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Here’s something warming for the end of January. It’s artist, Maira Kalman’s illustrated tribute to Inauguration Day. My favorite image? Hard to say… They’re all so full of lush, chunky color. Great writing too. Enjoy!

Have you ever wondered what’d happen to your garden if you let things go for awhile? How long it would take for the weeds and critters to take over? Well, dear reader, wonder no longer! Alan Weisman has written a strangely alluring book, The World Without Us that explains, in gross detail, what’d happen to the planet & its occupants if humans just poof! disappeared. I just finished reading the art chapter and it totally shifted my conception of the word “archival.”

Without giving away Weisman’s surprising prognosis for the survival of human culture I can tell you…

• That sculptors working with traditional materials own the word “archival.”

• Artwork made out of ceramic or bronze has the best chance of lasting through millennia.

• Ceramics are a lot like fossils. “Unless you smash them, ceramics are virtually indestructable.”

• Paintings are fragile. “Unless they’re hanging in 4000 year old pyramids with zero moisture, within a few hundred years of neglect, paintings on canvas will be a dead issue.

Hmm…

Snowdrops are blooming. I took this picture last week. They’re like a month early. Beautiful, though.

Two hunks of honeybee propolis 1/22/09

There’s a neat article about honeybee propolis and HIV in Secrets of the City. For those unfamiliar… propolis (a.k.a. bee glue) is a sticky substance made of tree resin by honeybees to coat and protect the inside of the hive. It’s got potent anti-viral and anti-bacterial properties. It’s wonderful, lively, fragrant stuff.

My favorite quote from the article:

There’s this peculiar relationship that exists between bees and certain individuals. It’s primal and ancient. There are rock paintings of the interaction between humans and bees in Europe, Africa, and Asia from 8000 to 2000 B.C. That’s how far back this goes…

- Marla Spivak

Amen.

Surf, encaustic & ink on panel, 5″ x 4″

It’s been a computery few weeks! I’ve been hard at work updating my website. The most exciting addition, I think, is a new gallery labeled “current” at left with 21 new paintings for you to peruse. You’re also invited to check out my new homepage (the image changes whenever you reload) and info about workshops. Phew!

Thanks to my pixel partner, amstec, for so gracefully keeping me in the 21st Century.

Praise song for the day.

Each day we go about our business, walking past each other, catching each others’ eyes or not, about to speak or speaking. All about us is noise. All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din, each one of our ancestors on our tongues. Someone is stitching up a hem, darning a hole in a uniform, patching a tire, repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.

A farmer considers the changing sky; A teacher says, “Take out your pencils. Begin.”

We encounter each other in words, words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed; words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark the will of someone and then others who said, “I need to see what’s on the other side; I know there’s something better down the road.”

We need to find a place where we are safe; We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain, that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle; praise song for the day. Praise song for every hand-lettered sign; The figuring it out at kitchen tables.

Some live by “Love thy neighbor as thy self.”

Others by first do no harm, or take no more than you need.

What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national. Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt grievance.

In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun.

On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp — praise song for walking forward in that light.

- Elizabeth Alexander

Commemorative chapbook offered by Graywolf Press on February 6th, 2009.

And congratulations to street artist, Shepard Fairey, whose Andre the Giant stickers plastered my Boston neighborhood in the early 90’s.

His portrait of Barack Obama was unveiled at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington on January 17th.

Christina’s World by Andrew Wyeth

Andrew Wyeth died in his sleep last night at 91. There’s a beautifully written obituary in (of all places) my hometown paper, the Daily Camera. Here’s another, with more detail, from the NYTimes.

Having grown up in Maine, the place of many of Wyeth’s paintings, his reputation always loomed large for me. I developed an early, unabashed love for his paintings, unaware they were at all controversial, or out of step with the times. His paintings of grass, hair, anything flossy, are enthralling. Golden. He was an inspiration.

