CathieSkinner's Blog

Online artist three- Karen Whimsey

cathieskinner — Thu, 05 May 2011 20:24:01 +0000

Karen Whimsey was born and raised in Northern California. She is also a middle school English teacher. She has always been creative in her daily life; by drawing and doodling, writing poetry and songs, embroidering, act ining plays, playing the guitar, and singing in weddings and choirs. She reminds me of Terrilyn Quick.

She designs and creates collage art, jewelry, and altered books. She plays with color, uses vintage images and uses text in her work. She did not go to art school, but took several collage workshops and art workshops to learn her craft. She found these workshops to be very inspirational. She is a member of the International Soceity of Altered Book Artists. She sells her work online from her own personal website. She also makes Reliquaries and sells them on her website. She has a Dancing Girl Reliqary called Ciera’s Spell and several religious ones representing the Catholic religion and some Eastern religions. Her work is sweet, whimical and beautiful. Her altered books are beautiful.

Online Artist Two- Laura Wait

cathieskinner — Thu, 05 May 2011 19:49:07 +0000

Laura Wait is the one of the online artists that I have decided to study further. She often uses words as images as a centra part of her paintings, art books, and prints. She has been inspired by Asian calligraphyand also modern artists that use letterforms in non traditional ways. She often uses encaustic to create obscured surfaces with layers of ink handwriting on Japanese handmade paper. She also uses oil sticks on her painting to add to the interest to her work. Her work has the feeling of a historival surfac on an ancient wall layered over periods layered over a period of centuries.

Laura Wait makes the following statement regarding her work,” The transparency of layers created with encaustic and the ability to uncover lost imagery is very appealing to me and is central to the intuitive methods I use in developing my paintings and books. My work evolves in a sereis whether the pages of a book or group of paintings, investigating visual aspects of a symbol or idea. The painting and visual aspects of a symbol or idea. The paintings and the books cross fertilize each other and sometimes I am uncertain whether the handwriting pages may become a book or a painting.

Online Artist One- Linda Zacks

cathieskinner — Thu, 05 May 2011 19:32:35 +0000

Linda Zacks spent most of her life moving around. She grew up in England and attended High School in Holland. She attended and graduated from Brown University after studying semiotics and creative writing. She also lived across the the street from the Rhode Island School of Design. All these life experiences led to a career as an accomplished designer and fine artist.

Linda Zacks loves words and letters.One of her signatures is how she uses type in her art. Her work is part poetry, part paint that often reflects adoration, anxiety, fear, tension and calamity. Her artistic vocabulary is very freeing and cathartic. Themes in her work include; the wonders of being female, the strangeness of America, love and hate and beauty and war.

She uses objects like old wood, torn paper, rusty metal, ink, duct tape and even scribbled over polaroid. She also uses alot of texture in her work.

My Blurb Book

cathieskinner — Thu, 05 May 2011 02:38:18 +0000

Untitled | Make Your Own Book

San Diego Museum of Art- Howard Hodgkin

cathieskinner — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 21:21:05 +0000

The second museum exhibit I attended today was at the San Diego Museum of Art; Howard Hodgkin’s Time and Place, 2001-2010. Howard Hodgkin is a British artist and this exhibit presents twenty-four paintings completed between 2001 and 2010. His paintings seek to evoke memories and emotions through distinctive use of color and brushstroke and the idea of landscape and nature emerge as a central theme in this particular group of paintings. Recently, the SDMA acquired the painting Hotplate for their collection. It is a small painting, 12 by 12. Painted stripes in orange, greens and some yellow and the paint extends onto the picture frame. Some of my favorites from this collection are:

Rough Sea- an abstract painting of different shades of blue painted on wood. In fact Hodgkin like to paint on wood rather than canvas. He also likes to include the frame as part of the painting.

Snow Cloud- a small dark cloud white, gray and black over an orange. Hodgkin uses bold strokes in all his paintings, which are all very abstract and simple in design. It looks like he uses a large brush to do his work.

He places wood into a frame and then paints the wood and continues onto the frame. Often the colors he uses and the titles of his paintings refer to nature.

My favorite painting that he did was called Deep Autumn. He used only the color black in this painting and placed the painting in a black antique frame. It was all black strokes and dabbles and again the paint extends onto the frame. I found the painting especially beautiful and was surprised since it was all in black.

