A Dog Day

My dog Gracie is 13 today. I'm dedicating this post to her and to my friend Andrea, artist and dog lover whose hand injury has left her temporarily unable to paint. So to all dog lovers, lovers of dog art, here's a few links to keep you busy.

Photos of People Taking Photos of My Dog. I really can't explain my love of this site, because the title is the only thing this blog is about. Homer, a french bulldog, likes to sit and sleep in the window of his owner's gallery in Chicago. Passerby's take pictures of Homer and Homer's owner takes pictures of them. And that's it, but I like it.

Dog Art Today is where I found the above link. It's packed full of interesting gems of art, historical and contemporary references relating to dogs, but also so much more.

The Secrets Inside Your Dog's Mind is a fascinating article from TIME about dog behaviour and the evolution of the relationship between humans and dogs.

Happy Thanksgiving to my American friends tomorrow. I'm using this holiday, completely unrelated to me, as an excuse to take the day off from the computer. Yes, I'm a daily blogger dropout. A 30"x40" canvas that has been painted over 3 times is staring at me accusingly, saying, "Paint me or get a job at Walmart!". Obviously, I'm projecting, and possibly I'm getting a bit INSANE and need a cyber break of at least one day. See you soon.

The Little Blue Pill of Distraction

Bleh. I struggled with writing a serious post today, but deleted it. It was triggered after hearing of the Pope's meeting this week with 250 artists from around the world. Some of his comments in his letter to the artists made me contemplate that often stated, romantic, (and IMO inaccurate) ideal of beauty as truth. What I originally wrote was: " Life is a complex balance of opposites, no growth without decay, no light without dark and a those who futilely attempt to block out suffering in their lives usually experience very little joy as well. Most of the best art reflects the entirety of human experience, not shying away from the ugly or depraved. Believing art has some kind of moral responsibility to depict, beautiful utopian ideals is usually voiced most often by those who have the greatest attachment to dogma"

Kinda smartypants of me eh?

So, aaaaanywaaaaays, as I was trying to think through my thoughts and type something coherent, the puppy was being noisy chewing on a plastic bottle, my kids were talking and the TV was blaring the local news. Then a Viagra commercial came on. It's part of a cute, cheeky ad campaign for Viagra where an older man confesses how Viagra cured him and his wife from their antiquing addiction. After the commercial ended, my daughter said, "So Viagra helps you break habits? So, if we have habits we want to stop, like biting our nails, we should take Viagra!".

Ummm....

Post over.

Wine, Chocolate and Road Kill Fashion

Here's an excerpt from an email I got today from a company wanting me to advertise some sales promotion on my blog:

"Hi Ellen,
We all love to play dress up. Who doesn’t love to express their style – one day you’re the sexy-city fashionista walking in 4-inch Stuart Weitzman stilettos and the next you’re the sporty-chic girl, complete with your PUMA yoga pants."

Wow, they have me and my readers pegged. Except they left out the predominant fashion statement I like to express- "look at me! my clothes don't stink and the holes are smaller than 1 inch, I'm stylin'!" *arms out and twirling*

Not much more than a year ago, I got my first request to do a product review on this blog. If I had said yes, I would have gotten a freebie, so I admit, I DID hesitate a little before ignoring it. That was the good old days, (a year ago on the interwebs qualifies as the good old days). Now, I get a dozen emails asking me to promote products and sales, but nuthin' in it for me. The audacity of these people, not even offering me a key chain with their logo on it. Sheesh. I don't know if I can be bought, not enough have tried. It's possible my integrity is a bit fluid. ARE YOU LISTENING? MAKERS OF BLU RAY PLAYERS?

No,I'm better than that, (ahem) but the fashion related email did give me a good laugh. It was also timely, because the weather has cooled, which means I get to wear my old, fake fur trimmed winter coat I love so much. The coat which has the ability to make my so very kind, non judgmental husband groan and say, "please, pleeeaaase, get yourself a new coat".

Ah my coat, so many compliments when I first wore it those many years ago, I looked like a Russian mafia wife. Umm, that's good, I think(?), then it became worn and tattered. Last year it looked like road kill, and this year it has gained the distinction of looking like really OLD road kill. Here, it is,in context, (picture may not be to scale) -

I proudly wore my coat to the winery this weekend. I went farm shopping and not far from me, what feels like the middle of nowhere is an organic vineyard that makes some nice wine. A little cottage winemaker in what looks like a little cottage.

The shop and tasting area is tiny, but was packed with 30 something year olds, clad in black wool with poetically arranged scarves, all looking as if they just spent a day perusing art in Soho. I was just followed around by the owners dogs. Because of my coat.

