Vook Rebiew

A Whole New Mind, (WNM) by Dan Pink, says, in his introduction, and I quote,

"The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind -- creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers, and meaning makers. These people -- artists, inventors, designers, storytellers, caregivers, consolers, big picture thinkers -- will now reap society's richest rewards and share its greatest joys."

I've read the book now three times. (I love it.) Mr.Pink does not ignore the Left Brain, but I must say I feel that most arts are always a combination of Left and Right. It's like mastering the scales on the piano, (left brain) so that great music and fun (right brain) can be performed by you on that instrument. Or learning which amounts of water will do what (left brain), with watercolors, so that art, and fun, (right brain) can be produced. What I'm talking about is the combination.

This is about a little quail with checkerboard wings who is wearing red high-top sneakers.

Actually it is my rendition of plagiarized art from two different magazine pictures......and yes, it is 2-dimensional: a 2-dimensional quail in two-dimensional high-top sneakers.....

(Oh, the fun you can have applying art to a square ceramic tile!)

This tile was rendered by myself, with colored glazes, and then placed in an "06" cone kiln, to be fired to perfection.

For my next 6-inch tile I am going to apply three borders in a row, as is often done on a woven Indian rug (Native American). These borders will stretch right across the middle of the tile instead of being found only at the edges of the square. Thus one can think in only two dimensions, and turn out a nice little piece of glazed art!

The art of COLLAGE is another 2-dimensional art form. It can be virtually any size, but sort of medium-size is a good place to start: just something that feels comfortable to you.

I advise that the first thought be of a BACKGROUND. In my experience this takes care of any last-minute quandaries in your collaging. A background can be painted on in sort of a solid color, or a more-or-less uniform treatment, OR it can be a background of something pasted on, like a map, or a sheet of newspaper, or some wrapping paper, or a piece of stationery, or a magazine page, or any kind of print-out or reproduction that you'd like to use in a background mindset.

After that you get to your main concerns, thinking bits and pieces, parts or photos, cut-outs, rip-outs, borders, old things, new things, with a color scheme or not, think stylized scissors or not, and if "scrap-booking" is a word that comes to mind, I admit I am aware of it: if anyone has had fun scrapbooking, think about how we can move on in our journey from there......

Back to Basics

I'm strictly a 2-dimension type of artist, and, even though one of my majors in college - oh so many years ago - was building with clay, I never figured it counted.

I switched from some 60 years of watercolors, to acrylics a couple years ago, still sticking always to 2 dimensions.

And when I reached an impasse with the larger canvases last fall, I got involved with yes, more 2-dimensional stuff: ceramic tiles, 6" by 6". Joined a ceramics club with their own ceramics studio, and their own kilns, and their own glazes, and since clay was one of my majors in college! - I kind of took ahold : began to even get into abstract ceramic tiles: still 2 dimensions, and still only 6" by 6".

More tomorrow.