Two Turtle Doves

I recently saw this post on The Matchbook about flour paste batik and I’m pretty sure it is about my level of difficulty. My mom loves batik and I have in my head a kind of white/orange/black with skulls and swirls that would look fabulous on my HALLOWEEN QUILT that my wonderful mom is planning on making me (ahem….right mom?) She actually is a really great quilter and you can view some cool stuff she’s done on her blog or quilt-tagged flicker pages. We own three (one for each boy and one for me) plus some other decorative stuff. Normally quilts aren’t my thing, but it really depends on the design. I like a more modern take and there is one she designed herself that is very Kandinsky to me. Whatever…point being that I’m excited about the new batik project being a Halloween-adaptable thing. I’ll attempt to post pictures here when I’m done, but you know how my disappearing pictures seem to be…

I like Andy Warhol. I think he is weird and strange and I probably wouldn’t have loved him in real life if I met him, but I love some of his work. Granted, I don’t “get” some of it, but some of it is beautiful. So as I was researching a good color wheel project, I came upon this article “Today the color wheel, tomorrow Andy Warhol: Pearl River students blend hues” It said “read reactions from this story” at the bottom and I thought, great, people who want to give lesson extension ideas, right? Wrong! Read what this moron had to say:

To even consider that Andy Warhol was an artist is ridiculous. To teach that to children is even worse. What did he ever do that any of us could have done besides abuse drugs and hang out at Studio 54? If a person considers the silk screening a photograph of a Campbell soup can or Marilyn Monroe to be art then then need to go to Paris and visit the Lourve museum. Why is it that art school has become a place where too many untalented people learn to be pretentious?

What did he ever do? Did you develop and popularize a whole genre of art or raise the bar on a style of printing? Were you aware he did more than silk screening? I don’t argue that the Louvre holds many great works, but I’d ask then if you have been to the National Gallery and taken a look at Warhol’s work too. It might not be romantic portraits, but art evolves and is in the eye of the beholder! They also comment on modern day art school….um…pretty sure Andy hasn’t been to art school in quite some time. Plus, how you gonna pick on a dead guy?

Since the article didn’t raise up Andy to some master status, it merely related him to a story about children’s art, why did this ‘yo decide that he needed to blast poor Warhol? Jeez!

Bridger, Taplin, and I visited the Mobile Museum of Art today, taking advantage of their “Free Fridays” through September. There are several current exhibitions, the best being GenX: Post Boomers and the New South and Material Imaginings (my favorite). The other exhibit, Poetic Spirit: Henry Wo Yue-Kee at 80, just isn’t my thing….Asian feeling. Eh. I’m sure it isn’t anything I could paint, yet I’m still not a fan.

I saw two artists that I really enjoyed and wrote down to investigate further. One was Michael Lucero, an American sculptor. His pieces are really vibrant and the one at our museum is called “midnight man” or something like that. I couldn’t find an image of it online, but Bridger liked it despite what I would deem a “scary” face on the backside. I’d post another image here, but it is really the favorite of his that I’ve looked at.

The other artist really captured Bridger’s attention in an image he kept returning too. His name is Carlos Betancourt (who thankfully, has his own website: http://www.carlosbetancourt.com/) The image we saw was from the Worshipping of My Ancestors Series, 2001.

Sometimes, though, I wonder what separates art from what any of us create at home. There were pieces there I could certainly not create or duplicate, though those aren’t even the ones I was most interested in. Certain things I wonder, now if I did that, would anyone buy it?