New Work in Progress

I had an out-of-town visitor this weekend but I was able to sneak in some time to paint. Company's gone home now, but I'm trying to stay off the computer too much for what remains of the evening.

I wanted to share what I'm working on really quickly! Here's a small canvas (6in x 6in) that I started yesterday afternoon. Collaged elements from an old book about birds, and acrylic. I just need to add some more details to jazz it up a bit. What do you think?

Knit Graffiti

I saw this entry on The Daily Green the other day about knit and crochet art (much of it pretty tongue-in-cheek) and I just had to look at the slideshow, even though their site is horribly slow and I consider slideshows to be painful. I mean, come on, just make it scrollable already. Anyways, I thought I'd share some of my favorites from the artists and groups featured in the article, so that you can see the goodness without dealing with the slideshow.

Knit graffiti courtesy of Knitted Landscape, an outfit that tracks knitted additions to our world via their website. Scroll through their images and you'll see knit flowers rising out of snow, crocheted cozies over rocks, and trees wearing something similar to legwarmers. The site encourages people to contribute their own modifications to their surroundings. Guerilla knitters of the world, unite!

Artist Lauren Marsden set out to cover the street signs in her hometown with knitted replicas. Over two years she outfitted the signs of every street she'd lived on in Victoria, BC. You can follow her trail here.

Knitting as a form of protest? The craft's image of home, warmth and grandmothers contrasts with this ambitious project by an artist whose first name may be Marianne (the Daily Green didn't attribute and I couldn't find her name through Google).
Volunteers knitted together pieces submitted by people all over the world. Her website states that she intends to continue with more variations of tanks until the Iraq war is over. If that's true, I can definitely spare a pink square....

And then you have Knitta Please. The originator of this whole knit graffiti art thing. I mean, how could you not love it based on the name alone? Behind Knitta is one Magda Sayeg, and she's finally joined the blogging world herself. There aren't a whole lot of posts yet about her crazy-wonderful guerilla artworks, but we should expect to see lots in the future.

Thanks, Magda!


Hope you enjoyed this little round-up of some of the funnest un-commissioned public artworks around. Keep your eyes peeled, you never know when you might come across one of these some day!








All images courtesy of the artists and websites mentioned herein.

Final (Late) Entry to Best of '09 Challenge

Yes, it's now 2010 (thank god - good riddance 2009) and this entry is definitely a day or two past when I intended to write this. I swear, I really need to kick this tardiness habit I have this year! No, I didn't make it through all the daily prompts, and yes, I chose to forgive myself for this. Just resolve to do better now when I can and not beat myself up for the past anymore. Good resolutions, no?

But I really wanted to respond to the last entry, as a record for my future self, if nothing else. December 31. Resolution you wish you'd stuck with. I started out 2009 with a few things I wanted to accomplish in addition to the fairly-standard "lose weight, do yoga more often, take vitamins, etc" that I end up ignoring. I accomplished just one, a big one. But of the all the resolutions I abandoned, the one I regret the most is not opening up an Etsy store to sell my artwork. {I confess to feeling silly about even stating this here. Bashful guilt.} I'm sorry not because I think the world would beat down my door to buy my stuff, but because I didn't open myself up to risk & give myself a chance. The point would not have been to sell a single thing, but rather to make the effort. And to have more faith in myself. So, I'm making this my top resolution in 2010: Believe.

Gwen has a great round-up post of the Challenge on her blog. She's also planning something big for this year - looking forward to joining in with this one. I'll be following & posting entries on these daily prompts on my other blog ninja haiku. Observations, frustrations, and random thoughts will be blogged there. Art, art, and more art, will be posted here. No more filler on this blog, I need to hold myself accountable to practicing & talking about that here.

The end of 2009 feels like a turning point & I think this new year is going to be a good one. Here's to a wonderful 2010 for all of us!