More comments about Green ART

I have been getting some grief over my comment about GREEN Art. I am not against recycling or "re-purposing" old stuff. I have been doing that all my life. Please take your beer bottles to the recycling center, plastic and old clothes in to Good Will. I just don't want it to be made into an art object for it's own purpose. The language is changing as it always does. "RE-purposing" bugs me. Can't you just use an old piece of furniture as something else without the term. Like: window panes for a desk or coffee table just because it is a great new piece. Does it have to be labeled?

When an artist grabs something that is red because she needs that color and it happens to be old and useless and then sticks it into her painting and it is the red object that you see working with the composition....then I like that. If the red thing is a recognizable thing and has nothing to do with what the painting is about and all you see is a catchup bottle, then Green Art Sucks. It becomes the propaganda of the 21st century.

Spring is coming hard to the high country in Colorado....Amazing birds are back, the grass is turning green under the snow and my tulips are up. It's time for me to do some serious work. I would like to get back to the landscape and it's always changing form. The land is endless in the West. I dream about riding over spaces that change with color, contour, endless vistas drawing me on and out. This winter when I was in Durango there was so much snow that the fences were erased, trash gone, endless white punctuated with the early color of willows, that beautiful raw umber and indian red and marked with a few slashes of pale mustard. Horses huddled close to the barns where they could walk and feed on hay thrown from short distances are images that are burned into my brain. There are not many, if any, dead and dying trees there. However there are the burned areas from the Mission Ridge Fire. These black and brown areas were covered with snow and the landscape looked much like I imagine it to have looked before the coming of man and the roads. Everywhere I looked was a landscape portrait worth turning into a fiber piece. Then there were the rivers, so much water and motion and another group of colors to contrast with the winter landscape, dark blues, greens and gray. The town of Durango was enchanting also. I would really like to live there. The drawback is that it is so very expensive. There just isn't a way to change geography for us. I would miss my home in the front range terribly too. But I did love the expanse of the Durango area.

I've been thinking about "GREEN ART". Most of the art criticism conversations that I have been a part of for almost a year include this term. What is this. I think that it is the thing that all of my art professors warned me about in college....propaganda art is not really art. After all if the first thing you see is the label GREEN and not the art itself, then it is not art. I think that it falls into the category of political art or politically correct art. This term bugs me. The fiber artists that profess green have recycled some form of garbage or recycled some piece of fiber that is not traditionally used in quilting. With one exception, that is all I see first, some clever use of junk. The art takes a back seat. It is also a very good ticket into the current shows. I see a formula: How to get a piece of fiber into the latest show. Use some form of trash, regardless of what you have to say, and you may be assured a place in the latest show. It's a trend is all I am saying. I want to know why green art is good......does it really save the planet....I don't think so.

My..Where has the time gone? I am seriously going to turn this blog into The Art of Why. I spend all day long thinking about why people are doing the things that they do. My world is evolved with fiber and two dimensional art. Color takes up just about all of my thoughts. Why do some work and some do not? My obsession with hating pink is ending because I am thinking about it and working some new pieces in PINK. Who'da thunk it? I just bought 500 Art Quilts. This book has an editor who thought that she could publish this many art pieces and have a good collection. I think that she could have slimmed it down to 100 Art Quilts and made a better publication. There are some really mediocre pieces in the book. Many of the quilts have bad design, not enough color contrast, and just are not thought out. The funny thing is that most are from art quilters that have made it into big shows. Just making it into this book is a big deal. I just wish that more thought and experience had gone into the selection. I mean, "What the hell?" So..this is my WHY thought today.