Finally, I really liked In Egypt. This was a very large painting, probably 5ft by 5ft. It was a large piece of unframed wood. There were large black dabbles all over the painting, then in the center, it looks like a blue palm tree, but this is what I see in the painting. His work is totally abstract. I really liked the simplicity of his work, the large brushstrokes, the fact that he worked on wood and painted his frames and used lots of bright colors in his work. If you want to see something different go and visit his work at the SDMA.

Museum of Photographic Arts- Streetwise

cathieskinner — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 20:56:27 +0000

Today I went to Balboa Park to visit a few museums of my class assignments. I went to the Museum of Photographic Arts first to see the exhibit, Streetwise- Masters of 60s Photography. This is exhibit is about American life in the 60s and how fractured it was by the political and social upheavel going on in society at the time. The women’s lib movement,the Civil Rights movement the Black Panthers, the Vietnam war and the sexual revolution were all going on at the same time.Streetwise explores the work of nine photographers who turned their cameras on the incredible changes that were occurring around them and in our country during that time frame. I enjoyed the exhibit and found my favorites as usual. I really liked Ernest Withers’s Mule Train leaving for Washington, Poor Peoples March, Marks, MS, 1968. This was a photograph of some young black boys standing next to a covered wagon with I Have A Dream painted on the wagon. This was one of the first photos I saw on the way into the exhibit. I learned about Robert Frank and how he is considered one of the most influential figures in history of photography. He traveled for two years acoss the United States and took 28,000 photographs. From these photographs, his famous book, The Americans was created. In fact the cover on the book of a bus with whites sitting at the front and blacks sitting in the back; I have seen before. I forget where I saw it but I was familiar with that photograph which sums up segregation in a nutshell. Another photo I especially liked of his was U.S. 285, New Mexico, which is a photograph of a road that seems endless. It was a beautiful photograph. According to the museum Streetwise offers a window to our recent past and serves as a guide to challenges we still face.I also found the work of Jerry Berndt very interesting. He is a documentary photographer and his photographs are of the red light district in Boston. I liked his picture of a wannabe pimp who offers him a girl for ten dollars. He calls this series Combat Zone because it was an alternative lifestyle going on around the traditonal life of the early 60s. Lee Fredlander’s photographs had a certain irony present in them. In Love Nashvill, TN 1963 she photographs a tv with a womans face on it. The tv overpowers the feeling in the photograph. The other one I found very amusing was New York City that had three people walking by arrows pointing left with a question mark in the center. One man stops and looks at the photographer. He is holding a briefcase. It is a great photograph. Diane Arbus’s work focuses on people, usually one person. My favorite of her collection was Max Maxwell Landar as Uncle Sam standing underneath laundry in what looks like to be an impoverished area. Bruce Davidson has a most famous body of work that truly documents the civil rights movement. I especially liked Two Women at the lunch counter- the white woman is looking down and the black woman is looking up (1962), both are eating something. It is a great photo that documents change as it was occuring. Other photographs by Ernest Withers that I liked were 1960, young black woman is holding up her voters registration card and a photograph was the I AM A MAN march- hundreds of these signs are being held up. It was a great exhibit and it took me back to my childhood. I lived in Charleston, S. C. during the civil rights movement so these photos bought back memories of my growing up years.

Museum of Contemporary Art La Jolla

cathieskinner — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 22:20:10 +0000

Today I went to the Museum of Contemporary Art in La Jolla. I saw the current exhibit Mexico: expected/unexpected. The exhibit includes over 100 artworks from the Isabel and Agustin Coppel Collection. A variety of artists are represented that are part of the contemporary art scene. The collection included paintings, prints, video installations, sculpture, several installations and photographs. Most mediums were represented in the collection.The museum writeup states that “the exhibit proposes that Mexican contemporary art, like the global culture tho which it responds, is unstable, rich, complex, unpredictable, and constantly shifting between tradition and innovation.” A few of the artworks that I found most interesting include the following:

1. Rivane Neuenschwander created a collage on paper. There were six framed pieces that had black paper with small circles of text arranged on the black paper. It is called One Thousand and One Possible Nights. It truly looks like a galaxy.

