Archive for November, 2007

Hurricane Andrew Mural Project

After Hurricane Andrew swept away their homes, some children in Dade County were so devastated that they couldn’t talk about it. So, they painted! One child painted a picture of the roof of a house falling down, with pets still inside the rubble. "I was so glad that my pets were okay!" reads the inscription to the drawing.

The "Love Can Build Anything" 48 foot movable mural (1992) is a collaboration among forty-five children (ages 12-14) who were traumatized by Hurricane Andrew. The mural visually depicts what the children heard, saw and felt before, during and after the Hurricane.

Center for Folk & Community Art

"Reflections" and "Peregrination"

post-gazette

Dirk Skreber

Also featured on green.mnp

Aerial views of surveillance photography and replication of print media are antiseptic placebos of intimacy: unnatural modes of viewing that have become instantaneously familiar, an essentially indifferent way of experiencing the world. Skreber doesn’t strive for photorealism, yet his work borrows from the tropes of mechanical reproduction. Translated into painting, these devices are uncanny. Untitled, a spectacle of catastrophe, becomes a cerebral deliberation of poetic form through Skreber’s intervention.

[via]

In the art of Donald Karvelis

Donald Karvelis is a painter whose personal mythology is deeply rooted in his Lithuanian ancestry. The artist’s imagery grows from a shared heritage in which icons and symbols not only represent reality but they are their own reality. The use of totemic shapes in his work produces an archetypal truth, pervasive in the myths and legends of Lithuania, and commanding in terms of contemporary consciousness.

Fascinated by cultural anthropology, Karvelis’ contemporary forms ask of their ancestors what was life like in the Bronze Age or the Stone Age? His iconography is by way of Old European artifacts. These figures evoke an ancestral recognition and open an inner door to the psyche. Just as Marija Gimbutas’ "The Language of the Goddess" accompanies the artist’s easel, and recordings of American Indian music and Lithuanian folk music fill his studio, ancient rhythms resound in Karvelis’ work.

The artist’s job, as he sees it, is to set a stage where meaning can happen. He has set forth on a path into the unknown, a creation from the depths of his soul, so that the work itself is the meaning, not requiring literary interpretation. In this way, his work provides a direct experience for the viewer.

read the rest of this article at lituanus

Disasters

Walter de Maria: On the Importance of Natural Disasters. (May 1960)

I think natural disasters have been looked upon in the wrong way.
Newspapers always say they are bad. a shame.
I like natural disasters and I think that they may be the highest form of art possible to experience.
For one thing they are impersonal.
I don’t think art can stand up to nature.
Put the best object you know next to the grand canyon, niagra falls, the red woods.
The big things always win.
Now just think of a flood, forest fire, tornado, earthquake, Typhoon, sand storm.
Think of the breaking of the Ice jams. Crunch.
If all of the people who go to museums could just feel an earthquake.
Not to mention the sky and the ocean.
But it is in the unpredictable disasters that the highest forms are realized.
They are rare and we should be thankful for them.

Natural disasters in Art

Wheatfield with Cypress

News Art

Natural disaster in cartoonery - Jim Meehan

You Reap What You Sow, Juan Carlos Quintana

via bestofneworleans

ESPN on Gracie Jiu-JItsu

Kennedy’s of the tap-out? Wow… This is worth watchin’ just to see that 9th dan 90-year-old whoop some arse.AA Al Bundy’s in this video too, jeez.