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.. .. Rose Cabat didn't really learn glazing until the late '50s... her husband Erni helped her develop a glaze that was so smooth, like a baby's skin, they called it "feelie glaze." Even then, she didn't come up with the actual feelies right away. When she began experimenting with vase-like pots, the mouths were conventional, with longer, heavier necks, and openings you could place flowers in.  But she eventually shrunk them down until most of the pots were 3 to 5 inches tall, the necks tiny and delicate, like the stem of a fruit -- and with no room to stick anything.

Then she applied the glaze in a way that made some oval ones resemble onions, so organic-looking that you were tempted to take a bite. Others were midnight blue and emerald green, but all looked so smooth you had to touch them, making the name apt. /// But it wasn't until well into the '60s that she put it all together, the forms and the glazes, and her pieces began appearing in museums around the world. "You know, you go from crawling to walking," she said, "to running to sprinting."  You could look at Rose Cabat's career in two ways then: One would be "Why did it take her so long?" for she was over 50 by the time she found her artistic vision, the feelie.  But you also could ask, "How has she done it so long?" for she is making those same pots four decades later, even if she has to wheel herself out now to the backyard setup that Erni installed for her eons ago. from article A life's refined shape - by Paul Lieberman,  LA Times Jul 18 2004 ....Rose Cabat's work is included in the book Collecting Modern:  A Guide to Midcentury Studio Furniture and Ceramics  by David Rago, John Sollo

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.. .. The Great American Pin-Up <Amazon.com>  <Powells> <Amazon.ca>  <Amazon.co.uk>

.. .. Women and nature have often been associated with each other, and it is perhaps no coincidence that each is celebrated, however dubiously, in the calendar.  I'm thinking of the Cindy Crawford, Sports Illustrated swimsuit and playgirl-of-the-month sorts of things, as well as my real interest here: the enormously successful Sierra Club calendars and their clones and spin-offs, such as Ansel Adams calendars, wolf calendars, and regional wilderness calendars.  The pinup girls and waterfalls in these calendars have some curious things in common. ... Both are souped-up, sleek, flawless, passive; in both, the orthodoxy of beauty has produced a curious homogeneity of visual reference to pleasures that are not altogether visual.  The chaos of thought and action have been replaced with a stale vision of delight, and the landscapes seem to loll alluringly in much the same way the women do. Rebecca Solnit - As Eve Said to the Serpent : On Landscape, Gender, and Art

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....from book: A New Kind of Science -  by Stephen Wolfram

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There is an obsessive quality to the collaborative works of Stephen Aldrich and Walton Mendelson. The rhythms, repetitions and patterns of imagery may remind one of certain outsider art or even the work of the clinically insane.  The difference, as Salvador Dali would say, between their work and the work of a madman is that they are not mad. Likewise, one may discern an affinity with Surrealism in the duo's juxtapositioning of dissimilar or incongruous material... their multilayered collages come from.. their interest in the workings of the universe, and from their recognition of the connectedness of all things.     from review by Craig Krull at photo-eye ~ ~ ~ above left:   from book: Metaphysics in Jars: Photographs by Stephen Aldrich and Walton Mendelson two prints at right [reduced size] copied from  Walton Mendelson's Arts Site "Eight galleries, grouped by style, from narrative inventions and mysterious isles, to exotic still lifes and floral plates: photographs, composites, drawings and prints. ... Information pages with a short, two-part demonstration of compositing, downloadable information on the conservation of images and framing, pricing policy, reviews, comments and more."

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Some have also responded to Andy Goldsworthy as a mystic or seer -- a practitioner of transcendence. But the artist.. dislikes such terms. "They trouble me -- I don't see myself as some sort of mystic," he says. "It really gives me the creeps, that kind of reading. I would hope my work has a deep spiritual content to it, but it's not being done in a self-consciously shamanistic or ritualistic way." Yet he also understands why he's attracting such a response -- because he sees art and nature, and by extension humanity and nature, as one.  "While I'm not pretending that what I'm doing is anything but being made by the hand of a person, the intention is to draw from nature itself and to understand it," he explains. "Inevitably, the division between what I make and what is already there is not so clear. And that's the great thing. It draws the place out into my hands." from article 'Rivers': a flood of interest by Steven Rosen, LA Times, 3/10/03 - about documentary film: "Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working With Time" / > photo at right: the artist with one of his constructions ....books by Andy Goldsworthy include: ..A Collaboration with Nature   /  Wood  /  Time

*related page: .spirituality

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Unlike his earlier projected works, which require a relatively dark and controlled environment, Bill Viola imagined The Passions pieces displayed on the newest development in video playback: digital flat panel screens that not only give a bright, sharp picture, but are portable and thus suitable for display in a normal gallery setting, like the small devotional paintings whose format Viola wanted to evoke. text from Getty Museum site for exhibition: Bill Viola: The Passions image at left: Five Angels for the Millennium (detail) - five channels of  color video projection on walls in large, dark room right: The Crossing, video/sound installation   related books:  Bill Viola: The Passions Representing the Passions: Histories, Bodies, Visions by Richard Meyer (Getty Ctr for Education in the Arts)

