Cindy's Many Hobbies: ARTSY MARCH

"ART SPEAKS WHERE WORDS ARE UNABLE TO EXPLAIN."

If I had to assign a theme to the month of March, it would definitely be ART, perhaps followed by SUMMER-LIKE as we definitely had mild and quite unseasonably warm weather for the month.

Getting back to the first theme of ART, it was a month of making art and seeing art both in person and online (via either website or a Zoom tour). The in-person experience was an online class I had via Zoom in early March. It was offered through a Columbus art gallery called the Riffe Gallery. My husband and I visited there once in person before the pandemic and were quite impressed by the quality of the art. I read about the class in City Scene magazine and strolled over to Eventbrite to register for it.

The class was called ‘A Friends and Family Workshop with Dana Lynn Harper.’ The description said, “DLH uses colorful, light-catching, and reinvented media in her work and will source found materials to create “wishing talismans” with you.

Looking at the examples I was a bit unsure about trying to create something similar, or whether or not I even wanted to. However, since it was free and I already had most of the materials, and certainly plenty of spare time on my hands, I decided to go ahead and sign up.

I admit to feeling just a tiny bit of stress once I received the list of materials and saw “STRUCTURE: Requires Wire or Frame, Ex: wire hangers, chicken wire, embroidery hoops, hula hoops, wire baskets.” I was pretty much ready to head out the door to Home Depot or elsewhere when the thought struck me that I could probably get away with using the red tomato cage we had in our shed. Then I hauled a couple boxes of supplies and my sewing kit into the library so I would have everything I needed nearby.

I’m not quite sure how many attended the class, but it seemed pretty intimate since it was only Esther and myself who shared our screens (best as I could tell) so we could interact on a visual level.

Regarding her current collection and subject of the class, the talismans, she said the inspiration came after losing her father and a close friend within a couple weeks of each other last year. She said she pondered life after death. “What does the spirit look like outside the body?”

Our class ended about an hour and a quarter after we started, but it pretty much took me the rest of the day and part of the evening to finish mine, and I ended up adding to it a couple days later after discussing it with my sister-in-law.

My talisman is “Corrie” (abbrev for Corona) and was built in honor of my sister-in-law’s grandparents and her very cherished dog who all passed away in February this year. I also inserted a reference to the 35^th anniversary of the destruction of the Space Shuttle Challenger in January 1986 and the upcoming memorial to the 20^th anniversary of September 11, 2001.

This weekend we drove out to Springfield to see the current exhibitions of which my two favorites are the Gary Birch paintings and sculpture. Milford, Ohio artist Gary Birch identifies as a Southwest Ohio painter and sculptor. His work seeks balance between disparate themes, especially those concerning domestic life, industry, and nature. This exhibit will feature both his expressive collage paintings and unconventional mixed media sculptures. (exhibit summary from website)

I also liked the unique perspective and unconventional idea of taking photographs of dioramas from natural history museums around the world that Diane Fox did in her UnNatural History exhibit. Tennessee artist Diane Fox captures the perceived reality posed by dioramas in this series of photographs taken in natural history museums around the country and abroad. Traditionally, dioramas allow museum visitors to experience wildlife firsthand using staged animals and painted backgrounds to create realistic fabrications. Fox’s photographs, however, work to break the illusion of these constructed scenes and ask the viewer to reexamine their relationship with nature. (exhibit summary from website)

Part of the fun of looking at the photos and the background displayed next to each was to see if I had been to any of the museums represented. In spite of the more than a dozen different museums represented worldwide, we had only been to one of the museums – the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco in Golden Gate Park.

The photo was of a diorama of wild dogs and really wasn’t one of my favorites due to the large reflection in the photo, so you couldn’t really make out the dogs as well as some of the animals in other photos. I definitely need to visit more Natural History Museums (like the Field Museum in Chicago which is one of Chicago’s more prestigious institutions).

I can, however, recommend a couple of the finer NH museums I have visited that weren’t represented there – like the Smithsonian Museum of NH in Washington D.C., or the Royal Ontario Museum (both which are temporarily closed due to the pandemic).

This weekend we also had a couple online street art tours via Zoom (and Eventbrite). The first one was in Los Angeles and the second was Brooklyn. Of the two, the Brooklyn tour was far superior due to the quality of the presentation in that it was presented in studio just using a laptop and slides of the graffiti.

The Los Angeles tour was a true street tour of graffiti in that our presenter, Galo was actually out walking the streets of LA. The only downside, besides the quantity of murals (a tiny fraction of what NY has) was the street sounds and cars that often interfered with the audio or visual part of the tour. Since it was late afternoon there, it wasn’t as busy as they said it would be on a week day, and we were lucky there weren’t many cars parked in front of the murals.

(me and Elton)

My husband and I are big fans of street art and got a huge dose of that when we traveled to Melbourne, Australia last year and took a tour there (and were invited back to the studio afterwards for a buffet and meet and greet with some of the artists). Where we live in Columbus there isn’t much graffiti, but there are a few murals and new ones commissioned all the time.

(no social distancing yet)

I definitely learned something from both tours, and it was interesting to get the inside perspective from a street artist from each city. I learned that the graffiti and murals are sometimes created with different materials besides just paint, and that there’s many different kinds of paint and techniques (including can control where they paint straight lines without the aid of painter’s tape and do a pretty impressive job of it). It’s bad form to steal someone else’s idea (‘biting’) and recreate it as your own.

Of course no one is happy when their piece is tagged or painted over. Some works are commissioned, while others may be done under cover of night. Contrary to popular belief, the police don’t constantly crack down on it everywhere, and there are some parts of the city (at least in NY) which are more respected where no one will ruin your piece (at least not until it’s been up for years and starts to fade). I also learned stickers are popular and collectible too (a couple of which I acquired last year in Melbourne).