Picture Day!

My life is crazy right now - busy at home, busy in the garden, busy with friends, and extra-super-busy at work. Whew! I need a vacation from my life. LOL

Anyway, because I'm so busy, today is going to be Photo Thursday (something I just made up). Hopefully, my nutty life will provide you a few minutes of entertainment today. Enjoy!

- Alex

Enjoying a gallery show in the neighborhood.

Having (many) good dinners with friends.

Trying to decide about siding and windows for my house.

Attending cool charity events with awesome people.

Going to conventions.

Dealing with my bees building crazy comb. (An experiment gone awry)

Marveling at my hive.

Meeting cool people (at conventions).

Attending graduation parties and EATING. 

And eating...

Enjoying my peonies and my bees (who are enjoying my peonies).

Visiting the company's "Corporate Art Sale". 

Having a sleepy, allergy-ridden Sunday.

Visiting the company warehouse to prep for another trip.

Wishing I had the time to just sit and knit (maybe next winter!)

Walt Disney

I'll tell you, I was a big Bugs Bunny fan as a kid. If you would have posed the "Bugs Bunny or Mickey Mouse?" question to me..it would have been Bugs all the way. He had so much personality, and Disney cartoons...well, they just didn't have the same sass.

Disclaimer: this attitude did not reflect my attitude toward Disney live action. I couldn't get enough Mary Poppins, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, or Parent Trap when I was little.

But now that I'm all grown up, I see the artistry of Walt Disney animation in a whole new light. This shift actually began when my daughter was about four, and her very favorite movie was Snow White. I had never actually seen it...and well...it was just lovely. No other way to say it. You could see the hand in the animation and the care taken to block out every frame with artistic balance. My mind had been changed.

Sure, I could take or leave some of the more recent animated Disney efforts, but there is a special place in my heart for the original classics like Snow White, Pinocchio, or Peter Pan.

I was fortunate enough to get to see a traveling exhibit of treasures of the Walt Disney archives in Chicago last month. That (mostly hand-made) collection of props, models, and original artwork on display reinforced my newish respect for Disney.

Take a look at what really caught my eye:

This is a hand-made prop of the submarine from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. It was absolutely stunning. I could have sat there all day and just counted the rivets.

This is an actual early Disney animation desk. It is a work of art in itself.

This is a close-up of an original Disney animation title card. I was knocked out by the subtle color pops in the shading.

If only I could have stolen this beautiful background painting from Pinocchio...

This is part of the costume worn by the artists model who posed live and on video for the animators reference on Snow White. My gosh it was beautifully sewn. (It was tiny. Had to be a size 0.)

It's hard to see, but this is a contraption where they slid in painted clear glass panels and then shot through with the camera for a 3D effect. This one was used on their first animated feature, Snow White.

The book at the opening of Snow White was carved out of wood by hand and gilded.

Storyboards for the penguin scene in Mary Poppins. Again, I could have studied this all day.

I don't need to tell you what this is.

Or this.

The color harmony, hand lettering, and composition took my breath away on this poster for an early Disney short.

This is the hem of Alice's skirt from the recent Alice in Wonderland. Yeah...I'm calling them out on that machine embroidery. Tisk-tisk.

If you get a chance to go see this exhibit yourself, please do! It's worth the price of admission.

–Cassandra

PS - I still love Bugs Bunny too! I mean really, everything I ever learned about opera was from him.

Aesthetics

I am a person who's been fortunate enough to be exposed to some very fine art in her lifetime. Museums, years of art history classes, and world traveling have worked together to shape the artist that I am today. However, I have to admit something sort of shocking. My biggest creative influences have come from TV.

I know...I know...many folks think TV is a fine-art wasteland. But the thrill I get when I see oddly creepy but beautiful vintage stop-motion animation sets me back on my heels. At this time of year when the Rankin/Bass classics such as Rudolph or the Year Without a Santa Claus seem to run on a loop in our home, you will find me looking at the screen very closely. Examining how every tree or character was made. As much as I love the Rankin/Bass films, what really captures my imagination is the older stuff. The stunning beauty of Suzy Snowflake or Hardrock, Coco, and Joe are a rich soil for my creative ideas.

It's no secret that I love classic films. But I don't think I've ever shared the fact that you can catch me pausing the TV on hand drawn title cards, and maybe even taking a photo so I can look at it again later! (I found this great resource recently.) I will even take photos of interesting props. Below is a photo I snapped while watching the silent film The Thief of Baghdad a couple months ago. I was swooning over the patterns in the background.