Next I went to this wonderful place, The Clayburn Store, a gourmet food shop and tea room in a building built in 1912 (which is old for this area of the world) in historic Clayburn Village.

I bought what is considered the worlds best chocolate. It is amazing. I was going to gift it to someone but oh, will you look at that, too late.

This chocolate is about revenge, perfectionism, and baseball uniforms for Venezuelan cacao farmers. Food artistry and great food writing at its best. Now, I'm off to savour a glass of wine with a tiny piece of chocolate and go paint ravens.

To end this post I wanted to link to some relevant art. Typing in a search for 'Road kill art' or 'artists who use dead animals', left me dizzy with the multitudes of art that does includes dead critters. It also makes me want to take a shower with a quart of bleach. Dead animals as subject and using them in art is nothing new. One artist I found that I do like is Marian Drew and her photographic images reframing the traditional European still life paintings of dead animals. Her work is sad and hauntingly beautiful.

I Enjoy a Good Cup of Coffee too, but.....

Harvey, you're an a*s, make your own effin' coffee.....

And here's a compilation of all the degrading commercial clips from Folgers of the 50's. Insane. My mother had to listen to this during daytime TV. I have a whole new respect for her.

Simplifying and Streamlining

Let's just quickly acknowledge that I missed posting the last two days for the Nablopomo and move on shall we?

Part of my reason for doing 30 posts in 30 days was to go out with a bang, not an explosive bang, more like a pot clanking bang. This blog will be altered and integrated into a new website with my own domain name soon. I've been fiddling with a website on Squarespace on and off for the past two months, I like the look of it but I wish I knew enough (any!) html to customize it more.

When I first thought of starting a blog 2 years ago, I had in mind that it would be used as a minor marketing tool to sell a bit of art here and there on Etsy. Although when you have a blog, you sort of need to write about SOMETHING, not just advertise yourself. Blogs that are nothing but self promotion are almost unreadable.

My first attempt at a blog lasted one post and was called, "Surrealist Art Mom". My youngest daughter was 5 at the time, Most of my time was still committed to being a mom, attempts to squeeze in art were sporadic so I had an idea to integrate my conventional life with some of my unconventional sensibilities. Surrealist Art Mom consisted of making a different kid craft each post. There were two different examples for each craft project shown, one nice cute craft made by my children and then my version using the same materials. The first post was sugar cookies decorated with food colouring makers. While my kids drew smiley faces and flowers on their cookies, I drew eyeballs in hands and wrote nonsensical, surrealist haiku's on mine.

The next post was to be cardboard tube art. My daughters would be making bunnies and puppies. I planned to do George W. Bush's Proposed Pipeline diorama in a shoebox. But the whole thing came to an end when I knew the key to making my craft successful would be borrowing the little plastic trees and forest animals from my kids play sets, having them strewn about looking dead from on oil spill. I just couldn't do it. I was too concerned about my girls innocent, developing brains being traumatized watching mommy do macabre things with their toys.

I know this blog needs to change, morph into something a little different because the frustrations I felt 2 years ago are gone now. At that time, I had spent the last 7 years feeling like an alien in my life. I loved spending time with my kids, but dealing with the politics of playgroups, preschool and small talk in suburbia felt so constricted. I'm not a joiner but joined and volunteered for half a dozen community groups during that time and was miserable. I wish I had discovered some of the mommy blogs like Fussy or Suburban Bliss back than, I would have felt normal, that I wasn't a freak, just separated from my tribe.

Having this blog and then my anonymous blog helped me get past some isolation. Yes, that anonymous blog is gone, reserved now for my private journals. Even with an alias, talking about my kids and husband and our daily life made me uneasy. It was called Me and My Stupid Diet, which wasn't an apt name as it dealt with my attempts to get myself and my family away from processed foods, all foods from industrial farms and living life as organic localvores. August and September were spent shopping at farms, canning, making preserves, herb sauces, baking my own bread and pretty much making everything we ate from scratch. Rewarding, except for the domestic slavery part. I'm still working on that kink, there HAS to be a way to make it simpler. For those interested, the Food Network created a reality show with 100 Mile Diet authors,
James MacKinnon and Alisa Smith, challenging 6 families to live on a local diet for 100 days. You can watch all the episodes here. The show takes place in my town. My suburban bitchin' shtick won't wash after you watch the episodes. It is beautiful here.

The new site will be my art portfolio and a blog and be my only web presence. One thing I know for sure I will never expect you to read a long winded, dull post as long as this one. Ever. And I didn't even post a single picture today. Sheesh.

