Showing posts with label Art. Show all posts
Name-your-price art
Shout out to my buddy Marta, who is selling her art to fund her involvement in Art City Austin, and she's decided to let you decide how much to pay for it. Marta's art is thoughtfully whimsical. And I don't know how to talk about art even though I like it, so why don't you just go check it out?
The artist behind the art
My husband and I had a rare day off together with the kids in school. We visited the Mabee-Gerrer Museum in Shawnee, an eclectic collection of art and artifacts donated by a worldly a Catholic monk, who was an artist himself.
I realized something while examining the exhibits: I love seeing the evidence of the artist in the art. The brush strokes, the finger prints, the globs of paint, crooked lines you can only see up close...Those are the things that I love to find. I noticed several years ago that when watching a scene with an actor incidentally reflected in a background mirror, I will watch the mirror instead of the foreground. I feel like the person rather than the actor is revealed in the reflection. The actor is presenting his face, a mask for the scene, and the back side is the real him. Guess that's weird, but I guess it's along the same lines of loving an artist's mistakes. It's about revealing the person underneath the art.
And the same can be said of writers. All of them, published novelists, wannabes, bloggers...If a piece of writing interests me, I want to know all about the author. Figure out how the particular piece germinated. Don't you?
A Gift
I'd just gotten in from grocery shopping (that's why I look so good), and guess what I found on my doorstep! This is the package I've been waiting for: the book that Marta made for me. It's a gift which combines all my loves--art, fiction, and hand-crafted...ness. The book is The Labyrinth House, one I gave a critique a few months (a year?) back, so it has sentimental value, not to mention I've been wanting to get my hands on some of Marta's art, and now I have it. Here's a link to her art page, Words Are Art. Go browse...buy something. One of these days it will be worth ten times what you paid, mark my words.
My 10-year-old daughter loves to look at Marta's pictures, so she is thrilled with the book, even though the story is too old for her. I need to put it under glass so she won't smudge it with all her touching. I'll do that after I read it again.
Looking at my gift, I see inspiration, anticipation, friendship, and beauty. It touches me so deeply that I'm not sure I can even see all the ways it touches me.
I'll stop gushing now. I just wanted you to see it.
