Hair as straight as sticks, dreams as frail as bog cotton, and eyes as big as plates.

September 18, 2015November 2, 2016 ~ Katy Kelleher ~ 1 Comment

On the internet, this series of photographs has gotten a lot of attention under the headlines “Old Finnish People with Things on Their Heads,” which, while funny, really obscures the purpose of these strange pictures. The series is actually called “Eyes as Big as Plates,” a rather beautiful name, if you ask me. Originally inspired by Scandinavian folklore, the series has grown to cover people living in New York, Japan, and Iceland. It’s the creative work of photographers Karoline Hjorth and Riitta Ikonen and while I do think it’s peculiar and humorous, I also think it’s a wonderful depiction of human dignity, just people being people in their natural environments. Sure, we don’t typically adorn ourselves with windswept sticks and stand atop a cliff… but why not? It’s not like I do anything better with my days.

I might just be in sleepy fiction mode, but each piece feels like a writing prompt to me.

Ilisia, the goddess of nightmares and daydreams, wonders whether she should claim credit for her most beautiful creation, the nightmare that incubated in an Englishman’s head until it was ready to spring forth, fully formed on Ilisia’s gracious loom, from his tingling fingers. Oh how she loathed the need for a human conduit! “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks,” she whispers into the air, a fine mist of spit spraying from her cracked lips. “You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout, till you have drenched our teeples, drowned the cocks!” Her voice lowers to a rumble in her throat, barely audible, but the birds listen still: “Nothing will come of nothing.”

Marvin lay down for a little rest in the wood behind his house. He thought he could find his way back easily—if not by sight, then by scent, for his wife Nona had been making Borscht when he left and the savory red smell lingered in the air. Sadly, when he awoke, he could smell no stew and see no house. All had aged, for faeries trick time and men who stray from the hearth are seldom mourned.

“Who are you looking for?” the man asked. “Oh no, Lars is not here. I am Otso and I am a bear.” He took a piece of dried rabbit out of the pocket of his trousers and began to gnaw at it, making the most disgusting noises as he ground and gnashed his old man teeth. For a moment, his headdress slipped, and I’ll tell you this, my friends: He really did look just like Lars.

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Fanciful work: Inside the studio with children’s illustrators.

September 14, 2015September 14, 2015 ~ Katy Kelleher ~ Leave a comment

If you, like me, get the Sunday night blues, here’s something that might get you excited for the work week: inspiring photos of artists at work! Photographer Jake Green spent the past year documenting children’s illustrators in their studios and the results are intimate, sharp, and cool. The above picture is of Katja Spitzer, a Berlin-based artist, drawing one of her colorful creatures. (If you’ve got little ones, take note: her book Let’s Go Outside is so cheerful and bright, I bet kiddos would love it.) I always enjoy seeing how creative types work, and Green’s photographs make me feel like I’m peering through the window, spying on their process (but in a nice, admiring, non-creepy way… is that possible?) Take a closer look here.

Because they’re beautiful: Here are three neon love letters.

September 8, 2015September 9, 2015 ~ Katy Kelleher ~ Leave a comment

1. Fionna Banner – “Be There Saturday Sweetheart”

This 30-foot-tall neon sign was constructed in 2000 on the top of the New Art Gallery in Walsall, UK. I don’t think it’s there anymore, but I don’t know for sure. What I do know is this: The simple statement comes from the love letters of artist Jacob Epstein to Kathleen Garman. Although she was married to another man when she met Jacob, Kathleen fell in love with the sculptor and eventually left her husband for him. They stayed together until his death. Despite the rocky start (or perhaps because of it?) their letters are filled with sweetness and light. “With you I have every joy and every happiness,” Jacob wrote to his lover. “My nights are my worst time. I lie awake and think of you. Last night, Sunday, was wonderful moonlight and I thought of you, picturing how you were, how fascinating you looked on the balcony beside the lake in the moonlight and the lantern lights… I am always yours Kitty. Be there Saturday sweetheart.”
2. Robert Montgomery – “The People You Love”

Truth time: I’m making this list today because I’m in a melancholy mood. I have a migraine hangover and my brain is fuzzy and unwilling to focus. I feel like a ghost of myself. I’m being lazy and wallowing—I’ll admit that.

But don’t let that take away from the art, because all three of these pieces are wonderful, lovely and haunting, modern and retro, sweet and sad. Artist Robert Montgomery created this piece after the death of a close friend. For him, ghosts are a positive force, a way of keeping in touch with the people he has lost. “I find the idea that love can somehow triumph over death an idea I need to keep sane,” he said.

But you know what I really love about this piece? It’s not just the ghost-y-ness or the eerie setting or the sparse and square font. It’s the way it turns light into a metaphor for humanity, for that elusive thing we call the soul or the spirit. Stare at a neon sign, then look away. The afterglow remains, spots on our vision. An imprint of what was. A visual ghost. More than a memory, less than a presence.