It's blurry...but I still look at it all the time.

When I was in college, I remember a teacher telling us about an article they read in Art in America that was analyzing the emerging artists of the late 80's color palettes against Hannah Barbara cartoons. Apparently what we watched as kids had an impact. This should not surprise us in the least. I actually remember watching Tom and Jerry as a small child and spending more time admiring the background art than the cat and mouse action. Somehow knowing in my gut they were special. Watch this...check out the amazing background art:

You know what all of these influences have in common? The human element...you can see the hand in the work. I love that it's not highbrow fine-art hand...but rather art that is created for the people. (If that makes any sense?) Beautiful because of, rather than in spite of, it's flaws. This type of art has soul that computer-aided creations will never have. Sure, computerized fonts, animation, or color-pickers give you a faster and more perfect result. And yes, I do make my living creating at a computer. But it can never match the artistry of hand-done work.

–Cassandra

Jewels of Denial

Today Alex is a bit under the weather. But lucky you...I found this great post of hers from a couple years ago that deserved another look. Enjoy!

I was an artistic kid. Right on through college, my focus was on art, in some form. Sometimes it was drawing (I'm pretty mediocre), sometimes pottery (also mediocre), some art history, and eventually interior design.

Then I got married, had a baby and, suddenly, didn't have time to sit around a contemplate the mysteries of  cerulean blue or Basquiat. In 18 months, all my dreams of being a boho artist in NYC were dashed.

Interestingly though, creativity can't be killed. It will bubble to the surface somehow, someway. For me, it came out in cooking. I had to cook every day and I discovered that I could get pretty creative with recipes. As a result of years of playing around in the kitchen, I'm a confident and decent cook who will, often, take risks with good results.

Once my son was in high school and fed himself most of the time (Easy Mac and potato chips, mostly), I found myself in need of a new creative outlet. In my neighborhood, there was a bead shop that had the most enticing front window filled with a gorgeous array of semi-precious stones and stunning finished jewelry. After a number of weeks of window gazing, I finally screwed up the courage to go inside. I wandered around, entranced by the colors and shapes, and was pleased to find that a strand of semi-precious stones isn't all that expensive. I also discovered that (like most craft shops) the staff was completely willing to help me learn whatever I wanted to learn. I had found my new muse.

Cassandra and I have spoken before about the siren song of craft supplies. When one starts a new craft, it's very easy to become enthralled by it and want to buy all the gorgeous bits that go with the new hobby. With beaded jewelry-making, very few tools are actually needed but it's not unusual to fall into the abyss of beads. As I mentioned, even semi-precious stones (including pearls) are pretty inexpensive when viewed individually. It isn't until you have a rubbermaid container full of them and realize that it's a few hundred dollars worth that the depth of the obsession comes to light. Like with yarn, there comes a point where I had to put a moratorium on bead buying. The rule (for all my crafts) is, "Supplies can only be bought with a specific project planned."

Another issue was that, while I enjoyed the action of making jewelry, I'm not an active wear-er of jewelry. I created hundreds of necklaces, earrings, bracelets, and more - sometimes even specifically FOR myself - but rarely, if ever, wore them. I'm not a big jewelry fan. I like it on other people and I like to wear things that belonged to my grandmother or mother but, in general, I wear the same silver hoop earrings and single silver ring every day. So, for the most part, I just gave it all away as gifts. Eventually, I stopped doing this craft because I figured people were sick of getting my jewelry for every gift-giving opportunity.

A rosary made by me

So, I'm left with a big box of beads, good tools, and an occasional desire to break it all out and start again. I won't get rid of my supplies because the day will come when someone wants a necklace for a wedding or a specific pair of earrings and I'll be able to make these items without having to re-invest in the hobby. Plus, every once in a while, I love just looking at the beautiful beads and imagining what they could become.

- Alex

Friday Finds: Another Time Suck

The one thing we're suckers for, here at Mighty Distractible, is gorgeous design. It doesn't matter what it is - a toilet paper holder or a house or a billboard - if it's designed well, we celebrate it.

Now you can celebrate design, and get lost in a deep, deep well of content, at designboom.com.