I do an awful lot of thinking and dreaming about things in the past and the future — the timelessness of the rocks and the hills — all the people who have existed there.

- Andrew Wyeth

Just got word… there’s a single space available in the Beginning Encaustic workshop I’m teaching at Creations Art Space in Boulder on Saturday. This’ll be my second time teaching at Creations. It’s a wonderful space lovingly tended by my friend, Eva Maier. I look forward to being there.

Beginning Encaustic at Creations Art Space
Learn basics of encaustic painting in this playful, hands-on workshop. Topics include:

- The tools and equipment of encaustic painting
- Health and safety in the encaustic studio
- Where to buy encaustic painting supplies
- Texture, transparency, transformation!
- Layering paper into your paintings

Each student will have the opportunity to work on three encaustic pieces; two samplers and a medium square painting.

Date: Saturday, January 17th, 2009
Cost: $90 plus a $15 materials fee
Size: Maximum 8 students
Register: Here

Archway from the Darb-i Imam shrine, Isfahan, Iran.

As a passionate observer of nature’s patterns (plant symmetry, honeycomb, etc…) and a long time migraine sufferer I found this article by Oliver Sacks fascinating. It hints at the idea that there’s some kind of universal/chemical truth underlying all instances of geometric pattern and it has something to do with how we’re physically made.

A choice quote:

“There is an increasing feeling among neuroscientists that self-organizing activity in vast populations of visual neurons is a prerequisite of visual perception — that this is how seeing begins. Spontaneous self-organization is not restricted to living systems — one may see it equally in the formation of snow crystals, in the roilings and eddies of turbulent water, in certain oscillating chemical reactions. Here, too, self-organization can produce geometries and patterns in space and time, very similar to what one may see in a migraine aura. In this sense, the geometrical hallucinations of migraine allow us to experience in ourselves not only a universal of neural functioning, but a universal of nature itself.”

I’m not sure exactly how this works but the demo caught my eye. It’s a new video game in which physical properties are applied to crayon drawings. Mesmerizing, eh?


Crayon Physics Deluxe trailer 2 from Petri Purho on Vimeo.

Here’s something I thought you might find helpful. It’s a blog assessment flow chart courtesy of the U.S. Air Force. It outlines a simple protocol for handling feedback – both positive and negative – comin’ atcha from the web. I love how it turns a project rife with emotion & complication (managing the online reputation of a business or idea) into a set of clear, tidy actions.

ben•thos
noun Ecology
The flora and fauna found on the bottom, or in the bottom sediments, of a sea, lake, or other body of water.

DIRIVATIVES
ben•thic
adjective

ORIGIN late 19th century: from Greek, ‘depth of the sea.’

A New Pair of Shoes, encaustic, ink and gold leaf on panel, 10″ x 8″

The painting above is part of a group show – Emerging Artists – hosted by Boulder’s Open Studios at the University of Colorado starting next week.

Date: January 14th – February 11th, 2009
Time: Wednesdays 9 AM to 4 PM
Location: Andrew J. Macky Gallery University of Colorado, Boulder.

Poets, Painters, Puddings

Poets, painters, and puddings; these three
Make up the World as it ought to be.

Poets make faces
And sudden grimaces:
They twit you, and spit you
On words: then admit you
To heaven or hell
By the tales that they tell.

Painters are gay
As young rabbits in May:
They buy jolly mugs,
Bowls, pictures, and jugs:
The things round their necks
Are lively with checks,
(For they like something red
As a frame for the head):
Or they’ll curse you with oaths,
That tear holes in your clothes.
(With nothing to mend them
You’d best not offend them.)

Puddings should be
Full of currants, for me:
Boiled in a pail,
Tied in the tail
Of an old bleached shirt:
So hot that they hurt,
So huge that they last
From the dim, distant past
Until the crack o’ doom
Lift the roof off the room.

Poets, painters, and puddings; these three
Crown the day as it crowned should be.

- Richard Hughes