Let's Get Serious

OK, enough with the shoes and the aging mother, let's get back to Art.

So, here are five works in a series I'm calling Iconic Books. These are constructed pieces with encaustic and mixed media on wooden panels. The top panels look like open books (with some exaggerations) but have no text. The bottom panels are continuations or extensions of the visual ideas used in the top panels. (You may recognize some panels that I had in different configurations.)

These are all 21"H x 12"W x 1.5"D, on two joined wooden panels with black rubber strips and tacks on the sides instead of frames.

Tale of Shadows

Phantom Story

Redacted

Primal Memory

Bound Up

I began this work thinking about the way memory loss takes away content and eventually even removes form, but then I realized that books themselves are becoming artifacts and iconic forms as digital media takes over content. No matter how much easier it is to read on Kindle, nothing will take the place of a real book in the hand - the smell, the feel, all the surfaces of the cover to be explored, and the physical interaction with the pages. This physicality of the book as object can't be duplicated electronically. We're talking dimensionality here, not pixels.

LOL and/or Really?

I couldn't resist posting these beyond belief images of shoes from a blog article in today's NY Times. A few weeks ago, when I saw some Bill Cunningham photos of actual women wearing heel-less shoes on the street, I thought that was the ultimate limit, but today's photos prove me wrong. Fashion-smashion.

Remind you of someone?

The NY Times article has some interesting excerpts from various writers, historians and shoe experts who comment on women's shoes, damage done to women's bodies by shoes (bunions and tendonitis anyone?) and why women's feet seem to be the locus of so much focus. Talk about yer foot fetish!

Home At Last

Finally the long struggle to cope with my mother's declining ability to care for herself has come to some resolution. This past Monday we moved my mother to a nursing home in Amherst, about a half-hour drive from where we live. All told, it took six or eight months to get the move accomplished. First, and still continuing, the struggle was with my mother, who failed to see the necessity of a move to a nursing home. Secondly, I worked very hard, and seemingly without progress, to find a home that I liked and to comply with all the paperwork required.

Eleanor's new home.

So this is not to say that I am now without stress over my mother's condition, but I hope that the stress eating diminishes somewhat since she's now in a safe place, and I can lose the 30 or so pounds I gained during the lead-up period. There's nothing like soothing yourself with comfort foods except they do not go down without a trace - unfortunately.

All I have left to do (hah!) is to go to the apartment she's lived in for the past 31 years and clean it out. No problem!