Day 5 at the Chicago Mosaic School with Verdiano Marzi - Contemporary Expression Mosaic Workshop

It's been over a week since the workshop finished. I spent most of last week getting website developer training and Google analytics training and haven't taken the time to finish writing about the workshop.

No one in the class finished their mosaics during the 5 days. The point wasn't to finish, but rather to participate in a thoughtful process where every step of the mosaic was carefully considered - concept, design, selecting materials/colors, cutting with the hammers & hardies (a new experience for some of us), and tesserae placement.

Around lunch time we did a critique of the mosaics. I generally love critiques, but this one was a bit intimidating - how could it be otherwise with such talent in the room - until it started. It became clear that every piece in the room was a visually compelling, dramatic, well-executed contemporary mosaic. Each artist spoke about their process for 5 minutes, then the group commented on the work, and then Verdiano asked his questions and gave his critique of the artist's work and made suggestions for finishing the pieces and things to think about for future work. Normally I expect to have some of the flaws in my work pointed out... but while all the comments were positive and affirming, it did not feel like things were being Pollyanna-ed. It just felt supportive.

After the critique we were invited to continue to work on the mosaics. I did not cement any additional tessarae to the mosaic, focusing instead on cutting what I estimated I would need to finish the mosaic and cleaning up my area thoroughly. I also shared my website with some of the students who had asked me about it. Sophie and Verdiano were also interested in the work shown on my website.

Here is my mosaic at this point. I'm waiting on some tools (steel hammer and carbide hardie to pair up with my carbide hammer and steel hardie) before I work on it again.

 

BMW - Ideas and Thoughts

BMW is asking people for ideas for the future on facebook

"Do you have a great idea, a design, a vision for the future or a start-up concept that concerns sustainable mobility? Just go to our “Your ideas” tab and enter the details of your idea, design or concept. We will promote the best three ideas with posts on our wall. We are looking forward to your entries!"

I'm not certain that I have a specific project. But I do have an idea that I feel is critically important... not a new idea, by far, but one I don't hear enough people talking about.

We really, really need to be mindful of the entire ecological effect any given project, product, or process has. Surely we're good enough at analyzing things now that we could determine which is more harmful - paper or plastic? gasoline or electric? coal or nuclear?

I don't drive a hybrid or electric car - not because I don't feel passionately about the environment or sustainability... but because I don't know if it's worse to drive a very fuel-efficient traditional vehicle, consuming petroleum products and leaving behind the residue of my passing... OR if it's worse to drive a hybrid/electric and encourage the ecological damage that the manufacturing production of batteries produces.

So I guess my Best Idea is that we learn the actual impact of our decisions; that we require government and industry to reduce, reuse and recycle (provided that recycling doesn't use more resources than making new - another quandary for another day...), that we find a way to de-politicize the information and the actions taken; and that we reward ecologically responsible behaviors (government, industry and individual) with funding and perks - make it pay to be ecologically responsible.

This will mean that we cannot maintain constant economic growth... that, above any other postmodern economic concept, needs to be publically challenged and understood... we cannot have constant, perpetual growth - it's a fallacy to think that our resources will sustain it. Like every other rhythm on earth - ecomomic growth should ebb and flow.

Day 4 at the Chicago Mosaic School with Verdiano & Sophie

With Sophie and Verdiano's gentle guiding I made some dramatic changes to the mosaic - changes to the plan I had, the final piece I had envisioned, changes in how I think about mosaic. This mosaic will, I think, be a stronger work, a less rigidly representational piece, a true abstract work (which was my goal). Although it has/will have a very real visual story for me, I think it will be more open for others to create their own stories.

Let me tell you a bit about Sophie and Verdiano...

When I met Sophie a year ago I thought she was a very gracious and warm person. It's was good to learn this week that I was correct. She is one of the most artistically generous people I know... By that I mean that she doesn't hoard her ideas, she doesn't keep secrets from others who want to develop a richer, deeper practice. She doesn't safeguard her preeminence.

And, best of all she's funny and mischievous and devoted to excellence in her art. 

