I Dreamt of Things...

Last night was a weird one. I had three disconcerting dreams...

1. Matt and I came home to a house we lived in. Inside was a long, dark black cobra coiled up waiting to strike. It chased us out of our house and we sat in the car as it stared at us from the outside.

2. As I placed some papers on the bed, a spider came crawling out. Matt kept trying to catch it but it was too quick. Finally, its belly swelled up to the size of a basketball and exploded all over everything.

3. I was in an airport trying to get home. There was a strange trolley system — it was like a train of grocery carts with seats that carried people around the airport. I was pregnant, but I didn’t want to be. I sat on my little cart jerking down the tracks, waiting to arrive at my destination so I could go home ... but there was no destination. I had nowhere to go. (p.s. I’m not actually pregnant, thank goodness!)

Matt’s Photos of Downtown L.A.

Downtown Los Angeles from the roof (14th floor) of the Los Angeles Athletic Club (LAAC).

Matt came with me last week when I had a business trip to Los Angeles. We stayed right in downtown at the L.A. Athletic Club. I always love having him accompany me on my work trips, because we get together with friends and we usually get to go hiking in the Angeles National Forest.

Looking southwest from the roof (14th floor) of the Los Angeles Athletic Club.
The purple light is coming from Staples Center and L.A. Live.

The L.A. Athletic Club has a rooftop area where people can go hang out (though from all appearances, it seemed like no one had been up there in a while). Matt got the great idea to go up there one foggy night and photograph the city. These images are beautiful!

Check out more of Matt McGrath’s photos here.

Rachell Sumpter’s Touching Eskimo Drawings

Finery. 11x14 inches. Pastel and guache on paper.

I was in Los Angeles last weekend with my friend Camille, and we spent a lot of time checking out the local art scene. The most memorable work I saw was created by Rachell Sumpter. These drawings of Eskimo scenes are so quietly touching — most of the drawings are no more than 11x14 inches, and the figures are often only about 3/4" tall.

The painting above is my favorite. It’s melancholy is punctuated by brightly-colored litter strewn througout the sea as this Eskimo tries to canoe through the water.

Go Wild. 13x21 inches. Pastel and guache on paper.

Igloo. 11x14 inches. Pastel and guache on paper.

Volcanites. 10x12.5 inches. Pastel and guache on paper.

Aurel Schmidt’s Illustrations

Aurel Schmidt is a 26 year old artist who moved from Vancouver to New York a few years ago. Her immaculate drawings exhibit exquisite detail. She creates wacky images using bits and pieces of leaves, bugs, butterflies, and other elements from nature. Many of the images are quite beautiful from a distance, and then you're thrown for a loop when you get up close and see that the bigger image is created with groupings of tiny bugs.

See an interview with Aural and more of her work here.

A Matter of Life & Death

I just read about artist Cordola Volkening in yesterday’s New York Times. About 18 months ago, she was diagnosed with brain cancer. Surgery and chemotherapy didn’t help, so now she is left with only months to live. Ms. Volkening faces her fate through obsessive painting, sometimes completing several paintings in one day.

I am inspired by the paintings, not just because of the circumstances surrounding their creation, but the use of color, abstraction, and gesture. These are beautiful and not at all self-conscious.


Quoting the NYT article:

So she spends her remaining time in a comfortable chair by a window at the studio. She painted years ago but with more mental interference, she said, making it more of an “intellectual pursuit” than the urgent, spontaneous process it is now. Now the brush itself seems to decide what to paint.

“I paint what comes out,” she said. “It’s not intellectual — it’s instinctive.”

She paints rapidly and spontaneously and her images are primal and powerful. There are urgent brush strokes, bold colors and bleak backgrounds. There are faces laughing and others cringing. There are winged characters flying into the beyond. There are people hugging each other. Different as they are, she said, they all reflect aspects of her condition.

She says the terminal illness has simplified things, washing away the worry and petty preoccupations that almost made life more hard when she had plenty of it. And she has never felt more connected to the canvas and to her creativity.

Beautiful Collages by Nancy Monk

Nancy Monk has been a working artist for over thirty years, working in a variety of media from glass to photography and painting. Her recent projects have focused on the paradox of obsessive layering and minimal selection. She layers paint, gold leaf, and small objects on top of photographs, framing aspects of the image to create her own narrative.

