The Root Girl: May 2012

Monday, May 28, 2012

Eye Candy

I'm an artist. I love looking at other people's art. All kinds of art. With my media-hopping, enthusiastic pursuit of any and all things that inspire me, I consider myself to have artistic ADD. As I make this page, I realize that there are just too many artists that I love. I think I'll have to do a series of these in the future. These are (just) a few of my favorite thiiiiiiings:

(p.s. I've taken care to only post photos that are labeled free and clear to use and share, so there may be better examples out there that you can click on the links to explore.)

Painters:

JMW Turner

His sweeping skies and tumultuous atmospheres make these paintings feel like abstractions, but the addition of a small, simple boat or a subtle horizon line plants us back in reality.

Claude Monet

I think you'd be hard pressed to find someone who doesn't have some affinity for Monet. His paintings are soft as fur, and he communicates a well-rendered object with broad, loose strokes. What a guy.

Mary Cassatt

It's not easy being a woman in the Impressionist boy's club, but Mary did it and did it well. Her colors remind me of icing on a cake, and her images are simply sweet, easy, and peaceful.

Gustav Klimt

In college, I had "The Kiss" hanging above my bed and I just fell in love with Klimt's flowing, organic shapes, shimmering colors, and strangely proportioned people. He brings so much character to the stories he paints.

Alice Neel
Neel has a way with depicting anxious situations and awkward people that I greatly identified with as a teenager.

Wayne Thiebaud
Thiebaud paints the most delectable desserts and amped up landscapes. I love love love his use of color, especially on the white rabbit and black shoes. Amazing.

Banksy

This mysterious graffiti artist is pushing our understanding of graffiti and what it can do. Highly artistic and site-specific, his pieces belong in a museum. And sometimes he puts them there.

Jenny Saville
Her pieces fall into the "attraction/repulsion" category for me. Fleshy women, sometimes marked up like topographical maps, are unappealing and yet beautifully done in patchy skin tones of soft yellows, blues, and pinks. They are visceral and intriguing.

Ceramicists:

Magdalene Odundo
Odundo's vessels are brilliant and strange, like neon internal organs. They are inspired by traditional African forms with a contemporary twist.

Adrian Saxe
Saxe's vessels are unapologetically odd, yet at the same time exuberant and rich.

Ayumi Horie
Horie's pieces are functional and artistic, filled with finger-marks and sgraffito animals with little pops of color.

Chris Staley
A college professor of mine, Chris is a brilliant potter, teacher, and writer. His design is minimal, and filled with meaning. I have been forever altered by his influence.

Jake Johnson
A grad student when I was an undergrad, I always looked up to Jake and the interesting work he was doing alone in that special studio with its very own door. Recently I have seen his work in galleries and stores in my area, and I love the playful direction his forms are taking.

Cristina Pellechio
Her works are at once intricate and playful while their repeating elements may be read as biology or design. I am especially enamored of her wall pieces. I feel as though this is a direction I have been exploring at turns.

Dick Lehman
More than anything, I love this potter's openness to share his experiences and his techniques. He wrote a wonderful article for Ceramic Arts Daily that basically calms the fears and supports the artist in transition. His work itself is like poetry.

Photographers:

Diane Arbus

I love Arbus' flare for the depicting the fringes of society with sensitivity. As a photographer, her gaze is not judgmental, nor completely objective. Her photos show her identifying with these people more than anything.

Ansel Adams
Crisp imagery of nature at its finest - soaring mountains, delicate trees - all in stark black and white honest to goodness film photography. To think that he was able to achieve these photos while lugging the necessary equipment to great heights in the back woods is even more amazing. No Photoshop here, folks.

Karl Blossfeldt
A champion of the small, the natural, the magnificent. Blossfeldt's photos make a simple weed into an important design, rich with form and value.

Immogen Cunningham
Her work is so varied - Cunningham moves effortlessly from the microcosms of natural design to heartfelt portraits. Her photos offer a sense of feminine softness as the subject responds to her, and she responds to the subject.

