Downside Up film at the Brooks on December 6 at 2pm

Sunday, December 6 | 2 pm
Downside Up
Can art make an impact on an individual, a community, a city? With the majority of its downtown deserted, many people had given up on North Adams, Massachusetts, until MASS MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art) located there and breathed life back into the community. The Brooks Museum collaborates with the Urban Art Commission to present this moving documentary about how art can bring the tentative, dangerous notion of hope to a city widely viewed as hopeless.

Stay afterwards for a discussion on how art makes a difference in Memphis with representatives from the Urban Art and Center City Commissions.

Tickets: Free for members; $5 for non-members.

2009 Crabs

I have finished painting crabs for this year:

caritas

Image Swirl

http://image-swirl.googlelabs.com

Here is a great new tool for digging through source images for your next art piece! So far by using it I came across images of coconut crabs, which grow to be up to 30lbs and climb trees. Yikes. I'm not painting those!

WiiSpray

seaweed crab

I look forward to discussing this in class tomorrow

Recently my Foundations classes watched and discussed Persepolis, the 2007 animated film based on Marjane Satrapi’s autobiographical graphic novels of the same name. We compared the film to the graphic novel, in which Satrapi translates the important events of her life into a series of narrative images. Many of us concluded that the drawings in Persepolis often communicate ideas about what was going on in Iran at the time more effectively than the translated idioms.

Now we're doing a project called Found in Translation.

In this project you will consider an important event in your life and translate it into a work of art. You are encouraged to use some of the techniques we have practiced in this class to compose your project. To brainstorm, you are encouraged to use mind-mapping (like we used in the Fused Interest Project). To research, try analyzing works of art, music, or literature that are related to your idea (like we did in the Place a Jar Project). To execute your project with superior craftsmanship, use the standards we established in the perfection project.

Part of the restraint in the project will be to share your idea without narrating during the critique.

I hope this TED lecture by Chimamanda Adichie adds another layer of interest to the discussion.

Caritas

Like Milan Kundera wrote, "How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!"

With all of that said, I hope you'll make it out to Caritas Village in the upcoming weeks to see the First Annual Peace Exhibition. The reception is Friday, December 4 and I'll have a couple of little watercolors on the wall.

Fred Stonehouse this Thursday Night

November 19

A major figure in Wisconsin art, Fred Stonehouse, nationally recognized for his beautifully executed artwork and witty sense of rebellion, will give an artist lecture at the University of Memphis in Meeman Journalism Auditorium on Thursday, November 19 at 7 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.

Born in 1960 in Milwaukee, Stonehouse received his BFA from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee in 1982. His style has a sophistication that reflects his diverse, cross-cultural interests, and outsider and folk art influences. Often encompassing religious or surreal contexts, his paintings are a materialization of his nostalgia for the familiar and not so familiar art of the past, blended with his own delicate balance of humor, beauty and derangement. Stonehouse has been featured in many solo and group exhibitions across the country as well as abroad. His exhibitions have been reviewed by publications such as The New York Times, Art in America and Art News, as well as internationally in Die Welt.

Stonehouse’s paintings and prints incorporate haunting portrait heads with antique motifs. His portraits are “transmuted self-portraits.” Often, Stonehouse adds strange characteristics to the faces, an alligator-like snout or a worm-like body. Commenting on Stonehouse’s most recent work, Jessica Baran of the St. Louise Riverfront Times notes: “Borrowing elements of carnival sideshow banner motifs, the iconography of Latino and Northern Renaissance religious iconography, and vestiges of spray-painted street art, this Wisconsin-based artist illustrates a world of self-mythology that is at once wistful and phantasmagoric.” She continues to say that while “whiffs of the flat, crude but essentialist brand of rendering associated with folk artists inform the work, Stonehouse’s paintings and drawings are anything but unstudied or incidentally realized. As a whole they read as a familiar epic long retold with the assurance of maturity, in which the idiosyncratic details merit more patient attention, and the broad strokes of childhood angst are subdued into melancholy lyricism.”

terrifying towels

Dear lord. I can't get this image out of my head.

I think that means I have to put it into a painting.

