Bas Couture...the lemure

Getting dressed in the morning is important. I have no money. I have 4 pairs of shoes, and I love clothes.  The reuse, recycle theme continues in this daily of what i was wearing when i made that weird thing, where it came from and how very little I paid for it. Ha!

As a side note: this low tech daily is documented by me with the equipment I've got: a computer and a phone. All photos are taken using one or another of those ubiquitous instruments.

 
Monday November 29, 2011


It was my daughters closest friend who  said it..."those aren't wolf ears holly, those are lemur ears.


She is SO right!

There's nothing upcycled about this outfit. Just new and eary. THey were $12 at the San Francisco Zoo.

I think I will wear them for ever.

Now I have to pay some bills before I make some art, although I had a conversation this morning that made me want to make music instead.  

What is expression anyways?

I liked that question

Fore more about this episodic post click here 

Excess, intention and the trash can

I believe life is excess. It may not all be blueberry flavored honey sticks, or chocolate bon bons...

fresh seafood bars or the Madonna Inn...

but it - life - is based on our usage, creation, and storage of a little extra.

Energy

It is a mistake to think we should (or could) stop it...excess

but we should definitely channel it

turn it into something beautiful with our attention, our labor, our intentions

 Procreation, pattern, love, lust, art, music, exploration, and creation are all the result of excesses. So are war, destruction, and pollution.

Perspective. Beauty. Desire. Habit.

Pleasure. Intention.

Oh my gosh...I'm talking to a trash can....

Something in nothing

I hear it...I hear you

One is silence

One is sound

 in between

the silence and the sound

from inside

I watch

There is a world in this liminality 

Upcycled baby clothes, downcycled monsters

Sometimes - the monsters need to be dealt with.

Sometimes - they just keep hiding and  then JUMPING out at you from under your bed, or in your closet, or from your boyfriends garage.

Sometimes it becomes unbearable and you can't think about anything but the monsters and you want to cry...but you're 40 something..I mean you're in second grade now and you shouldn't be worried about these invisible lurkers...should you.

That's when you need your sleepy sweetie (as my daughter calls them). They are actually monsters themselves, but the cutest darned things and if you chuck one under the bed, or in the garage, or place it strategically at a door or by your head in your bed - they won't let the big bad monsters near you! They're AMAZING! They totally work, I swear.

The upcycling of the sub-optimal and the creation of courage

I have always dreaded, I mean physically rejected with significant functionality shutdown, any suggestion of performance. Funny that. I have been known to literally crawl under tables (as an adult) when asked to speak publicly. And yet - I love people and my attire would suggest that I have attitude, and courage - which I do...I'm just shy too. 

The other month I was trying to learn this Piano thing. I used to play and I love playing but I have this f#*!ing movement issue and it feels like trying to play with frozen fingers. Yes - I'm slowly freezing and it TOTALLY sucks (see the beast named here) but the upside is that I have this window into another world - the one that gets defined by the thing it's not...and sometimes only really exists in this contrary state.

C O N T R A R Y

P E R F E C T I O N 

Then, there's this perfectionism, which in it's righteousness becomes fundamentalist and there's no room for the contrary anymore - only the RIGHT - and it that state is spoiled and poisonous. 

M A S O C H I S M

On goes the flashlight...

There are things that we can do, and thing that we can't - and in between those two poles there's allot of pleasure to be had - my point is that we miss out on one hell of allot if we can't find some worth in our sub-optimal works and performances too.

And...sometimes that worth is found in the sharing. And then - sometimes it's just better to keep your mouth shut too...which I'm really bad at.  

How to: make a rocket costume out of cardboard

 It was a swift exit to unconsciousness for my daughter as I read to her tonight. I'm not sure if she was even awake at the end of the second opening quote, the first from Foucault, the second...Karl Marx. One thing I'm sure of is that by the time we got to the Wiyot massacre my la la las fell on def ears.

That was her dads book which I've never actually read, because I lived it. Its true! Well - I lived the writing of it anyhow and the sentences in that book conjure images of the place...wrapped, as we were, in it's foggy grip next to the industrial harbor, stuck at the edge of old town.

I started reading again there, and painting. It was the first real studio I'd had since college, and the art that came out was solidly steeped in the conversations we we were having.  

My work still has allot of that - of those conversations and although our work is very different, it excites me that what we share (aside from our awesome daughter) is still motivating and I think mutually beneficial.

This is the first painting in a series based on documenting my upcycling projects. It's meant to be sincere and funny too as you probably couldn't actually make the outfit in this DIY project by just looking at the visuals. Its how I feel half the time I look through a product assembly manuel - WHAT???

But - if you fill in the blanks - you could probably figure something out.

And - thats what it's all about!

Look, don't look

From now on I'll just call it art torture. 

A few weeks ago I subjected the children in my daughter's second grade class to a perspective lesson, and blah blaah blaaah...I had a bunch to say about this, but I'm boring myself. Suffice to say that they were less than impressed.