Verdiano. What can I say about Verdiano... He's a strangely wonderful mix of innocence and brilliance. He, like Sophie, shares his whole self, his whole world, with you. Karen said it best Saturday night - "even though we don't share more than a few words, I understand him. I understand him without speaking." [a paraphrase… I cannot recall her exact words – they were much more profound…]

I never saw Verdiano without a smile on his face – well, except for when he was focused on what a student was trying to accomplish. At those times he got this intense, not-quite-a-frown-deep-thought look that signified a total concentration on the task at hand. I don’t know where the man gets his creative energy – he was 100% present for all 5 days.

There are some people who are the universe’s gift to the rest of us… I’m spending time with several of them right now. 

Day 3 with Verdiano and Sophie...

I'll start this post off with the photos... There are three - one of the sketch for the mosaic, one of my table at the end of the day and a close-up of the mosaic.

I'm thinking its title is Facing (maybe Finding, or Hunting) the Mystery... or something like that.

I had the option to go on a tour of mosaics in Chicago, but I was on a roll with cutting tesserae, so I stayed behind and cut a lot of stone. I had enough glass cut so I just focused on the marble. You get in a rhythm and it works well - the hammer strikes the stone perfectly and the cut happens where you want it - then you get cocky and you either get your thumb with the hammer (and the hammer is sharp) or you hit the hardie with the hammer (*shame*) or your cuts go all wonky and you cannot get the pieces you want no matter what. So the moral of the story is:

STAY HUMBLE and your cuts will satisfy you (and Verdiano too!)...

Verdiano and Sophie really seem to like my mosaic at this point. I feel pretty good about the mosaic and pretty damn good about them liking it. Karen said "Wow." too. It's great to learn from people who show you where you're going good and where you could change things up and get better results. I think we'll be doing a critique on Sunday and that will be great too. I love critiques - love talking about everyone's work, together, looking for the strengths in a piece and offering suggestions for making the next work even stronger.

It's great to be working on a piece that is so different. I love the Blenko glass. So I'll be getting some of that when I get the down-payment on the next mosaic (a week from today). I've learned about some great new tools and some of them will be going home with me and others will come later (we're pulling together a list of people interested in the tools from overseas [France? Italy?] so that we can buy en masse and save). And I'm definitely getting a bunch of marble.

Verdiano's Modern Expression Mosaic Class

I'm in Chicago, at the Chicago Mosaic School, studying with Verdiano Marzi. It's day 2 of a 5 day class. We're working with stone and glass. I've never worked with stone before...

I'm using a tight-grained, sandstone-colored marble, and a second, similar colored marble that has tiny geodes or crystals in it. I'm also using some gray/black marble - one with white veins and one without.

Along with the marble I'm using some smalti and some Blenko Dalle de Verre glass.

During the first day Verdiano (who doesn't speak English) described the methods for working with the various materials to create contemporary mosaics. Verdiano lives in Paris and teaches mosaic at the Louvre. He speaks to us with the aid of mosaic artist (and professional orchestral and chamber music violinist) Sophie Drouin who translates for us.

After Verdiano spoke to us, we grabbed our hammers, selected marble and glass, and learned to cut tesserae. It took me most of the remainder of the day to get to the point where I was able to cut tesserae that suited me. Verdiano says I make good tesserae... so I'm happy.

I'm staying with Eileen, and when I got back to her apartment last night I was totally empty of inspiration for the design I wanted to create. I selected the first art book I saw on her bookcase - The Color of Light, by Marko Ivan Rupnik. I saw that the first pages of the book was images of beautiful abstract paintings. I wanted to do an abstract work. I've not done an abstract mosaic and the whole point of taking a class from someone like Verdiano is to really push oneself.

I only looked at a bit of the book before deciding to take a walk on the beach. Eileen lives a couple-three blocks from Lake Michigan and there's a great beach at the end of her street. As I walked in the rapidly cooling evening air, I found and collected a couple handfuls each of some lake-smoothed brown (chert?) and black (coal) stones. When I came back to Eileen's and went back to looking at the book I discovered that the second half of the book was full of images of the mosaic that Rupnik did in the Redemptoris Mater Chapel. The chilly walk on the beach and all the wonderful images in the book opened up something for me and I sat down and made around 25 sketches for the abstract mosaic. Two of them were really strong. One was exceptional.

