Sunday, October 26, 2008

Hats Off to Art

We have discussed in this space how important my friend SuRu thinks it is to take your art seriously before others will do so. Hence this is an intimate reflection of the relationship of fashion in head wear, character and meaning. Or not. Big Bertha's on South Lamar provided the second lens.

While many, many others were watching a football game, all dressed in burnt orange, a color that I don't find attractive in and of itself, FFP and I went on an art gallery crawl. [FFP did have the DVR dutifully recording the game so he wasn't indifferent.]

We were lucky enough to actually hear from four artists who were being exhibited. At the Davis Gallery they were hanging patinings for an opening in the evening and all three artists were there. None had a profound explanation for their work with the most being said by Miranda Gray and that about the medium (egg tempura). They seemed more voluble when questioned individually by the tour goers. I like all the work in different ways and degrees. At D. Berman gallery the artist (Jeffrey Dell) had come to the gallery especially to talk to us. He is a teacher and printmaker and, as befits a teacher, he had lots to say. He explained the use of hair in his current work and the emergence of violence in his Venice work. He talked about how tedious printmaking can be and how he thinks that he gravitates to things that are hard. I thought, "Boy, not me!" For me, art is easy or not at all.

These tours always leave me wanting to make art, though. Not on the terms of the artists I see, but on my own terms. Yeah. Shop window pictures and blogging. Oh, I'm also interested in collage. Or shop window collages. Or blogging collages.

I left the tour early, getting a friend to pick me up in my car at the next to last stop so that we could go to a bad neighborhood and retrieve her car after the people in our building had it towed from her assigned place when some idiot who is supposed to have a different place complained to them that she was parked in the wrong spot. Long story and all part of the excellent way this building is operated. But it's improving. Really. Repeat that to myself.

In the evening we had a belly full of sports, watching the UT game's recording, some other football, the World Series.

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