God's Eye

First of all, more people should come to Church of Craft. Tonight was quiet, and a little odd at moments, but pretty awesome. Tristan made a 10 foot monochord this weekend--he set it up on the bar and plugged it into an amplifier and let everyone bang on it. BIG sounds. Steve learned how to patch his own jeans and played piano (which inspired me to be listening to my Erik Satie station right at this very moment) on a big white grand piano. Some guy made buttons out of string, another guy made an erotic statue out of obscure german lego-esque building blocks, and I made a very large god's eye. I just don't understand how people could choose to miss this shit. It just gets better and better every month.

I don't think anybody gets the god's eye. Not that there's so much to it--it's really just a ubiquitous childhood crafty weird church camp kind of thing (not that I have ever been to church camp) that I thought would be fun to try on a large scale. It makes perfect sense to me, and I think it looks awesome, but maybe I'm just odd. I did a little research to see if anyone in the art world has touched on the subject, and lo and behold:

By Arianna Stolt

From a window display at Craftland by artist Jen Corace.

So yeah. It's not a sweeping trend or anything, but I suspect maybe it will be. I think I'm going to make a bunch and create a totally church campified stage set for the fauxbois record release. You'll see.

rethinking

letting go of an idea that i'm attached to is a really hard thing to do. and that's why i'm going to do it here, in a semi-public sphere. to make it *official*. goodbye big beautiful dilapidated building. i will think of you often.

colouring

in the spirit of wasting time, i thought i'd visit colourlovers, which i haven't messed around with for a while...so much fun to be had on the internets. too much. here's a color palette:

based on this "inspiration" photo:

fashioning

uh oh. found a new time-waster.

Welcome to Polyvore! by csnow featuring Forever21

collaborating

I was just browsing around my friend Rick's blog and was reminded of this project that we did together a while back. I miss the little ghosties. It was an extremely fun and satisfying project--the kind of thing I could do all the time.

helping

I am so happy to get to practice my rudimentary design skills for friends with cool businesses...

quilting

Last night I had a rare opportunity to see a collection of Gee's Bend Quilts at BAM and meet two of the artists whose families have been making these quilts for generations. It's a remarkable story, and the quilts are really exciting to look at.

I have to admit though, some of the Q&A totally bugged the shit out of me. There could have been a really interesting conversation about any number of topics--Louisiana and China--the two women present--had really insightful and intelligent things to say--but were asked stupid questions like: "Doesn't it just feel AWFUL to see your work hanging in a museum, instead of wrapping yourself up in it?" Louisiana's answer was (I'm totally paraphrasing) "If we kept our quilts for ourselves, we'd be the only ones who knew about them--this way the whole world gets to see them, and enjoy them. Our quilts are like children--they are born, they grow up, you let them go." Such a lovely, simple, pure way to look at it. And all those art students couldn't grapple with the guilt they felt about how intentionally they are going about their work. How much purpose and importance and thought they put into it; instead of just creating--out of necessity--and letting the work speak for itself.