One of my favorite things about this site is their tagline: "since 1999 home of design culture, leading independent publication for design, architecture, art, photography and graphics"

I found the site through Pinterest (of course) when I saw this:

'sand bowl' by leetal rivlin

My first impression of the site was that it was overwhelmingly advertising heavy and that there's WAY too much copy crammed into the home page. Funny that a site dedicated to art and design would have such a crappy design but...

Once I got into it, I fell in love with the inspiration. A lot of the content is submitted through their DIY Submissions feature. If you type DIY into their search engine, you'll get TONS of cool ideas for projects.

So...you can curse me and thank me later. ;)

- Alex (the pusher)

Let me tell you about Wes

Every movie that Wes Anderson has made has given me shivers of pleasure. His aesthetic is everything that I love all rolled up in one place. As a matter of fact, when I am watching one of his films, I feel like he made it just for me. When I meet him one day, I'm going to thank him for that.

Last night I went to see Anderson's latest production, Moonrise Kingdom. I walked into the theater giddy with excitement and walked out wiping my eyes from the sweetness. On the car ride home I was framing everything in my field of vision - the traffic, the buildings, the people in their yards - as if they were storyboards in a Anderson film. Try it sometime, even the shabbiest of sights morph into something artistic and curiously innocent.

People dance together when they fall in love.

That innocence that he finds in everything and everyone, to me, is the heart of his work. No matter how deceitful the character or how ordinary the place, you get the feeling that you're viewing the scene as a childhood memory. And all the filters and revisionist history of remembering the past come along for that ride.

Sometimes grown-ups need to go outside with an axe and a bottle of red.

Anderson's movies have a "hey kids, let's put on a show!" (Little Rascals) quality. The sets, costumes, characters, dialog (and all the other stuff that movies are made of) seem to be designed from impressions. Let me clarify. I can draw a shark by sitting at the aquarium and sketching from life, or, I can just sit down with paper and draw a shark. An actor in a Wes Anderson's movie doesn't follow a doctor around for a month to learn to play a believable doctor... he puts on a white lab coat and stethoscope and plays his idea of a doctor, seemingly drawing from childhood impressions. Pulling that technique off so beautifully is one of the reasons I think Anderson is brilliant. It is a slippery slope where the movie could come off lame and amateur, but his never do. It becomes charming and leaves room for the visuals and music to help buoy up the story he's trying to tell. I think his characterizations work, in part, because he employs actors who "get it" and are able to make the process sing.

So, what makes me watch his movies over, and over, and over again? More than anything, it's the sets. I want to live on a Wes Anderson sound stage. The colors, the light, the furnishings...all so imperfect, but somehow perfect together. The style is always a careful blend of artistic and utilitarian. Every prop in every shot tells the story of the place and gives you insight into the character who belongs there. The most obvious example of this is the children's rooms in The Royal Tenenbaums:

I know that Anderson has a distinct style, and some scoff that he is a "one trick pony". I disagree. He's not a filmmaker who is bringing to life someone else's screenplay, his movies are cradle-to-grave his own. He is an artist creating a body of work. Like Picasso's cubism or Richard Avedon's portraits, he is creating a series that in retrospect will make perfect sense. An artist has to explore every nook and cranny of the theme that is driving them to create.

Thanks for letting me gush on about this subject. And, for the record, I could keep on going...

–Cassandra

Friday Finds: Evil-Cute Crochet

I can't remember where I saw the first piece of Shove Mink's art - it was probably on Twitter - but I can tell you that, as soon as I visited her Etsy store, I wanted EVERYTHING she's ever made.

She calls her work "anti-gurumi". It's evil, a little twisted, and only "cute" because it's mainly made with yarn. Her store is called "Croshame", which is funny in and of itself, and her work is nothing short of brilliant. Please note that, while these may look like dolls, they are not for children and are priced accordingly.

I often complain that people don't view "craft" as "art" and, as a result, don't value it more. However, this stuff can't be categorized as craft in any way, shape, or form. The attention to detail and the skill is just too fantastic.

So, for your enjoyment, I give you my two favorite pieces of Croshame art - The Krampus* and The Exorcist Playset:

 

* The Krampus will be mine at some point in the near future. I'm just sayin'.

Jewels of Denial

I was an artistic kid. Right on through college, my focus was on art, in some form. Sometimes it was drawing (I'm pretty mediocre), sometimes pottery (also mediocre), some art history, and eventually interior design.

Then I got married, had a baby and, suddenly, didn't have time to sit around a contemplate the mysteries of  cerulean blue or Basquiat. In 18 months, all my dreams of being a boho artist in NYC were dashed.