Today we started on our mosaics.
Here is mine around noon today.  

And here it is at 6:30 as I finished up for the day. You can see the tesserae and the andamento.

Current Mosaic Project

Just some work-in-progress photos (Jason, don't look if you want your mosaic to be a surprise!)

Freudian Slip Fashion Show

The show was a great success! There was nearly 300 people there for the event (the Gregerson Family Jam - a benefit for the Gregerson family). We did not have control of the lighting or the stage area (since there were bands playing before and after the fashion show), but it turned out fine anyway. Emerald & Casey (Freudian Slip Fashions) are planning another fashion show for the fall.

Today is Dad's Birthday

He'd be 82. I miss him.

I wish he was here so that I could call him, although I rarely did (*shame*) when he was alive.

He was born in 1929 - the end of the Roaring Twenties - the same year as Martin Luther King Jr., Dick Clark, Grace Kelly, Imelda Marcos, Audrey Hepburn, Anne Frank, Jackie Kennedy Onassis, Yassar Arafat,   and countless others.

In the months before his birth Mother Teresa arrived in Calcutta, a revolt (José Gonzalo Escobar and Jesús María Aguirre) failed in Mexico, and Herbert Hoover was inaugurated as the 31st U.S. President.

He was 3 months old when the first public demonstration of color TV was conducted.

He was 4 months old when a secret decree in Russia created the gulags and the Geneva Convention was signed.

He was just 7 months old when the Stock Market crashed.

He was not quite 8 months old when the 7.2 magnitude Grand Banks earthquake occurred, snapping transatlantic telegraph cables and triggering a tsunami.

He was 8 months old when the Museum of Modern Art opened in NYC.

During my father's first year Pablo Picasso painted two cubist works, Woman in a Garden and Nude in an Armchair, the first Academy Awards were given, and Popeye debuted in the comics. ^Source

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Let me tell you about him...

He was extraordinary in his willingness to examine any topic, any idea, any belief that he held. If you had a good argument or explanation he'd be willing to meet you halfway.

He taught me how to look at a problem as something that had a solution, rather than an insurmountable obstacle to complain about.

He taught me how to use tools, how to fix things, how to be more independent and sure of my self than most young women.

He wasn't all that comfortable with us as babies, but as we became able to "do" stuff with him he enjoyed our interactions. He got better with babies as time went along, and was a pro with his grandkids.

He loved cars, and motorcycles and trucks - loved reading about them, looking at them, shopping for them, having them, fixing them, giving them to us.

He often had pit passes to the Indy 500 and Daytona.

He wanted to live to be 100, but said, as he was dying "I've had a great life, not too many regrets. Take care of your mother for me..."

More about my dad

^{Source: Wikipedia}

I survived, but...

... my phone did not. Well, it did not survive unscathed.

Went for the first outdoor bike ride of the year this past Saturday. A car came quickly out of a driveway right in front of me and I had to come to an abrupt stop. I did not have my pocket zipped closed and when I caught myself (and my bike) by getting one foot down fast, I kneed my phone right out of my jacket pocket.

It landed face-down on the pavement and came apart. I picked up all the pieces (including the pieces of glass from the touch screen and took it home. It still turned on, so I put the glass pieces back in, and covered it with packing tape...

I'm not close enough to the end of my phone contract to even think about getting another phone - I refuse to pay full price for one of these things.

How to Fix Congress

Below is the content of an email I received today. I'm not certain exactly what I think of it except that I think it represents an overly simplistic point of view.

I have put some questions at the end... What do you think?

The 26th amendment (granting the right to vote for 18 year-olds) took  only 3 months & 8 days to be ratified!  Why?  Simple!  The people demanded it. That was in 1971...before computers, before e-mail, before cell phones, etc.