Word of the Week — EXACT

Each week, I close my eyes and choose a random word from the dictionary. I then do an image search for that word online, and choose some of the most interesting, unusual, and unexpected results to share with you.

Interview with Arjen Noordeman

Arjen Noordeman (my friend and fellow Cranbrook grad), of ElasticBrand, single-handedly brought CranbrookDesign.com back to life last month, after it had languished for a couple years. I interviewed him about the new site, his work, and his inspirations.

Check it out on CranbrookDesign.com.

25 Things...

Rules: Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you and post it. At the end, choose 5 people to be tagged. If I tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about you.

Thanks, Maya! Thus…

1. I’ve lived in six states so far, and in four different time zones: Alabama, North Carolina, Michigan, Utah, California, and Colorado.

2. Right after college, I spent the entire summer figuring out the right combination of ingredients to make the most perfect tomato salsa. This past summer I figured out how to make an amazing mango salsa to complement it.

3. I attended the North Carolina School of the Arts for high school. I get a kick out of describing it as a real-life experience akin to that 80s television show Fame.

4. I met my husband Matt McGrath on match.com. We hiked 12 miles in the Angeles National Forest on our first date. We’ve been married 5 1/2 years now.

5. I have about 600 hours of yoga teacher training, and have been practicing yoga since 1999. My favorite posture is janu sirsasana.

6. At about seven or eight years old, my mom took me to an art museum for the first time. When it was time to go, I sat down in the floor and pouted until she was finally dragged me out. My favorite artists as a kid were Georgia O’Keefe and Matisse.

7. I lived in an artist’s loft above skid row in Los Angeles for a year. It was hot and loud, it smelled terrible, and there was nowhere to shop or eat out. After a homeless guy pushed me off the sidewalk and into the road in front of oncoming traffic, I knew it was time to move to Glendale.

8. I had a horse named Beast when I was in elementary school. He was the gentlest, sweetest horse imaginable.

9. I get my love of the outdoors from my dad. On the last trip he made to visit me, we went to Joshua Tree National Park, Prescott National Forest in Sedona, and the Grand Canyon. We took a yack-inducing pink jeep “adventure tour” during which our seatbelts got quite a workout and our cheeks ached from laughing — out of pleasure or fear I’ll never be sure.

10. I’m a southpaw. Once in college I was at a dinner party where everyone at the table randomly turned up left-handed.

11. As a kid I always used to think my dad was lying and/or crazy when he said his favorite color was brown. Now I agree with him. I also have an affinity for orange.

12. I believe the planet is gravely overpopulated.

13. My favorite place to recreate is in southern Utah.

14. The things I miss most about living in L.A. are: my yoga community, ethnic food (especially Thai food), dive bars, my girlfriends, Michael Levine’s fabric store, Swains art supplies, and going to the Staples Center to see L.A. Kings hockey games.

15. The things I don’t miss about living in L.A. are: the too-cool hipsters in Los Feliz/Silverlake, the traffic, valet parking, and knowing that I would probably never be able to afford to own my own home.

16. My favorite ice cream combination is Raspberry Sherbet and Peanut Butter & Chocolate from Baskin Robbins. And yes, I like them mixed up in the same cup!

17. I always try avoid paying for parking. I would rather walk half a mile than pay to park.

18. I am extremely sensitive to loud noises. I always cover my ears when an ambulance streaks by. I’m sure people think I’m nuts.

19. I really need to make a separate line item in my budget just for shopping on amazon.com.

20. I love owning a Honda Civic Hybrid. It gets around 47 mpg, and it doesn’t scream “Look at me!” like the Prius does.

21. After taking a horticulture class in college, I tortured my friends and family endlessly by rattling off Latin and common names of about 300 native and ornamental plants.

22. In college, I wanted to double major in graphic design and landscape architecture, but one of my professors discouraged me from landscape architecture. Although I love practicing graphic design, I regretted following his advice.

23. My mom is my favorite shopping companion.

24. My first job was as a roller-skating waitress at a drive-in burger joint.

25. My favorite wild animal is a desert big horn sheep. They are nimble rock-climbers!


And now it’s my turn to tag five innocent people! Here are my victims:

Danielle, my roommate at NC School of the Arts and author of Dreadsky, a blog about her photography.

Victoria, author of Las Angelenas, a blog about fashion, food, and life in Los Angeles.

Kim, the most literary person I know. She posts irregularly at KimSaid.

