Beautiful lady out of Baltimore makes beautiful art—particularly her embroidered trashbag series “El Barrio Bodega.” The colorful ones are my favorite, but there’s also a fantastically tacky-ugly-pretty gold one, too. “Growing up in Brooklyn and Harlem I’d visit my block’s bodega daily, with pennies in hand, and leave with priceless treasures,” she explains on her website. “More than just bags, they reflect a sense of pride for my neighborhood and are a symbol of my cultural identity.”
Art
Vociferous!
Loud summer, sun rude and demanding
an indifferent master
but my skin is impossibly hungry
for architectures of raucous light
(Photograph by Maria Kazvan from her lovely series of nudes in nature. Go see more.)
Ian Davey’s flights of fancy.
Artist Ian Davey paints exquisite and delicate scenes of nature on an unusual canvas: swan feathers. Naturally, much of his work depicts birds, alongside other kinds of flora and fauna. Naturally, I’m impressed.
I actually just wrote “I’m obsessed,” but that’s not true, is it? No, I’m impressed and awed and a little in love with the work others do, but looking at Davey’s impossibly detailed, impossibly delicate pieces, I’m reminded of what true, genuine, nearly obsessive passion looks like. He must love what he does. There must be something sweet and quiet about creating each piece. It’s probably like how I feel when I leave the room and it’s just my characters playing on a page (not me anymore, not a writer working, toiling away with a lock of hair in my mouth and a furrow growing between my eyes as I stare, stare at the words). It must feel something like that.
I think that’s why I’m drawn to artists who do this kind of dexterous, focused work. Like Jenine Shereos or John Stortz. It’s easier to spot with visual artists, but there are writers who work the same way. Some writers paint with huge brushes and gesture wildly. Their characters tend to barrel into my mind, knocking down defenses and inserting their speech patterns on top of my own. But then there are writers who sneak up on you. It might take longer to swallow those first chapters, but once I’ve fallen down the rabbit hole, I tend to stay there for a long, long time.
We can go swimming.
If there is one thing I hate about spring, it’s the waiting. Waiting for your first truly warm day. Waiting to wake up to open windows and not a pile of snow. Waiting to swim.
Swimming is the most sacred act of summer. All other warm-weather rituals pale in significance when compared to the first hesitant steps into lakes still cold from mountain run-off, ponds yet to become fragrant and discolored as leaves and twigs and small, nimble fish live and die and stew in their shallow edges. I can remember my first swim of almost every summer. Feet bare in the sand (bare feet—another pure joy that never loses its sweetness!) eyes stubbornly stuck on the place where, I imagine, I can no longer walk on tiptoes and keep my shivering chest above water, the place where I’m forced to embrace the water or retreat. I’m not the run-and-dive type. For me, it’s a slow walk. First my lower legs (that’s easy). Then my thighs (harder). As the water comes up to the top of my bikini bottoms, laps at my navel, I realize I’m in for the full immersion. That’s the point where there is no going back. One step, maybe two deeper, and then I always let go. Spread my arms out and fall forward, as though I’m leaning into the arms of some trusted beloved. Fall, and then swim.
I can’t find image credits for either of these images. So if one is yours, please forgive. They are both so inspiring—one sinister, the other sweet, but both made me thirsty for summer.
Schadenfreezers
Terrible, yet so very amusing. And what nice, bright colors! See more of these clever, nasty little popsicles here: Schadenfreezers.
Art of the far north: Zaria Forman’s Greenland farewell.
It’s been a long, difficult winter. Frigid and unrelenting. Bitter cold in a way that feels almost violating, seeping under my clothes and into my skin, settling in my bones and turning those elegant calcified shapes into fragile pieces of ice, ready to shatter at a moments notice.
To be clear, I’m not a fan of winter.
But I am very much in love with Zaria Forman’s series of drawings, “Greenland: Chasing the Ice.” In August 2012, she lead an arctic expedition for the purposes of capturing the icy landscape in art. Inspired by her mother’s desire to head north, Zaria struck out on history’s second trip with this goal (the first was in 1869, led by the American painter William Bradford). Tragically, though Zaria’s mother was instrumental in planning the expedition, she didn’t live to see it through. “Documenting climate change, the work addresses the concept of saying goodbye on scales both global and personal,” Zaria writes. “In Greenland, I scattered my mother’s ashes amidst the melting ice.”