Of the 27 amendments to the Constitution, seven (7) took 1 year or less to become the law of the land...all because of public pressure.

I'm asking each addressee to forward this email to a minimum of twenty people on their address list; in turn ask each of those to do likewise.

In three days, most people in The United States of America will have the message.  This is one idea that really should be passed around.

 Congressional Reform Act of 2011

1. Term Limits
   
   12 years only, one of the possible options below
   Two Six-year Senate terms
   Six Two-year House terms
   One Six-year Senate term & three Two-Year House terms
2. No Tenure / No Pension
   
   A Congressman collects a salary while in office and receives no pay when they are out of office.
3. Congress (past, present & future) participates in Social Security.
   
4. All funds in the Congressional retirement fund move to the Social Security system immediately.
   All future funds flow into the Social Security system, and Congress participates with the American people.
5. Congress can purchase their own retirement plan, just as all Americans do.
   
6. Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise.
   Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.
7. Congress loses their current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people.
   
8. Congress must equally abide by all laws they impose on the American people.
   
9. All contracts with past and present Congressmen are void effective 1/1/11.

The American people did not make this contract with Congressmen. Congressmen made all these contracts for themselves. Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career.  The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, so ours should serve their term(s), then go home and back to work.

If each person contacts a minimum of twenty people then it will only take three days for most people (in the U.S.) to receive the message.

Maybe it is time.

THIS IS HOW YOU FIX CONGRESS!!!!! If you agree with the above, pass it on. If not, just delete.

You are one of my 20+.  Please keep it going.

My questions for anyone interesting in discussing this:

1. What, if any, are the benefits from not having term limits on congress?
2. What, if any, are the downsides from not having term limits on congress?
3. What, other than the length of time served by individuals, would be different if we had term limits for congress?
4.  Would there be a financial advantage or benefit if the retirement/Social Security/health insurance changes suggested here came to pass?
5. I'm curious - does anyone think any amendment limiting congress in these ways would actually have a chance? 

It is - and rightly so - a difficult process to adopt amendments to the constitution. The constitution provides that an amendment may be proposed either by a joint proposal by the congress (with a two-thirds majority vote in both the House of Representatives and the Senate) or by a constitutional convention called for by two-thirds of the State legislatures (none of the 27 amendments to the constitution have been proposed by constitutional convention).

1. The congress proposes an amendment in the form of a joint resolution which is forwarded directly to National Archives and Records Administration's Office of the Federal Register for processing and publication. 
2. The OFR adds legislative history notes to the joint resolution and publishes it.
3. The archivist submits the proposed amendment to the states for their consideration by sending a letter of notification to each governor along with the informational material prepared by the OFR.
4. The governors then formally submit the amendment to their state legislatures.
5. A proposed amendment becomes part of the constitution as soon as it is ratified by three-fourths of the States (38 of 50 states).  

It seems to me that no congress is going to promote an amendment with these kinds of changes the emailer is proposing. And I'm not certain that we'd ever get 33 or 34 state legislatures to call a constitutional convention... for this or any other amendment. The payback - on this one especially - might be a bitch.

I also think that for the most part these kinds of changes - whether by law (statutory, case or regulatory) or by amendment - are suggested when there would be a marked advantage to one party or the other (remember that the Republicans were all for term limits during FDR's presidency, but wanting to eliminate them when Reagan was in office, and I'm sure there's a equally appalling example for the Democrats too, but I just cannot think of one right now). And that sort of pisses me off - I don't like it when it's assumed that I won't see the hidden agendas...

So my last questions are:

1. Who is this benefiting? Or maybe, more importantly, who would think it would benefit them?
2. With whom do you think this email originated? Not actual people, of course, but what political views, economic status, et cetera... do you think might inform their opinions and motivation?

Dreadlocks

In December I went to a salon in Minneapolis and had dreadlocks done. The dreads were created with the use of a "dread perm" and I thought all was well.