Do they look like an army of toy tanks to anyone else?

Sarah and Sunny are having a show!!!

The Sunny and Sare show features oil painting, drawing, sketchbookery and installation...

Opening reception is on Friday, November 20 from 5 to 7:30 p.m. The exhibition will be on display at the Art Museum until January 9, 2010.

AMUM is located in room 142 of the Communication and Fine Arts Building. Hours are Monday through Saturday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. except University holidays and between temporary exhibits. AMUM will be closed from December 21, 2009 through January 3, 2010. Admission is free. For
more information call (901) 678-2224 or visit www.amum.org

This is what I look like when I'm teaching:

Kathryn Hicks carved this skull out of basswood for our Foundations I class and caught a picture of me with my teaching face on.

manifest calls for entry: Burb and the Drawing Annual

B U R B

An International Competitive Exhibit of Works
Exploring Zones of Living

Postmark Deadline for Entry: December 11, 2009
For more info. visit:
http://www.manifestgallery.org/lists/lt.php?id=bUoCVgRRBFkEGlIDUBoDCwRX


Exhibit dates: January 22 - February 19, 2010

By the end of the twentieth century, suburbia became the place where over
half of all Americans live and work. More than just an American phenomena,
however, cities around the world have birthed an “outer ring” of
domesticity, interconnected by nodes of consumer options and web-like
traffic systems. This formational landscape of backyard BBQs, super-size
shopping boxes, mini-vans, and cul-de-sacs is the terrain upon which many
artists work today (while others respond from an urban distance). Through
various contemporary visual art forms, artists are creating work that
documents, explores, celebrates and criticizes these particular zones of
living.

Manifest invites work in any medium that responds – positively, negatively,
or neutrally – to this modern construct: suburbia.


Postmark Deadline for Entry: December 11, 2009
For more info. visit:
http://www.manifestgallery.org/lists/lt.php?id=bUoCVgRRBFkEGlIDUBoDCwRX


______________________________

INTERNATIONAL DRAWING ANNUAL 5

A Competitive Annual Publication of Works of Contemporary Drawing
and Writing about Drawing

Cash awards totaling $1000


Postmark Deadline for Entry: December 31, 2009
For more info. visit:
http://www.manifestgallery.org/lists/lt.php?id=bUoCVgRRBFkCGlIDUBoDCwRX


Hardcover and perfect bound books available: Fall 2010

The International Drawing Annual is an extension of Manifest's Drawing
Center activities. Its goal is to support the recognition, documentation,
and publication of excellent, current, and relevant works of drawing from
around the world.

A natural question will be "what is drawing?" and that is exactly the
question the Annual is meant to investigate from year to year. Therefore
submissions are expected to vary, including a range of drawing types, from
the most academic to the most experimental, but all with some relevance to
the artists' honest understanding of the practice of "drawing."

With the inclusion of a call for writing about drawing Manifest eagerly
pursues a deeper understanding of how drawing is realized, discussed, and
interpreted in contemporary society. Works of writing will be selected to
complement the artwork chosen for inclusion in the publication.
Participants may submit artwork, writing, or both.

To learn more about the Annual series, artists included, and previous prize
winners, visit:
http://www.manifestgallery.org/lists/lt.php?id=bUoCVgRRBFkDGlIDUBoDCwRX

Postmark Deadline for Entry: December 31, 2009
For more info. visit:
http://www.manifestgallery.org/lists/lt.php?id=bUoCVgRRBFkCGlIDUBoDCwRX

Memphis Botanic Garden Sketches

a little derainged?

The Creative Jar

Nashvillager Jodi Reeves, who writes The Creative Jar, featured my playground collection on her blog!

Julie Püttgen Lecture Notes

So you missed the Julie Püttgen lecture last night, but you're going to her opening at Material tonight and you don't want to feel bewildered? Well, I'm sure these notes will really help.

Here's what I was thinking during the lecture:
1. I'm glad I don't have an umlaut in my name.
2. Cloudmapping! I do that! I totally do that! . . . wait, I used to do that. I should do that again!

