Photo suite 216 -- more found art

Flag art by Brad Devlin

I went to the opening of an art show this week that really resonated with me, because the artist's subject is one that I've been fascinated by for years.  Brad Devlin is a local artist whose work for many years has been to recycle found objects and junk, and this show consisted entirely of flags.

Brad Devlin, Feel The Bern

Brad Devlin, Take Five

 Brad Devlin, Manifest Destiny

Brad Devlin, Melting Pot #3 (detail below)

(yes, they're tiny carpet samples)

Brad Devlin, D Boon Kilt A Bar

I find it intriguing how the basic format of the American flag -- starry union in the corner, stripes of alternating color -- is so ingrained in our minds that you can vary it considerably and still say "flag."  Even if you saw only one of these works, without a title and in any context, you would know it's a flag.

Hold that thought -- I'll be writing more on the subject of flags in my own art in subsequent posts.

Photo suite 202 -- found art

Found art -- now I understand!

Last year I had a project with my friend and art pal Uta Lenk in which we sent each other pictures of "found art" every week.  Sometimes the found art was simply a reflection or a patch of picturesquely peeling paint, but sometimes it was actual "art" found in an unexpected place.  In Rome last summer I was walking along the Tiber and was surprised to look across the river and see these mysterious figures on the embankment on the far side.

I sent the photo to Uta and promptly forgot about it, until yesterday I saw an announcement that artist William Kentridge is going to do a huge public art installation along the Tiber next year.  Apparently what I saw was a test for the real project.

Here's a rendering of what it's going to look like:

image from Tevereterno

The images are in effect made from dirt: a stencil is placed over the embankment wall and a high-pressure hose is used to power-wash around the edges.  What's left is the natural patina (fancy artspeak for dirt) of the wall, and as time passes more dirt will accumulate, eventually obscuring the figures.

Meanwhile, the frieze will extend more than a third of a mile and be illuminated at night.  According to the release, it will include "scenes of war, kings, victory, mythology, and devastation."

And I saw it first!!

Photo suite 186 -- circles underfoot

Photo suite 172 -- sidewalk stains

Last year I exchanged photos of "found art" every week with my art pal Uta Lenk (click here to check them all out).  Apparently I spend a lot of time walking with my eyes on my feet, because I found lots of "art" on the sidewalk.

A year of found art

You know I'm a devotee of regular art -- projects in which you commit to making something every day, week or month according to the rules set at the outset.  I've been doing daily art every year since 2003, which you can check out at my other blog.  These projects have been my personal activities, but for some time I've also had the pleasure of doing regular art with a partner, Uta Lenk, my quilting pal in Germany.

We started out in 2010 and 2011 by exchanging emails every day, each with at least one photo.  Then in 2013 we did thirteen posts, each consisting of thirteen images of thirteen objects.

Last year we changed the rules and exchanged photos of "found art" --  accidental patterns and compositions created by man or nature and discovered by camera-carrying observers.  We had both enjoyed taking this kind of picture in the past, so we didn't have to search very hard to come up with our weekly contributions.

One of my favorite places to find found art is on the sides of dumpsters.  They get scratched up by rough handling, then they rust in the scratches, they attract graffiti, and occasionally they get painted over, yielding surfaces that remind me of Pollock or Rothko.

One of Uta's favorite subjects is reflections, and she's much better than I am at finding them.

I'm posting our found art to the blog we started in 2013, Dreizehn Thirteens, in case you want to see what we have been up to on both these projects.

And yes, we're doing a joint project this year too, but for now it's just between the two of us.  We'll fill you in later.

Junk art -- the tutorial 2

Here's the rest of what I told the fourth-graders about different ways to make junk art:

Fourth, choose objects with similar colors.

Word on the Street: Orange

Green on the Street 




















Fifth, choose objects with similar shapes.

Paper Moons

Road Kill 2: Circles

Road Kill 3: Rectangles 

Sixth, make letters or words.

Tupelo

Street Runes (yes, it's words -- you just don't know the alphabet)

 I'll show you what the kids came up with tomorrow.

Junk mail haiku 1

I've written before about a twist on found art where I search out "found poetry" on the printed pages of books and newspapers.  I've posted some of my compositions here, and more on a blog called Haiku Art.

Recently I started a new project, finding haiku in junk mail.  This is an ideal art project for the terminally frugal: your raw materials are in endless, renewing supply, and your equipment cost is minimal, one glue stick lasting for many months.

The rules of this project are simple: the junk mail has to come in a conventionally shaped envelope, and I paste the found haiku onto the front of the envelope.  If our address is printed on the envelope, I cover it with a blank label and put the poem there; if there's a window I usually put the poem inside it.

Eventually I plan to bind the "pages" into a book, but for now I'm just finding the poems.  I've been on a roll in the last several days, as I'm trying to go through the piles of stuff that accumulated on my kitchen and dining room tables during the months I was quilting nonstop.

When I work on projects like this with a strong element of conceptual art, I find that half the fun is thinking about the different ways to categorize and organize the work.  When I made bundles last year, for instance, I enjoyed grouping them by contents, by theme, by source, by size, by style of labeling tag, etc.

This project is no exception.  Having finished almost 100 so far, I'm delighted to sort and contemplate the many themes and variations that are appearing.

Let me talk first about the poetry, and come back in later posts to the visual aspects.  My basic choice is whether the poem should be a fair representation of the appeal, or whether I should take words and phrases out of context for surprise, irony or humor.  Much as I enjoy the latter, I sometimes feel it's disrespectful to make fun of the real human suffering in question.  I tend to play it straight with humanitarian appeals, but exterminators, insurance agents and used car salesmen are fair game for anything silly I can find.

Many of my haiku end up simply describing the dire situations that the appeal is trying to deal with.  You can't always tell exactly what is under discussion, but you certainly get the drift.

Slightly different are the poems that present the appeal itself.

Still others present a call to action.

Are you sobbing yet and reaching for your checkbook?  The poems will be more fun in the next post, I promise.

Photo suite 31 -- found drawings