Art in the garden has freedoms and challenges. We have to expect nature to intervene: the elements will work upon the piece long after the artist has put down her tools. Continue reading
Tag: Sculpture
Sculpting With Wool: Debie Deaton, Mixed Media Artist
Crow, bug, goldfish and tealfish wool art waiting for new homes
At Chimneyville Arts Festival in Jackson last year, one stand was a Shakespearean comedy, full of colour, reverie, laughter and life. Was it just in my imagination that Falstaff, Feste, Caliban and The Man In The Moon cavorted with felt acrobats, goofy-looking puppets, elves, Pod people, birds, bees and bugs?
Insect with beautifully detailed wings
Art bugs
A lady dressed in a bright jacket sat quietly by the stand, rising to greet visitors with a Duchenne smile. This was Debie Deaton, a member of the Craftsmen’s Guild of Mississippi. Continue reading
RHS Hampton Court Flower Show’s Twilight Zone
A 8ft meteor has fallen to earth, coming to rest in a garden. The impact has blackened the fencing, scorched vegetation and reduced trees and shrubs to charred branches.
The path is miraculously unscathed: not quite so old as the meteor, it has been made from a Caledonian boulder formed millions of years ago. Smaller boulders lie around, giving the floor added dimension and creating a lovely backdrop for the silhouettes of low growing plants and twisted embers of wood.
The dark planting scheme glows red hot in places: the chocolate-red cosmos and orange-red helenium firing up the green and pewter foliage, the burnt wood and the futuristic lilacs. This is the Elements Mystique Garden from RHS Hampton Court Flower Show 2018, but the setting would not be out of place in an episode of The Twilight Zone. Continue reading
Wordless Wednesday: Nature and Art
Stone Angel
As a Doctor Who fan, I really ought not to like stone angels as much as I do. My sweetheart loves to visit cemeteries in his quest for tough plants (‘flowers even dead people can grow’). We often see cherubs but the more characterful angels, like this one holding out a lily in remembrance, are rare. Continue reading
Life In Clay: Mixed Media Artist, Harold W. Miller
I’m a fan of Harold Miller, a contemporary sculptor, who works in mixed media with a focus on clay and ceramics. His largest works are staged on 3D surrounds that have more in common with a theatre set than a traditional frame. Heads and figures, often embellished with tin or jewellery, emerge from textural backgrounds made from clay, stone and/or beautifully stained driftwood.
These two smaller figures show Harold’s technique and storytelling ability. The figures look self-contained, but their silence is lyrical. The man above is one in a series of wind figures wearing stylised, windswept cloaks. It’s almost impossible for the viewer not to imagine the story of his life, as if the clay could have its own history.
But when I first saw Harold’s work exhibited at Chimneyville Crafts Festival, it was this lady, captured in prayer, that I admired most. Her slim frame seems vulnerable and she is rapt in her faith. Though she is made of clay, she overflows with humanity. I can’t tell you her story, but I seem to feel the strength of her heart.
Playing With Lines And Colour
This week’s photo challenge is a strange one at first reading. It’s about a different style of portraiture:
Explore silhouettes, shadows, orientation, and other ways to mask your subject… Explore the use of anonymity to express both that which is common to all of us and the uniqueness that stands out even when the most obvious parts of us are hidden.
I’m not a portrait photographer so I planned to sit this one out, until I remembered this series of pictures I had so much fun taking. Continue reading
Weekly Photo Challenge: Peek
The challenge asks us to tempt our readers to click through by showing a peek of something. Continue reading
Outsider Art: Watts Towers by Sabato Rodia at Dusk
I’ve never liked the term ‘Outsider Art’, so why am I using it? Good question. It gives me a chance to take a pop at it a sentence or two later! Art, of all things, should be inclusive. Outsider Art seems to imply exclusion or at least condescension (“they’ve had no training, you know”), as if there is an overarching Art Club, but you have to be a paid-up member to lunch there. Continue reading
Weekly photo challenge: Face
Garden Art: Stone Head in Topiary
A witty placement of a veiled stone head at Gresgarth Hall Gardens in NW England. She’s ‘clothed’ in box topiary that has been trimmed into a cube.
She’s positioned near the door so it’s easy to imagine her as a kind of guardian angel.
A Fairy Wrestles With a Dandelion – Will Her Wish Come True?
This week’s photo challenge Weight(less) asks us to look at the effect of gravity in an image of something heavy or light. I decided to combine the two. While you might not immediately think of a fairy or a dandelion seed head as heavy, I’m going to try to change your mind. Continue reading
Garden Art: David Harber’s ‘The Mantle’
I caught a bit of stick about the rusty found art I shared earlier this week, so I thought I’d go to the other extreme: a verdigris bronze sphere I’ve seen and admired at shows and exhibitions that is embellished with gold leaf. As it says on the artist David Harber’s website:
…the gold leaf constantly shimmers and glows, flooding the centre of the piece with light – soft and subtle light when the sky is overcast; bright and intense when the sun’s rays hit the piece.
Art in the Garden: Connected
How often do we sense a connection between two people but can’t tell what it might be?
Most of these figures don’t seem connected at all, though they are joined at the base of this sculpture. The lady in the background is staring into space: remote, self-contained, she’s oblivious of the others around her. But the man and the woman in the foreground… now there’s the connection I thought of when I saw this week’s challenge. There’s something that intrigues me in the way their eyes seem fixed together – perhaps they don’t really want to attend to each other quite so closely as they seem compelled to? Continue reading
