blog

Art vs Illustration vs Craft

Wed, 1 Sep 2010 08:21:00 -0700

Again today, I heard someone put down artists, and it makes me sad that there is this rift between people who make things.

What is art, what is illustration and what is craft? It seems to me that they are all just a pair of glasses that the wearer chooses to put on.

Take, for instance, the Great Wall of China. The above image is the default image for a new blog post in the iWeb, but it’s as good a man made thing as any to illustrate my point.

Great Wall of China as art: I can appreciate the wall as an installation. Like a piece by Christo, is accentuates an immense landscape with an equally immense manmade accomplishment that runs along the top of it like a graceful brushstroke.

Great Wall of China as illustration: I can appreciate the wall as not only an interpretation but a very real dividing line between two nations.

Great Wall of China as craft: I can appreciate the skillful workmanship of the wall itself.

The more I think about it, the more it seems to me that art, illustration and craft are inseparable from each other. So I just don’t get it when I hear people criticize each other’s creations.

My 15 Minutes of Warhol

Sat, 14 Aug 2010 13:55:20 -0700

After repeated visits to the exhibit, “Andy Warhol Media Works” at the Seattle Art Museum (and I do mean repeated- I work as a gallery guard and will probably spend more time in the exhibit than anybody else in the world!) I was inspired to put up my own version of the exhibit, starring, who else, but myself!

The exhibit features Warhol’s photo booth strip portraits, his “screen test” movies and also a room of polaroid camera portraits.

Here’s a close up from my photo booth portrait, and you can click here to visit the page with the full version and the movie and polaroid.

There’s a Warhol quote at the end of the exhibit that says how art should be for everyone, and I enjoy that and also the idea that anyone can be an artist.

We’re not in Kansas anymore!

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 22:25:21 -0700

Last week I visited my hometown, Muskegon, Michigan, a small rust belt city on the shores of Lake Michigan. I always say that “it’s a good place to be from” and that the best thing it has going for it are the sand dunes, beaches and forests north of town.

I must say, however, that I was shocked, yes, shocked, to see what a great collection the Muskegon Art Museum has! I made a pilgrimage to see the Museum’s most famous painting, John Steuart Curry’s “Tornado Over Kansas”, an American Regional classic that I used to stare at entranced, as a child and that I later discovered was actually used as a reference in the storyboards for The Wizard of Oz movie.

Imagine my surprise to find not only the Tornado, but dozens of other canvases that any museum would be happy to own by Edward Hopper, Pierre Bonnard, Whistler, Thomas Hart Benton, Lucas Cranach the Elder, among others!

And it’s not like I’ve never seen their collection before. I grew up seeing these works of art. I took summer art lessons in this building. I never realized when I was growing up, before I studied art history or had gone to a hundred other museums, what a great little collection I had right in my own backyard!

I am so grateful that I was exposed to such a great collection growing up in this out of the way place- what are the odds that I would want to grow up to be an artist if I had never been exposed to these artworks? I guess we’ll never know- but I have a renewed appreciation for the difference that a good art museum can make.

Click here to see my Flickr gallery of a few pieces from the Muskegon Art Museum as well as of the Victorian splendor of the neighboring Hackley Library.

This is Where We Sell Out!

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 13:27:02 -0700

Everyone else probably did this back in their MySpace days, but I am still excited to announce my Cafe Press store debut!

Even though I’ve designed professionally for years and many friends have suggested that I put my own artwork on cards, shirts and mugs, it wasn’t until this morning that I actually sat down at the computer and put two and two together.

Now, thanks to the marriage of my design skills and online print on demand services, we have the Rebecca Bush Shop.

Right now there is just one design on a variety of t-shirt styles, but I’ll be posting more products and designs soon.

But for now, I’ve got to go take a breather.

This is Where We Start

Mon, 17 May 2010 07:01:29 -0700

A few months ago I was perusing the Artist Opportunities on Artist Trust website and I saw one for The Fiction Project at the Brooklyn Art Library.
The way it works is that you send them $18 and they send you a blank book and a randomly assigned theme.