For her exploration, Courtney-Clarke chose not to focus on African cities, where Western habits and styles have replaced the local culture. Rather, she traveled to remote rural communities where traditional life had continued, passed from mother to daughter to granddaughter for generations. "These are places that foreigners don't get to and governments don't know about in their own countries," she said. Courtney-Clarke often spent a month in a village until, as she put it, she became "like a sister to them," and brought out her camera. "These are not photos I took from a car window with a telephoto lens," she said. Berber women in Northern Africa, being Muslim, are seldom permitted to show their faces, and many appear in the shadows of these photographs. But Courtney-Clarke eventually earned the trust of her subjects and captured the images she wanted, "with the permission of a husband or brother," she explained. from "Revealing Africa's Other Face" by Michelle Falkenstein, womensenews.org - February 21, 2003 *African Canvas: The Art of West African Women by Margaret Courtney-Clarke, Maya Angelou related site National Museum of African Art: www.nmafa.si.edu

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images from Daniel Ost site: danielost.be and from his book: *Leafing Through Flowers

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We live in such a media-saturated culture. And for the last 10 to 15 years, the conversation's all been about that. Painting's been based on photographic images; and the truth is, that is a thin diet for artists as well as for citizens. Some greater authenticity had to be found, and it is found in craft, the ability to make beautiful things connected with the tradition of art. producer and art collector Dean Valentine .... [LA Times May 8, 2003] photo: Valentine in his home living room with Tim Hawkinson's sculpture "H.M.S.O."

*related pages:......painting........photography...............

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The images I take are about ideas and if they are beautiful or interesting enough to hold the attention of someone who would not ordinarily bother to look, it is the first step in making science accessible to begin the process of discovery.  Science photographer Felice Frankel - Artist in Residence in Science and Technology at the Edgerton Center, MIT. ....On the Surface of Things : Images of the Extraordinary in Science

 

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I think the form, for me, of working in installation is one that always implicates you actively within it. So that unlike an object, which we are very comfortable standing outside of and looking at, to work in installation is to work in relation to a particular place and all of the confluences and complexities of whatever it is that creates that (space).  And so, as a viewer, to come in, it's the experience the minute you cross the threshold: it's the smells, it's the sounds, it's the temperature, it's how all of those things have everything to do with the felt quality of ultimately what the thing becomes. I started in weaving, in textiles. I think that my first hand is still a textile hand in some ways, but I was very dissatisfied with the flatness that things actually had when they were done. It seemed like they were dead in some ways. And working, for me, in the form of installation in the way that I have, it's that you're coming in and you're in some instances animating the space, and the process is often very social; for me, that part of it is very satisfying. Ann Hamilton ~ ~    tropos [photo above right] For "tropos," Hamilton covered the floor of a 5,000-square-foot factory space entirely with horsehair. The hair, which varied in color from black to blonde, was sewn in bundles and seemed to gradually undulate ? like ocean waves ? across the horizon of the space. What would seem to be a normal factory floor was in fact also altered by the artist, re-poured into subtle shifts of elevation. One discovered this only after walking on and through the horsehair, navigating the now difficult terrain. Hamilton also made subtle alterations to the light which entered the building, replacing the transparent windows with translucent, textured glass. This rather restrained intervention of light and hair immediately focused attention on a solitary figure situated at the room’s center. Here sat a person at a small metal desk, day after day, performing the same ritualized task. Smelled before it became visible, the task was to silently read and burn the printed text from an entire book, line by line. By walking around the space.. visitors would activate a halted, perplexing audio component. From the perimeter of the room, located outside the windows, was the murmur of a man struggling to speak. Sounding like ordinary language and yet garbled beyond sense, this slow speech had the effect of transforming the empty warehouse into an otherworldly, mental space. from PBS series art in the twenty-first century *Ann Hamilton by Joan Simon  /  video: Art In The Twenty-First Century

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.. .. I have one huge concern because I sort of split my time between the artworks and the architecture - that, in a way, the processes of making them are very, very different.  And I've always been afraid that there'd be a real split, or a schizophrenia that would begin to occur between my life and my creative process as an architect and my life in art.

Simultaneously I could be doing an art show called "Topology," and a commercial line of furniture entitled "The Earth Is (Not Flat)" and yet they're the same voice. For the first time, and that was a couple of years ago, I was sort of made to feel whole.  But I think it is hard to separate yourself into two worlds, so it's very nice when you know that the worlds, though separate, are in absolute close dialogue, and that they're in step with one another.  And that's been very, very important for me in my aesthetic, artistic development. > from PBS series art in the twenty-first century > artwork by Maya Lin:  "The Wave Field," 1995. Shaped earth; 100 x 100 feet - curving line at top is a footpath "Untitled (Topographic Landscape)," 1997, particle board, 16 x 18 x 2 feet **Maya Lin: Architect and Artist - by Mary Malone Boundaries - by Maya Ying Lin

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