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Why Art?
I was up earlier than normal this morning. A deadline with the foundry is looming and my brain was wanting to organize my work tasks in order to move on to thinking about what might also be accomplished in the four extra hours I was planning to take off to ‘art’. Yesterday a coworker asked…
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Rosanne Cash, Black Cadillac
A year or so ago, I woke to a Saturday morning interview on NPR with Rosanne Cash. I lay there, snuggled under the covers, listening to her talk about the death of her parents and the process of writing the songs for her new album, Black Cadillac. Cash was incredibly open and frank in the…
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Maya Lin
My mind is a-whirl. Yesterday I drove a friend to Eugene for doctor appointments and walked to the nearby U of O bookstore instead of hanging out in the waiting room. I am working on new pieces for a November show. Books are strewn around my computer chair and piled on worktables. I am thinking…
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Larry Brooks, Unblocked, Unleashed & Uninhibited
For the last 12 years I have been coordinating the South Coast Writers Conference in Gold Beach, Oregon, on the Friday and Saturday of President’s Day weekend. Every year it is a huge undertaking for our small college outreach center, and every year we manage to pull it off with a small but mighty group…
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Alberto Giacometti
I have been thinking a lot about Alberto Giacometti lately. When I was in grad school, professors would tell me my work was reminiscent of Giaocometti’s and from the few pictures I could find, it appeared to be so. Then, just before my second year of school, I purchased a small book on his work…
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Bill Reid & The Raven and the First Men
Recently a site visitor asked me about Bill Reid’s The Raven and the First Men, mentioned in my opening statement. Living and working as I do far off the beaten path, books have become my umbilical cord back to the art world. In the early 80’s I came across Indian Artists At Work, by Ulli…
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Vincent van Gogh and Other European Memories
One last indulgent post on European travels long ago. From Switzerland we travel to Spain and then on to France. We toured the Prado and the Louvre, but then Bobbi flew home to teach junior high art, and I traveled on alone. I headed north seeking to put distance between me and the unsettling forwardness…
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Magdalena Abakanowicz
Lately I have been thinking a lot of my travels in Europe at 21. How different it was in 1973, before cell phones and internet. How truly on our own we were, especially during the final month of our travels. Phone calls were prohibitively expensive and nearly impossible to execute. My only communication home for…
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Michelangelo’s Rondanini Pieta
I grew up in the mountains of Colorado. I don’t remember ever going to an art museum before setting off at 21 to study art history in Vienna for the summer. For two months, I attended lectures in the morning and spent my afternoons in museums, then we all went our separate ways for one…
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Life on the Edge
As I sat down to write this week’s post, art was the furthest thing from my mind. Two major winter storms past through last week, each strong enough to flip chip trucks south of town, shutting down Hwy 101 for the duration of the clean ups. Our son flew home from college, necessitating the long…
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Russell Childers, When is art ART?
When is art Art is an age old question. It is hard to imagine now that at one time a Van Gogh was not considered art. I came of age after the heyday of figurative sculpture. Dada artists such as Marcel Duchamps had already made the first "ready mades" by mounting a unicycle upside down…
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Jimmy Valvano, Don’t Give Up, Don’t Ever Give Up
I love December. In part because as the youngest, it was my job to arrange the nativity set. Little did my mother know that the hours, and I mean hours, I spent arranging and rearranging that set taught me my first lessons in sculpture. My passion for nativity sets and the hope and significance of…