The instructions they provided were:

1. Do not wash hair for 3-4 weeks
2. Roll dreads, once/week, with lock tightening gel.
3. Come back in a couple months for a dread maintenance

I ended up needing a dread maintenance at 4 weeks because my hair grows really fast (since December 18th my hair has grown around 1 1/2" - maybe more...) and because the dreads were getting really lumpy and frizzy. I felt like a dreadlocks failure because I was following the instructions perfectly and my dreads were not coming out well.  I thought I was going to have to cut them off and I was quite sad about it all. I realized the once-a-week rolling wasn't going to work for me, but did not know exactly what I should do. I started looking around the web for more information about dreadlocks and ran across the DreadHead HQ website.

On the DHHQ site I learned that  that I should be washing my hair a couple times/week; I should be rolling my dreads everyday instead of once/week; and I did not have to pay a salon $50/hour to do my dread maintenance. After reading the site from cover-to-cover I figured out that I could have done a better job getting my dreads started without going to a salon (umm... $350.00, oh well.... live and learn).

DHHQ has a toll-free number. I called it and talked to Betseh. She was generous with information, helpful, and supportive. After hearing that I'd had a dread perm she was pretty worried about the state of my dreads, but after seeing the photos on Facebook, she said that my dreads looked remarkably well, considering. We talked about how I could rescue them and get them on  track to being exactly what I wanted them to be... 

So now I've done my first waxing (last weekend) and I've been rolling each dread for 1 minute each night (all 80 of them). I don't really fit nicely into the DHHQ alternating maintenance routine since my dreads were salon built and the perm did make them dread quite a bit right away, so I'm kind of coming up with my own way to work my way into an alternating schedule. I'm counting all the time since I had the dreads done as the first month. This past week I've had the initial waxing in my dreads and I'll continue that until next weekend. Then I'll wash out the wax and start the Week A week.

I've got great expectations - already I've noticed that my dreads are much less ziggiedy-zaggiedy and lumpy after just one week of the DreadHeadHQ method... stay tuned.

I'm working in the studio here - on a mosaic.

Artist Statements

Art Amiba post - does art speak louder than words?

I am of two minds when I think about artists statements... primarily I think crafting an artist statement is a good exercise for undergraduates and emerging (gag, I hate that word, but for lack of a better one...) artists IF it helps them focus their passion into good art. And by good art I mean art that communicates something to anyone who invests the time to really look at - or listen to - it.  (Great art, in my opinion, is art that captures the viewer, art that insists the viewer invest the time...)

I believe that an artist statement should be about the artist, not the work. The work, when executed well, doesn't need an explanation. And in fact, I think the explanation usually gets in the way of the audience's experience with the art.

I think people worry too much about getting "THE" message of a work. When I talk to my students I tell them that every piece of art has a message for them and that their responsibility, as the viewer, is to discover that story. It will be an individualized story, the work tells a different story to each viewer, each viewer creates their own story. It may be the story that the artist intended to tell, but probably not. And that's the way it should be.  

I do think an exhibit should include an artist statement. But it should be tucked away in a unobtrusive, out-of-the-way place, available but not front and center, a way for the curious audience to get a glimpse of the artist's persona (note - persona, not person - very few people - artists or not - are secure enough, honest enough, or even self-aware enough to offer up a one page window into who they really are).

An artist or curator, who puts the words before the art is simply egotizing.

Dreadlocks

Earlier this month I dreaded my hair. I thought about it for a long, long time. Since I lead a double-life (professional at a Catholic university and artist) I was of two minds about doing it.

I worried a bit about having what some would consider a drastic hairstyle.
I'd wanted to dread my hair for years.

I wondered about taking care of dreads.
I hate mussing with my hair (before I'd just twist it up into a knot on the back of my head and either wrap it with a jumbo hair-tie or stick some sticks through it).

I could not build my dreads on my own - that would take too much time and look too sloppy while they formed.

So I found a place that does dreadlocks and set up an appointment.

Before Dreads:

 

After Dreads:

So far I've only had one person say "Why did you do THAT?" Everyone else has really liked the dreads...

And it's gotten me back into knitting - I'm making hats and headbands for my dread-ness.

Bamboo Mosaic

This one was done by one of my workshop participants. It was her first mosaic.