Art from a long, long time ago...

Went to a fun talk this Friday at the Crow Canyon Archeological Center in Southwest Colorado, given by Michelle Hegmon, a professor at Arizona State University. Hegmon studies the ancient people that resided in the Southwest over a millennium ago and her specialty is  Mimbres Pottery, earthenware from the Mimbres river valley in southern New Mexico...

 from Archeology Southwest website

 

Unlike pottery from other cultural areas in the SW, like Mesa Verde region in SW Colorado and the Hohokam region in the Phoenix Arizona basin, that have a style distinct to the region...

pottery from the Mimbres Culture shows the work of individual artists...



 

 

The Mimbres Classic Period was @ 900 AD to 1200 AD and unlike the Mesa Verde region and  the Hohokam regions, which ended violent, mass death from starvation or violence, the Mimbres Culture just kind of petered out. 

 

The funniest part of the talk for me, as an artist, was listening to an archeologist and science types trying to put their usual "measurements" to art, doing calculation on how many artist and how long it would take to make the amount of pots discovered or known of, at the different sights. Their big mistake- that artists are consistent in their production......? Have these scientist actually talked to or get to know an artist.  

 

Consistent and artist should never be in the same sentence!

 

The archeologist did matched up the style of several artist, that drew their rabbit's ears the same, or had the same whimsical style to their antelope, which was corrected in the talk from the audience to "pronghorn". They also identified a style that they called "transitional"where a creature has the attributes of two animals....

 

A bird or a fish?

 

  We, artists, would call that "metamorphosis" and it is one more of those amazing things where cultures all over the world thought up the same thing, like....drums.

 

Today, the word "Metamorphosis" calls forward the images of M.C.Escher...

MC Escher's Official Website

 

who in the Twentieth Century, was still playing with the ideas the Mimbres pottery artist were pondering in the First Century and those pieces are so simple, but so good...

 

 



they could sit in the Metropolitian Museum of Art, that contemporary in their design. It is such a reminder of how all art comes from the soul and transverses not only centuries and but geography.

 

Another example of how great art comes from the common core of all of us are Gee's Bend Quilts...

Auburn University's Website on Gee's Bend Quilts

 

 created in an isolated community located in a bend of a river in Alabama, an African American community, barley holding on in the late Ninetieth Century and into the Twentieth...

where some amazingly talented women created amazing quilts from rags and worn clothes to keep their families warm and now, those quilts are hanging in museums around the world.

 

There is much info on Mimbres Pottery online and there is a Data Base, where they can be viewed.

 

 

photes noted attached to a linked website from Wikipedia Commons 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

Repeat of '76

I should be working, I'm trying to, but also have live feed from 9NEWS in Denver on the other monitor. The weekend was spent looking at Twitter, the Denver Post and my home town paper.
But I didn't whip out this illustration over the past few days, this is actually an illustration inspired by another flood, called a "once in a life" time 100 year flood. The one in 1976, when I was nine which killed 144 people, I wasn't in the Big Thompson when a sixty foot wall of water wiped down the canyon in the dark of night, but my grandmother was and my family came to help her just a few days later and my brother and I hiked up high to get a first hand view of the destruction- I wrote about it HERE.
But this below isn't from thirty six years ago, this is from this weekend...

 

 

from the DENVER POST PHOTO GALLERY

 

There should be a road, along side the river, there shouldn't be a waterfall at the mouth of the canyon near what is called "the Narrows", I think that is Drake, though I.D. ing communities in a canyon you have driven a hundred times is hard from the air. Like I said, my grandmother lived for many years in by the Big Thompson, we had a cabin up in Glen Haven. I was married up in Estes Park.

 

Funny, I feel more stress about this, then I did facing a raging fire wiping up our canyon here in the Four Corners, last fall, our house is right on the other side of the road...
 

 

But I was right there, watching the whole day the absolutely amazing fire fighters who saved my house!! and I'm concluding that being there you know what is going on, and you just get to doing what you need to, where when you are watching from afar, with nothing to do, you can well, obsess!  My family back on the Front Range are very calm and going on with their lives, none of their houses are near the flood plain thank goodness, I am heading up to Wyoming to meet up with some of them, this weekend, so will hear the stories and will be in the Front Range for Thanksgiving, when I will be able to see for myself that where I grew up is "moving on", which we Coloradoan are very good at doing, whatever Mother Nature throws at us.

Redo and redo...

I have actually been working, while I have been driving circles around the West...just on the same thing, well actually the same two things, doing them over and over again.

The story starts months ago, if  you're interested.

Last year- defined by the school year, since I am a teacher and a mom, the year starts in September and last year I taught three days a week, did the same the year before, because the year before that my illustration biz wasn't very busy, so I taught art and creative writing at a little charter school one room school house on  the edge of two Indian Reservations.

Hugely rewarding, but not so good for my illustrating, because three half days, driving 45 minutes even down a glorious canyon to get there, between my kid going and getting home from school, really leaves two days to do art and promotion and keep the house up, go to the grocery store and yoga.

Last school year, I started to feel the need to be in the studio, thanks to a out of the blue email from LADYBUG magazine and the opportunity to do this for them...

 

Stitching it reminded my what I really wanted to be doing  and by the end of the year, I had resigned from a charity board position, back out of other commitments and I was only teaching two days and had pretty much decided to not come back this year.

But the summer finally arriving, I hardly had any new work to put in my portfolio for the SCBWI LA showcase, where agents, art directors and editors from New York would be looking for illustrators to work for and I did not have my picturebook dummy ready for an expensive additional intensive I had signed up for on a whim.

So what did I spend my summer doing?

Well, traveling and actually redoing and redoing two illustrations that were not coming out the way I thought they could.

But the SCBWI LA conference was good for me- probably not getting new clients this year- but in giving me a deadline and a focus. Focus being I needed to revamp about everything- portfolio, website, not that what is there is bad, but that I feel a new level for me starting to come out, thus the redo and the redo, I learn in the process and so have to stitch and rip out, sometimes to the point of destroying the collage. I learn by trial and error, just would be better if the trial did not come two month before a very expensive conference, but so be it and walking away from the conference, I have a lot of specifics to tailor things, lay out of website, better understanding of color and printing, and the publishing process to hopefully make my work even more appealing.

So yes, one step forward and about a dozen back is where I am, but I now have four days, minus yoga class- that if definitely needed or I kind of go crazy- ask my husband- to be home and in the studio.

The fifth day? Well, I'm still teaching Art...

 

one afternoon a week. I mean how could I not get out of the studio at least once a week and make art with these cuties!

 

So that is where I am at, the beginning of this new year and hope to pour what I am working on over this blog- and yes twitter, go can go to @moonflowermuse if you are even wanting more pics and muses from me.