Laura's Art Blog, Exploring the Material World

Hmm… There’s an interesting story (and slideshow) about the artist J. Morgan Puett in today’s NYTimes. How to describe…? The homesteading artist? She seems to be blending ideas from the high art worlds of fashion & installation with basic homemaking & historical preservation. I’m attracted to the homemaking & preservation part. Not sure what I think about the art world packaging. Looks beautiful though. Curious. I love the fashion. The whole thing’s an inspiration.

It’s an honor and a pleasure to announce the following events.

SISTER BEE at the Montserrat Encaustic Conference
Montserrat College of Art, Beverly, Massachusetts
Saturday, June 7th, 3:30 PM
Sunday, June 8th, 3:30 PM
Open to conference registrants. Wax-centric Q & A to follow.

SISTER BEE at Colorado’s Chautauqua Association
Chautauqua Community House, Boulder, Colorado
Monday, June 23rd, 7:00 PM
Open to the general public. Tickets $10. Panel discussion to follow.

SISTER BEE at the Heartland Apiculture Society’s annual meeting
Marshall University, Huntington, West Virginia
Thursday, July 10th, 9:45 AM
Open to conference registrants. Q & A to follow.

Honeybees love soapwort.

This sphinx moth does too!

I took these photos on Saturday – a perfect spring weekend day if I’ve ever seen one. This sphinx moth hung around for a full half hour sucking up soapwort nectar. (Check out that proboscis!) This was an unusual sight. They’re more commonly seen at dusk. It’s interesting to me how a bird (the hummingbird) and an insect (the sphinx moth) can share such similar forms.

Have you noticed? Honeybee and beekeeping imagery is popping up everywhere these days. Most of the bee images I see are cliches. There’s the bee covered beekeeper – quirky and alarming. The ubiquitous vintage skep – representative of honeybees in a friendly, nostalgic way. Good old-fashioned scientific illustration – elegant and mysterious. And of course – cartoon honeybees.

It’s rare to find honeybee imagery in art or graphic design that falls outside those four categories. But every now and then something looks different. Congratulations to the talented folks at the New York Times Magazine for getting the shapes and textures of the hive just so in last week’s fashion spread, Killer Bees. I love the way the photos evoke clusters and comb and the sensual luxury of honey without resorting to visual cliches.

Thanks to my dear and thoughtful friend Carmel Zucker for knowing me well enough to guess correctly that I’d LOVE this.

There’s a neat little slide show about Philip Guston on Slate. Can you guess which one’s my favorite?

Is this art? I think so. The first time I saw this piece I had no idea what I was looking at. (Thought I’d stumbled on some kind of post-apocalyptic, puppet inspired, two-person modern dance bit.) When I finally clued in that I was looking at a prototype of military robot it sent a chill up my spine.

Good art, when it’s perplexing or threatening, gives me that same feeling.

Happiness. My painting “Sleeve” made it into On the Edge, the juried show at the Montserrat Encaustic Conference slated for June. This is something I wanted very much but didn’t at all take for granted. It’s an honor and a relief to get in.

The theme – On the Edge – is a thought provoking one. Encaustic’s in the midst of a tremendous growth spurt and the medium’s gaining a reputation (deserved or not) for having a certain “look.” So the opportunity, through this show, to talk about edge pushing – new ideas, new looks, new movement – feels especially interesting. I can hardly wait to see the entire show!

What do you think? Do you agree there’s an encaustic “look?” Good or bad?