A Sense of Place

In anticipation of one of my art meetings coming up tomorrow evening, I have been thinking about our challenge to come up with a concept for everyone in the group to use as a stimulus for a small piece of art. I went back through a bunch of Quilting Arts Magazines because they have readers challenges every so often that would speak to this challenge pretty quickly and easily. It wasn't a readers challenge that peaked my interest, rather a phrase used by the Studio Art Quilt Associates (SAQA) for their exhibit in 2007: "A Sense of Place" (QA Apr/May 08)

So, essentially, that's what I'll present to the group tomorrow. And my original idea for my sample to present to the group was going to use a discharge travel photo how-to from a more recent QA (Dec 09/Jan 10). I still want to try this technique, but for now, the "sense of place" has sent me on a National Geographic tangent.

I started off the evening seeking environmental inspiration and landed on an image of Thorncrown Chapel, a place I must definitely see someday:

by architect E. Fay Jones; Photo © Timothy Hursley

 

The following images are ones that I've had as desktop images on my computer from time to time, all from National Geographic:

 "Toad River Valley, Canada" Photograph by Michael Christopher Brown

 "Rock Fort, India" Photograph by David Lazar

"Sandbars, Australia" Photograph by Paul Chesley

And finally, we'll end with one I found today and of one of my favorite sites on vacation this year:

 "Owachomo Bridge at Night, Utah" Photograph by Jim Richardson

 Here's one of my images of Owachomo (taken from the other side):

 So many places to see, so little time.

Architecture, Design, Video, and Environmentalism

Kontentreal, a documentary film company that I would love to work for, has been and continues to make a series of 25 minute shows called e2. Though the episodes air on PBS, I have never managed to watch them on our local channel. I watched the first energy series about a year ago and decidedly loved not only the narrative style (if you watch nothing else, watch the first minute or so) but the shooting style as well. I think the blurred edges that leads your focus is added in post, but certainly it's the first time I've seen this effect.

The design episodes focus on architectural design and really show off some new and intriguing buildings of the green persuasion.

Watch the full episode. See more e2.

Along this same train of thought are the environmental homes. Both of these versions were pointed out to me by the same friend and both are spectacularly wacky and brilliant in their way:

The first is the earthship. Frankly, I'd like to live in one of these. Think about it...no more heating and air conditioning bills, create your home with used materials, recycle your water collected from rain, and power all your "I can't live without it" necessities of technology with wind and solar energy.



The second is the Tree Fab Hab.  While the thought of living in a tree house excites the little girl who never grew up inside of me, I don't think I could wait for my house to grow. Not to mention the fact that I struggle to keep up with my garden and yardwork outside of my house. I don't really want to imagine the weeds that would overtake my actual home!

I really did learn a lot about how much a good architectural design can affect the utilities of a house when we worked on the video for the Center for Sustainable Energy last year, if only we can implement at least some of these things into our current or next dwelling...until we can afford to build our own earthship.

Google Images is my friend

Google Images is such a wonderful thing, especially when you can come up with some words to search that give you really interesting results. For example, if you search the word "orange" you will get images of the fruit, images using a lot of the color, images that include the word, etc. This was very helpful to me when I designed our T-shirt for Res Life when orange was our group color but no one in our group was particularly happy with that color. So, I created a vector image to represent both the color and fruit "orange". I realized then the possibilities of searching images, but have struggled sometimes to find good search terms. Today, after talking about love stories on our way home from a wedding in St. Louis, I decided to search "love story". Well, I got a lot of hits that you might expect: images of a CD with that title, movies with that in the title, etc. But then I found an image which led me to a website called DryIcons where they have a bunch of vector art, and there I found images I liked even better.

Sometimes I can't help but think "hmmm... how could I make that move?" 

 

And then there were just some that were "pretty"

 

I really was drawn to this one in particular:

After my discussion today with a friend who is working on a fellowship in D.C., researching a particular building of historical significance, it seems almost fitting I would be drawn to an image reminding me of a city skyline.

And in other news, a friend was telling me about this "grow your own home" project by MIT the other day. It's a bit of a stretch for me, since I have a hard time maintaining my yard and garden that I can't imagine how much work it would be to maintain a home that's literally growing, but wow, what a concept! Talk about a childhood dream - to live in a tree house - and environmentalism for the hard-core. Now, I want an eco-friendly house, but I'm not sure I'm willing to wait many years for it to grow!