Art, art, more art

Hello again.

I’ve got art on my brain. Sometimes it’s the art of baking… dropping cookies neatly onto a gleaming silver cookie tray, making sure each little dough dollop has precisely the right amount of chips or chunks of fruit or ginger. Right now, though, I’ve got more traditional art popping up in my brain, like a slide projector possessed. A few days a week I work at a public university’s art galleries, so if it’s not cookies, or my own work, art is where my head’s at.

This weekend, while visiting a friend in Boston, I stumbled off the blustery Fall sidewalk and into the Harvard Bookstore in Cambridge to spend the next couple hours sifting through used art books in the basement. My favorite find was a huge book, the kind that you place on the coffee table and it overshadows the table, itself becoming your new tabletop. This ten pound monster was a collection of paintings and mixed media work by the New York based artist Alexis Rockman. I cracked open the book into my lap on the dingy carpet floor and was immediately entranced, flipping page by page, astounded by each new eye present. He paints animals and plants with astounding detail in spectacular arrangements–part fantastical field guide, part two-dimensional melodramatic diorama. I can’t explain in words… you’ll just have to check out a couple for yourself… see more of his work at http://alexisrockman.net/work/projects/. The first one below is a comment on genetically modified farming and breeding. GMOs=terrifying and Rockman’s painting=hilarious.

Now that I’ve started, might as well devote this post to environmentally-focused art. Enjoy!

Phil Ross utilizes live plants, fungi and other organic materials to create his work. See more at http://www.philross.org/.

Andy Goldsworthy creates outdoor sculptures by rearranging materials on-site and then documenting the project. http://www.rwc.uc.edu/artcomm/web/w2005_2006/maria_Goldsworthy/TEST/index.html

One more: Fritz Haeg is making “animal estates” and “edible estates” ie. birdhouses and gardens, but they are much more than that. See below and see more at http://www.fritzhaeg.com/.

It blows my mind that the art world is accepting mushrooms, birds’ nests and leaves as art, but I love it.

Have fun out there, cookie-eaters and blog-readers.

Hannah

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