Category: art

Painting Crate

Ivan Kreilkamp3 Comments

My extremely handy wife Sarah made this totally cool crate to ship two of her big paintings in. I’ve created a category called D.I.Y. but it should really be called My Wife Does it Herself because I rarely do it myself, although sometimes I help a little bit. Like if she has to reach something high up, or if it takes two people to carry it.

Anyway, I am kicking myself that I did not take a photo of this crate. Our awesome friends Melissa and Steve, who moved to Philadelphia a few years ago, all of a sudden wrote Sarah that based on the images on the website, they wanted to buy two of the big paintings in the show (“Full Moon Sushi Night” and “Swamp”). Fantastic! But it turns out that it is no easy matter to ship the paintings. Fed Ex and UPS will not ship original art. Too many liability issues, presumably. Probably too many people insist their water colors were worth $10,000 or whatever. So, you basically have to lie or fudge, and therefore cannot get insurance. Also, you need to make your own custom crate.

So Sarah made it herself. This all happened in the basement over two afternoons when I was in my office at school. I came home and there was this five foot high crate, in two halves, into which each painting was bolted, put together as a sandwich, and screwed together with a power screwdriver. It weighed 85 pounds. We lugged it to UPS and Sarah claimed it was a “fabric wall-hanging,” which is technically true, I guess. It cost $136 to mail. The embarrassing thing was that there was — what were the odds? — a Fabric Arts guild member in line behind us, a friend of an acquaintance, who got all excited and interested at this enormous piece of supposed fabric arts being shipped off to Philadelphia, so Sarah kind of mumbled something vague and made her get-away…

Gap Whitney Museum artist edition t-shirts

Ivan Kreilkamp1 Comment

Gap Whitney Museum artist edition t-shirts: by Kenny Scharf, Barbara Kruger, Chuck Close, Kiki Smith, etc., and Sarah Sze.

Why couldn’t Barbara Kruger appear in her own ad?

I wonder if the artists are being tagged as sell-outs for this, or is that concept too late-20th-century? The t-shirts are quite nice so I myself would not really make that accusation, although doing freelance design work for the Gap might well undermine one’s credibility as a scourge of corporate capitalism, if that’s your thing. (Is there a philanthropic angle here? $ to fund developing artists, hint hint?)

At $28 I’m tempted by the Glenn Ligon.

Sarah’s MFA show!

Ivan Kreilkamp5 Comments

Sarah’s thesis show [not images, just an ad] is up! The reception was on Friday night. She was one of 7 MFA Fine Arts students in the show, along with two photographers, a metal-worker, ceramacist, sculptor.

I think her paintings are fantastic — beautiful, strange, complex — and the show seems to be a big hit; she’s been receiving accolades from all sides, and she even sold the most expensive painting on Friday night — “Umwelt,” a.k.a. the bat painting, probably my favorite if I had to choose, so I feel a bit melancholy about its leaving our life so soon — to a complete stranger. The MFA has been long & hard in some respects but it’s now possible to look back and see all the stress, self-doubt, and very hard work as leading to this point and to painting that is (I think) richer and most original than the work she’d been doing previously. So I guess it was worth it.

I’m also proud of her for doing the work she wanted to do, when at times it must have been tempting to change her approach to something closer to the norm within her program (which tends to focus on representational, figure-based painting).

She’s going to put all the images up somewhere, but for now, here are two of the paintings, “Swamp,” one of several more representational paintings of plants and cacti, and “Full Moon Sushi Night,” which is one of a group of three somewhat wilder, more abstract paintings that grapple with the representation of nonhuman experience of time and space.

Here is her artist’s statement:

“How do you paint a living thing – for example, a bat? The lesser long-nosed bat migrates across the Sonoran Desert every year from Mexico to North America. It follows a specific nectar corridor across the burning desert. Columnar cacti like the Saguaro bloom at night, exuding a melon-like scent. Without the sustenance of the nectar from blooming columnar cacti, the bats wouldn’t survive the long trip, and the bat guano fertilizes the cactus. The two creatures are locked into a fragile interdependence resting on delicate timing. The bats use echolocation, not perceptible to human ears. The bat, or any living creature, embodies more times and spaces than my human eyes can perceive.

How do you paint a smell? How do you paint echolocation? – a bat’s, a whale’s? How do you tell the story of any living thing?”

Sarah can be emailed at: sarahp812 AT gmail.com, and the images can be seen at:

http://sarahpearce.blogspot.com/

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