Recycled Cardboard Tiki Surfboard Paintings!

I just finished these. 
 




I hadn't painted for a while, so I thought a mini surfboard series would be a good warm up.









I liked the look of the recycled cardboard, & figured it would be a friendly, non-intimidating surface to paint on, but ended up really enjoying its corrugations.









I started wiring & gluing things into the channels & ended up with a kind of tiki vibe. More here.....

Life on the (ocean’s) edge…..

It’s the place I feel most at home. For me, growing up in Southern California, it was my only link to nature. 

The city pretty much stopped at the sand.

I spent hours on the beach or sitting on the jetty staring out at the water. It seemed to me to be about freedom, adventure, possibility, hope…..the great wide open & the great unknown. Because whole worlds lie beneath the water’s surface & across its great expanse.

I remember learning in school that border ecosystems are the richest & most diverse. I think that’s part of it too.


Not only the change from the developed human world to nature, but also from land to sea. 

Completely different creatures living in completely different environments in such close proximity.


 













I’ve also read that geological formations closer to the coast are newer, & therefore more rugged than the ones further inland, which have had more time to erode, softening their features.

All of this seems to me to work as a metaphor for the human condition.

 

I feel that I’m on the edge of the human world when I’m on the water’s edge. 

 









I’m a speck lost in all this amazing vastness that I can’t even begin to comprehend (much less control in any way). 

I know that the birds foraging for food next to me are much more together & authentic than I’ll ever be, & somehow that makes all my human problems seem pointless & very small.

I leave renewed, refreshed, & energized. With hope & newly determined to be a freer & happier human.  
 

 

So I can’t blame these people for their tenacity to fight off the elements in order to stake their claim on the edge. It’s where we all want to be isn’t it?

Their struggle sums up our human condition for me. Sure we want to be comfortable, but we want to be part of nature too.

Art & Garden Links

My last year of college I had an assignment to research artists that had inspired me. I had a great time delving into the library & pulling all that inspiration together helped me to focus.

Collecting links for this blog was similar, though things have changed somewhat over the years. I found that while there are a tremendous amount of images & information available on line, there is not always one link that represents an artist well. For example, William Morris, whose amazing work is very well represented in his coffee table books, & has inspired me for years has retired, & his website doesn’t do his work justice. I couldn’t find a site for John McQueen either, but did include the links that I could find for both these artists.

Other searches led to new discoveries. While searching for a good link to Constantin Brancusi’s work, I discovered But Does It Float, a site dangerously full of inspiration where I could easily become lost for quite awhile.

Others have become more accessible over time. Years ago I discovered the designer Andree Putman while rooting about in the ASU architecture library, & have since found that her books are hard to come by. I was pleasantly surprised to find her fittingly elegant website.

More links on the right. Enjoy!