Whoa, right? It’s big, heavy, sad, lovely work. And the drawings, as you might have noticed, are stunning. Zaria also traveled to Svalbard (a peninsula at the northern tip of Sweden) and produced many drawings based on that experience. Her work is amazing. Delicate, detailed, but so, so cold. It makes me shiver to look at it.
Girls.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the friendships that form between girls. As a kid, I always had just one best friend. I tended to have these incredibly close, very intense relationships with just a single person. I guess you could say my serial monogamy began back in grade school, because as an adult, I do the same thing with men.
I think I’ve always been drawn to the intimacy that can arise between a pair of two—especially between two girls. For years, the most important relationship in my life was with a friend named Sara. We spent every free moment together; we held hands, we called each other every night; we talked alike and acted alike. We were eventually voted “Dynamic Duo” in our high school yearbook. Even now, when fiances and boyfriends have become our Significant Others, we remain close. But the giddiness, the head-tingling pleasure of whispering secrets, the sweet feeling of acceptance—all that is something I will always link to childhood. To late night sleepovers and days spent passing notes, written in glitter pen, folded with intricate origami, and written in the secret language that passes between middle school girls.
While her photographs don’t depict groups of two, Osamu Yokonami’s series of schoolgirl portraits remind me of that strange, almost mystical feeling of becoming so very, very close with another person. There is nothing sexual about it, but in some ways, that makes it even more intense; it’s wanting to be someone, to inhabit the same space, to have an identity that is somehow more than yourself, yet lighter, more diaphanous, full of sweetness and light and air.
Dressed in uniform, these girls are seen from a distance. At this range, they all look the same. They could have come out of the same wooden doll, little matryoshkas walking one by one across a snowy field. They could be dolls or demons. They meld together, these girls.
The entire series is gorgeous, as is all Yokonami’s work. There is a dreamy quality to it that reminds me of old photographs, shot with clunky cameras and developed in dark rooms. See what I mean, here.
Jillian Tamaki makes myths come alive.
I have always been drawn to myths and legends above all other forms of storytelling. They’re the oldest answers to all of our questions. They speak to people across cultures and generations. They say something vital, strange, and deep about what it is to be human. They are in our blood, deep within our veins, moving like so many slow growing roots, connecting us to our most primal fears, most archaic yearnings.
Over and over, artists have tried to capture the otherworldly nature of these stories, and I never get sick of seeing them. But these images, by illustrator Jillian Tamaki, strike a powerful chord in me. Her style is both precise and free-flowing. Shadows of horses rush from a dark cloud, swans beat their wings into a frenzy of feathers. The style reminds me of woodblocks, but there is something wonderfully modern about each piece.
In addition to this series, which was created for a new printing of Irish Myths and Legends (available through The Folio Society), Tamaki has worked on several more mundane projects. But though they may be company commissioned, her talent elevates even ads.
{Via}
Maine-made prints.
I don’t highlight Maine-based artists nearly enough on my blog, especially considering how much awesome talent is hidden away in our corner of the country. Including Josh Brill, the artist behind Lumadessa. He makes these fantastic geometric animal prints that I totally adore. While his shop has many colorful avian prints—including a stately blue jay and a pretty little cardinal—I particularly like the jungle animals. Made of stripes and blocks and other hard shapes, they are surprisingly light and sweet.
In unrelated news, I just finished reading Life of Pi. I expected to love it, and I didn’t. But I did close the book with a new appreciation for zookeepers. I’ve still never been to a zoo (an odd never-have-I-ever fact), and I’m not convinced I should ever go to one, but there is something to be said about animals loving their routines. I know my dog loves her simple life.
Anyway, if you want to buy one of Josh’s prints, you can do so here. 1% of profits go to animal and environmental charities, a fact that makes me feel mildly better about possibly purchasing yet another quirky, unframed print. I really need to find some good, cheap frames…
Bright white, true blue: the MFA exhibits my favorite colors.
It’s not often that I wish I was back in Boston, but this exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts has me planning a trip down south: “Blue and White,” on show at the Henry and Lois Foster Gallery. Blue and white ceramics are such a familiar sight, but this show takes the traditional color palate and somewhat rigid medium and twists it, transforming the formula. From what I’ve seen online, the pieces echo earlier work in a playful, irreverent way. Plates are painted with unexpected scenes, impressionist brushstrokes dance across porcelain, and polka dots lend a youthful quality to a fluid sculpture with a möbius strip-like complexity.
How fun, right? Sadly, it’s only on view for a few more days… so I probably won’t make it there. What a bummer.
Katy Kelleher 