Category Archives: blogs and sites

blogs and sites, Inspirations, music + film

Dancing for Yourself via New Art

“Awesome, isn’t it?
Dancing for yourself is the best, and we all (?) know the feeling of something that is so good it should really be changing the world….

Now that we’ve gotten this far, you need to know something: this event was staged. The person dancing is a performer, and what you have just seen is an art project.”

Provoking thoughts about experience and performance, art and self, the public, the commodity, and the private, the everyday, the contrivance, and the sublime. This is the latest post from New Art, who does not write often, but is always worth checking out when he does.

Discuss with your favorite dance partner, or with a reflection of yourself in some large mirror.

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blogs and sites, classes + workshops, Inspirations

Spirit Cloth

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I am doing Jude Hill’s “What If?” textile workshop this year. If you aren’t familiar with Jude Hill, she is the author and maker behind the blog Spirit Cloth.

I have followed Jude’s blog for years and years…drawn to it by the photos of Jude’s powerful, storied textiles (she dyes, weaves, embroiders, and layers bits of raggedy, salvaged, vintage or distressed cloth into works that seem to embody so much more than aesthetics and a set of skills. They aren’t flashy, slick, or neat cloths, and you don’t see many of the gaudy commercial printed fabrics in her pieces. Instead you find these rich, frayed layers of earthy colors, and hand-worked stitches that are more like the sensitive, exploratory marks made when drawing, rather than the frilly, showy, vivid, loud stitches of, say, today’s crazy patchwork creations.

But more than Jude’s works, I am drawn to her words (and to the silences that pool, gathering like moon or morning light, around her words). She seems so earthy, and yet so unaffected by the frantic energies of the world. For me she embodies the archetype of the wise woman who lives in a forest outside of time…there she sits, dyeing her cloths in copper pots, stitching her beasts and her moons and her paths and her stories, watching the seasons change, feeding the stray animals that circle her home (drawn perhaps by her serenity and openness) and taking that Life, and incorporating it, so simply and yet so, so wisely, into her spirit cloths.

On her blog, she doesn’t screech her own ego all the time, doesn’t blow her own trumpet, doesn’t pull stunts to draw attention to herself. There are no blogger awards badges. There are no giveaways or product endorsements. There are no animated GIFs of pulsing hearts (thank God). There are no OMGs or LOLs in her posts. She doesn’t GUSH over every new thing that comes along…she doesn’t squander her love or her language on mere THINGS. Her words are few, and choice, and simple. Unpretentious.

All that. I am drawn to all that like you wouldn’t believe.

So I went to her, this year, at last…perhaps to learn a thing or two about the way she works…but mainly just to be able to sit, as it were, at her feet, like a student, like a disciple, and be very quiet, and listen to her. And hopefully learn a little bit more about how to become such an unaffected, meditative, imperturbable and self-possessed woman…doing my quiet thing, in the forest of my spirit, still in the world but no longer excessively of it.

When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.

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blogs and sites, craftiness, Inspirations, made with paper

Mini-eco’s pixel pop-up Valentine’s cards

'woodburned' valentine card

By far the cutest idea I have come across for a paper-engineered Valentine’s Day card has come from the blog minieco.co.uk by a clever lady named Kate. This 8-bit pixel heart pop-up reminds me of more than just old computer graphics…I can see counted-thread cross-stitch charts, lego, and kids’ wooden building blocks being used to decorate the basic heart shape.

mini-eco's popup pixel valentine's card

Mini-eco is choc-full of gorgeous paper projects like these pop-up Valentine’s Day cards. Each and every one is a must-do for someone who loves playing with paper and sharp objects! ;)
Photo: Kate from mini-eco.co.uk

I made a couple of plain versions, first, using the same sort of brightly colored card used in the original post, just to get the hang of all the cutting and scoring. The first one wouldn’t pop-up properly and, upon closer inspection of how the pop-up thing ‘works’, I found that there was a small error in the cutting and scoring template provided with the tutorial. If you just keep in mind that each vertical cut in the top-half of the heart has to extend down to meet the horizontal scoring line of the previous ‘step’, you will solve the pop-up problem. Another way to think of it is that each vertical line in the top-half of the heart should be three pixels long, not just two (as it’s shown in Kate’s cutting/scoring guide) and that you will have to extend the two-pixel-long cut downward by the length one more pixel…till it meets a horizontal cutting line.

Starting out with Kate’s basic tutorial for the pixel heart, I used a really fabulous Japanese paper that mimics pale wood…it’s so realistic that at first I thought it was just very thinly shaved wood veneer! It even has the fine, hairline streaks of silvery film, like you find in the grain of real wood.

I cut the heart, but didn’t do any folding until after I’d decorated it. I used a dark brown felt-tip marker to do a design that sort of reminded me of wood burning and folk art. I tried to use dots and hatching to give the design some contrast. Then I gently went over some parts with a colored pencil to mimic the slight smoldering that forms around the dark design areas when you use an actual burning tool.

Cut a slightly larger piece of dark burgundy card for the backing, and glued the pop-up card in place. And that was it…easy, and such a pretty card to look at…I have been staring at mine for hours, enjoying its chunky dimensionality and the illusion, from certain angles, of a burned Valentine made from a solid piece of wood. :)
'woodburned' valentine

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blogs and sites, DIY, stuff i've made

Cut Out + Keep

Pleated Paper Flowers
Cool cool! Am Featured member on Cut Out + Keep today. There’s an interview, some pics (you’ve probably seen before, here or on Flickr), plus a few of the more popular projects I’ve posted on CO+K over the years.

Thanks ever so much, Cat Morley and the rest of the folks who make CO+K such a great site for every DIY project you can imagine!

