A Sky Full of Kindness

"We're all the same people we were when we were children, we're just bigger and pretend that we're not." -Rob Ryan

Handmade Portraits: Rob Ryan from Etsy on Vimeo.

What could be a greater way to celebrate the world than acknowledging the beauty in the everyday?
Read the full Etsy blog post here: http://etsy.me/handmadeportraitsrobryan

 I just adore his work and if you have a chance to check out his site, you can find it by clicking here: Rob Ryan

Lovelies

earthseawarrior

 

mwest0425 

andiespecialtysweets

These are a few of my most recent favorites. They can all be found on etsy and the links are below each image. Please take a moment and check out their lovely shops. Thanks for supporting handmade.

Fregley

I can finally share Fregley with you! He was made especially for my partner Haley (The Zen of Making) and created entirely of cotton. He was my first creature to feature a cable running up his left side. I can imagine this technique being used in a few different ways and I'm already putting it to use on a new little monster in the studio now. I'm so pleased he made her happy and I know he excited to learn he was moving to Brooklyn. 

Thanks again to the Handmade Gift Exchange sponsored by Craftaholics Anonymous.

Solar Sewing

I found this video via etsy and thought it was pretty cool. I've recently purchased the Doodle-Stitching book and envy the technique. Artist P.Nosa is behind this video and there are many videos on his site. Have a look and tell me what you think.

Alexa Meade

Alexa Meade uses acrylic paint applied directly onto her subjects. Sometimes, she also paints an entire vignette around them, making your perception of the real and painted blurry. She is a 24-year-old artist from Washington, D.C. who compresses a 3D concept into a 2D plane. I am in awe and amazed by her work. It's bright and bold!

 (via)

Inside Out

"I wish for you to stand up for what you care about by participating in a global art project, and together we'll turn the world...INSIDE OUT." -JR

Can art change the world? Yes! Have a look at the 2011 TED Prize winner's wish here: 

from TED.com:

Working anonymously, pasting his giant images on buildings, trains, bridges, the often-guerrilla artist JR forces us to see each other. Traveling to distant, often dangerous places -- the slums of Kenya, the favelas of Brazil -- he infiltrates communities, befriending inhabitants and recruiting them as models and collaborators. He gets in his subjects’ faces with a 28mm wide-angle lens, resulting in portraits that are unguarded, funny, soulful, real, that capture the spirits of individuals who normally go unseen. The blown-up images pasted on urban surfaces – the sides of buildings, bridges, trains, buses, on rooftops -- confront and engage audiences where they least expect it. Images of Parisian thugs are pasted up in bourgeois neighborhoods; photos of Israelis and Palestinians are posted together on both sides of the walls that separate them.

JR's most recent project, "Women Are Heroes," depicts women "dealing with the effects of war, poverty, violence, and oppression” from Rio de Janeiro, Phnom Penh, Delhi and several African cities. And his TED Prize wish opens an even wider lens on the world -- asking us all to turn the world inside out. Visit insideoutproject.net ...

"I would like to bring art to improbable places, create projects so huge with the community that they are forced to ask themselves questions."

JR, Beaux Arts Magazine

Matthew Cusick

Matthew Cusick was born in New York City in 1970 and graduated from The Cooper Union with a BFA in 1993. His work has been exhibited internationally since 1996.

Cusick lets his work be guided by his various materials: maps, atlases, encyclopedias and school textbooks. “I like to catalog, archive, and arrange information and then dismantle, manipulate, and reconfigure it. I use maps as a surrogate for paint and as a way to expand the limits of representational painting. Through a process of cutting up and reassembling fragments of maps from different places and times, I am attempting a more complete representation of an existence, one that incorporates the geographical and historical timelines of that existence within the matrix of its image.”

The Boxy Lady

The Boxy Lady is one of four structures Derek Diedricksen built on the property of his Stoughton, MA home. It's extremely small, portable and can possibly be used to help the homeless. Each is mostly made from scavenged materials such as pallets, discarded kitchen cabinets, storm windows, etc. and cost less than $200 on average.

via

Be Linen

I've been falling more and more in love with linen lately. The way it falls, the softness and the beauty of linen stuns me. I found this lovely short film about linen and wanted to share it with you.

Meemer!

Meet Meemer. He listens to your secrets and never speaks a word. His soft red body is so squishy and flops when tossed upon a chair. He is super special and I can't wait for him to find a great home. Hopefully, he'll find someone who loves him as much as I do. 

He was also featured last month in my Underneath it All post. He was the one with the purple heart carefully stitched below his hand knit skin. His over-sized blue eyes make him really hard to resist.