3. Tracey Emin – “I Listen To The Ocean And All I Hear Is You”

I saved my favorite for the finale. I find Tracey Emin so inspiring, both as an artist and as a human being. I love her brash attitude and her feminist message. I love her sensitive, neurotic, erotic works (I stumbled across “Everyone I’ve Ever Slept With” when I was in college and that piece blew my freaking mind). I particularly love her neon ladies, all naked and glowing with legs spread and toes pointed. I would have shared one of those, but I try to keep my blog SFW, so instead here is one of her text-based pieces (another good one reads: “People like you need to fuck people like me”—not as poetic, but pretty damn funny). Emin’s extremely prolific and likes to work with light-up letters, so if you like this as much as I do, you can see more of her work here.

And you know what? After writing all this and doing the work of inserting images and googling details, I find myself feeling much, much better. I think it’s Tracey’s good influence (or I’m just going to pretend that’s it and not the glass-and-a-half of wine I drank while waiting for my internet to catch up to my thoughts). Thanks, lady.

Get outside and worship in the Tree Church.

July 12, 2015 ~ Katy Kelleher ~ 1 Comment

In the past two weeks, I have gone mountain biking at Sugarloaf, hiked Bradbury Mountain, swam in three rivers and one pond, tried stand-up paddleboard yoga for the very first time, went bouldering and fell on my butt, and climbed up a slippery waterfall. I’m proud of this fact, even though it means I’ve been neglecting my blog and my books and my work. But the easiest way to recalibrate my inner system—to reset my mental state to neutral, to flip the switch from madness to sanity, to stop the centipede from whirling around my skull—is to go outside.

I won’t get weird and preachy here, but I don’t know how to say this without sounding a little too earnest. So I’ll just go ahead and keep it short: I need green things. Nature makes me whole and balanced and good. It’s my jam (friluftsliv FTW).

So naturally I fell in love with this outdoor church in New Zealand made almost entirely from living things. “After traveling the world and being a keen observer of Churches, Barry Cox decided to construct a unique Church of his own using living trees,” reads the website. Construction started in April, 2011 and now the church and garden grounds are open to visitors. You can also book it for weddings. How nice would that be?

Sadly, it’s too expensive for my nuptials (not to mention halfway around the world). But what a great idea! It reminds me of earthwork artist Olafur Eliasson’s piece at Bard, the Parliament of Reality. It’s an art installation that also functions as an outdoor gathering space, and I used to visit it often when I was in school. It’s been years; I wonder what it looks like now…

See more about the tree church here and here.

Food for thought: Lee Price paints oral cravings.

July 1, 2015July 1, 2015 ~ Katy Kelleher ~ Leave a comment

Food is something I think about all the time. As I’m eating lunch, I’m silently planning what I will have for dinner. I know many people don’t operate this way; my obsession is born from two things: a history of disordered eating and a real compulsion to savor everyday joys. I know, that’s a lot of contradiction. But I think it’s true. As much as food has given me grief in the past, it’s also something I adore. It’s the easiest, fastest way to gift yourself with a moment of happiness, a burst of pleasure. Out of all our cravings—and I know you crave more than just food because everyone does—it’s the most harmless to indulge (except earworms, but that’s a craving of another aural/oral sort).

And yet. Food is still so fraught, and that’s especially true for women. Hyper-realistic painter Lee Price digs her heels in and confronts the complex rat-king tangle of emotions that is nourishment in her recent series of self-portraits. “The areal view evokes the feeling of an out of body experience: the subject is watching herself engage in a compulsive behavior but is unable to stop. There is an absurdity to this act of compulsion. At the same time it is an attempt to find real nourishment,” she explains. There’s something at once both comforting and disturbing about these pictures. They feel brave. And yet. To call them brave seems strange. It’s just an artist eating food in a bathtub, right? It’s just a woman chowing down, right? But like, is it ever? (No.)

I won’t go into a big feminist rant here because I’m sleepy and that’s not really what I do on my blog anyway. But I will say this: I love her work. I love food. I hate food. I can’t imagine a world in which I would ever let someone photograph me eating in a bathtub. But Price did that to create her uncannily seductive paintings and that’s freaking badass.

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Gemma Correll gets me.

June 9, 2015June 9, 2015 ~ Katy Kelleher ~ Leave a comment

It’s no secret that I’m really an anxiety-flavored bag of blood that walks around on two large feet. I can’t help it—worrying is in my nature. It’s something that informs every major life decision, but probably holds more sway over the small stuff. It’s why I own so much bedding (so I can stay in bed all day, of course, and never see people) and why I insisted on getting another dog, even though one is probably enough (no, it’s not—I need all the animal companions in my quilt-covered paradise).

But artist Gemma Correll gets it. She recently released a very funny book of comics called The Worrier’s Guide to Life and I’m totally smitten. She makes fun of student loans, Valentine’s Day, those freaking “Keep Calm” posters—ya know, the big stuff. It’s great. I love comics, though not the action hero kind. I prefer Kate Beaton’s brand of brilliance to Batman’s stumbling ineffectiveness.

And while I’m listing awesome female artists, check out Hallie Bateman and Esther Werediger. From the comfort my horizontal workstation, I online-stalk them both.

Pencils are trendy.

