Took a trip to Boston with the family this week. Really excited about all the inspiring design, applied art, folk art, and colonial era wallpaper in the new Art of the Americas wing.
I really really wanted to buy both of these but I was on a budget so I had to pick just one. You’ll have to come visit our house to find out which one I got!
it has recently come to my attention (again) that my passion for organizing things in rainbow order sometimes freaks people out. here I offer two examples of art that celebrates the chromatically obsessive urge.
Andrew just sent me this link, an awesome video made in Buenos Aires. Wall paintings and graffiti and stencils and street art is one of my favorite favorite things about Buenos Aires. It is everywhere and it’s out of control and it’s interesting and beautiful. Also, incidentally, I am feeling in a great mood. Not sure why, it’s a cold gray rainy day out there but I’m feeling proud for having survived the past thirty years and excited about the day ahead of me.
Robert Rauschenberg died on Monday. I remember going to see the Rauschenberg retrospective at the Guggenheim museum in New York during my first year studying textiles at Parsons. Our drawing teacher Karen(?) brought our class to see the show and she talked about how Rauschenberg’s paintings are related to textiles; they’re about treating the surface, rather than creating an illusion of depth. He was one of my first favorite modern artists. I love that he uses old things, scavenged and salvaged. Here’s a quote:
“I really feel sorry for people who think things like soap dishes or mirrors or Coke bottles are ugly,” he once said, “because they’re surrounded by things like that all day long, and it must make them miserable.”
WOW. mike sent this to me. we were talking about it and we figured that if you had a simple computerized knitting machine, such as the Brother model Mike had back in the usa, then you could make up your animation on the computer. You’d have to turn each frame of the animation into a picture. If you have the right software, you can turn each picture into a knitting pattern, which you can download to the knitting machine computer console. Then the knitting machine sets its needles to make the pattern automatically, so you just need to move the carriage back and forth and back and forth, until you’ve knitted each frame of the animation!
I really loved coming across each one of these artists on the internet and I love them even better when I look at them next to each other. As far as I know, the two artists are totally unrelated but clearly they have an aesthetic connection. I want to make things that are this beautiful!