2. Rivane Neuenschwander also created Suspended Landscape. This was a beautiful, delicate installation of garlic peels and vegetable fibers suspended from the ceiling- probably at least 100 of them with the garlic peels at the bottom of the string that is suspended from the ceiling. In a way it looks like a collection of white flowers- a flower field. And you could walk through it – it was very cool.

3. Mark Bradford created three large framed pieces of mixed media on paper. He created these art pieces from recycled, scavaged material taken from old billboards and broadsheets and creates images to address the subject of underground economies and migrant communities. The three large pieces had the words Lucky and Brand in them- they were otherwise abstract creations.

4. One piece I found a bit strange but interesting was a taxidermied donkey by Maurizio Cattelan. Apparently, he works with this material quite a bit. He states that the donkey which is staring down and sitting represents the postmodern, melancholic thinker at odds with the world. Interesting but not my favorite.

5. A piece that I did like was Union by Abraham Cruzvillegas which was an installation piece that looked like a large necklace made from seeds, ceramic beads, pasta beads and pearls. He was trying to connect modern art with indigenous craftsmanship.

6.My very favorite piece was a wall installation by Francis Alys. The installation consists of one oil and encaustic on canvas on panel painting and 25 mixed media on tracing paper drawings. The installation is called The Round. One drawing is a group of hands in a circle. Other drawings have men facing each others backs walking in a circle. I liked the connection I felt to the piece and the connection the hands and men have in the art work. Some are drawned in pencil, others paint, each was different but the subject was the same.

Mexico: expected/unexpected is an interesting exhibit of contemporary Mexican art and I would recommend the exhibit for others to visit.

Ash Thorp

cathieskinner — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 03:46:37 +0000

Tonight former student of CSUSM, Ash Thorp came to our Artists Book class to tell us about his post school job experiences. He is a digital artist that works in illustrator and especially photoshop. He shared with us his work experience at Prologue which is a company in LA that does digital designs for movies. He worked on movies such as Camelot, Thor, The Tourist and many others. He showed us his story boards for each of the movies. Some of his work was rejected but some was quite successful.My favorite storyboard was Camelot. I found his images magical and ethereal.I especially liked the way he created the sword of Camelot. He has a strong work ethic and basically shopped for his job at Prologue. He went for it. He applied for a job by showing his work and was hired at this very successful LA company. He had to take the train and commute for a year. He started out as a junior associate and ended up as a Creative Director. Then he quit. He now works for a small design studio in Encinitas. His work was very diverse and creative. He came to talk to our class because he feels you need to give back. He has been very successful. He left the job in LA because he didn’t like LA and he has a wife and daughter that were living in San Marcos. He is happy now and still doing creative work. He buys lots of books. He was a delightful young man and it was impressive to hear of his early success.

Cathie’s Scrapbook in progress

cathieskinner — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 01:28:56 +0000

Cathie’s Scrapbook

Kim Stringfellow

cathieskinner — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 22:51:24 +0000

Last class we attended a lecture by Kim Stringfellow, who is an Associate Professor at San Diego State University in Art, Multimedia and Design Department. She share with us several of her art projects. The first was her photos of Jackrabbit Homestead dwellings that are located in Joshua Tree Park. These are usually one room dwellings with minimal facilities that are now abandoned but were once lived in. Apparently, they get there names from being the only place for miles around where a jackrabbit can find a little shade. The dwellings are each on five acres of land. The program ran from about 1938-1970′s. She talked about the history of the Jackrabbit dwellings and how they came about and had some interesting stories about some of the people that used to live out there. Another project she discussed was,”Greetings from the Salton Sea”. She has a collection of photographs and also wrote about the Salton Sea in a book that she published, “Greetings from the Salton Sea”. I was able to look through the book as Professor Small bought a copy to class. The book is filled with interesting photographs about this unique place. She also has created several audio tours that you can listen to while driving in your car. She shared an audio tour she has created about the I-5 corridor from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Professor Stringfellow also talked about the graduate program at SDSU and what criteria admissions is looking for from applicants. It was interesting listening to an artist who created art books about our local region. She researched her projects thoroughly and was very informative about her subject matter. I enjoyed her lecture, stories and photographs.