Furry Happy Monsters

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7_xzAWLv-g

A View of Miraflores

Edible Mutations

From Uli Westphal's photography website:

The Mutato-Archive is a collection of non-standard fruits, roots and vegetables, displaying a dazzling variety of forms, colours and textures, that only reveal themselves when lawfully enforced standards cease to exist. The complete absence of botanical anomalies in our supermarkets has caused us to regard the consistency of produce presented there as natural. Produce has become a highly designed, monotonous product. We have forgotten, and in many cases never experienced, the way fruits, roots, and vegetables can actually look (and taste). The Mutato-Project serves to document, preserve and promote these last remainders of agricultural diversity.

Painting of the "Miraflores"

From Wikipedia:

Miraflores is the name of several places in Spanish-speaking countries. It is also the name of a battle fought in Peru in 1881. It means "to watch flowers" or "flower's view" from mira ("watch") and flores ("flowers").

That's what we have, or rather 'mirahierba'. I just doesn't have the same flow, does it?

I'm painting the landscape across the street. It's been raining so everything is coming to life. Besides the new grass beaming and squirming in the sun, I've made company with the hummingbird... family that lives in the Indian Paintbrush tree and a couple crows plus a small bird with black and white stripes on its head.

My first 30 minutes painting and I saw a Gray Fox ( ? or an over-sized house cat) sitting in the grass on the scope for a meal of tasty vermin, I like to believe that he was breathing
fresh air and blissful in the damp sunlit grass.

I saw four monarch butterflies flitter around each other and back and forth over the field.

Today I heard aggressive bird shrieks and saw an osprey sitting on the second-to-top branch of dead tree on the crest of the hill (very Halloweeny!). Small birds and crows were flying high then turning mid-air and swooping down to scare the osprey away. The osprey was at least 3 times the size of a large crow!

I am absolutely delighted!!

Chuck Close on Art During Crisis

Keep on Making and Creating.

Reflection on Marcel Proust on Art

"Through art alone we are able to emerge from ourselves, to know what another person sees or a universe which is not the same as our own and of which, without art, the landscape would remain as unknown to us as those that may exist on the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, worlds more different one from the other than those which revolve in infinity space, worlds which, centuries after the extinction of the fire from which their light first emanated, whether it is called Rembrandt or Vermeer, send us still each one its special radiance."

-- an excerpt taken from the new book Paintings in Proust: A Visual Companion to 'In search of Lost Time' by Eric Karpeles.

Appeal

Along with sharing arts opinions, websites and artists on this blog, I'd also like to share some of my own work. Stay tuned for drawings, paintings, photos, and the like.

Mode of Proof's founder Ryan Griffin DJing at a late night party in Detroit, December 2004.