My theme is "This is Where We Start" and I just started working on it, stream of consciousness/ diary style not sure where it really was going.

So far my story has followed my return to my old job as a security guard at the art museum and the decision to part with my car. I'm a bit over half way through. Bigfoot, Hammering Man, and Dzunukwa have made appearances woven together with metaphors for travel and the body as vehicle for the soul.

The guidelines for the Fiction Project is to fill your book with 50% pictures and 50% words and send it back by the deadline, May 23rd. Then all the books will be in the Fiction Project Show at the Brooklyn Art Library this summer and then become part of their collection.

I'd love to be able to attend the opening! We'll see if I can swing a vehicle to make it there.

Scrambling

Sun, 4 Apr 2010 18:53:46 -0700

Have you ever become so busy that it isn’t until you stand still for a minute that you realize just how exhausted you are? That was the way I felt on a recent weekend getaway with my lady painters group.

The sudden stop made me realize that so many aspects in my day to day life have changed in the past 6 months that I may have been running on empty.

Usually I like to bring a creative project to work on during these retreats, but this time I only brought one sketch book. And I only drew one sketch in it. And even that sketch was just an act of stepping on the brakes. I drew it and then put the book away.

Last fall it became apparent that due to the downturn in the economy I would need to find another part time job. I was lucky enough to get hired back at the Seattle Art Museum part time, a job I left 16 years ago.

Just a week before I accepted a position on the Board of Directors at a non-profit art gallery, and took on quite a few chores there.

And soon afterwards, I’ve suddenly been offered a variety of additional freelance illustration and design work, in addition to my usual client.

Suddenly my life is full of new challenges, working with a variety of people and I love it.

But I’m tired. I’m ready for the world to slow down a little bit. But I also know that it’s been really great to say “yes” to so many things and that I don’t grow when I get too comfortable.

Self Portrait Challenge!

Sun, 24 Jan 2010 06:59:21 -0800

Sometimes it really helps to have a deadline and someone to share it with. Last month I challenged my friend Isobel to complete a self portrait in time to hang in the January show at A/NT Gallery.

She produced a beautiful oil pastel painting of herself holding a bowl of fruit and I came up with a colored pencil and watercolor painting of myself with a cartoon squirrel.

Isobel portrayed herself standing between two of the iconic curvy shapes that populate her usual abstract artwork. The bowl of fruit mirrors the wonderful food still life photos that she has been taking for her cooking blog.

Of course the “squirrel on my back” represents that crazy busy energy that keeps me thinking up stuff like this. ;)

We’re planning another self portrait challenge for next month, referencing the “Odalisque”, so if anyone else wants to join us, please do. Deadline: March 5th!

Tidings of Comfort and Joy

Fri, 4 Dec 2009 21:21:36 -0800

There I was, washing up some Thanksgiving dishes at the kitchen sink , staring blankly at the detergent bottle when it came to me in a vision! Like the three wise men, bearing holiday cheer (Cheer?). Rather than gold, frankincense and myrrh, however.... enJoy!

Stumping Lake?

Sun, 1 Nov 2009 07:12:02 -0800

This erie landscape of stumps, fully revealed at low water, was once the forest at the mouth of the Bumping River as it poured into Bumping Lake.

The wall of the dam was built just above this point and now this area becomes a part of the lake at it’s highest water level.

In the fall, drained from the summer’s irrigation, the water level drops to reveal this stump studded landscape. New grass springs to life from the loamy soil just in time for.... winter.

For a brief time spring and fall co-exist.

We saw footprints of elk, sunken deep into the ground, who must’ve been grazing on the new grass.

We also saw some baby mountain toads, newly hatched out of the lake. Only an inch long, they begin their journey, hopping up into the hillsides where they will burrow in for the winter.