Underneath it All

If you ever wonder what is on the inside of my dolls/creatures, besides time and love, I can assure you each of them has a hand-stitched cotton tubing inside. It takes time, but I want to make sure my creations are super durable and hold up to play and your little one's curiosity. These two new dolls even have little hearts. No one will ever see that, but it's there, lovingly sewn underneath it all.

Ai Weiwei, Artist

The Chinese Government has destroyed the studio of Ai Weiwei, a protean artist who is one of the most outspoken critics of the Chinese Communist Party. Even though he said officials told him that the demolition would not take place until after the first day of the Year of the Rabbit (which falls on February 3rd) he was shocked to discover that workers had begun knocking it down today. 

Sad news. They also knocked down a neighboring studio he had designed for a friend. Mr. Ai's studio was to be used as an education center and a site for artists in residence. 

Weiwei compares the seeds in his current installation at the Tate Modern to Twitter "...a vast sea of ideas and communication contributed by individual people." Weiwei had the seeds made in the southern Chinese city of Jingdezhen. Each of the 100 million seeds was molded, fired, and painted with three or four individual brush strokes, often by women taking the objects home to work on them. One thousand six hundred people were involved in the process.

Although the installation was intended to be interactive and in the fist few days of the show people were allowed to walk on them and pick up the seeds, this has resulted in the release of dust from the individual "grains" rubbing together. The dust could "be damaging to health following repeated inhalation over a long period of time." Visitors are now limited to looking at the installation from behind a barrier and they are not happy. I personally would assume the entire 'feeling of the installation would be pointless without having the interaction with the piece.

Julia Randall

Decoy 1

Lick Line 20

Bubblehead

Julia Randall is a Connecticut-based artist whose drawings are actually accumulations of many fine layers of color upon color with the white of the paper showing through, which creates the dimensionality. Each of the above pieces are colored pencil on paper. The mouths are isolated within the space and make the viewer feel voyeuristic while allowing our brains to make unconscious assumptions about what we see.

Have you seen this?

Fitzsu is offering made to order Poultry Domes for both chicken or turkey. A new, untypical glass collection designed by Fabrica for Secondome.  

Objects used in the past, such as cake or roast covers, are reinvented in both their use and their shape. The past and the future blend in these innovatively-shaped creations: the future lies in the ideas and sketches of Fabrica’s young designers, while the past is represented both by the choice of the material (glass) and by relying on the art of skilled glass-makers. The piece above was designed by Ben Cabelli (Israel). A collection revisiting daily use objects in an ironic and unconventional way and transforming them into top design pieces.

REcreate by Katie Thompson

The inspiration behind Recreate was Katie Thompson's passion and flair for transforming the ordinary to the extraordinary.

Located in South Africa, Katie never works within established stylistic boundaries. She creates an eclectic combination of styles, materials and finishes; this skill highlights her passion and her ability to find the intrinsic beauty and new, hidden purpose in the old, discarded items she chooses for her pieces.

A hoarder of all things useless, impractical, broken, colorful and shiny; Katie’s designs show tell tale signs of her Dadaist leanings. By nature an extremely energetic, bubbly and creative individual, Katie’s energy filters through to her work and into her pieces and the lives of her clients.

Mehmet Ali Uysal

This installation created by Mehmet Ali Uysal is displayed at the Chaudfontaine Park in Belgium. Thanks to my brother Sam for sharing this installation with me.

Undressing My Mother

Undressing My Mother - My brother sent this to me this morning. It's so lovely and stirring he said. He's right.

Charlotte Mann

Charlotte Mann's trompe l'oeil style walls and floors are an inspiration.

Charlotte is a British artist known for her wall drawings and drawn room installations. These densely detailed 1:1 scale drawings of rooms in rooms are invariably made with thick black marker pen on a white ground. The images above are from work she did in Milan, Italy at the Fontana shop. Her perspective is amazing.

How fantastic would this idea be for a backdrop pin a portrait?

A Look at Smithville

 

This dollhouse opens in the front and was owned by the grandchildren of Hezekiah Smith. He had more than 40 patents for many different inventions and improvements. He also invented the Star Bicycle, seen below.

He was quite eccentric and provocative for his time and his life story is one of betrayal, love and fury. He trained his pet moose (above) to pull a cart and also had a small zoo on the property. His mansion is a lovely place to visit and the grounds surrounding the estate are breathtakingly beautiful. More information on Hezekiah Smith may be found here and here. I also have many other photos of the property in my flickr.

Mountain Man

I fell instantly in love with Mountain Man's Song "How'm I Doin'" a few days ago while listening to this mix. Today, I found their site and the video above. I hope you fall too.