Downside Up film at the Brooks on December 6 at 2pm

Sunday, December 6 | 2 pm
Downside Up
Can art make an impact on an individual, a community, a city? With the majority of its downtown deserted, many people had given up on North Adams, Massachusetts, until MASS MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art) located there and breathed life back into the community. The Brooks Museum collaborates with the Urban Art Commission to present this moving documentary about how art can bring the tentative, dangerous notion of hope to a city widely viewed as hopeless.

Stay afterwards for a discussion on how art makes a difference in Memphis with representatives from the Urban Art and Center City Commissions.

Tickets: Free for members; $5 for non-members.

2009 Crabs

I have finished painting crabs for this year:

caritas

Image Swirl

http://image-swirl.googlelabs.com

Here is a great new tool for digging through source images for your next art piece! So far by using it I came across images of coconut crabs, which grow to be up to 30lbs and climb trees. Yikes. I'm not painting those!

WiiSpray

seaweed crab

I look forward to discussing this in class tomorrow

Recently my Foundations classes watched and discussed Persepolis, the 2007 animated film based on Marjane Satrapi’s autobiographical graphic novels of the same name. We compared the film to the graphic novel, in which Satrapi translates the important events of her life into a series of narrative images. Many of us concluded that the drawings in Persepolis often communicate ideas about what was going on in Iran at the time more effectively than the translated idioms.

Now we're doing a project called Found in Translation.

In this project you will consider an important event in your life and translate it into a work of art. You are encouraged to use some of the techniques we have practiced in this class to compose your project. To brainstorm, you are encouraged to use mind-mapping (like we used in the Fused Interest Project). To research, try analyzing works of art, music, or literature that are related to your idea (like we did in the Place a Jar Project). To execute your project with superior craftsmanship, use the standards we established in the perfection project.

Part of the restraint in the project will be to share your idea without narrating during the critique.

I hope this TED lecture by Chimamanda Adichie adds another layer of interest to the discussion.

Caritas

Like Milan Kundera wrote, "How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!"

With all of that said, I hope you'll make it out to Caritas Village in the upcoming weeks to see the First Annual Peace Exhibition. The reception is Friday, December 4 and I'll have a couple of little watercolors on the wall.

Fred Stonehouse this Thursday Night

November 19

A major figure in Wisconsin art, Fred Stonehouse, nationally recognized for his beautifully executed artwork and witty sense of rebellion, will give an artist lecture at the University of Memphis in Meeman Journalism Auditorium on Thursday, November 19 at 7 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.

Born in 1960 in Milwaukee, Stonehouse received his BFA from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee in 1982. His style has a sophistication that reflects his diverse, cross-cultural interests, and outsider and folk art influences. Often encompassing religious or surreal contexts, his paintings are a materialization of his nostalgia for the familiar and not so familiar art of the past, blended with his own delicate balance of humor, beauty and derangement. Stonehouse has been featured in many solo and group exhibitions across the country as well as abroad. His exhibitions have been reviewed by publications such as The New York Times, Art in America and Art News, as well as internationally in Die Welt.

Stonehouse’s paintings and prints incorporate haunting portrait heads with antique motifs. His portraits are “transmuted self-portraits.” Often, Stonehouse adds strange characteristics to the faces, an alligator-like snout or a worm-like body. Commenting on Stonehouse’s most recent work, Jessica Baran of the St. Louise Riverfront Times notes: “Borrowing elements of carnival sideshow banner motifs, the iconography of Latino and Northern Renaissance religious iconography, and vestiges of spray-painted street art, this Wisconsin-based artist illustrates a world of self-mythology that is at once wistful and phantasmagoric.” She continues to say that while “whiffs of the flat, crude but essentialist brand of rendering associated with folk artists inform the work, Stonehouse’s paintings and drawings are anything but unstudied or incidentally realized. As a whole they read as a familiar epic long retold with the assurance of maturity, in which the idiosyncratic details merit more patient attention, and the broad strokes of childhood angst are subdued into melancholy lyricism.”

terrifying towels

Dear lord. I can't get this image out of my head.

I think that means I have to put it into a painting.

Do they look like an army of toy tanks to anyone else?

Sarah and Sunny are having a show!!!

The Sunny and Sare show features oil painting, drawing, sketchbookery and installation...

Opening reception is on Friday, November 20 from 5 to 7:30 p.m. The exhibition will be on display at the Art Museum until January 9, 2010.

AMUM is located in room 142 of the Communication and Fine Arts Building. Hours are Monday through Saturday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. except University holidays and between temporary exhibits. AMUM will be closed from December 21, 2009 through January 3, 2010. Admission is free. For
more information call (901) 678-2224 or visit www.amum.org

This is what I look like when I'm teaching:

Kathryn Hicks carved this skull out of basswood for our Foundations I class and caught a picture of me with my teaching face on.