Partners in Art

Well, I'm feeling much improved from my now-vanquished infection. Antibiotics--truly a triumph of modern times.

So I will now continue with my infrequent postings in the typical format, but before I do, there is one more acquaintance I'd like to share with you. There are many more than that of course, and I will try and add them as I think of them. This one, however, I fortunately remember.

The "M" I sometimes reference both here and on my Twitter feed is actually my lovely partner, Rosalynn Rothstein. She wears a great deal of creative hats, both the figurative and the literal varieties. But mostly she is doing two things: painting and arranging flowers.



And not just putting flowers in a damn vase either, but practicing the Japanese art of ikebana, and specifically, the sogetsu school. It's kind of like martial arts, in that they have particular styles and master teachers. I could try to explain the difference to you, but I'd just get it wrong.



The part that we can all appreciate is that it forms some awesome syncretisms between her flowers and her paintings. The flower arranging is all about balance, and both space and negative space, and throwing all these elements out of proportion. And her paintings, which she has previously referred to as landscapes, find themselves mimicking natural instances of balance and inbalance as well.



Her paintings are bright and colorful, rhythmic and abstract, and at the same time, they tend to put people off balance. Especially in Portland, the land of cutesy proportioned, baby-like animal paintings, they cut through the fog like uprooted trees and landslide scars. Nature may be totally sweet, but it's massive weight hasn't forgotten how to kick your ass. Bacteria, beetles, and boulders can all rend the flesh off your pretty little arms, and we should remember this, even when looking at the most delicate flower.



Rosalynn's work is available for viewing on her website, The Modern Forest, and is normally hanging around Portland somewhere. Right now she has a quilt sculpture piece at The Launch Pad Gallery, and some paintings at the Way Post. For the ikebana, there is always some around the house, and on our front porch. Sometimes she leaves them in public places as well, though those are not around for long. Especially in front of Stumptown, where people like to throw away pretty flowers. Damn you, Stumptown.

Pen and Ink Like Imagination Lassos

Amos Goldbaum lives in San Franscisco, and makes his living selling T-shirts on the streets.



He's also a pretty phenomenal artist, but I think the former is quite profound, due to my own ability to support myself with my work. The ability to intersect very creative work with something that the general public would like to, say, wear on a T-shirt is rare in this day and age.



At the school we both attended, I remember seeing his strange creations crawling across the walls of dorms, empty cartons of consumer products fixed to the walls with masking tape, and the odd book or pamphlet, produced who-knows-where.


His work, to me, is an interesting interface between the machinic, the animal, and the human, taking common-place sights and depicting them in an unsettling perspective. His ink and line form is perfect for the work, because it depicts shape while leaving it hollow. The uncanny, twisted shapes look like ghosts, showing just how uncanny it is to see people walking down the streets, strapped to the gills with machinery, as if nothing was wrong.



And at the same time, nothing is wrong, because these things are around us and in our minds all day, and we just go on living, from one day to the next. But are we okay? Do these creatures need our help? Are they trapped in their machinic assemblages? Or are they happily lurking, waiting to attack us if we try to pet them? Everything mundane is also uncanny, and everything horrifying is also normal.



You can either catch Amos on his Twitter feed, where he reports his daily selling location on the streets of SF, or at his website, where he has a very nice little store, and hundreds of images from his sketchbooks for your perusal. In addition to his own prints and shirts, he's also illustrated albums art work, a book or two, and done posters for local events. He's also had a few shows in the SF area, which you can see photos of on his site.

Friends, Philistines, and Countrypersons

I have an infection, and the constant hacking and coughing is giving me a nice little autumn writer's aesthetic, but I still am not feeling up to rattling off a philosophical tract at the moment, though numerous topics are flowing, especially after a great in-the-car discussion with Megan yesterday about intellectual property and folklore ethics. And other stuff too.

So instead, I'm going to do one of these curation things, where I take you on a guided blog post tour. It's not the most ground-breaking topic for a blog, or for the self-pleasuring world of the Internet for that matter, but it's something I've been meaning to do.

So without further ado, here are some people I know, who make interesting things.

They aren't linked by the type of things they make, or the style, or the potential interest to the "readership of this blog", but people whom I actually know in person, and not just via the Internet. Most of them I know from college, which for those of you who don't know, is a vast social system in america designed to sort and agglomerate human intellect during the end phase of pubescence. On the exit pipe side, here are some people who I ended up standing near, and who probably know more about me than my web auteur-ship typically exhibits, and who might have seen me shouting in various stages of undress at some point in time, which was probably not actually real.

The point is, among the various milieus and inspirations a person can inhabit and absorb in this atemporal, networked, year-of-our-data, there is still something to be said for those who have actually been seen going at it, making art, making gross body sounds, or just plain making a mess in some corner of the physical world. No genre here, man. Not even a categorical application of techne. No philosophical convictions or linked-in-thematic theses. But to paraphrase one of them, "I know some people, and now you're going to hear about 'em."

Beginning with the next post...