A New "Sketchbook Project" Book

This is my third book made as part of the Brooklyn Art Library's Sketchbook Project. You can have it digitally reproduced and put in their digital library, but instead I am saving $60 and posting it here. I will mail the book off to be shelved in Brooklyn after it travels in a mobile library with many fellow sketchbooks on the 2015 sketchbook tour.

One note: the sketchbook provided by the project has very thin paper. Show-through from the page before often influenced the following page.

It is rough, messy sometimes, and spontaneously invented. I fell asleep and woke up doing it, finding new weirdness being born out of my sleeping hand. Please enjoy, "Shell."

Stone and Water

I took the opportunity while the weather was sunny and mild for two days and worked on the stone sculpture I started a couple of years ago. It's been gathering moss, literally in my yard. After two full days of chiseling the weather turned windy and cold again, but I persevered.

You stay warm lifting a heavy hammer and wacking at stone with a chisel, so it wasn't too bad. I worked outside because the dust and stone fragments fly everywhere.

On the morning of the fourth day I took it inside the studio and under lights, rotated the sculpture this way and that, leaning it over to get under the chin, the ear, trying to get it smooth where I wanted it smooth, and the face as symmetrical as possible. Last I carved the title that in the last stages became obvious to me: Eros, and my name. Just El. It's a good name for carving in stone, just two letters.

Phosphorescence Dark Cloud

Since I was entering it into a juried show I thought I might as well enter some other pieces, but I wanted something new, never seen before. Today I made a bunch of watercolors after some thumbnails that I made last night. I chose two, the only ones that evolved into a fairly recognizable scene. I stole some frames from other artwork, cut some mats and they are ready to go tomorrow to the Trenton City Museum to meet the judge of Ellarslie Open 32.

Phosphorescence Two Sails

Philly Art: Spector, Represent & Vitra

"Keep the Home Fires Burning" is a show after my heart with objects and sculptures made out of thrift store junk: old furniture, wooden bowls, baskets, clothing and wooden tchotchkes such as Russian nesting dolls or an elephant from India. It is in the Perelman Building, an annex to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Shelley Spector, a Philadelphia artist and gallery owner, was invited to use the museum's textile collection to create this installation. Many pieces, such as the towers made from bentwood chair frames, use fabric in their construction.









Here is my friend Tara looking at a sculpture made up of bird-shaped baskets and a nest of fabric eggs on a simple woos dowel tree. Odd, one doesn't usually see ducks in trees.

This elephant balancing on the wooden bowl supports various bibelots, while the two birds in the sculpture on the right sip blue, wooden water.

detail from Village

What may be the meaning of the long green serpent hanging from the ceiling, and does it matter?  Is it the thing itself that is interesting, just for its shape, color, texture, size? It dwarfs the puffy pincushion-like bundles clustered below.

Yet, if I were to interpret this sculpture, just for fun, I would say that if these bundles are a village, then the green shape is a cyclone passing through their midst. I think that's probably the first thing that comes to mind for many of us.

Village

In the art museum's main building you will find the exhibit: Represent: 200 Years of African American Art. This is  an exhibit of African-American Art from the museum's collection. It was an excellent show with some familiar pieces and some that I've never seen before. I'll share just a few clay and stone sculptures from the exhibit.

Squirrel, by William Edmondson, limestone

Face Pots, Unknown Artists

Here are two views of the stunning Mother and Child, by Catlett. The artist's work reminds me of the German expressionist, Kathe Kollwitz, who also depicted women and their sorrows and their joys. It's beautiful and sensitive work.

Elizabeth Catlett

Mother and Child, clay

Also in the Perelman building was an exhibit of all kinds of products from the European design firm, Vitra. I loved all the chairs and was dying to sit in one to test it out, or take a lovely nap in one of the easy chairs. Here's a selection.

I would say the heart-shaped chair was my favorite with it's pointed base and red felted surface. I am always a fool for anything heart-shaped. They were all very creative, but to sit in? I can only guess how that would be.



One last sculpture to end this post. This sweet, life-sized sculpture was found in European Art at the main building. I include it here in honor of the approaching season, at last making itself known with some milder temperatures.

Figure of Spring, 1912
designed by Michael Powolony,
made by Wiener Keramik