Super Realistic Folk Art Carved Coconut Head Wearing Glasses c1920s

I swear I saw this guy working in a hospital one time.

Good thing I didn't bump into him. His head might have rolled off.

Okay, maybe the hospital was poetry. And the doctor was W.C.W.

Have You Ever Seen This Brilliant Documentary?

This documentary about the Van Gogh forgeries leaves the mind spinning, not because of the fact that such forgeries exist, but because of the way it underscores how people and cultures cleave to narratives and talismans that have less to do with any grounded reality and much more to do with powerful emotions which those narratives energize. Van Gogh exists only to be us.

The story of the Gachet family after Van Gogh is one about which I would love to know much more.

Émile Schuffenecker may just be Big in Japan.

The debate goes on, and I suspect it will for quite some time.

And hey, sometimes they come back. 

In the Extremely Grim Department, there's this creepy news. 

De'Von Bailey Was Murdered

Anyone rational who has seen the video of De'Von's fatal shooting by police will know that he was murdered.

I don't know if one or both officers making the arrest fired the four shots, three of them into the young man's back, but whoever did that was doing it out of anger that the young man was escaping and not from any fear. It's totally obvious.

Anyone who watches that body cam footage can see that young man took off as fast as he could and was not looking back once. There was no way in hell anyone could interpret that as a threat.

Unless I heard it wrong, these officers are already cleared and back on the street after three days of desk duty.

So they're free to murder again when their sense of authority is challenged or their ego gets a little dent in it.

JUSTICE FOR DE'VON!

THE COLORADO SPRINGS POLICE DEPARTMENT IS GUILTY OF COUNTENANCING MURDER.

I Love This Book

Peter Yovu's Sunrise is a book I would highly recommend.

It's a livre d'artiste masquerading as a paperback poetry collection.

Yovu's less is definitely more.

Dark matter everywhere.

Dark energy everywhere.

Folk Art and Inuit Carvings

This was the summer I fell in love with folk art. I don't mean just American folk art, but all folk art,  the folk art of other cultures as well. I can't stop looking at it online and searching for it at flea markets, etc.

I really love theorem paintings and I want to try to update that idea for some contemporary projects involving recycling old clothing that would otherwise go to waste. Old shirts can become new theorem paintings.

Here is a set of folk art carvings I felt very lucky to find. (Photos not mine.)

And I found these burl wood carvings out of Ashbery's home town of Sodus. These remind me of De Chirico so strongly! These two figures really play on my subconscious. Strong in wabi-sabi! They refuse to resolve into the beings we sense implicit in them. More than a little sci-fi. They also remind me of that art show where the Futurists displayed a (natural,unmodified) tree root figure as art. (Photos not mine.)

Here is a small lot of pyrography plaques by Bettie Vretenar. I love the gender-fluid George Washington. Pronouns: they, them. And the spaceman is dishy too. These look even better "in person." (Not my photo.)

And this guy has such an interesting and flexible sense of balance! This piece of early kinetic art can be balanced numerous ways. The artist was quite ingenious. (Not my photos.)

I've started very slowly collecting Inuit carvings. Here are two I didn't nab for my collection, but whose beauty stayed with me. 

This first one is Levi Tetpon, who is just an amazing sculptor and totally under-recognized. (Not my photos below).

And this otter is attributed to Charlie Kasudluaq (b. 1927). This one also broke my heart in several places.

 I'll close with this nonpareil folk art carving of a Southern Baptist snake-handler. This went for over five hundred dollars even with the condition issues. I agree. It's going to haunt my dreams for years. Hard not to see a direct connection to those carved women of Knossos wearing the serpent-skirts. And yet the artist who carved this in the nineteenth century probably never saw those images.

I Love Outsider Artists

I love looking for work by interesting outsider artists.

Here are two watercolors by Chris Tsopanoglou (1949-2013) that I was so happy to find for my small collection.

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And here is a small mixed media work by Marion Scheller. It reminded me so strongly of Joe Brainard and folk art at once. I was so happy to find it.

Find a Toni Morrison Book and She Lives Again

“If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”





“Make up a story... For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief's wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul.”




“At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint, or even remember it. It is enough.”




“Sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding could ever be.”




“Anger ... it's a paralyzing emotion ... you can't get anything done. People sort of think it's an interesting, passionate, and igniting feeling — I don't think it's any of that — it's helpless ... it's absence of control — and I need all of my skills, all of the control, all of my powers ... and anger doesn't provide any of that — I have no use for it whatsoever."





“I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.”




“In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.”




It is sheer good fortune to miss somebody long before they leave you.”



“All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.”



“Have you ever seen the way a cloud loves a mountain?



“Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created.”



A dead hydrangea is as intricate and lovely as one in bloom. Bleak sky is as seductive as sunshine, miniature orange trees without blossom or fruit are not defective; they are that.”



“Whatever happens, whether you get rich or stay poor, ruin your health or live to old age, you always end up back where you started: hungry for the one thing everybody loses - young loving.”