Folk Fest Art

The 39th annual Winnipeg Folk Fest has just finished, and I am so happy with the piece that was included as a part of the Prairie Outdoor Exhibition. My dad and I worked on it together this year. he built the structure and I painted it. It actually turned out even better and bigger than I imagined. Now we have to figure out what to do with it now that the festival is over...

You mean this is my job?

Look what I finished making at work today! It is a bird person. My students were working on their sculptures, and over the past few weeks I was able to complete one myself. Usually I only have time for a half finished demo, and don't get to actually finish. BUT this time, there were enough spare moments of class time to finish this thing up. My favourite part is the backside.
What is it made of you ask? Well it is has a tinfoil frame, and is then coated in plaster bandages and plaster, sanded down, primed and then painted. It is a figure sculpture project that I came up with for my students, and it always seems to have a decent amount of creativity and life to their pieces (though they are not always proportionally accurate...). It was nice actually completing something in class instead of only marking or planning, or teaching. Class days with spare moments seem to be rare, and today's exception was due to a Tournament that had half my students away.

Henrique Oliveira-Artist

I came accross these photos of an artist named Henrique Oliveira. His work is stunning. He is a Brazilian artist who takes discarded, decaying fences that are commonplace in Sao Paulo, and puts them together in the form of abstract, three dimentional works. Apparently the colours found in his peices are original colours with how he found the wood. They remind me slightly of some kind of combination of Richard Serra and John Chamberlain in the sense that his work is monumental in size, colourful, abstract and made of materials that were once something else. A much more natural form than either of those two artists, and clearly very different and distinct from them, but somehow they come to mind when looking at pictures of his work.
This site link to Totonko: filtro de diseno is in Spanish(but there is an English "swtich") and the pictures are arranged well, which is where I stole the above images from.
http://totonko.com/2009/03/tapumes-henrique-oliveira/comment-page-1/#comment-6302
Also here is Oliveira's webpage:
http://www.henriqueoliveira.com/tridimensionais.html
He also paints, but in my opinion, his three dimentional work is far greater than his paintings.
I wish I could see it in person!

Share Some Candy

I decided I need to start looking at other art blogs, so that I can be inspired, and maybe actually be a part of the larger blogging community. The nice thing about searching for blogs is that they are EVERYWHERE! I don't have to look very far to find a blog that has something that interests me.
Today's search has brought me to a site called Share some Candy. I have included some screen shots of the home page. The site is filled with images and low amounts of text, which is nice because you can just scroll down, look at images, and not worry about reading anything when all you want to do is look at art. It is fairly low on clutter, which also makes it easy to look at. It is a site maintained by several contributors, and is broken down into a great span of art, design, illustration, graffiti, logos, objects, packaging, photography, sculpture, video, typograpy, furniture, and architecture. The sculpture section in particular made me excited.
http://www.sharesomecandy.com/sculpture/index.html