I'm so Sorry but I'm Addicted to TED

I'm seriously addicted to TED Talk videos.  I figured If I'm going to watch a video anyway while working on art, then I might as well watch something thought provoking and awesome.  It's either that or finding something on failblog.org to amuse myself with.  I was really impressed by 2 artists who gave talks about their work in the videos.

The first video is of contemporary artist Aparna Rao.  She works with technology to create amusing and sophisticated sculpture meant to provoke a reaction of some sort.  My favorite are the blank canvases with the little creatures who pop out from behind them when it's quiet. 

Ok that video should work, if not the link is here.

After that I continued to watch videos and work on the Whale.  I'm trying to fill in this 2 inch squared area and it's taking me a fairly long time.  So the next video is of an artist named Béatrice Coron.  She works with paper cutouts and creates these absolutely gorgeous and very elaborate scenes with nothing other than paper and an exacto knife. 




If the video doesn't work you can find it here.  Her work reminds me of Kara Walker's pieces.  Kara Walker is a well known artist for her paper cutout silhouettes and installations.  Where Béatrice's work is rather whimsical and fun, I feel Kara's pieces are more political and darker.  There's no pun there.  Kara Walker works with wall installations from what I've seen of her work.  I love it.  It's meticulously worked on and the themes are sort of like a sinister story time. 

From Artnews.org

She deals with stereotypes within the African American community in a style that is reminiscent of early American illustrations.  The graphic quality of the black shapes on the white background allows for far less distraction in the messages of her work.  I truly love the work and she exhibits all over the world, I'm sure the National Gallery and Metropolitan Museum of Art have her work in the permanent collections.  And if they don't they should cause it's incredible.   

Other than that it's been a quiet and pleasant day.  Except for my father's students.  It's always a challenge to listen to them.  I really wished I had gone outside and enjoyed the nice weather, but I really wanted to get more work done on the Whale.  Also the efforts to clean my room have been... slow.  I get distracted easily by shiny things.  And my room is full of them.  Something else I've been meaning to do is re purpose some canvases that I've taken the older paintings off of.  I don't really care for the paintings I previously made... they kind of sucked.  So I want to make more beaded pieces at some point so I need to stretch some fabric over them.  That way I'll have them ready to go when I need them.  It's not like I don't have plenty of fabric right? 
 
Well I guess that's it for today.  Not much else is happening recently, besides the day jobs coming up but that's not a topic for this blog.  So on that note:
See Ya'll Later!

P.S.- Yay for reaching over 200 page views!!!!!

Little Movies, Big Movies and Beatboxing to a Cockroach .

I had to get this typed up before I forgot to post this.  I've been working on the Whale this morning, and to keep the screeching of 9 year old beginner flute students out of my room I decided to watch some TED Talk videos.  I love TED videos.  I watched a few this morning and one of them was more of an educational video for students than an intellectual thought provoking statement of facts/ theories.   So the video is kind of awesome, this guy uses various instruments to record the neuron impulses from a cockroach leg and teach students about neurons and electronic impulses.

The title really caught my eye, The Cockroach Beatbox. Curiosity got the better of me and it turned out to be really interesting... and gross.  The link will take you to the TED Talks webpage should the video above not work.  I'm not sure if the guy on stage is trying too hard to connect to today's youth or if he genuinely wanted to use a beatbox guy to prove a point.  He probably could have used a big drum or another deep booming instrument to get the same effect.
Anyway I ran across another video of the accomplished and very awesome Aimee Mullins (link will take you to the video since I can't seem to get the embed code for it).  If anyone took a sculpture class at MICA or the Puppets and Prosthetics class you would have watched her in Matthew Barney's The Cremaster Cycle.  Cremaster Cycle was filmed in the Guggenheim Museum if I remember correctly and was a series of short stories that all fit together in some form or another.  A lot of repetitive movements, problem solving and wonderful prosthetic and costume work.  The concept was really way out there but I highly recommend finding a copy just for the experience.  Back on track, Aimee Mullins is an amputee, she's missing the bottom half of her legs just under the knee joint.  She's pioneered prosthetic limb construction and has provoked thought over what beauty is for a woman who's missing bits of herself.   I loved how she talked about how her legs could give her extra inches of height.  Who wouldn't want a few extra inches right?  Her conversation on the subject was really funny and the reactions of the people in her life are really interesting to hear.  I started wondering if, god forbid, I ever lost my legs, I'd want to be like her.  I wouldn't want to wallow in misery or try to get people to pity me, I'd want to do something awesome like her.