From Insider Art to Outsider Art

Yesterdays post had me thinking about value in art. Literally, the dollars and cents of it all. Contemporary art may establish much of it's value in intellectual.....oh god, I'm going to use the dreaded artspeak word....discourse, whereas outsider art, art made by the untrained and unknown often gets it's value from the stories of the artists lives.

One of those stories is Henry Darger, a reclusive janitor with a troubled childhood. He had no family, no friends and was most certainly mentally ill. For 50 years Darger wrote and drew obsessively in private. After Darger's death, his landlord discovered the extent of Darger's obsession, 30,000 densely handwritten pages. Among them was a 15,000 page meandering fantasy epic he entitled, "The Story of the Vivian Girls, In What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, as caused by the Child Slave Rebellion." 300 or so illustrations accompany the work. The images are appropriated from illustrations from printed advertising like the Coppertone baby. They are drawn on paper, painted with child watercolours. Darger was no great artist, but his obsessive world and disturbing life have made his larger paintings sell in the six figure range. He himself lived in poverty. The 2004 documentary based on his work and life, In the Realms of the Unreal is worth a watch, here's the trailer.

Ignoring Art

Context is everything. It's no surprise displaying artwork from a famous contemporary artist on an urban street is overwhelmingly ignored. This was demonstrated when Belgian artist Luc Tuymans participated in an experiment where he painted a large artwork and hung it on a busy street in Antwerp. Predictable as it is, I find the video interesting because of the comments by curators and admirers of Tuymans work.

I have a tic of internal eye rolling every time I hear artists referred to as 'important'. It's confirmed now I'm a philistine because I've only vaguely heard of Tuymans although he's considered by many as the most important living painter alive. I like his paintings and I'm curious to read more to see why his work is considered valuable and influential. But c'mon, as much as I love painting, looking at painting, talking about the process of painting, the self-proclaimed importance of the art world makes me, well... barfy. Tuymans himself doesn't seem to suffer from this inflated view of contemporary art. The people surrounding him do.

I once had a professor (also somewhat important in the art world) who I did think was brilliant say, "If you can do art, you can do anything". It's been over 20 years since I first heard that comment and I still can't figure it out. I do have glimpses of what he meant. It takes a high degree of intellect to create great, meaningful art in any artistic pursuit. Still, I would like to know what he meant exactly. Clearly in that context, I can't do art, because if someone wants me to discuss the Euler-Tricomi equation as it's used in the investigation of transonic flow, I am so, like, totally clueless.
Now, be a dear, watch the video and have a little chuckle about how wrong all those curators were.

Grey Days

"Garden"
acrylic, pen, pencil and thread

Yes, I missed a day. I suppose I could have pushed out a post before midnight last night, but I didn't have the energy. Notice the verb- push, like in birth. It's as though I've been giving birth to marginally liked children every friggin' day for 2 weeks. Ah, but is that not the path of any pursuit? enthusiasm in the beginning, then a plateau of boredom and waning energy which you have to work through?

Yesterday, I finished the piece above. Actually, now that I see it up here, some things are bothering me and I have a few things I'm going to add. The woman is my sister in law. I finally have gotten to a point where I'm comfortable using images of people around me in my artwork without having it necessarily reflect anything about that person. I'm sure my colour choices have been somewhat influenced by all the torrential rain and wind we're having. It's horrible. Everything has been cast with grey lately. There's a heavy, sick dampness in the air. Wait, am I REALLY talking about the weather? I thought only old people did that. Oh dear. I WILL try to do better tomorrow.

Searching for Eagles

I had intended to finish a mixed media piece tonight to post on here, but I'm going to watch TV instead! So there! But before I go, I will leave you with photos of my search for bald eagles today. The eagles have landed to feast on the spawning salmon in the upper Fraser Valley where I live. I ran into about 6 other people who had the same aspirations for getting impressive photos. They all caused me to have a bad case of lens envy as I saw their tripods all set up with huge telephoto lenses on their camera. So I mumbled a sad hi as I passed them, knowing I'm not geared with the goods to belong to their unspoken special bird nerd club. Sigh.

We also took the wrong trail, so I was too far from the beach for good photos. The closest eagle was a juvenile eagle in a tree. Eagles don't grow their signature white head feathers until about 3 yrs of age. This one didn't join the others on the beach to eat all the dead salmon.

Impressive turn out for eagle numbers, I counted 15 in this picture.

My kids were quickly bored, so to appease them we left and drove down the street to another beach and had our annual Poking at Dead Fish Day.

Nature- the ugly...

and the beautiful ....