gray or grey?

my favorite (not)color is gray. or grey? Spell-check says, "gray." I like grey. My favorite color? So hard to say, but yellow is often an easy choice, especially when paired with grey!

And now, the Grey Dress.

I've been working on this one since last weekend and it's gone through a major revision. The last time I used this (basic) pattern, the fabric was more pliable, and this being more rigid of a fabric - silk acetate blend, I'm finding little room for flex. Stubborn as I am, I didn't want to use a zipper and I think I accomplished that goal. The dress is for the Guggenheim show we'll attend in a few weeks. It's important to look our best and represent ourselves well through our dress am I right? Thinking I might have to go shoe shopping... a sweet dilemma.

So now, obviously, I'm off to work the hem.

replace

The road south of our apartment has been under construction since we moved here (3 months!) and today, the asphalt eater came through. I don't actually know what this million dollar piece of machinery is called, but it's truly a feat of human engineering. It slowly rolls along the street behind a dump-truck, its rear ripping and digesting the old asphalt, which then rides a conveyor belt to dump into the dump-truck. What's left is a perfectly cut away, single lane, tamped and ready for replacement asphalt. It's somewhat inspiring - maybe a long roll of paper with a bird's flight, the disturbed air of its flapping wings, a smudgy, erasure of mark-making following the flying bird form. A bit like Blu's animations throughout South American cities, where you can see the history of his drawing as he covers it up or smudges it away.
I've been working a lot lately... not much on the computer though. I think my lack of blog posts reflects that. The grid on rotated grid, gray tones drawing is still coming along slowly. I'm debating over whether to contact Prismacolor about the crappy quality of their pencils. I swear I'm getting about 50% of my expected use out of these pencils... they just crumble sometimes. Occasionally I wonder what other media I might use to achieve the look I like so much using the pencils to burnish the paper. Nothing else ever seems to promise the same or similar effect. Is this the price I pay? This is an expensive drawing! I'm saving all my stubs... planning to add up operating costs when this one is done.

I'm also working on the slip-casting molds for the ceramic birds (at Peter Kramer's studio up north of Denver). It's been hard to get myself up there because it's a long-ish bike ride and the weather has been poor on the days when I have time to get out there. I have to remind myself that there's no real rush to get this project done, so I don't have to worry about momentum. It is strange to be away from a project for so long - I find I'm not sure where to begin. I did take the opportunity to try silicone in one of the molds that's done already. I had the idea last Fall while using black silicone caulk on the Mod Fab that a black silicone bird would be beautifully opaque and transparent at the same time. I'm testing with some left-over translucent white here, as you can see. It worked! I'll have to work on the seam that's left and how to achieve best aesthetic. Overall, I'm glad the original idea seems like a real possibility.

There's always something going on with these creative juices... I did find a fabric store very very near my house here. I'd say it's the biggest, baddest selection of fabrics I've seen since visiting a fabric store in NYC. So, I bought some! Last weekend I started banging out a dress to wear to the Guggenheim in a few weeks (for the Frank Lloyd Wright and Taliesin Retrospective show opening!!!). It's coming along. Pictures when done...

Mira Schendel have you seen my breathing?

This is what I'm up to these days:
I was turned on to Mira Schendel today, thanks to New York Times article, Alternative Modernism via South America and the MOMA's show, Tangled Alphabets. Her series, Graphic Objects, evokes nostalgia and security in me as I recognize my own meditative repetitive writing and assembling of lines, letters, marks, and forms. A few images of her work at the MOMA: This untitled piece is such a simple albeit beautiful use of graphic text to form atmospheric texture and space. I imagine these letters as abstract and arbitrary forms evoking language and communication depicted here as form and texture relevant to time and space. Our human existence at once archived and forever forgotten in disjointed memories of communication. This next image is redolent of chaos as it suffuses all of our well meaning organization.
Yes, we will be attending this MOMA show in May while in NYC for the Guggenheim retrospective of Frank Lloyd Wright (including Christian's work!). ...can't wait!

mountain carving

...taking time out to be with lovely people in a lovely place.

on designing - excerpted from Anni Albers : Selected Writings on Design

Below is an expert from my newly discovered, favorite reading.

Very few of us can own things without being corrupted by them, without having pride involved in possessing them, gaining thereby a false security. Very few of us can resist being distracted by things. We need to learn to choose the simple and lasting instead of the new and individual; the objective and inclusive form in things in place of the extravagantly individualistic. This means reducing instead of adding, the reversal of our habitual thinking. Our households are overburdened with objects of only occasional usefulness. Created for special demands and temporary moods, they should have no more than temporary existence. But they cling to us as we cling to them and thus they hamper our freedom. Possessing can degrade us.

Having fewer things sets for the designer or craftsman a fundamentally new task as it implies designing things fro more inclusive use. His attitude will have to be changed from exhibiting personal taste and the exaggeration of personal inclinations in designing to being quietly helpful. He will have to focus on the general instead of on the specific, on the more permanent instead of on the merely temporary. Giving up continuous change does not necessarily mean that we reach a state of stagnation or boredom; it does mean overlooking moods and modes. This stabilization need not be equivalent to limitation, nor need it mean scantiness. It is designing in a manner to hold our interest beyond the moment. Pure forms will never bore us. Neither do we ever tire of nature. We have to learn from her to avoid overstatement and obviousness. These are truly dull. WE have to become aware of nature's subtlety and her fine surprises, and to translate these into our idiom. It is easy to invent the extravagant, the pretension, and the exciting; but these are passing, leaving in us only neurotic aimlessness. The things that have lasted and the things that will last are never subject to quick fashion. That good work and great work have been able to survive we may take as a sign of the good sense in us, buried under temporary nonsense. Instead of adjusting our work to the public demand of the moment, so often misinterpreted and underestimated by our industry, which is concerned with fast-moving mass consumption, let us direct it to this true sense of value underlying public demand.

May 1943

Albers, Anni. Anni Albers : Selected Writings on Design. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 2000.

the grid and bread

Two things we can't live without.
This might be the best loaf of rustic italian I've made since arriving at high altitude. I've yet to eat it, so there could be a soggy center, but... I'm leaning toward optimism. Oh the beautiful crumb that must be under that golden crust! Simultaneous work includes color study and application on the grid (varied, this grid includes the 45º diagonal overlay). This drawing addresses and requires meditation on the gradual building of forms and the relationships between color. corresponding to my other work in the recent years - it is another effort to simply make marks and fill space while avoiding meaning or explanation. It is as much about intersecting lines and coloring the resulting forms as it is not about the lines and colors. Discovery, explanation and conjecture about form and composition, themes and meanings - all of this seems to arrive afterward as is often the case with art.

Ts 2008