One of the artists that fascinates me is Andy Goldsworthy -- he creates really interesting works of art using only natural materials found at the site of production. Some of his art is intended to last for hundreds of years; some to last only a few hours...I'm getting ready to turn the big 50 next month, so I thought I should go outside and play in the dirt like a kid today... I tried my first attempt at "environmental art" and made two artificial flower pieces using only parts of plants and flowers found elsewhere in my yard.
It was a fun way to spend a few minutes. I have a new appreciation for the amount of time and patience Goldsworthy spends on his art!
I really didn't have an advance plan of attack for these, just cut some plants and played in the dirt. The flower to the left is made from parts of four plants, the one above from two.
There is a very cool documentary on Andy Goldsworthy worth renting that shows him creating his art. One of my favorite segments shows him creating a "thread" of icicles that appears to be threaded back and forth through a vertical slab of rock -- completed just before dawn to take a few pictures at sunrise, all gone a few hours later. He also does some impressive stone work, dynamic art in streams, etc.
Check out some of the pictures of his work on the web and if you like what you see, go rent the DVD "Rivers and Tides" to see him and his art in action (literally).
And in keeping with the "new things" theme, I tried making a short time lapse video of the above. Maybe I should stick to Hot Wheels and dump trucks! Don't ask what I was trying to do with the line of flowers, I don't have a clue...
I love this! You know, I am not being very successful at doing something new every single day, but what having the blog has done for me is give me license to reconnect with my creative/little kid self-- mostly on the weekends. I don't know whether you require reconnection or not, but I think it is sort of having that effect on you too. When before I would say to myself, "don't waste your money on a butterfly cut out stamp just to make a collage"... now I just buy it because I have to accomplish a new thing! So net-net,out a few bucks but so happy to have my butterfly collage. I love your timelapse too. How did you do that? Special software?
ReplyDeleteAmber -- thanks! I think I'll try some more of this down the road. I agree with you that blogging and looking for new things are great ways to reconnect on living a full life. Its funny, in a sad way, how many of us as kids experienced wonder and joy at our first simple art or playing a first musical note only to lose that wonder as we get older and somehow start comparison with others and demote ourselves to "not an artist" or "not a musician". How foolish of us! Reconnecting indeed. I just got a new camera, a Canon G9, which does really nice video (much better than what I'm posting on web) and has a simple to use timelapse video mode that can take a frame every 1 or 2 seconds, automatically merging the frames into a video with no extra effort. My previous P&S camera didn't have many options for manual exposure control and the G9 seemed like it would give me a lot of options without making the full jump into a DSLR which has its own set of tradeoffs. I shot a timelapse of a 1 hour drive from Tucson (cactus) to the top of Mount Lemmon (pine trees, snow) that came nice except for the bug splats on the windshield. I'm going to have some fun with the timelapse stuff in the future. [There is also software out there that will allow you to combine individual pictures into a video, and intervalometers which can trigger some cameras to take a shot every xx secs/mins -- not what I'm using, but its out there.]
ReplyDeleteI like this, Warren, very cool! Thanks for visiting my blog, by the way. Hey, do you know about sketchcrawls? Check out http://www.sketchcrawl.com if you want more info...if you'd like to join the Tucson folks that are crawling on 3/29/08 all day, location to be determined (sketchcrawl.com/forum and click on the 18th Worldwide sketchcrawl and click on the Tucson link to read the discussion.)
ReplyDeleteby the way, I also liked to see the model train layouts....that looks like it could be a fun hobby!
Alanna -- thanks for the info! I've just started reading The Creative License by Dan Gregory and completed the first exercise: chair, mug, table, face(?!? not quite). I've got too much going on this weekend, but maybe in the future I'll join you guys for a sketchcrawl -- thanks!
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