May 20, 2015May 20, 2015 ~ Katy Kelleher ~ Leave a comment

Today in hot trends: the humble pencil! Here’s my evidence:

1. The hilarious/absurdist Artisan Pencil Sharpening skills of David Rees, who offers his service by-mail from his home in the Hudson Vally. Because… why? Who cares. It’s funny. (Here’s David Rees chatting with The New Yorker.)

2. An exhibit called “The Secret Life of the Pencil” opens in London this week featuring photographs of the writing implements of famous artists, writers, and designers. Dying to know how Dave Eggers sharpens his pencil? I wasn’t either, but I clicked on this link and read the story anyway.

3. A pretty young hipster lady in New York City has opened a store called C.W. Pencil Enterprise which sells (you guessed it!) pencils. She has a tattoo of a pencil on her forearm. Her store has been described as intoxicating and charming. Then there’s this: “Her store is the size of a juice box, with a checkered floor and jars of yellow button chrysanthemums sprinkled around. With its spanking newness and luminous blocks of color, the place looks like an Edward Hopper canvas.” It sounds terribly twee and yet despite my cynical whining I still really, really want to visit!

Pencil, I’m so glad you’re finally getting your moment in the limelight (after being No. 2 so long to the pen). (Ugh sorry, I seriously couldn’t help myself.)

Great words in graphics and what I learned from kid writers.

May 15, 2015May 15, 2015 ~ Katy Kelleher ~ 5 Comments

I say this all the time, but teaching writing is one of the shiniest, happiest parts of my life. I work with the wonderful people at The Telling Room, a nonprofit writing center located in downtown Portland, Maine. I haven’t been teaching for too long, but I’m learning quickly how difficult it can be—but also how rewarding.

One of my favorite things about teaching writing is seeing how kids use language. They go crazy with it! They can be free and funny and break all the rules. It’s like how Picasso said it took him four years to paint like an old master, but a lifetime to learn to paint like a child—there’s something to be said about un-learning things, throwing education out the window, and thinking like a child.

But while my students may have a leg-up when it comes to sheer inventiveness, here’s one thing I have on them: Vocabulary. Kids simply haven’t learned all the beautiful, specific, melodious words that English can provide. Which is where these super cool minimalist posters come in. To address the vocabulary question, a graphic designer from Edinburgh named Mick Watson created a series of posters that depict complex words in simple graphics. “I was thinking about my 9-year-old daughter’s expanding vocabulary and wondered that if I made some posters with a visual hook and put them up around the house whether she’d pick them up,” Watson told Slate writer Kristin Hohenadel. “She was being a contrarian at the time so I started there!”

Watson’s list includes some of my favorite words, like petrichor and deasil. And I admit, I learned a few new words looking at his designs! See more of Watson’s Word of the Day project online here.

The ultimate mombod.

May 10, 2015May 10, 2015 ~ Katy Kelleher ~ 1 Comment

In honor of Mother’s Day (and since my mom reads my blog more than anyone else, probably) here’s a very cool graphic of mombods compiled by the smart ladies at etsi-ketsi. (Don’t know what a “mombod” is? It’s cool, it’s a stupid made-up thing that happened on the internet.)

It’s also interesting to note that these aren’t all Stone Age sex symbols as some might assume. “Erroneously, perhaps even cynically, many of the statues and sculptures shown here have been named Venus statuettes by patriarchal archeologists, as in Venus of Willendorf and Venus of Laussel; names based on the well-known nude depictions of the much later and slender Roman Venus,” explains scholar Eva Sawada.

Here’s another amazing graphic, this one shows “Goddess Sculptures” from the early Bronze Age. There’s something so amazingly modern about these, so geometric and cool, especially the top row. With their sharp angles and big shoulders, these femmes remind me of 80’s business ladies in power suits. How would you worship a boss-bitch goddess? By burring a pyre of vintage Vogues? By using lipstick as warpaint and reenacting the ancient ritual of the power lunch? By sacrificing your toes to the torture of a pointy heel? One can only imagine. Anyway, happy Mother’s Day or whatever. Enjoy the history lesson.

Things that I wrote: A Dress to Die For, published on The Hairpin.

May 8, 2015 ~ Katy Kelleher ~ 1 Comment

Like other narrative arcs that replay over and over in our fairy tales and myths, the poison dress resonates for a reason. Clothing is intended to shelter us, to provide a firm barrier between the squishy stuff of our personhood and the sharp edges of the outside world. Clothing should protect us and shield our nervous parts from the thorns of Eden.

But despite its intended function, clothing is often harmful—particularly to the women who wear it and the workers who make it. Beauty is pain. And it’s a pain that begins far before Glauce tightens the strings on her golden bodice, long before ladies shimmied into their arsenic-laced gowns, long before we stepped into our Forever 21 high heels and stumbled towards the nearest bar. It’s a pain that begins in production.

I keep forgetting to post this, but it’s one of my favorite pieces I’ve ever written. Support your local freelance writer! At the very least, you’ll learn that there is a shoe museum in Toronto which is amazing and filled with gorgeous old things. It’s a bit like my hair art piece… but even more fun to research. Go read it!

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