The cow above lives right around the corner from my sleep doctor’s office.
More cows from the Austin Cow Parade appear in the video.
Tag: art
Doodle 1. Don’t Judge, Mrs. Pollock
Doodle 1.
Doodle something abstract, using shapes and only one color.
Words & Wine Wednesday at Austin’s Writing Barn featured Carin Channing discussing her book 365 Days of Doodling: Discovering the Joys of Being Creative Every Day.
Ms. Channing didn’t know she was a doodler until she was forty, when she accepted an online 30-day Doodle Challenge. When the month was up, she began doodling with friends… and with strangers… and then she started teaching doodling.
Why? Because doodling is–I’m pulling from her long list of adjectives–“fun… liberating… fun… energizing… youthfulizing… clarifying… fun…”
I’ve never been a doodler. I have a heavy touch and a tight grip. My pencil doesn’t sweep lightly, freely, and steadily across the page. The pictures on my paper don’t look like the pictures in my head. Frustration guaranteed.
But at Words & Wine, Ms. Channing made doodling sound as much fun as her book claims it is. She handed out paper and markers and invited us to draw.
I used the prompt “Draw how your day started.”
The picture wasn’t worth a thousand words, so I added some. The zigzaggy lumps that look like armadillos are cats.
David is a word person, too, but he employs more subtlety:
Ms. Channing’s books were, like Mt. Everest, there, so I bought one.
Today I did my first official doodle, displayed at the top of the post.
Didn’t Jackson Pollock’s wife say to him, “But you have to abstract from something. What are you abstracting from?” (If Mrs. Pollock didn’t really say that, Marcia Gay Harden said something similar in the movie, which is close enough.)
I quashed the dither by turning my pencil on its side and making a blurry square, and another one, and then a couple of ovals, and another blurry square, and another oval… and the ovals began to look like eyes and a mouth. An oval blur in one of the eye-ovals looked like an iris, so I added a blur to the other eye-oval. That made the eyes focus. I restrained myself from putting a ladybug on the shoulder.
So much for abstraction. Some of us, I guess, abstract to rather than from.*
Where creativity is the goal–and this is oh, so important–judgment must be silent. As Mr. Pollock no doubt said to his wife.
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*I write that way, too.
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Typewriter Rodeo, who create “custom, on-the-spot poems for event guests, using vintage typewriters,” was also featured at Words & Wine Wednesday. The typewriters are beautiful. More about that in a later post.
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Weekly Photography Challenge: Creepy
Finally I have something that fits the category.
I posted one of these shots several years ago and promised to say more about it later, but after some thought I realized I didn’t know what to say. So I let it go.
Now, however, is the time.
The photos were taken at the Dishman Museum on the Lamar University campus in Beaumont, Texas, where David and I attended the Boomtown Film and Music Festival for a screening of one of his videos. We walked into the Dishman to register and found this piece of Art looming over us. It reached out and pulled my camera from its bag. I began snapping.
My first thought was, It’s from The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig, a picture book I love even more than my second-graders did. The pink, the snouts, the little house, the flowers. Pigs.
Then I realized the pink shapes were more wolfish than piggish. Rabidly wolfish.
Fascinating.
Nightmarish.
And cute. Darned cute.
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WordPress Weekly Photography Challenge
Rice Pudding Suitable for Framing
My friend Em informed me that she has found the Google Art Project and will therefore be incommunicado for about the next five years.
If she can drag herself away from the National Gallery of Everywhere, she might show up for dinner Sunday, an engagement we made months ago. If not, she’ll send her husband along by himself.
Em is an artist. One of her pieces hung in her office—a pencil drawing of opera star Marian Anderson. It is beautiful. She entered it in the county fair several years ago. I don’t remember how it placed, but it didn’t take first. Her husband said it would have done better if she’d put a pair of boots and some cactus in the background.
I wish I had Em’s passion for visual art, but I have neither the education nor the eye. I’m a word person. If I had my way, I would cover all my walls with words.
Which brings me to the point: I have discovered how to turn words into art without using talent or turpentine: Wordle.
I pasted the text of an old post into the Wordle website, clicked Go, and Voila! A post suitable for framing.
Or it will be when I get the bugs worked out.
Related Articles
- Google Art Project adds White House, the Met, National Gallery (news.cnet.com)
- Google Art Projects Photographs Works At Art Institute (chicago.cbslocal.com)
- Go On a Virtual Art Scavenger Hunt in the Google Art Project (freetech4teachers.com)
- Google Art Project (paperartscene.com)
- Google Art Project now has over 30,000 works including the White House Gallery (theverge.com)
- Google Art Project (gambitpublish.wordpress.com)
- Six Aussie galleries join Google Art Project (abc.net.au)
- The everywhere museum: Catch gorgeous Indonesian Art on Google Art project (nextlevelofnews.com)
- The Google Art Project Expands Virtual Collection (bespacific.com)
Kathy Waller 