3. I wonder if she raises chickens . . . she keeps talking about egg tempera. I guess you probably can't travel as much as she does if you have a coop to clean out every day. I wonder if I would rather have chickens or plane tickets to India?

4. I'm definitely going to the Atlanta aquarium during Thanksgiving and they had better have an alive Whale Shark.

5. Is houseboating a verb?
6. This work is really morbid--one second we're talking dead whales, then pancreatic cancer, then brain cancer, then monsters who are hopelessly longing. Why are there so many hopeless monsters in these paintings?
7. How do you spell tanka? Thangka?
8. What kind of a person drags her husband, five ponies, and four staff members around India for the sake of a few paintings.? Could these paintings have been made without the investment in adventure? Maybe--but then this talk would be so much less interesting. Someone should make a movie about Puttgen's life. How can she have done all of this and still look like she's about 25?
9. When she starts talking about collaboration I can't help but think about the tortured metaphors my husband and I use when we talk about how extroverts and introverts are like vampires and batteries. I wonder if Püttgen is a vampire (extrovert) or battery (introvert). She totally intimidates me, so I'm going to guess she's more of a vampire. Then again, she's explaining the ways that "empty space must contribute to collaboration." That's a pretty introverted thing to say. Later, when I ask, she refers to a New Yorker article about robots and refers to herself as a bossy cow.
10. WOW THIS PARADE MOVIE IS AWESOME I WANT TO HAVE IT PLAYING ON A LOOP IN MY STUDIO ALL THE TIME.
11. This work seems totally unaffected by pop culture.
12. I wonder what's in her "current recipes" folder on her desktop. Food or recipes for performance/installation art? Her artist statement describes recipes for artwork, but maybe it's a folder full of veggie lasagna tips and tricks.
13. She uses the title "They say that gold will last" and inside my head a high-school know-it-all poetry student is screaming ROBERT FROST ROBERT FROST NOTHING GOLD CAN STAY OMG SAY SOMETHING ABOUT ROBERT FROST!
14. I wonder if the nun "Perdita" has as much in common with Sister Corita as with Püttgen. I think I need to buy this book.
15. www.unlessanduntil.info. Who uses .info? That's totally awesome.


OK, now that I've looked over these notes I realize they're totally baffling. You'll be much better off preparing for the show by looking at Püttgen's artist statement.

Puttgen's really one of those "universe in a grain of sand, infinity in an hour" kind of artists. I wonder what universe she's building in Material today?

Front Page News!!!

Marathon Art Night

I'm thinking about trying to hit all of the shows I've been invited to tonight.

I'll need to start five minutes ago to get to them all before the last one closes:

Mud Molders United: Jones Hall 4:30pm

ANF Art Show: Concepts of Color 5:25pm

Julie Püttgen: "They Say that Gold Will Last" Material 6:00pm

Don Estes and Anne Siems at David Lusk Gallery 6:00pm

Jeri Ledbetter - Mano a Mano II L Ross 6:00pm

Memphis Matters 8:00pm (There's a huge chance that this is past my bedtime).
Playback Memphis invites you to an evening of stories about life and work in our beloved city. In a Playback performance, audience members tell stories from their lives, then watch as actors and musician bring them to life on the spot without script, score, or rehearsal. Playback creates ample opportunity for laughter, reflection, and dialogue. It’s compelling and entertaining theater—as well as an outstanding tool for community building.
All proceeds go towards bringing the Playback experience to communities in need. We are currently partnering with local non-profits MIFA, Porter Leath, and Victims to Victory.
Two shows ONLY. This Friday, November 6th & Saturday, November 7th at 8pm. General admission $15. Students and Seniors with ID $12. TheatreSouth (1000 South Cooper).
ALSO, SATURDAY NIGHT SHOW 2 @ 8PM
FOR RESERVATIONS AND TICKET INFORMATION
264-0841 / INFO@PLAYBACKMEMPHIS.COM
LIMITED SEATS AVAILABLE
RESERVATIONS STRONGLY ENCOURAGED
CASH AND CHECK ONLY
Playback Memphis is generously supported by Arts Memphis and the Tennessee Arts Commission and lots of amazing Memphians.