Tuesday, October 22, 2013

A is for Awesome

Hello internet. I've missed you. (Well, parts of you.) It's been a hectic couple of months full of turmoil, magic, and synchronicity, because the universe is good like that. The tornado of change has dropped me into something like Oz, except there will be no attempts to murder women for their possessions and fewer tiny people singing and dancing. (Pretty much just me, actually. But I sing and dance a lot, and I'm short, so you can pretend.) The biggest and most fabulous change is, quite literally, an awesome thing: I am proud and honored (and still, to be honest, frankly sort of shell-shocked) to announce that the Awesome Foundation has given me a grant to make artist books and scatter them all over San Francisco. Really. (If you don't know about these folks, you should; everything about them lives up to their name. There are chapters all over the world, and every month every chapter gives away a grand to fund a project they think is sufficiently awesome. Yes: some very, very nice, generous, and potentially insane people think that I should get a thousand dollars to make art. I am okay with this.)

Miniature collage is my thing. There will be miniature
collages hidden in books all over San Francisco. 
Basically I make the art I want to find myself.
That makes sense, right?

The project I submitted was inspired by the "Portraits of an Ingenious Gentleman" project I stumbled across a few months ago, and I was doubly delighted to have been chosen for the grant because it felt, in a way, like I was being given the chance to show my gratitude for the amazing experience of discovering that work. Now other people will be able to stumble across and discover the work that I leave hidden in books all over the city. If all goes well (i.e. if I do a decent bloody job) the books I make will, hopefully, inspire the same feelings of delight and wonder that I experienced when I discovered Boethius's drawings. If not, it will probably just inspire befuddlement, which is sort of like wonder after wonder has had too many drinks and starts slurring its words at the bar....


You can read the details of the project submission on the Awesome SF website, but suffice it to say that those of you in San Francisco may start finding strange-looking volumes in your local bookstore bargain bins within the next few months. I'm basing each book on a different person's unique description of a moment they experienced joy, starting with this lackadaisical inquiry I made into the nature of joy back when I was actually blogging enough to have, you know, people who commented on my blog and whatnot, but I'll be putting up a submission page for the project soon so you'll be able to submit your own joyous experience to be turned into an artist book and floated out into the world for others to discover. I'm still - perhaps oddly - a little shy about myself as an artist, and I still feel a little baffled that people want to actually give me money to do this, so I'm really hoping the work I do lives up to their faith in me. it's kind of, um, well, you know. Awesome. 

In the meantime, in case you didn't know, my artwork is a perk for the Indiegogo campaign to start an amazing (yes, okay, awesome) new arts venue in Santa Cruz, CA, and the very first piece I made is actually absolutely inspired by a moment of joy -- each piece I'm making is custom-themed for the campaign donor, and this one's a gift from a husband to his wife that he wanted themed around the e.e. cummings poem "[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]," which was read at their wedding (talk about moments of joy!). It's not finished, but here's a glimpse.

It includes, among other snippets, a fragment from one of
 my favorite Chagall paintings and a da Vinci anatomical
drawing of a heart. The whole thing is less than two
inches tall. Did I mention I like tiny things?

1 comment:

  1. Hey, that's awesome!
    Which of those moments from that post are you choosing? Or is that a secret?
    And, man, I would be commenting on your blog if I had known you'd moved it!
    Bad!
    I'll be catching up on your posts, but I'm pretty swamped, right now, so it might take a while.

    ReplyDelete

Please do try to be thoughtful and considerate when posting comments, but we do love hearing what you think!

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...