Saturday, January 18, 2014

Savannah College of Art and Design Visit

Took the artsy Joseph kid to the Savannah College of Art and Design to check out the school during SCAD days and partake in a really cool XC recruiting visit set up by the coach. Arrived in town Thursday night and heading out midday Sunday. Man, this place is rocking as far as art goes! The facilities and basic equipment and supplies are just incredible for all of the many art programs offered here. Not, to mention, Savannah is just a really cool town.

at dusk near the SCAD Art Museum
SCAD Admissions Building
Cool buildin 
another cool building
cool church
SCAD also has a pretty good XC team that is only going to get better with the gungho awesome running joker coach guy Patrick Reagan now leading the runners. This hyper little dude is awesome fast and appears to be able to get his runners faster as well! To get the full experience, the XC coach had the recruits running together in various parts of town, hanging out with the team some, and actually spending a couple of nights in a dorm. Pretty cool.

While here, we also toured various facilities such as the painting and drawing building in Alexander Hall and the film and sound design building. Crazy awesome places. The art being done by these students is very good too, which indicates that some decent instructors are here. I like the fact that there was a tremendous diversity of artwork being done. In other words, everything did not look alike.

awesome hanging thing done by a student
Joseph looking at awesome hanging thing
in one of the film studios
film studio
poster design for a movie written and done by students 
getting a spiel about the wonderful film dept. by a former MSU grad
Editing classroom populated by IMacs
Student art
Lobby of Alexander Hall
Light Bulb Sculpture
corridor in ceramics wing
corridor with ceramic art examples by students 
one of the ceramics rooms  
one of the print making rooms
one of many hallways full of art in the ginormous Alexander Hall, which used to be some kind of warehouse
A beautiful print about 20 X 30 inches. I cannot convey in words how beautiful this piece was!
student art
Student sculpture (wood with bandaids)
large painting by student 
more art in another hallway
cool painting! 
paintings
hallway with art
for those who like the use of white space, check this out

nice expressive portrait 
large pen drawing
some Asian styled art
more student art
student art 
Asian landscapes
We even experienced the college dining experience, eating at two different cafeterias: The Hive and J. O. s. Both served excellent food with healthy choices such as vegetarian and organic selections being the norm. With on staff chefs, some rather tasty entree's were served as well. For hungry runner dudes, the fact that these were all you could eat buffets was an added bonus.

Anyway, its a long drive to Savannah, but a pretty cool place!


Thursday, January 9, 2014

Some folks visit my studio

A couple of art folks came out to my house and studio Saturday morning to check out some of my art and maybe get an idea of how I do things. And, Joseph, who has been really getting into the art scene lately, also had some trippy stuff and ideas to show. The two visitors were Laurie Burton, local artist and Tania Mottos, a young lady from El Salvador who is doing an internship here in Starkville. Joseph and I visited Laurie's studio last weekend, so she seemed pretty excited to be checking out our space and art. 

After apparently driving down a couple of wrong roads, which is not unusual when people visit us for the first time due to strange intertwining country roads in the area, they arrived. And in a fancy car! Convertible Camaro. Don't see many of those out on these gravel roads. It was very cool. I got Joseph to take a picture of me in front of it!

Laurie's fancy car!
I started the tour with my house, so they could check some art that I had made using the local fossil shells and cedar, and also some of my collaborative work that I have done with other artists from around the world. Laurie was really digging the fossil shell mosaics, and you could see the wheels turning in her head. Laurie makes really cool mosaics with glass and other things.

As we headed outside, I showed them my handmade cedar benches and carved tikis. Fairly cool in a basic primitive way and quite different from the art that I typically do. We finally made it to the studio, where both Joseph and I showed them some of our art and talked about some of our methods. We both like to explore different media and techniques. Sometimes the results are pretty good, sometimes, we just make a mess!

Joseph, Laurie, and Tania - one of my "Fish" paintings in the center
Laurie, me, and Tania - one of Joseph's collages at right

Looking at stuff