Digital ReadyMades

Suburban Landscape II- Digital Manipulation. 2005

Suburban Landscape I- Digital Manipulation. 2005

D-Evolution of Suburban 'Dream Home'- San Diego. Digital Manipulation. 2005

D-Evolution of Suburban 'Dream Home' III- San Diego. Digital Manipulation. 2005

I hope everyone was able to enjoy domesticity during the just past holiday. I indulged my inner  domestic goddess by cooking a pretty good ‘Pasta al Forno’, which actually gets better two days after baking, keeps well in the fridge and will feed you for half a week!

I have also been surfing the web and handpicking the best architecture and design sites the world over, thanks to the World Architecture Community- do check out the new blogroll .:Global Architecture:.

Must-See:
1. Architecture Lab, a fresh, young, visually captivating and insightful international online architecture and urban design magazine edited by Aline Chahine, an architect living and working in Beirut, Lebanon.
The Architecture bites offered here are just the right size, as a prelude to your favorite periodical or taken on their own.
Can Architecture be delicious? Well, check out Architecture Lab and let me know. Made me fall in love with A. all over again.
I love Aline’s chosen quote:
” A great architect is not made by way of a brain nearly so much as he is made by way of a cultivated, enriched heart.”- Frank Lloyd Wright

2. NotCot. They believe in ideas, aesthetics, and amusement. And they do it with stunning graphics and provocative by-lines. I’m a believer, too.

Architectu re-kindlings

image via Octogon (Design and Architecture online from Budapest)

So here it happens, the siren of Architecture called, and I heeded.

Nay, I relinquished.

Architecture, that capricious muse, finally seeps in my art chamber- yet how could I have kept it at bay?

Architecture is, indeed, frozen music.

If this building was music, what song/genre would it be?

Sir Barry says that some architects of the Baroque era literally applied to their designs harmonic ratios learned from musical intervals and harmonic relations between notes.

I always thought Baroque was the music closest to the act of creating, to perfect mathematical equations, the music of the cosmos. Fractals’ music. Baroque and its clavichords is what I am listening to right now, as I finish a 3D digital model. The model dances and takes form. Digital sculpture.

You must pardon if I wax poetic. I just finished ‘Death in Venice’ and my heart is full of poetry tonight.

Love via Blog

image via habitofdesign.blogspot.com

I wanted to show off the lovely necklace that I received from Jennifer at Habit of Design. A flower for SketchBloom!

Well, I will have to wear this at my next art/design outing!


In other news, some housekeeping:
[pay no attention to the man behind the curtain]
In order to be qualified to enter the Technorati universe I am obliged to post these codes.

Yes, Technorati, this is Really my blog!

2QQC6AC75FTF

33WVSY2GZNTV

Transitions (On the Road)

Photograph from Nokia phone (3.2 Megapixel camera, Carl Zeiss Lens). Early Summer 2009.

Do you remember

Driving back from Las Vegas

Dusty

We stopped at a roadside fast-food

Nowhere, California?


We played Monopoly

waited until the sun came down,

until the traffic subsided.

You were merciless.


M.A

November 23, 2009

Coffee Culture

San Francisco – Cafe’ De La Presse

Legendary Literary Cafe’ a stone’s throw from the French Embassy.  The staff’s uniforms were très French, the atmosphere European, and the cappuccino was ….flawless.

Collage, Pilot Pen on Paper

Pilot Pen on Paper. November 2009

All photographs taken with Lumix (Panasonic) camera, Leica wide lens.

San Diego: Newschool of Architecture and Design – Cafe’ A la Carte

Bringing coffee, culture and ‘moments of urbanity ‘, as Francisco Sanin, a dear professor in Syracuse|Florence, used to say.

The passage/hallway is transformed in a piazzetta; Adam, the owner, strums his guitar, chats with customers.

Brings book such as ‘Reading Lolita in Tehran’, and Russian lit.

.

Our very own coffee cart @ NewSchool: Cafe' A la Carte. Pilot pen, Graphite and Prismacolor white pencil on paper. November 2009

Arabic Coffee
Naomi Shihab Nye

It was never too strong for us:
make it blacker, Papa,
thick in the bottom,
tell again how the years will gather
in small white cups,
how luck lives in a spot of grounds.

