LOLCAT – Maybellene – Needz Anythingz Dusted?

Thanks to our cat Maybellene for being such a good sport (and thanks for dusting under the couch!)

 

Three new “Day in the Life of an Artist” videos

Three new videos from my ‘Day in the Life of an Artist’ video project where I am making 288 five minute videos that when seen together will comprise 24 hours of my life. Checking out the graffiti wall at hampshire college, looking at barred owls, and contemplating water flowing over a dam.

 

 

#23 – Making a Prismacolor Chart

This is another video in my video project – A Day in the LIfe of an Artist. I am making 5 minute videos of different times in 24 hours. There’ll end up being 288 videos when all is said and done in a few years.

This is me making a chart of the colors of some Prismacolor pens I bought, so when I want a certain color I can quickly find the right pen. I am using the pens for a special project.

In the background is the Style Wars outakes from the DVD. At the end is Dondi saying how cool it would be to make a film following a young graffiti writer’s progress. I highly recommend the Style Wars and Wild Style DVDs because they have great commentary tracks, outages and interviews. The Blade interview in Style Wars is inspirational.

Northampton Art Walk – January 13, 2012

My art walk started a little early – at lunch I found this yarn owl on the bike path on the ‘yarn bomb tree’. It was nice to see some new yarn creations in town. It was an auger of how much I was to enjoy the art walk later that night.

It was windy and cold – the kind of cold that makes you start planning where to go inside next as soon as you step outside.

At the Center for the Arts there were two show. One was of photographs by the recently retired Gazette photographer Gordon Daniels. The photos were fun to look at – I found myself looking to see if I knew the different locations and trying to identify them based on the buildings or the scenery in the background. There were a lot of people at the show. I think I recognized the mayor of Easthampton.

In the other gallery was a show of watercolor illustrations by Danny Quirk. These were really well done. I’m always amazed at how realism works – how up close you can see all the layers, the brush work, and it seems so simple, but from a few feet back all of that vanishes, and it just looks super-real. Art is just an illusion. There were also marquets for each painting, which included a drawing and color studies and notes about symbolism, light and other details. It was cool to see them.  There were these giant berry-like things with the regular cheeses and things in the buffet. They looked like gigantic mulberries. I was afraid to try one.

At Thornes there were some drawings by Michael Childress. They were interesting abstract drawings. Heather and I both liked the same one so we got that one. It has a kind of timeless quality. Michael mentioned to Heather that he has some of his paintings up at the Dirty Truth, so I plan to go over there and check them out. He also had these decks of hand-drawn cards and you could lay them out. Heather was raving about the sweet potato things on the food table catered by Paul and Elizabeths.

At the Trailside Gallery on Strong Ave. was a great show by our friend Todd Sinclair who we hadn’t seen since we lived in Boston. His show was oil painting, color studies, most of them he used an angel as a theme to improvise with. They were really cool and it was a nice experience to see them all together filling the room. I really felt mesmerized by the paintings. I have a portrait he did of me from in Boston, probably from 1994. All I can say is that if you are reading this go over to the Trailside and check out his show.

Then we headed over to Foe where there were some really amazing porcelain sculptures and drawings by Coby Ellison. The process he has to make them (I kind of understood how he explained it) is really intricate and involved. He glazes them and fires them 7 times. They have a look to them that is really unique. There was some old school industrial noise playing while we were there that reminded me of Boston.

At this point it was snowing and really windy and cold so we headed home. I had seen the stuff at the Oxbow by Phil Lawrence and Lydia Kann Nettler earlier in the week, so we just headed home. It was way too cold to walk over there, or over to Market Street to see what was happening there. Anyway, this was really one of the best art walks–we bumped into a ton of the regular  ’art walkers’  we always run into, and that is always fun to compare notes and say hi.

An International Art Collaboration with Lizzie Watts

Back in 2010 I did this watercolor of a caterpillar . . . 

. . . then in January 2011 I received an e-mail from Lizzie Watts (also from Leeds–the UK one). She was then a student studying art & design and prepping for her A Levels. One of her class assignments was to create an ‘appreciation piece’ and she had picked my caterpillar picture that she found on this blog.

Here is some of the art she made in poster paint & pastels for her assignment . . .

I love her version. She really captured the spirit of the caterpillar. I feel like the background is the aura of the caterpillar.

She imagined the butterfly based on the caterpillar. I think it is fantastic. It really conveys the essence of looking at butterflies, one of my summer pastimes. 

The good news is Lizzie got into Leeds University! 

Here are some of the pictures from her show . . . I really like everything she did. One of her abstracts looks like early Kandinsky, which I think is the best Kandinsky. The dresses are great and I love the zebras too. 

these look like warhol butterflies come to life.

 

#020: 1:35 – 1:40 p.m. “Drinking a Soy Latte at Northampton Coffee”

Another exciting five minutes of my life. Here I am drinking a soy latte in Northampton Coffee.

If I had been sitting in a different spot and started ten minutes later, then Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth would have been in the background. I see him in there all the time. I keep forgetting to keep a sharpie with me all the time because I want to ask him to sign my iPod. I had Evan Dando from the Lemonheads sign it, but it is starting to wear off.

I have some videos of Evan performing solo at Flywheel that I have to edit together and put on youtube. That’ll probably be a future five minute video – “Editing video of Evan Dando performing at Flywheel” That way I can put in that footage, but still keep this to one long take for each video which is the only rule I made for myself.

It was so warm for so long (all December) that I finally got my bike out of the basement. Then today was about 15 degrees and I lost my gloves. So I rode my bike to Deals and Steals and got a new pair. Walking downtown at lunch takes too long. twenty minutes compared to 4 or five on the bike.

 

#019: 10:40 – 10:45 a.m. Riding into town on my bike

I’ve got to figure out how to make a steady cam. I think I saw an article once on how to make one. I got a gorrilaz tripod thing that hooks onto the bike handles. It is amazing how that little music in the intro makes something so ordinary as a bike ride seem so cool. They say video is 80% audio. So true.

I was taking advantage of the warm weather to see if there was any new street art up in town, because I want to put a cap on all the 2011 pictures and start 2012 fresh. I am still cataloging 2011 pics. I have 4250 pictures from 2011 of street art in Northampton. I am thinking of just data-dumping all of them onto my flickr. It is easy to do from iPhoto. But I might try and be a little bit more organized and make different sets for the different names and then make one big collection. I don’t know seems like a lot of work. At least I am going to go through them all once more and star all my favorites. just to be clear, I am documenting (not creating) street art.

Anyway here is #019 from my A Day in the LIfe of an artist in 288 videos – 10:40 – 10:45 a.m. “Riding into town on my bike”

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