She Knit Her Hair

The best art is not expensive and not expensive. The best art is when you take what you got and you make something incredible. Xiang Renxian spent 11 years knitting her hair into a fine looking coat to give to her husband. Yes, honey.

http://www.ecouterre.com/chinese-woman-spends-11-years-knitting-coat-hair-from-her-own-hair/

Kirsty Mitchell's mother was dying, and she created this elaborate world using nearby locations and handcrafted costumes.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2145760/Wonderland-Kirsty-Mitchell-heart-breakingly-beautiful-photographic-series-memory-extraordinary-life.html

Retired Carthedral

Rebecca Caldwell's "Carthedral". Sooooo good.

http://www.carthedral.com/carthedral/

Vollis Simpson Whirligigs

I walked into a friend's house this week and there was a Vollis Simpson whirligig. I thought this couple was cool in the first place, but this took the hummingbird cake. It's like every day I get more Southern and feel more like laying down in a field of metal whirlygigs built by an old man in North Carolina. Please look at http://www.wilsonwhirligigpark.org to get the picture.

Vali Myers and Gianni Menicheti

My friend Jessika told me about this woman who had a pet fox and wore bright red hair and black eyeliner. She had a cage in her house that she liked to go into and a throne for the fox. She lived in Italy with a much younger man who was totally in love with her and over 100 animals in an enchanted, wild valley. They were both artists.

I developed a fixation upon hearing this. It turns out that I had Vali Meyers' picture on my wall, just by happenstance. I just finished reading her biography, written by Gianni Menicheti, whose artwork is posted above. Her is a short, inspiring video, if you have 9 minutes to spare:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tK1tflgkX8A

The Sketchbook Project

This is the sort of thing I would dream up, but never pull it off, because I don't have the resources or know- how (my head is FILLED with such projects!)....

"TOGETHER, THOUSANDS OF CREATIVE PEOPLE AROUND THE
WORLD ARE FORMING A TRAVELING LIBRARY OF ARTISTS' BOOKS."

A touring library of over 22,000 sketchbooks from over 130 countries and growing. Eventually they will reside in Brooklyn, New York.

I was happy to learn about this, but I never managed to turn in my $25 to get a sketchbook and participate. Wasn't I overjoyed when my dear friend Michael visited this weekend and BROUGHT ME A SKETCHBOOK! Happy, happy.

http://www.sketchbookproject.com/

Cornelia Konrads - Killer art in public space

http://www.cokonrads.de/

All of this artwork is by German artist, Cornelia Konrads. Imagine stumbling on this without warning.

Magical landscapes - I will take all I can get.

Here is a great article about a magic maker, word wrangler and "One Thousand Feathers" creator,  Raven Mack. A snippet:

How do you think being born and raised in Virginia has influenced your writing and other creative works over the years? Does living out in the country have a particular effect on your work these days?

I guess I am the product of where I grew up, which even more specific than Virginia is Southside Virginia, which is sort of the abandoned orphan section of Virginia, similar to Southwest Virginia except we have no mountains. But it fits because it’s a trash part of the state, and I am born from trash people. I enjoy living in the country because I can have stinky ass pigs and goats and chickens and broke down cars and jukeboxes beside the chest freezer on my front porch and nobody can say anything; though even where I live, which is allegedly rural as fuck, I have had complaints from the law-abiding, God-fearing assholes who live in proximity. It affects my work because I’m connected to that, though even when I lived in cities or couches or whatever, I tend to see the beauty in the grime, and the disgusting nature of the shiny. Not sure why that is.


http://rvamag.com/articles/full/17120/writing-you-can-stab-people-with-an-interview-with-raven-mackhttp://rvamag.com/articles/full/17120/writing-you-can-stab-people-with-an-interview-with-raven-mack

Carol Es

http://esart.com/projects/journal/http://esart.com/projects/journal/
"The Journal Project began in March 2004 and continues to this day. It is a continuous, stream-of-consciousness diary created on manila, hand-cut garment patterns. Using only pattern making pencils, inks, and stamps for manufacturing, I write or draw whatever comes to mind in the moment. The patterns shapes are prepared just as they would be for manufacturing, like when I was a kid working beside my father in downtown Los Angeles. Satirical textile terms, rants, poems, dreams, and anecdotes are included; personal worries about being an artist and working in the art world. It's a candid view into one artist's life. The pieces are then installed somewhat like a mosaic - shapes are pieced together in an aesthetic fashion and fashioned to the wall with colored sewing pins."

Thinking of Jerome Caja

I culled this photograph of Jerome from http://www.boston.com/community/photos/raw/2008/12/a_long_way_from_mayberry.html

I've been paying more attention to my dreams lately. And I woke up this week remembering Jerome Caja and seeing his work in San Francisco almost 20 years ago. I saw little paintings of drag queens done in nail polish on tin foil. Beautifully done. Campy and wise and wacky. He also used bottle caps, plastic ashtrays, liquid eyeliner, glitter and coal.

He was also a performance artist and a character.

