When faced with the challenge of planning a 12-year old's birthday party during the pandemic, I designed a blind baking contest modeled after the technical challenge in the Great British Baking Show. I delivered nut and gluten free ingredients to the participants' doorsteps. They had a set of detailed instructions and didn't know what the end result was supposed to look like. They posted their results and ranked everyones cupcakes on a google form. Here are their hilarious and impressive results. I'm planning on repeating this activity with my high school students this year. Stay tuned!
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I love textiles and they have ended up in paintings or influenced parts of them quite a bit. Sometimes, though, I just have to craft something from some beautiful fabric. Here are some pillows I made with fabric from Marimekko, during a recent snow day. Because of my love of working with fibers, having enjoyed macramé as a child, knitting, crocheting amigurumi animals, learning about the mathematical application of crochet, and this collective art, reef, climate change project was particularly exciting. www.marimekko.com/us_en/fabric https://www.kqed.org/arts/12808325
I can't wait to visit this museum in person when the pandemic is over. Here's a clip of a video of Dr. Libby O'Connell, Chief Historian Emeritus at History Channel and former Senior Vice President, Corporate Social Responsibility at A&E Television Networks, shedding light on the early American portraits of children by artists like Ammi Phillips. The link to the full clip is here.
https://vimeo.com/118197507 https://folkartmuseum.org/ Here are some gallery shots of my painting at a well-attended opening of the Totem show at the Beacon Gallery in Boston's SOWA district. That’s the top of my large canvas. You've got to love the compulsory, arms clasped behind back, gallery-goer.
This documentary is a remarkable look at the art of origami and its applications in the world of engineering and medicine. Here's a little snippet of an origami artist manipulating paper in a beautiful and intricate way. https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/between-the-folds/
I have always been enamored with the early Flemish still lives so when I saw one of these video pieces at the Worcester Art Museum, I had to share it with my students and incorporate it into my Food curriculum unit. You can see more videos here. http://grahameweinbren.com/SLwBMainFrame.html
"The still life of the 17th and 18th centuries famously celebrates sumptuous arrays of exotic fruits, vegetables, flowers, meats and fish, cheeses and breads, seductively arranged on imported porcelain bowls, gold platters, or in delicate hand-woven baskets. Often the painting also includes a memento mori in the form of a skull, a fallen glass, or a worm burrowing into an apple, a moralistic omen of the futility of indulging in sensual pleasures rather than attending to the spiritual side of life. These paintings adorned the walls of the houses of the bourgeoisie, for whom these wondrous goods had recently become available with the development of colonies and the expansion of international trade. Serving up the fruits of global commerce on glowing silver platters comfortably removed from the exploitation that fueled the Dutch Republic's phenomenal rise to prosperity, these paintings, exhibited in international museums as examples of high culture, are the front surface of a hive of contradictions. Still life with Banquet is built on this unstable foundation. At the same time, it celebrates the rise of the “Slow Food” movement which both reconsiders the practices behind what we eat, and develops new approaches to gourmet dining. A multi-course meal, using local, organically grown, pristine ingredients is carefully prepared and elegantly served family style at long banquet tables. For the meal a cross section of people gather in an unusual and/or remote urban location (such as a garage) for a seasonal menu using iconographic ingredients. The dishes nod to the Dutch cookery of the Golden Age, the setting's culinary history and the cooks' improvisations. The long, dramatic table settings relate to the projection's sumptuous qualities and draw from the Dutch banquet aesthetic. The meal is accompanied by super high resolution projections, modeled after Dutch and Spanish still lives, of those very ingredients and table decorations. During the consumption of each course, the diners are surrounded by images of its ingredients naturally returning to the soil in an ecological process of decomposition, while at the same time the flowers and plants decorating the tables emerge in a natural process of growth, replacing the now decayed and moldy foodstuffs. This is accomplished by placing the raw foods of the still life images on a hidden bed of soil prepared with seedlings and young plants, timed to grow and mature as the foods decompose. Also, as the organic materials condense and diminish, a few items that were obscured by the fresh ingredients are revealed: these are substances that will never decompose such as plastic toys or water bottles, the mementi mori of Still Life with Banquet, and, of course, our present civilization's long-lasting reminders of mortality. The dinner, set in a video installation, explores food's shifting identity ― what was once luxurious is now accessible and inexpensive, what is fresh and healthy a bourgeois luxury." Grahame Weinbren The entire book is available online nearly 200 years later. "John James Audubon's Birds of America is a portal into the natural world. Printed between 1827 and 1838, it contains 435 life-size watercolors of North American birds (Havell edition), all reproduced from and-engraved plates, and is considered to be the archetype of wildlife illustration." Each print is also available as a free high-resolution download!
https://www.audubon.org/birds-of-america I will say that these illustrations were created before there was an understanding of endangered species and Audubon hunted all these birds, stuffed them, and then posed them for his illustrations! Audubon described flocks of passenger pigeons that have since been hunted to extinction. Even though in his time he didn't have the awareness of the collapse in bird population, decline of scenic beauty, or loss of wilderness, a few years later environmentalists used his images as a resource to educate people about these threats. Thankfully there was a group of women who were Boston socialites that helped put plumes out of fashion. http://www.npr.org/sections/npr-history-dept/2015/07/15/422860307/hats-off-to-women-who-saved-the-birds Love this exhibit as well! https://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/birds Horst Kiechle's paper organs take making those 3d paper forms for geometry class to a whole other level. http://torso.amorphous-constructions.com/
I have shared this incredible Radiolab podcast on color with countless students. It also inspired a science fair project with my daughters, where we ran some experiments with our dog to see if she had a favorite color.
This is a great 3 minute TED Ed video on the science of color. I have enjoyed delving into color theory with my students over the years. Here are some fascinating color factoids. Why is the sky blue and the sunset orange? Why do bands of color appear on oil slicks? Why do zebras have stripes? Will there ever be an invisible cloak? One of the Lego artists interviewed in the PBS video, Alex Kobbs, makes stop motion animations of war- themed video games. While online gaming technology heightens reality and is becoming increasingly more graphic, Kobbs' work makes the action one step removed from reality by translating it into the medium of Lego. Although I do not condone violent video gaming, Kobb's work takes us back into the realm of imaginative play and toy soldiers. |
Yael Kupiec-DarI'm a painter, designer, and educator. This blog is where you'll find news on my latest exhibitions, projects, creative pursuits, the art I've been looking at, and educational videos and resources that I've created or that have inspired me. Archives
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