Leaning over the stove, he let it
boil to the top, and down again.
Two times. No sugar in his pot.
And the place where men and women
break off from one another
was not present in that room.
The hundred disappointments,
fire swallowing olive-wood beads
at the warehouse, and the dreams
tucked like pocket handkerchiefs
into each day, took their places
on the table, near the half-empty
dish of corn. And none was
more important than the others,
and all were guests. When
he carried the tray into the room,
high and balanced in his hands,
it was an offering to all of them,
stay, be seated, follow the talk
wherever it goes. The coffee was
the center of the flower.
Like clothes on a line saying
You will live long enough to wear me,
a motion of faith. There is this,
and there is more.

Tempus Fugit

Digital manipulation of photograph. November 2009

“Out beyond ideas of wrong doing and right doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase ‘each other’ doesn’t make any sense.

Rumi

 

 

This is what may happen if you move an image while scanning, tweak the result in Photoshop, and pixelize : an Impressionist painting.

Try it. Let me know how it works for you.

Sleep…Perchance to Dream.

“To sleep, perchance to dream-
ay, there’s the rub.”

Hamlet (III, i, 65-68)

Ink on Paper. September 2009

On Leon Krier

Pilot Pen on paper. November 12, 2009

Yesterday I attended Leon Krier’s lecture at NewSchool of Architecture and Design.

I thought it was very interesting when he said the ruins of the World Trade Center resembled a Frank Gehry building (! things that make me go mmm…), so here is my 30 second Frank Gehry assignment, given to me by a student.

I really wanted to ask Mr. Krier about Seaside and the Truman Show, but decided not to.

Thought-provoking concepts in the lecture, even though not fully demonstrated in practice.

Architects are members of an elite. Otherwise, we have no raison d’etre.

Leon Krier, November 12, 2009

Pilot Pen on Paper. September 2009.

Offerings

Watercolor and Graphite. November 12, 2009

Persimmon- very quick pastel rendering. November 12, 2009.

Got out my pastels today after a long, long time.

I have a wonderful book on pastels bought when I used to have a studio, but no time to do art:/ Time to dig it up, experiment, and get messy.

I have been on a ‘fruit’ roll lately, and  here is a  poem on vegetables.  I have been toying with the idea of making this blog into an (almost) daily offering of art, accompanied by a poem or quote  (art and poetry being ‘my thing’, as they say), along with the occasional writing and random posts. What do you think? Is consistency inherently good, and does a ‘theme’ make a blog stronger? The poems would be the ‘dream’ part of SketchBloom. Are poems dreams? Oh My, I am starting to sound like the Log Lady form Twin Peaks!

Anyways, few months ago ‘Writers’ Almanac’ , on NPR , featured a poem titled ‘ Vegetable Love’.

I ran into ‘ Vegetable Love in Texas‘, which contains some lines resonating with my current state of mind.

So here is for serendipity.

Vegetable Love in Texas
by Carol Coffee Reposa
Texas Poetry Calendar: 2008


Farmers say
There are two things
Money can’t buy:
Love and homegrown tomatoes.

I pick them carefully.
They glow in my hands, shimmer
Beneath their patina of warm dust
Like talismen.

Perhaps they are.
Summer here is a crucible
That melts us down
Each day,

The sky a sheet of metal
Baking cars, houses, streets.

Out in the country
Water-starved maize

Shrivels into artifacts.
A desiccated cache
Of shredded life.
Farmers study archeology

In limp straw hats.
But still I have
This feeble harvest,
Serendipity in red:

Red like a favorite dress,
Warm like a dance,
Lush like a kiss long desired,
Firm like a vow, the hope of rain.

 

 

 

 

The Best Art Book…Ever.

Go to Your Studio and Make Stuff- The Fred Babb Poster Book

Sure, I too consider The Artist’s Handbook of Materials and Techniques a veritable oracle for the blossoming artist, but I have to say, Go to Your Studio and Make Stuff is simply the best art book…ever.  One of my favorite art/inspiration books, it’s  full of what the author calls ‘Art Propaganda’, quirky posters with humorous, inspiring art quotes.

When I was a senior, finishing my Art Baccalaureate Show, I plastered the oversized poster pages all over my studio.
I will never forget the poster for ‘Don’t Drink and Draw’, and my students love this saying.

I hope you will be able to find and peruse this beautiful book —which uses humour for a powerful message: Art will save you.
In the meantime, take a look here.

PS : Good Art won’t match your sofa.