Bumping lake dam

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 12:16:18 -0700

Bumping Lake? Nobody’s positive about the origins of the name. My guess is that it’s named after the Bumping River, which no doubt got it’s name because it “bumps” along on it’s way down the east side of the great Cascade Mountain volcano, Mount Rainier, just 13 miles east.

The dam was created 100 years ago and regulates the water flowing down into the Yakima valley below. Eastern Washington is drier and sunnier than the more notoriously wet western side of the state, and where it is irrigated, there is farming.

I’d never visited Bumping Lake this late in fall and it was exciting to see a fall color begin to mix in with the evergreens. One of the yellow trees is the Larch, our only deciduous fir.

Bumping lake retreat

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 22:45:02 -0700

Every year, if I’m lucky, I get to visit Bumping Lake, on the eastern side of Mt. Rainier. An old forest lodge built by the WPA, a real vintage mountain retreat, it was once the house of Jack and Kitty Nelson, who maintained the dam at Bumping Lake. Legendary Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas was a frequent guest here.
Today it is the weekend home of our friends, one of whom is a member of my illustrators group. This year we spent 5 days drawing, painting, hiking, photographing, felting, printmaking, cooking, mushroom hunting and even a bit of archeology!
To be continued...

Lake quinault paintings

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 07:19:42 -0700

This weekend I had the great pleasure of visiting the Quinault Rainforest on the Olympic Peninsula. I hiked almost every one of the South Shore Trails and took hundreds of photographs.

Then I began to create paintings based on my favorite photos on my laptop using the ArtRage painting software. Below are the first three paintings and the photographs that they were based on.

mercury non-rev

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 04:15:12 -0700

I’m going to talk about astrology today, a study that I find eternally fascinating, and our current experience of Mercury in retrograde.

Our ancestors, having no internet, television or movies to entertain the nighttime mind, made up their own stories and one of the places they projected these tales was into their observations of the changing sky.

Upon this heavenly stage, with it’s backdrop of stars, trod a few bright players. The “stars” of our show, the leading man & lady, of course, are the sun and the moon, who make regular dramatic appearances and exits, but we also have a fine supporting cast of planets.

Our word planet is derived from the Greek planetes asteres, or “wandering stars”, a charming term referring to the way that they appear to go backwards during the times when not traveling tandem to Earth.

Our most quick and inconsistent wanderer is the planet Mercury, who speeds around the sun so much faster than we do that he appears to go backwards or “retrograde” several times a year.

Mercury gets his name from the Roman’s winged messenger of the gods, a fellow concerned with all forms of commerce, communication and travel.

When Mercury is retrograde (currently September 7th through 29th) the story is that all areas of life ruled by Mercury are prone to go awry: miscommunication, bad purchases, being lost or delayed in travel, to name a few. The general astrological advice is to check twice, watch out for hasty moves and comments.

My favorite feature of Mercury Retrograde is that it’s also a good time to go back over unfinished business and to tie up loose ends. I always seem to have enough of those to keep me busy.

facebook portraits

Sun, 6 Sep 2009 19:28:01 -0700

As an artist who does portrait work, albeit mostly of 4 legged animals, it was only natural that when I joined FaceBook last year that I often use one of my portraits as my “profile” picture, that postage stamp of a picture that appears next to my posts.

One of my friends asked me to draw one of her (and then one of her guinea pigs-- No, I don’t think that they have a FaceBook page, but you never know, my cat does have a CatBook page, after all!)
and Rebecca Bush FaceBook Portraits was born.

I was pleasantly surprised to see an article on CNN.com last week on a resurgence in portrait work. It even featured an artist, Matt Held, who is currently producing paintings for a show that is based on FaceBook profile pictures!

Today I created 5 new portraits of my friends in a variety of styles using the ArtRage program (note to self: buy stock in this company, I keep mentioning it!)

Jaymi and Logan: crayon on canvas

DC: crayon on canvas

Dina: marker on canvas

Laura C: marker and crayon on paper

Isobel: crayon on canvas