Robert Mapplethorpe
Strong composition, extreme contrast. All around gorgeous.

Websites:

www.ceramicartsdaily.com
Hands down, this website and its optional email newsletter keep me sparked. They are always introducing a new technique, book, or artist with great free videos and downloads. Sometimes it's easy to feel all too alone in the home studio, and this website helps me feel connected to other artists.

www.jpgmag.com
This website features lots of inspiring contests, galleries, and projects for the photographer of nearly any level of ability. People can comment on your photos or even vote for them to win you monies. Yeah!

http://www.artcyclopedia.com/
A great place to do your art history research by artist, movement, time period, etc. The links to works go to the museum websites where the pieces are housed. An oldie but goodie.

http://www.pbs.org/art21/
A lovely high-end educational resource for especially contemporary working artists. Profiles are organized by themes such as "identity," "balance," and "history." They make DVDs with episodes featuring the artists often in their work spaces.

http://www.photography-now.net/
This is the place to go to discover your new favorite photographer. Great web design and easy to navigate.

www.zapplication.org
Your one-stop shop as a burgeoning artist looking for places to show. You can fill out all of your information and upload pictures of your work here, then take a look at deadlines for show applications all over the country. They even send you email reminders if you want them to.

www.artfinder.com
Don't know who your favorite artists are but you want to sound intelligent/pompous at the next social gathering? Go here to explore and make your own collection!

My Manifesto on Food

All right, people – here it is: My Manifesto on Food. “Finally!” you’re thinking. I know. So after much reading and researching and gnashing of teeth (I really need to start wearing my night guard), I’ve decided to purposefully ingest poultry. Now, I’m not breaking up with vegetarianism, we’re just reassessing our relationship. It all started with an inkling. Actually, the whole vegetarian thing started with an inkling back in college. A vegetarian roommate, the mystery meat in the dining hall, and the dizzying heights of being an individual left to my own devices all got me thinking that maybe I should give this vegetarian thing a try. Here and there I might have the rogue meatball, but I remember the moment when I couldn’t finish my chicken quesadilla at a nearby eatery. “No more!” I declared in my mind. It didn’t taste very good, and moreover, it didn’t feel good. With vegetarian fare, however, I found that I could fully enjoy and indulge in every crunch, chomp, and moosh of buttery asparagus, or mashed potatoes, or lovely mixtures of couscous and curry. Truly, vegetarian foods are varied and so tasty, packed with flavor and invariably healthier. That is, if you’re managing to avoid the weeknight shuffle of “Eh, let’s just get a pizza” or cobbling together of various starchy cheesy chemically bits and pieces. After a full day of work, I find myself more often in this predicament than in one where I am measuring my protein, B12, and Omega 3 intake. Energy levels go down, coffee intake up. Now, coffee is a wonderful and delicious ritual, but I’d rather it give me a bit of a buzz rather than keep me simply puttering along. When I first switched to a vegetarian diet, I enjoyed numerous benefits of clearer skin, feeling lighter all around, and yes, a bit of pride and moral righteousness. Now I find myself more easily run down and it is very difficult to feel sated even when I’m full.

The ideas posed in Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle turned my mind inside out. After eight years of vegetarianism, I was finally forcing myself to pin down why I was eating what I was eating, and Kingsolver brought up a point about the basics of nature. Put simply, there is no food without demise of some sort. Even in my garden at home, worms get accidentally chopped in the well-meaning planting of a vegetable. Mass production of soy beans for my delicious sausage replacements take over entire ecosystems, kill various creatures (wasted deaths), and propagate the use of pesticides while their shipping across the country uses up polluting fossil fuels. It suddenly made the most sense to compromise with myself. Desirable food = as local as possible, as simple and whole as possible, and as healthy and natural as possible. I also decided to trust what my body was telling me. A new intense concentration on the memories of roasted chicken plagued my mind. Could I really do this? Kingsolver brings up a point about local farms producing animals that have had happy lives, access to fresh air, and far better deaths than they would have at the hands (paws?) of a wild animal in a less-agricultural setting. Things started to click. Here is my current list of ideal foods:

Vegetables and fruits – locally grown, in season, eaten with wild abandon while the gettin’s good.