Keeping to the video trend for this post, I stumbled across this set of videos on music.  I don't particularly care about the music, although it's super helpful for finding new things to listen to, I love the people in them.  They're crazy!  This guy in the first video is just really likable and funny.  I'm eagerly waiting for the next video to come out cause I really like the attitudes and humor of these guys.

If I ever end up in London I want to see this shop. It looks like a chill place to go to for music.
Well it's about 2:30p and I need to go meet up with Marina to see John Carter.  This should be fun.

It's now 10:10pm, John Carter was ok.  It was fun and the guy who plays Gambit in X-Men was hot... and yeah.  I need to add the John Carter books to my ever growing reading list so that I can have a comparison, but overall I enjoyed the movie. 

Monster Strawberry!!

Oh man I had strawberries for breakfast today.  I took a photo.  It was huge!  I had to split it into 4 pieces in order to take civilized bites!  

Udon!

Yesterday I was at Mitsuwa Asian Market in Edgewater with Dory and Mae.  We had lunch there, I got chicken Udon noodle soup.  Next time I'm getting the ramen bowl cause it looked super tasty.   We spent some time wandering the book shop and did some food shopping.  I got pocky for the first time in a couple of years.  So tasty :3. 

It's finished, and there was much rejoicing.

So I guess I'll wrap this post up with the promised photo of the new cape.  I'm not gonna bother finishing it right now, cause frankly I'm not thrilled with it. It's just a little too puffy.  Commence with the re-patterning.

Good night and See ya'll later!

Flea Market Finds and Wasting My Time.

Well this week has certainly been busy.  I haven't found a few spare moments until now to really sit down and work on a post.  I never thought I could keep myself so busy in NJ, I was really reluctant to move back home, and I'm still sore over the situation that led me to going home.  I guess I'm never really going to get over that in my mind so I'm just going to let it simmer on a back burner until it evaporates away... or explodes.  Anyone who knows me knows of my infamous cooking skills so the issue is more likely to catch on fire than anything else.  I finally had a Sunday off with nice weather!  This means flea market time!  I was looking for a bird cage, something I could turn into a lamp shade for my swag light.  I put a plant light over my plants in order for them to stop growing sideways, but the paper lantern I have absorbs too much light, so not enough is getting down to the plants. 

Me being silly.

Well, I did find a birdcage, but it was big enough for me to sit inside it, so that was a bust.  Funny how the universe/ karma works right?  I think really hard about finding a bird cage and the universe delivers in a way that doesn't help me at all.  I'm sure there's a cosmic lesson in there somewhere but I'm really not grasping the message.  I'm more annoyed than anything else. 

I've got a peg arm X3

But I found some other little bits to use.  I found a bracelet display arm thing.
I happen to really like it, and I've been waiting for the spring months so I could acquire some air plants. 

Bulbosa (via bing.com)

I like the Bulbosa.  I think the hand would be a great air plant stand since it has this great flat area in the palm to support a plant. 

It's made of wood!

Then there was the Ouija pointer and I found deer antlers (to go with the legs on the wall).  The problem with the antlers is that they smell really bad and on closer inspection there's still bits of flesh attached which are moldy.  Didn't see that at the flea market and couldn't smell it due to high winds. It's also a really crappy mount, I'm gonna bring it down to the taxidermy place a few miles away and see what they recommend.  I knit another short cape!  It's longer than the first one and therefore it puffs out more.  Not terribly thrilled with it.  I'm now drafting a different pattern so that I can make a lace one instead of a cable knit.  I think it'll have to be worked in 3 pieces instead of 1 big piece.  This means 3 needle bind offs.  Woot.  Note my lack of enthusiasm.
So I literally just got called in to the store to cover some hours, huzzah for 10 hour weeks.  I'll bitch about work on facebook this is not the place for it.  But I will say that when I get four boxes to unload and no hangers to hang anything with, my manager had better not think to blame me. 

