Jade pendant from New Zealand Maori artist Thomas Ratima at Spirit Wrestler Gallery in Vancouver, BC, Canada. I bought a pendant there over a year ago and have had it on ever since. This is a wonderful gallery, carrying the work of three cultures: the First Nations tribes of the Pacific Northwest, the Inuit of Alaska, and the Maori of New Zealand. I highly recommend visiting it if you’re ever in Vancouver. The art on display is stunning. Their website is here.
“…For the last decade, Zac Freeman has been saving pieces of household junk that would one day become a part of his masterfully intriguing art collection. He wanted to give his two dimensional portraits three dimensional value by using glue to meld everything from bottle caps, nails and old keyboard pieces onto a board to create faces that can only be seen from a distance.…”
From: https://www.home-designing.com/2010/10/recyled-art-zac-freeman
Zac’s website: https://www.zacfreemanart.com/artwork.html
Peter Aschwanden was the illustrator of John Muir’s wildly popular How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: the Manual for the Compleat Idiot, of which Wikipedia says: “…Muir’s self-published edition sold more than two million copies to become one of the most successful self-published books in history, while its subtitle preceded (and likely inspired) the unending flow of “for Dummies” books from IDG Publishing.”
We tracked Peter down in 2001, and he agreed to illustrate our Septic Systems Owner’s Manual. He ended up making a book on a rather mundane subject into a work of art, with drawings very much like those of R. Crumb. The cover he came up with looked like one of the ’60s Fillmore posters. Peter passed away a few years ago, but family and friends have created a website featuring his posters, T-shirts and books. It’s at https://www.peteraschwanden.com:
I ran across the book Building With Earth by Gernot Minke when I was in London last month. It’s just been published (Birkhäuser Publishers, Berlin) and is an informative, up-to-date handbook on earth architecture. I visited Minke some 20 years ago at his studio near Kassel, Germany, and saw a lot of his work with cob, strawbale, and living roofs — very advanced for the late ’80s. He’s kept at it, in addition to teaching at the University of Kassel, and this book is a culmination of all those years of work.
This photo, in the book, is of a building in a small town in Colombia by architect Octavio Mendoza Morales. More of Morales’ work can be seen at: https://www.casaterracota.com. When you get to the site, it’s in Spanish, so press: “Entrar,” then “Galeria,” then to see more photos, “siguiente.”
This photo just came in from Taeke Henstra, a Dutch photographer living in Spain. it is the sculpture garden of artist Peter Buchs near Pueblo de Benifasar, a small mountain village in the La Senia region, in the Maestrazgo mountains in Spain. Lots of photos at: www.petersgarden.org
This is a link to a blog posting about a house in Gojo, Japan designed by architects Eastern Design Office for an artist, described on the blog as “…a traditional craftsman who puts the crest on Japanese traditional clothes.” There are a bunch of photos of the concrete house, with its repeating circular motifs, and this display of some of the artist’s crests (applied by hand to each garment).
In an alley around 14th and Valencia this morning on my way to the Green festival
At stunning fashion exhibit at Victoria and Albert Museum
