Creative Sprint - I'm sprinting along.

Homage to Josef Albers

Jakarta MicroGralleries

So Creative Sprint is sprinting along, and I'm doing each day as the prompt pops up.

 I can't remember which day that was for, but it was prompted by my remembering how much my art foundation year was so informative to my life as an artist and a teacher.

My profs had been educated by men who immigrated to the U.S. to escape Nazi Germany. They were teachers at the Bauhaus academy and brought their knowledge with them where they could all get teaching or professional jobs. How fortunate for all of us.

My teachers learned from them and passed it along to me. I remember how profound the feeling when I viewed the slides that Josef Albers showed to our Art History class. He was invited by our teacher, Canio Radice (who wore bowties to class and I think might have smoked a cigar.) I don't remember much about Albers, silly 18 year old that I was, but I remember the impact the slides of his projects had on me.

The second photo was taken in Jakarta. The organizer of MicroGalleries enlarged our favorite of my cards, and also made postcard sized copies of it for people to write on. I don't know what they wrote or where they sent them, but isn't this so cool?

Done with Art-o-Mat, almost done with year long project!

 Here it is, my favorite of my tiny landscapes for the Art-o-Mat project. I finished wrapping up today and I'll deliver them tomorrow. The opening event for the 10th Anniversary of the Richmond VA machine will be this Wednesday at the Visual Art Center. Very exciting!

 Today's mail art pieces (day 362, omg almost at the end) were inspired by Josef Albers. 

 I was surprised at how much work goes into making small paintings. Really quite similar to making large paintings but I think I want to do more of these, even after the year long project ends.

 My friend Ann called me this morning to come join her at the VMFA garden, but I was finishing my project and couldn't join her. However, when I finished,  I asked C to join me and we walked over to the park. Here are the stairs leading up to the upper level. The water falls runs alongside. It makes a nice water flowing noise.

 Here's the approach to the park, with the VMFA on the right and ahead of us, the berm (which actually is covering the multi-level parking deck) which is a park area with benches, plants, and sculptures.

I love to photograph this building. I liked the reflection in the pool, with the cat-tails in the foreground. The sky was so blue today. It was spring-like outdoors. We sat for awhile at the top of the berm enjoying the view, getting sun on us, saying how lucky we were to live so close to this lovely place.

Not planned #47

"Merit"

I seriously had NO idea what I was going to do for today's piece. I cut up some mat board to do something similar to the #43 series. I was planning to cover a board with some background, cut up, and so on. But as I prepared to do that, I noticed the Josef Albers card (actually saved the front of a note card) and remembered that I wanted to send a "merit" badge to someone who commented on my "puzzle" post last week. So I sandwiched the badge between the Albers card and  one of my many free cards, the kind that I pick up in restaurants in New York City.
I used wide double stick tape to put the two cards together, neatly sandwiching the badge.  I had this sweet faced little boy, probably from a Dutch master, which fit perfectly in the corner, and there at hand was this text from a design magazine. Perfecto! Today's card appeared, I had to make it #47.

The recipient will have to peel apart the two cards to get at the badge, which may mean this image is the only lasting one of the #47. Unless the recipient is VERY careful, the cards may get torn in the peel apart process. But all is impermanent, to quote the Buddha.