Nature as Medium: Eco-Art: Environmental Art: Land Art

Since the 1980's various artists, sculptors and painters mostly, have been communing with the land. Many use elements of nature such as stone, sticks, leaves, and flowers as their medium and regard the ephemeral nature of such art as part of its integrity. Others engage in architectural dialogs with the land, some with environmental issues in mind. Here are some resources for your creative dalliance...

Articles
"Earth Artists: Using Nature in Art to Raise Environmental Awareness". Eco Hearth: Come Home to the Earth



Art Nature Dialogues: Interviews with Environmental Artists by John K. Grande, 2004. State University of New York. (This book is in the Tomball Library collection.)


Wikipedia article on Land Art (This has the names of a number of other artists as well as a discussion of the philosophy behind the art)


Artists
Alfio Bonanno (Don't be deterred by the Finnish--just click on his projects!)
Gilles Bruni and Marc Babarit (Click on their 'catalogue' to see artworks)

Patrick Dougherty (Click on the link below his book to enter the site)
Andy Goldsworthy
Tomball Library has a copy of his DVD Rivers and Tides: Working with Time. The camera follows this gentle Scottish sculptor as he discusses his creative process. His rock walls that wind through the landscape, leaf chains that float on meandering waters, and ice sculptures that glow in the sunlight are but a few of the natural media he has used.
David Nash
Michael Singer
Nils-Udo
Bob Verschueren

Flower Painters, Botanical Artists, Botanical Illustrators

I'm looking at Siriol Sherlock's Botanical Illlustration: Painting with Watercolours, drooling over the shimmering translucent flowers and fuzzy matt leaves that are the dazzling stock in trade of  good watercolorists. Yum!  Flower painters, botanical artists, and botanical illustrators have a stunning history and an exotic future.

Here are some websites to explore, some clubs to join, some artists to enjoy. And of course, some books...




Botanical Societies
American Society of Botanical Artists
Botanical Artists Guild of Southern California
Botanical Artists of Canada
The Society of Botanical Artists (U.K.)
The Botanical Art Society of Australia, Inc.


Historical Illustration online
The Romance of Orchid Discovery by John Day. The Kew Gardens (a.k.a. The Royal Botanic Gardens) are featuring an oline version of the Victorian botanical illustrator, John Day.

Floral and Botanical Artists
Ann Blockley
Coral Guest
Karen Klugein
Anna Knights
Jan Kunz
Ann Pember
Billy Showell
Marney Ward
Janet Whittle

Books
Wulf, A. (2009).  The Brothers Gardeners: Botany, Empire, and the Birth of an Obsession. New York: Knopf.
This is about how the obsession with botany and gardening got started in England. American colonies are involved...We have copies of this book at the Tomball Library.

Margaret Stevens (2004). The Art of Botanical Painting. London: Harper Collins.

Pierre-Joseph Redoute (2000). The Lilies. A reprint of one of the most famous historical botanical illustrators, who created these between 1802 and 1816.

Humor in Art

I love humor in art. The blog of Malaysian tee shirt designer Chow Hon Lam certainly qualifies. He's a terrific graphic artist with a fantastic sense of humor. If you need a dose of silliness, here's a place to get it...  Here's the link.

Mesmerizing Japanese cell phone ad

I try to post every kind of art I find that I think someone in the Tomball Art League will be attracted to. When I saw this fantastic video posted on Facebook, I immediately thought of Bob Trivers and his inspirations in wood.


This is an art piece with fascination.


It is introduced this way. "This beautiful ad was done by Drill Inc, a Japanese advertising agency, and it features a wooden ball rolling down the homemade marimba in the midst of Kyushu, Japan’s woodlands. Simply awesome."

And it is. Here is the website. I hope you love it.

Google Art Project

Warning: This website may devour hours of your life.

Opportunity: This website is a glorious passtime.

If you’ve used Google Maps or Google Earth, you’ll be familiar with that lovely feature that lets you tour down a street and see 360 degree views as you turn around.  In the Google Art Project, you will use the same technology to tour the inside of seventeen famous art museums.

You can walk along the halls of the Museo Reine Sofia in Madrid and notice the Juan Gris paintings on the walls. You can amble virtually from gallery to gallery in the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia . You can stop to look at a ultra-high resolution image of Birth of Venus in the Uffizi Museum in Florence or zoom in to check out Van Gogh’s brushstrokes on Starry Night in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

The website even lets you create your own art collection. Capture full-size images of paintings or close-up details, add your own notes to your image, and come back to them over and over. 

But you might set an alarm before you begin, if you have anything else you need to do! 

Off-beat books to inspire your summer travel

Travel season is upon us! I'm featuring some hidden gems; some off-beat travel books to inspire your artistic experience of interesting places. The library has only one or two copies of each of these so you'll probably have to request them.

Georgia O'Keeffe and New Mexico: A Sense of Place by Barbara Buhler Lynes

This catalog for a 2004 travelling exhibition of Georgia O’Keeffe’s work features the genius’ landscape paintings and beside them, photographs of the sites she painted.  You’ll quickly notice that the macro textures of landforms carved by eons of erosion was O’Keeffe’s primary interest and that the micro-texture of soil and vegetation was not important to her at all. I thought it was a great way to get inside O'Keeffe's head. It combines paintings, photographs, and geological charts as well that describe the landscape in parallel scientific, visual, and evocative languages.  A great book if you’re an artist traveling with a geologist!

The book also contains tidbits of her life story that illuminate the person she was and her long love affair with the New Mexico landscape.

Metro Stop Paris: An Underground History of the City of Light by Gregor Dallas

Gregor Dallas, a historian, writes about key moments and characters in the human history of Paris through, of all things, its subway stops.  I hope it stirs your imagination as it did mine as you read about famous philosophers and poets, kings and citizens, life and death, and link them to the arrondissements of Paris.

At the first metro stop,  Denfert-Rochereau, in the part of Paris once called Hell, there are catacombs, and from 1830, the guillotine. The Trocadero metro stop elicits memories of French Cuban author Anaïs Nin and her Viennese psycho-analyst lover Dr. Otto Rank. The Gare du Nord neighborhood is where St. Vincent de Paul’s charitable relief happened. Saint-Germain-des- Près brings you to the heart of Paris’ intellectual soul on the Left Bank. And the last stop, Pere Lachaise, takes you to the famous cemetery where renowned cultural figures are buried, including artists David, Ingres, Delacroix, Corot, Caillebotte, and Ernst.

Leonardo’s Universe: The Renaissance World of Leonardo da Vinci by Bulent Atalay and Keith Wamsley

Whether or not you’re planning a visit to Italy or just trying to understand mathematical principals in art, this book is a treat. If I tell you it was published by National Geographic you’ll know that the photographs and diagrams are excellent. The geography of Leonardo’s life and work and the story are wonderful, too.

Cody Hooper: Abstract artist

When I viewed the website gallery of San Antonio abstract artist Cody Hooper, I found myself thinking of him as a southwestern Piet Mondrian. This talented emerging artist experiments with the glowing effects of layers of glazes. He also exhibits a brilliant sense of proportion. Lovely, evocative, beautifully composed abstract compositions. Just wanted to share him with you...