Jump forward

This week  made them try to draw bizarre objects that I flashed on a screen for them for 1 min each (or maybe  bit more) - from memory. 

At first I had them then slowly came the scribbles and "I'm finished" and "this is boring!" and "Holly..I don't remember anything."

Oh really?????

SCOUNDRELS! 

"ART my friends, is NO picnic in the park...or luncheon on the grass...or Sunday stroll along the banks of some river. ART my little friends, is HARD WORK, like any other discipline! And if you're going to be good you'll have to suffer like the best! Sometimes you'll be adrift, and some days it will make you feel weird, 

but by golly if I have anything to do with it, you will have exposure to different ways of making art and ways of translating your observations of the world that most people never get!"

I should have said that, but I didn't.

But then... Look...

This exercise didn't come out of any text book - it came from thinking long and hard about how we observe, and thinking about how to strengthen that ability to observe.

What I came up with was that having information taken from one, crucial information and in this case visual information, sharpens ones appetite for the information and subsequent attention to those details that might not be so desired had they not been taken away.

Does that make any sense?

And, going back and forth between looking and remembering while drawing, ultimately facilitates the widest range of artistic expression. 

And check out these Bots! I want to turn them all into t-shirts. Aren't they cool?

By the time we got to my last RIVETING object, a little Chinese hat, they were pretty much done, as was I.

There were no huge conclusions to be drawn, and I left feeling like "Shoot! I wish they liked this better!" and I've been thinking about that...that and the part where I couldn't figure out how to say what I wanted and stumbled head first into the great abyss tripping over my words, then thoughts...then I couldn't figure out how to end.


Then, several days later I start thinking about all the details I remember of exchanges I've had with some of my art teachers and artists I was around one way or another, from infancy and on: Joe Funk, Sam Francis, Maureen Murdock,  Elena Mary Siff, Ken Nack, Will McLean, Helen Chadwick, to name but a few.

Hey teachers! Even and especially you dead ones, yeah you Joe, Sam, Ken, Hellen...you're still talking! And these amazing little people 5 million miles away from where you may be, or where we were - these little people are are taking little bits of you in and doing amazing things with some of the things you've taught me.


I'm sorry I'm not a better messenger.


And now I'm done, I mean really. I've turned to mush.


But wait - I have to say, through mascara soaked eyeballs now OUCH! that I'm especially thinking about Ken Nack because he taught me that life, all of it, can be art - if you want it to be. He emphasized over and over again that your experiences are what it's all about - that by god, if a student wasn't in class it was probably because they had to do laundry and that was sometimes just WAY more important than being in class that day. And...all those students missing in class after lunch in Florence? Well - it was hot out and these Italians and their butter...I'm sure, he would say, smiling and chuckling a bit, that it was the butter that did them in. 


So - from one generation of artists to another to another...thanks!

Parts shared

So here I am again, at a car thing - yapping with yellow nailed and pitted men with accents saying things like "it comes from Russia" then snickering, sporting dogs and expensive glasses and little soft leather shoes. All this in a giant mud puddle in some park. 

I know nada, nothing, zilch about ANYTHING to do with cars - but I start examining them, and allow myself to be mistakenly identified as one of the family who owns this or that car because I'm so audaciously in the middle of them photographing.

Oh god. What is that? And that and that? It's all so...sexy!

"Hi, do you own this? No, your friend? But really, you went across country in a blah blah blah spider thing and they're super easy to work on yourself? Really? I should get one?"

 Maybe when I find my wallet I'll do that... or maybe when I have more than $33.87 in my bank on a good day. Yeah I'll get one then. But what was it? A spider, a fiat, a thing a mee whatever? I know it was white and had black seats. Yes - I know this.

 Romeo oh Romeo! You'r buffed steal is so exciting to me...why? I do not know. 

Where did my boyfriend go. I have this urge to rub his belly.

I walk around feeling that I know more about the intimate details of these candy coated capsules nestled in the mud than their owners. 

But it's not true. These scarved and leathered euro snobs with cool glasses and funny looking grand children are DETAIL oriented. I'm not the only one getting into the intimate spaces of these beauties. 

  I am the only one kicking my heals up though, risking a catastrophically embarrassing  slip into that there mud, to the beautiful sounds of Edith Piaff wafting past the grilled cheese sandwitch truck and on out of the park where it finds me dreaming of the Tuileries and stormy autumn skies in Paris now. 

I liked that music.

I like these cars and their parts.

 And, you see - although I can't afford that one easy to work on car...(until I find my wallet...), I can still own all these car parts.

That's what these little photo essays illustrate (that and copious amounts of extra libidinal energy)

Sometimes if you can't own stuff, you can take it...that is - you can photograph it.

Meanwhile my mud flap boy is off silently swooning over that alpha romeo's door handles. Cheater! Infidel! 

God, you are so handsome...  

You...you might be the reason

that I want to be better...less sloppy, smarter and more kind person.

Even though I want to cover you with mud sometimes and roll you down a hill.

Yeah, it's like that. That's all.