Peter, who occasionally teases us with cool retro stuff on his blog, The Grant Report.

And last but not least, my WT... Lisa O!

Happy Paintings by Ryan Bubnis

The Ultimate Pleasure

Ryan Bubnis is a Portland, Oregon-based artist who works with a variety of media to create these happy little paintings. I love the colors and goofy style of the drawings.

The Seal, The Skull, and the Stranger

Bubnis’ work has been featured in publications such as Nintendo Power, Clout, Vapors and Juxtapoz magazines. Some of his clients include KidRobot, Nike, P.N.C.A., Ooba, The Portland Mercury, Hasbro, Gama-Go, ABC and 20th Century Fox.

Sustainable Cluster

My Type Designs Featured at GOB Magazine’s Blog

Check out GOB Magazine’s blog. They featured some of my type designs today! These are two original typefaces designed by yours truly. This poster is a short manifesto of my teaching philosophy, and was in the recent exhibition I PROFESS organized by VisuaLingual.

A Few of My December Paintings

Untitled No.1, 12x12 inches

Here are three paintings I finished over our holiday vacation in Boulder, Utah. I’m having trouble thinking of good names for them, so if you have any ideas, please leave me a comment!

Untitled No.2, 12x12 inches

I love working with printed fabrics, and the texture of the cardboard is so nice! I’m still pining for access to a laser cutter so I can cut more intricate shapes for my collages.

Untitled No.3, 12x12 inches

I Dreamt of Things...

I dreamt that I had a giant Russian Tea Cookie the size of a beach ball. I held it in my arms as I proceeded to gnaw on it like a mouse would a huge piece of cheese.

Here’s my favorite (and easy) recipe for Russian Tea Cookies... These are Matt’s favorite!

1 cup butter
1/2 cup powdered sugar
3/4 cup pecans
2 1/4 cups flour
1/4 tsp salt
1 tsp vanilla

Cream butter and powdered sugar. Add vanilla, then flour, salt, and pecans. Chill for an hour. Roll into balls. Bake at 325° for 25 minutes. Roll in powdered sugar after they have finished baking.

YUM!

Student Disrupts Utah Land Grab

Wacky sandstone formations in Canyonlands National Park.

Ever since this story came out, I’ve been fascinated. Several hundred thousand acres of public land in southern Utah was essentially being given away to oil and gas developers by the Bush administration. In the waning days of his presidency, Bush was pushing through the sale of huge swaths of sensitive wilderness to developers at flea market prices. Much of the land in question, most notably, is located in and around Arches and Canyonlands National Parks. . . Exactly where Matt and I spent our Christmas vacation!

View of Island in the Sky from a distance.

In fact, each evening as Matt and I left the park(s), we could already see flames shooting out of the earth at current oil and gas development sites dotting the landscape. This was particularly unsettling due to the bitter cold and thick blanket of snow covering the ground.

Enter University of Utah student Tim DeChristopher. He got out of his final exams, and went down to the land auction at the BLM office in Salt Lake City. A testament to the rushed nature of this auction, DeChristopher was able to register and begin bidding on the land immediately. He was able to purchase leases for about 22,000 acres of land around the national parks, and bid up the price for many other parcels before he was arrested.

Utah Hwy 211 on the way to Canyonlands.

You can help keep DeChristopher from being charged with fraud by helping him raise the funds to follow through on this purchase of the land leases, thereby protecting some of the amazing wild lands in southern Utah. I wonder what would happen if everyone who wanted to save the planet were as brave as Mr. DeChristopher?

I also joined the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, a group dedicated to preserving the one-of-a-kind natural places found in southern Utah.

Canyonlands New Year

Sunset in Canyonlands National Park.

I saved up my vacation time all year so that I could have two simultaneous weeks off for the holidays. Matt had some time too, so we got to spend the entire vacation goofing off outside. Interestingly, it took me a week and a half to chill out enough to forget about work and everything else, so I could finally enjoy myself completely. Canyonlands National Park, especially the Needles section, did the trick. We stepped out of the car and onto the Slickrock Foot Trail, into a solitary landscape, and I could finally breathe deeply, relax, and simply BE.

Matt’s and my shadows on the wall of Lower Spring Canyon.

My yoga teacher Jasmine Lieb used to say, “We’re human beings, not human doings!” Why should an idea so simple be so hard to implement in life?

The White Rim Trail, an old 4wd road along the edge of the canyons.