Mild fish – sustainable, low-mercury, wild, rich in Omega-3s…generally this will involve eating as low on the food chain as possible (i.e. sardines) and opting for less popular choices (so long tuna and flounder).

Poultry – free-range, pasture-raised, organic, local chicken mostly. My vegetarian lifestyle has prepared me to settle for nothing less. I don’t need meat so badly that I’m willing to have another being suffer its whole life away in a cramped dirty cage for me. I’m voting with my money as to which farming method I prefer for this country.

All of these things are ideally provided by a local farm that has figured out its own natural process of self-sustenance. If you haven’t done so already, I highly recommend that you read about the process of Polyculture farming. To give a basic overview, sing this to the tune of “Dem Bones”: The grass grows in the pasture, the pasture feeds the cowsies, the cowsies poop on the pasture, the chickens eat up the poop seeds, the poop gets spread as manure, the manure in turn feeds the pasture, dem farms dem farms dem farms.

Miss Booky Pants

Normally I don't have any particular theme to my course of pleasure reading. Of course I have "categories" on my bookshelf - horses, art stuff, novels, Calvin and Hobbes anthologies - but nothing has come close to the amount of reading I have done of late on (I'll label it after my internet bookmark of the same name) Farmy Things. This encompasses everything from people who start farms to people who think about food to people who like to eat. Call it what you will - the Slow Food movement, Farmer's Marketeering, dirty hippie talk (shakes fist) - but I can't get enough of it. And I want you to read these books, too. And then I want to talk about them with you.

There's something to be said for the practicality of these books and this way of thinking. It's a sort of do-it-yourselfery that comes during a time of increasing industrialization, technical takeover, and zombie apocalypse anxiety. For me, it has recently become even more entwined in my life for vegetarian concerns and how to eat in the most logical, moral, and ecologically friendly way. So for whichever is your particular concern, I hope you read these books (cue Reading Rainbow theme music):

The Last American Man by Elizabeth Gilbert

This is the book that started it for me. Elizabeth Gilbert (more famously known for Eat, Pray, Love) gives us a glimpse into the world of a man who charts the course of basic human civilization for himself. He lives in a teepee, makes his clothing out of animal skin, eats from the wild, and eventually acquires his own little slice of natural paradise. There's also a smattering of his emotional pitfalls, which only makes this book more enjoyable to read.

The Dirty Life by Kristin Kimball
Oh, I love this book. I love it so much. Here is the personal memoir of a self-described city girl who gives up the excitement and ease of NYC to make a home and a whole-diet CSA farm with her country boy husband. I think this was my first exposure to the idea of vegetarian gone locavorian. More on that later.

Growing a Farmer by Kurt Timmermeister
A restauranteur turned farmer in search of the perfect food to serve his customers and himself. I would love to go to his onsite restaurant one day.

The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan
How had I not known about Michael Pollan before? His books were recommended to me by my good friend and partner-in-obsessive-food-research, Siobhan. He's the go-to guy if you want to understand where food comes from, and what you need to consider in eating healthy, ethically and eco-friendly. I don't know that he ever takes a strong stand for one particular avenue, but he raises and explores the questions of hunting, foraging, and farming. A must-read.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver
A recommendation from another small farmer, this book is a lovely combination of memoir, statistics, and recipes. A family moves from the parched, water-importing land of Arizona to the lush hills of Appalachia to attempt a year of local food eatery. The way Kingsolver describes her relationship with asparagus had me eating it ravenously for days. This book shows not only that everything has its season, but it also blew my mind 180 degrees to consider the effects of vegetarianism in ways that I had not previously considered. Again, more on that later. Comes with a neat website, too! www.animalvegetablemiracle.com

The Root Girl