7:15pm
Wow.  Just wow.  I can't even describe the aggravation.  This job isn't worth it.  I really do not want to make a habit of talking about my jobs on this blog so that's all I'm going to say about that.

Anyway, the Whale is progressing.  Slowly.  I need to color match some beads and pick up the right tones to complete the whale and give it a three dimensional look.  Once the whale is completed I will continue on the background.  Unfortunately I have to work the piece this way.  I need to make sure the buttons don't
interfere with the beading on the whale. 

I should think more on the toilet.  No seriously, I had this great thought about the Brain.  I rushed out of the bathroom just to write it down before I forgot it.  I wrote, "I was thinking, about the amount of control I exert in my pieces.  The Whale is extremely controlled, down to the last button.  But then there is the Brain.  I control the amount and frequency of the stitches, the mathematics are mine to manipulate.  The form however is wild, organic and chaotic.  From my efforts to exert control on my art, comes a chaotic and free-form shape.  There is a juxtaposition inherent in the piece, the logical pattern of stitches and the illogical form which results from it."  God I miss MICA.  My mother sees the Brain and says, "Why don't you use that yarn to knit an afghan?  Wouldn't that be nice?"  See my frustration here?  I feel like this almost every time I try to talk to my parents about art.  At least my father will smile and nod even when he has no idea what I'm going on about.  I need to move out of the house.

Finally finished The Offspring by Jack Ketchum.  I do not recommend it.  There's a movie based off of the book which seems to have gotten some good reviews but the book was not scary in the least.  It's about a small town in Maine besieged by a tribe of wild cannibalistic people.  The viewpoint of the book jumps between the characters, from the cannibals, to the police and the various victims.  I found it to be rather bland and I held no sympathy for the characters.  For me, I need to feel some form of empathy for the characters in the book, or at least feel something.  The one scene I found interesting is when the divorced couple end up the in cannibals lair and the jack ass of an ex-husband tells the cannibals that if they want answers, they should torture her by biting her.  The wife is horrified that he'd betray her fear of being bitten to these people who will have no problem exploiting that weakness.  I actually felt something for the wife, I felt betrayed an her behalf, that was a rather crappy thing to do and I really hoped the ex-husband was gonna get it: which he eventually does.  Overall the characters were not that well developed.  The female characters were two dimensional and annoying, and the men are either weak or jack asses.  I found it hard to identify with any characters and immersing myself in the story of the book was a challenge.  So like I said before, I do not recommend picking it up.  Next on the list is Obit: Inspiring stories of ordinary people who led extraordinary lives. by Jim Sheeler.  I'm about a third of the way through it, and so far I'm enjoying it.  It's kind of morbid in that everyone who is written about is dead, but the stories are, like the title said extraordinary.  Will write more when book is finished.  The book list is so long.  I've got 42 books to read and that's just the ones in my line of sight.  I think Sex With Kings will be next.  Actually I may put Obit on the back burner just to read Sex With Kings first.  What can I say, sex sells. 

Urban Spectacles

Anyway on the art side, I stumbled across this artist based in Chicago who makes custom spectacle frames at Urban Spectacles.com.  I.  Want.  A.  Pair.  They are gorgeous.  The artist: Scott, hand makes wooden frames and each one is different.  He inlays different woods, bone and one pair even had crystal inlaid in them to create a specialized design for his clientele.  I want a pair similar to the one pictured on the left.  I love that inlay and the modernized cat eye look.  One day, when I have money to burn, I'll order a pair of these and wear them every day of my life!  Although getting prescription lenses is going to be a pain in the ass.

I can't think of anything else to write about and this post is long enough as it is. 
See Ya'll Later!

It's a messy world after all.