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art + design, blogs and sites, Inspirations, life, my friends, philosophy

via Ordinary Meditations: New Year Restart Meditation

Powder Blue Rainbow by Chati Coronel, 2012. From her SkinSkin exhibition.

I thought I would maybe start writing a post, now and then, about some of my friends. Hopefully they won’t mind!

My friends. You would like them. They are artists, directors, writers, art therapists, graphic designers, journalists, travelers, extreme sports enthusiasts, singer/songwriters, filmmakers, dancers, actors, playwrights, social workers, doctors, musicians…and they are all visionaries, aces in their fields, risk-takers and question-askers, ecstatic poets, seers and mystics. I feel extremely lucky to know these amazing, fiercely individual people.

There were nights, years ago and in Manila, when we would all manage to turn up at one place together: the energy, the vitality in the room would be a palpable force. Many a time, at these magical events, a quiet mood would settle over me and I would sit back from the conversation, look around the room at the faces of my friends, and be aware that I was witnessing one of the happiest moments of my life. At the time, I was convinced that the sheer concentration of vision, talent, quality and character gathered there would, most certainly, change the world…how could it not? I also knew that we would find it harder and harder to come together as we got older…that we would scatter, that we would each go off alone (or go in pairs) and grapple with the narrowed-down parcel of life before us.

Of all the things I had to leave behind when I moved to Australia, the nearness of my friends is what I most deeply miss and feel the loss of.

In all my group of friends, I am the underachiever. No, really, I’m not kidding and I’m not being self-effacing.

Chati

Artist Chati Coronel on saatchionline.com

“Soft human, open heart, mind on fire, walks with tender feet on the earth, laughing.”
—Chati describes herself.

Chati is a painter. A fantastic one. She is also a living doorway into stillness, mindfulness, cosmic harmony. She radiates joy, she treads the razor’s edge of the present moment, and being near her puts all your mind’s chattering, falseness and discontent to rest (and yet she is not some naive and prudish saint…her works are sensual; they revel in being alive, in womanhood, in wildness, in playfulness).

She also keeps a quiet, luminous blog, Ordinary Meditations, about her “quest for everyday enlightenment.”

The reason I wanted to introduce you to Chati, actually, is that she’s written a lovely end-of-the-year post about how she and Edber prepare for the New Year. She has, since publishing this post a couple of days ago, gone completely offline, as they begin a process of mind, body, and spirit cleansing, meditating, reflecting, and space clearing—of both physical objects and “old affirmations, old dreams, old goals. Melt away old pains, old issues with breaths. Go to zero.” I thought I’d share her post with you, in case you wanted your New Year’s rituals to amount to a little bit more than noise-making and a hangover on the first day of 2013.

Via Ordinary Meditations: New Year Restart Meditation.

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blogs and sites, craftiness, Inspirations

Fancy wooden journals by Kris

East Timorese man & woman carvings on merbau, with barramundi fish leather spines

Kris has written another book called Out of Census (his fourth! And I’m convinced it’s his best! More about that in the week) and we are throwing the official launch party on the 1st of February at the Darwin Visual Arts Association (although actual copies of the book are going to start circulating tomorrow…he’s sitting across from me, stitching signatures, as I type this!)

The launch will take place alongside an exhibition called “Publish, and Be Damned”, all about the joys, pains, and craziness of self-publishing, and of the world of books in general.  Kris has done a whole bunch of pen and inks that center on the theme of the writer and his muse, and is binding some very one-off journals, as well. A diverse gang of our creative friends will be participating in the show as Kris’ guests…I will try and do something along the lines of bookbinding and printing, too, if I manage to pull myself together in time.

The figures on the covers in the top photo are a traditional man and woman pair of carvings that we bought several of when we were in Dilli, East Timor for 2 months. They are carved from a single thick branch, and when we bought them, they were joined together by a short length of braided raffia. The leather on the spines of both books is tanned barramundi fish skin.

Here are some of the other journals Kris has made for the show:

wooden journals: mandala and dragonfly

Mandala and dragonfly wooden journals (above), made from ipil or merbau (Intsia bijuga).

Above and below: A book bound to fit the shape of a very large pair of oyster shells. Mother of pearl and barramundi spine.

And if you think these are different, well, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet!

via Kris’ post Fancy books.

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art + design, blogs and sites, Inspirations

And then, at some ungiven points, not necessarily at the end or at any sort of finale, the Holy-Flip happens. It could be a form, it could be filled with air or helium, it could be pretty far away from you, but still yours, still stemming from this surprizing head. You might say “things came into place”, but you have no clue what you are saying, you don’t have the perspective, you just enjoy it, the fact that now it seems clear, there is a connection, things are being said which you knew you wanted to say or wanted someone to say, some other head maybe.

And you know what? When it works, it’s so simple.

From the post “How It Works” by VVOI, on his blog, New Art —one of my all-time favorites.

And then, at some ungiven…

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amazing people, art + design, blogs and sites, Inspirations

The Art of Kris Larsen

Somebody please tell me whether you’ve seen any flying pigs recently?

I need to know, because my introverted, decidedly anti-technology husband has just started his first blog…and I was sure that pigs would learn to fly, first.

As the title suggests, the blog will feature the drawings and paintings that Kris does, mainly for fun, sometimes for exhibits and, lately, to illustrate the pages of the books he writes and self-publishes.

There won’t be much writing posted at his blog at all—he has been doing more than enough writing in the four books about his experiences as a philosopher-adventurer. Excerpts from his books are over on his website, Monsoon Dervish, if you’d like an idea of the content.

The very first post features 14 images about the joys and dangers of writing, intended for a 2013 calendar called The Writer and His Muse.

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