Interestingly though, creativity can't be killed. It will bubble to the surface somehow, someway. For me, it came out in cooking. I had to cook every day and I discovered that I could get pretty creative with recipes. As a result of years of playing around in the kitchen, I'm a confident and decent cook who will, often, take risks with good results.

Once my son was in high school and fed himself most of the time (Easy Mac and potato chips, mostly), I found myself in need of a new creative outlet. In my neighborhood, there was a bead shop that had the most enticing front window filled with a gorgeous array of semi-precious stones and stunning finished jewelry. After a number of weeks of window gazing, I finally screwed up the courage to go inside. I wandered around, entranced by the colors and shapes, and was pleased to find that a strand of semi-precious stones isn't all that expensive. I also discovered that (like most craft shops) the staff was completely willing to help me learn whatever I wanted to learn. I had found my new muse.

Cassandra and I have spoken before about the siren song of craft supplies. When one starts a new craft, it's very easy to become enthralled by it and want to buy all the gorgeous bits that go with the new hobby. With beaded jewelry-making, very few tools are actually needed but it's not unusual to fall into the abyss of beads. As I mentioned, even semi-precious stones (including pearls) are pretty inexpensive when viewed individually. It isn't until you have a rubbermaid container full of them and realize that it's a few hundred dollars worth that the depth of the obsession comes to light. Like with yarn, there comes a point where I had to put a moratorium on bead buying. The rule (for all my crafts) is, "Supplies can only be bought with a specific project planned."

Another issue was that, while I enjoyed the action of making jewelry, I'm not an active wear-er of jewelry. I created hundreds of necklaces, earrings, bracelets, and more - sometimes even specifically FOR myself - but rarely, if ever, wore them. I'm not a big jewelry fan. I like it on other people and I like to wear things that belonged to my grandmother or mother but, in general, I wear the same silver hoop earrings and single silver ring every day. So, for the most part, I just gave it all away as gifts. Eventually, I stopped doing this craft because I figured people were sick of getting my jewelry for every gift-giving opportunity.

A rosary made by me

So, I'm left with a big box of beads, good tools, and an occasional desire to break it all out and start again. I won't get rid of my supplies because the day will come when someone wants a necklace for a wedding or a specific pair of earrings and I'll be able to make these items without having to re-invest in the hobby. Plus, every once in a while, I love just looking at the beautiful beads and imagining what they could become.

- Alex

"Paging Dr. Freud..."

So.... Cassandra and I saw this the other day:

We both laughed. Then I said something like, "That's a blog post waiting to happen!" - at which point we turned the car around and took photos.

We're always looking for material.

But what, exactly, can I say about this? It is, at once, creative and fun as well as silly and non-conformist. My inner child loves it but my outer grown-up thinks it's ridiculous. I'm also not-so-secretly jealous of this person's ability to freely express their "art" without fear of judgment. You don't drive around in a rubber ducky car doing errands unless you have a pretty healthy sense of self - or an extreme desire to be the center of attention.

So, who needs the therapy here? Me, with my repressed desire to express my creativity or the duck-car owner with their "obsession."  I'm pretty sure that the answer is "me."

Regardless, the duck car definitely makes for interesting conversation fodder like "at what point does an interest or hobby become an obsession?"

I believe that, while some creatives are truly obsessed, most are just super-comfortable with their choices. Obsession by definition requires a certain amount of pain - either in the uncontrollable desires that create the obsession or in the aftermath of the obsession (drained bank account, an inability to take care of oneself, alienation of others, etc.) I'm guessing that duck-car owner is probably just fine with the choice to create this particular piece of art. I doubt that he or she is obsessively scouring every possible outlet for new and different ducks. I can't imagine that he or she has spent too much money on the creation of the duck car. And, I can pretty much guarantee, that there's little to no pain being generated by flaunting the duck car in public. Except for maybe the embarrassment that duck-car owner's mom probably feels. As a matter of fact, I imagine that duck car brings a lot of joy wherever it goes. 

Cassandra and I certainly enjoyed it. 

So...let your freak flag fly. Wear purple every day. Collect cow figurines until your house is littered with them. Knit yourself a Dr Who scarf (only 12 ft long!) In the end, our obsessions aren't obsessions as long as they're bringing us, or those around us, happiness. Just remember to turn it off if it starts getting in the way of your real life or someone might sic Dr Freud on you.

- Alex