Well I've been having fun this week. Had quite a few hours from various jobs. There's the temp. agency, the store and my art. Yes I include my art as a job, or more like a career. Still working on the new caplet, and trying to finish a lino-cut of a lily. I really want that finished so that I can start making prints. But I lost my reference image so it's been slow going. I've also been cleaning my room. Yeah thrilling. It's been a mess and I really need to get a few things, like shelves and bookends. I have a whole lot of books from school, my compulsive book shopping when I hang out with 'Chele, and the many many books I've been finding in the basement. I found some great books on Medieval and Renaissance history, classic literature and poetry. There's also this bound collection of "Buck Rodgers of the 24th Century" comic strips. It's a coffee table book. I need some amazingly sturdy shelves and heavy bookends since a few of them are like coffee table books, so they're odd formats, huge and heavy. Along with shelves I found this great tutorial online about how to take glass jars, mount them to a plaque and voila you have jar storage on the wall! That would free up so much shelf space and allow me to condense further. Especially since I may be coming into more weaving supplies. Yeah so I got a call from this lady I met about 3 years ago in a knitting store, and she's looking to give away some weaving supplies so I said I'd go to her place pick it up. Woot. Last time I picked up supplies was at a flea market, it was a big box of buttons. The buttons stink to high heaven. They smell like mothballs, old lady, and some foul smelling waste or something... maybe old urine? I really don't want to think about it. I had the whole lot of buttons soaking in a 2:1 mix of disinfectant alcohol and water, and let it sit for a few days. Now I'm rinsing them and scrubbing them with anti-bacterial soap individually. Some of the buttons have depressions/patterns/ridges so I have to scrub with a toothbrush to insure the safety/health of myself and anybody else who comes into contact with my pieces. Any fabric covered buttons are just being tossed. I have no time or patience to deal with trying to salvage the fabric after all the crap I found. The water that came out of that bath, was literally brown. And not in a translucent way, it was solid, like trying to look through milk. Oh, wow that was a bad comparison, now I'll never drink milk without thinking about that foul stench. Eww.

Well on a far more pleasant and sweeter note, Marina (on the left: that's the "what did you put in my fro-yo" look. Much better than Blue Steel) was in town, and we got Fro-yo. For those of you who are like me, "fro-yo" stands for "frozen yogurt". 'Chele got me into saying that phrase, of course she had to explain it to me first. Side note: for those of you who don't know me (or do) I'm "adorably out of the loop". Seriously that's how I've been described. I just recently got rid of the VHS player, and my TV is seriously from 1996. Just to give you an idea of how behind in technology and slang I am. Anyway, Marina and I went to a local fro-yo place. It's a self-serve-pay-by-the-ounce kind of place and every week they get different flavors. One time they had Pomegranate Sherbert and I combined that with chocolate and cookie dough bits on top and it was an orgasm in my mouth. Seriously. Anyway today was strawberry and chocolate, with cookie dough, brownie batter, and fresh strawberry bits (on the right)! We just chilled for a little bit, caught up on the latest gossip and chit chat. All that fun stuff.

I've had this great idea for a lamp. My sister and brother-in-law got this huge bottle of wine (at left) as a wedding gift. It's like two times the size of a normal bottle of wine and deep blue. So I want to turn this into a swag lamp that I can hang over my bed. I want to put a whole ton of bright little LED lights so that it looks like little stars pouring out of the bottle. That might require a specialty drill bit though, so I'm going to wait on it. I would like to get it done so that I can maybe hang it over my little garden (on the right). So I have this interesting little story about my jade plant. One of the leaves fell off, and for anybody who's not familiar with a Jade Plant (on the left), they have these spoon shaped, thick, fleshy, water filled leaves that don't really fall off all that often. So in the past, the leaves that have fallen off have dried up completely. Well, a leaf fell off back in like... October? Yea I think it was October or November, anyway, I set it on the window sill to dry out and left it for a few months. Well, 2 weeks ago, I checked on it, and lo and behold it started sprouting new leaves. Go figure right? This plant is so freaking resilient, I did not anticipate this. Sometimes succulent plants need a cutting in order to propagate, like a stem and several leaves at least. I never thought this would work. So obviously I had to pot it otherwise I risk it dieing (on the right, the new little leaves are coming out of the stem side of the older leaf). My Hobbits Pipe did this too. One of the leaves fell off, so I potted it. It has yet to really grow. It's taken root but that's about it. That was half a year ago. Jade Plants are pretty fast growers. but now I've got too many plants. Once this one takes root, would anyone like to adopt it? Otherwise I'll try to foist it off on my sister hehe.

So to leave off on a random note, I was working with my fabric glue last night, and this happened (on the left). It's a glue BUBBLE. It even dried out in the bubble shape! I could not fathom the awesomeness of this, and so had to take a photo.

Well I think that's all for now.
More interesting things to come!
See Ya'll Later!