists renting space at Emerson Umbrella. …

“On the first day of installation, in the rain, Stromeyer and crew unloaded the steel pieces. The first challenge was lifting the heavy steel pieces over a series of wires on the site. On the second day, with the sun out, the artist worked on moving those pieces into place and mounting them properly. …

“He takes pride in the fact that he creates his art, from the twisting of the metal to the sandblasting and painting.

“ ‘It sounds really simple, but you don’t grab one end and turn it in the way you intuitively might think,’ he said. “[Each piece has] to be built incrementally, every inch, bending it in multiple directions at once. I spent two months building jigs for the hydraulic press to create those forms. And each twist is different.” More.

I’ve known Mimsey West (her professional name) for 30 years. One of her sons was in school with John. I love her art, especially some slightly abstract watercolors she did years ago of sheep in Wales.

A couple times a year the Umbrella artists hold open studios, and it really is a treat to go — lots of art available for one-of-a-kind holiday gifts.

waltz-of-the-sculptures

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Toronto: Ai Weiwei’s Nighttime Magic

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 9, 2013| 2 Comments »

Someone tweeted this today, and I thought you would like it.

Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has created a nighttime art installation made of bicycles all lit up.

On October 5, says Alice at the website My Modern Met, “Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei presented a new version of his incredible Forever Bicycles installation. As the centerpiece of this year’s Scotiabank Nuit Blanche, the all-night contemporary art event that takes over city streets, 3,144 bicycles, the most Weiwei has used of this work to date, were stacked 100 feet in length and 30 feet in height and depth in Toronto’s Nathan Phillips Square. This was the first time the installation has been displayed in an open air, public space. Since this was a night-time festival, it was spectacularly lit up with pink and blue lights.”

Check My Modern Met for a stunning array of photos, here.

Photo: http://www.mymodernmet.com

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Tree Stump Breeds Wildlife Art

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on October 6, 2013| 3 Comments »

This was posted at an Arlington blog last May, but I just saw the sculpture it refers to.

“You are invited to watch the ladybugs for the Waldo Park Tree Sculpture being made right before your eyes … Work by artists has already begun to transform a tall tree stump on the hill in Waldo Park … into multimedia sculpture that features local birds, animals and insects. The Friends of Waldo Park are holding two community participation days as this work is created. …

“Watch the metal-smiths at work as they cast aluminum ladybugs to be bolted onto the tree sculpture. Stop by for however long you’d like to see how metal-casting is done!” More.

Note the metal ladybugs crawling up the trunk, the bunnies peeking out from inside, and the hawk on top.

carved-hawk-and-metal-bus

bug-close-up

rabbit-in-tree-waldo-park

hawk-carved-from-dead-tree

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