Read more here: http://www.queerculturalcenter.org/Pages/Caja/CajaIntro.html

Plenty more of his racy art to be seen on the web

the good stuff at home

I came back from Chicago with Proximity Magazine.

Proximity is a magazine dedicated to contemporary art and culture.
Our mission is to amplify discourse on local and global art ecologies. We hope to serve as a map of artists, collectives and alternative spaces to commercial galleries, museums and universities ­as a means of connecting and cultivating sustainable creative communities.

http://proximitymagazine.com/magazine/issue-7/

I'm looking over a million rad ideas on the plane ride home, tons and tons of sites to look at, and there is my friend PATRICK COSTELLO.

http://ptackcostello.blogspot.com/

We just had dinner together two weeks ago in little old Charlottesville. He is one of the nicest, most fun people around. I knew his work was amazing. Turns out that his blog is one of the raddest and I think we need to do a project together pronto.

Here are some images. You dig?

Butch Anthony, *Sigh*

Go and look up everything you can find about Butch Anthony. He who makes life into art and magic down there in Alabama. This is the south I dreamed of and how I came to be here and why I will never leave.

"Mr. Anthony, a lanky and laconic 46-year-old who dresses exclusively in Liberty denim overalls (he owns 25 pairs) and a battered straw hat (he has 10), is a self-taught artist, builder and local hero, whom the state of Alabama once chose to make a Christmas tree ornament for the White House — the Bush 43 version. He is also the host of the Doo Nanny, the annual alt/folk art “micro” festival, as he calls it, that started as an “art party” he and two friends gave on the side of the road 15 years ago in nearby Pittsview, and moved to Mr. Anthony’s property here three years ago. " (New York Times)

http://www.museumofwonder.com/

Over 10,000 curiosities from around the world and beyond.

Admission
25 cents.

...and Counting:

http://wafaabilal.com/html/andCounting.php
Wafaa Bilal's brother Haji was killed by a missile at a checkpoint in their hometown of Kufa, Iraq in 2004. Bilal feels the pain of both American and Iraqi families who’ve lost loved ones in the war, but the deaths of Iraqis like his brother are largely invisible to the American public.…and Counting addresses this double standard as Bilal turns his own body – in a 24-hour live performance -- into a canvas, his back tattooed with a borderless map of Iraq covered with one dot for

each Iraqi and American casualty near the cities where they fell.

Love this magazine!

http://www.mulemagazine.com/

Worth a peek for a job well done!

Collage Crush

http://www.salaczar.com/collage.html

David Wallace. Love this.


Two facts - I am exhausted and I love these collages.

JR, French artist, wins humanitarian award

 

http://jr-art.net/

Quasi legal street art - images of the poor on the grand scale - a desire for the art to speak, not the celebrity

"Winning such a prize is a consecration for JR and a headache. He was refusing to give media interviews yesterday because he regards celebrity as an obstacle, even a threat, to his work"

The art of Richard Lange and Judith Selby Lange

In 1999 we started collecting plastic debris—carrying it away by the bagful— all from Kehoe Beach, a remote stretch of the Point Reyes National Seashore, in Northern California. Certain items would catch our interest: milk jug lids, combs, toy soldiers, disposable lighters, cheese spreaders from lunch snack packs. We were attracted to things that would show by their numbers and commonness what is happening in the oceans around the world.

The plastic we continue to find is not left by visitors; it is washing up from the ocean. Back in our studios we clean, sort and categorize the pieces according to color and kind. We use the plastic to make artworks including large sculptures, installations, photo tableaus and jewelry.

We are a collaborative team. Our love of nature is combined with our interest in science to produce an on-going series of art works about the oceans and the environment. While the content of our work has a message about the spoiling of the natural world by the industrial world, our final intent is aesthetic and celebratory.

Judith Selby Lang    Richard Lang

http://www.beachplastic.com/beach_plastic/What_and_Where.html

Collage Crush

http://www.warpart.co.nz/index.html
Warp Art - The collage Art of Peter Lewis

*Swoon*

Do a web search for Swoon street art and you will find her. Or on the cover of art news. Beautiful work.

SWOON is a street artist from New York City who specializes in life-size wheatpaste prints and paper cutouts of figures. Swoon, real name Caledonia “Callie” Curry, studied painting at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and started doing street art around 1999. Swoon is also a member of the Justseeds Artist Cooperative.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swoon_%28artist%29

Jaina Bee Pencil House

http://www.jainabee.com/pencil.html

Looking online/looking ahead to summer. We need some cool projects to do as family to get excited about. This one is too extravagant, but I'm glad someone did it!

Jimmy Danko

I started this blog at work with the idea of drawing together art, mental wellness and activism....because in a round about way that is what I do for a living (plus empty the recycling, track payroll, order take-out for long meetings). Sometimes I fantasize about who I will be in my next life, when I really hit my stride. Maybe I could move to Argentina and forget about winter, keep an illustrated journal, paint giant Bob Dylan and Frankenstein, explore abandoned carnivals, sport a soul patch...........but there is no point, because Jimmy Danko beat me to it!

http://www.jimmydanko.com/