Lily's Favorite Art

Lily here to share 5 of my favorite entries. With the exception of #5, mine are quite girly this year. Not sorry, Felicity. XD

The Flowering Wall
The artist cut, crafted, and hot glued all of these paper flowers by hand, each one unique, and arranged them on panels to create The Flowering Wall. You can't really tell from these photos, but Mom reports that many of them sparkle with varying amounts of glitter. The artist created this for her daughter's wedding, as she (the artist) was battling cancer and could not attend the wedding in person. What a beautiful backdrop that made at the wedding reception!

Victorian Dresser

front

back

Yes, it really is made of wood, and yes, it is life-size! The artist laminated 2" thick boards of cherry wood into the general form, did the initial shaping with a mini chainsaw, and then used die grinders to carve the details. Some sanding and a coat of clear polyurethane later, and there you have it, a wooden dress. Totally impractical, yes, but gorgeous.

The Fitting Room

This painting was hanging on a wall behind Victorian Dresser. (I wonder if that was planned?) The subject matter: 3 of the artist's daughters trying on prom dresses in a mirrored fitting room. I love the color palette, the way the artist has captured the effect of all those mirrors, and the artist's "chunky dot" style of painting. (I'm sure there's a way more technical term for it, but I'm too lazy to investigate further at present.)

Origami Bonsai
Here is Mom's photo. The lighting isn't so great thanks to the window, but it shows you the whole thing straightforwardly.

And now for two artsy shots from the ArtPrize website:

Any guesses as to what kind of person it was who created this delicate pink tree? I figured it was probably a girl, and a super girly girl at that. Dead wrong. It was a young, very nice dude. XD He offered to teach passersby how to fold origami butterflies. Mom declined. *Sighs* But I want to know how to fold paper butterflies! There must be a tutorial online! At any rate, I really admire the end result. The branches are curved just right, and the butterflies make the branches look like they're covered in pink blossoms. Pink seems like the perfect color for this - I'm not sure any other color would've been as pleasing.

African Menagerie, An Inquisition

Last and not least, behold the African menagerie! This 7-paneled giant oil painting depicts 209 African animals species. (I'm not sure if that number includes the human or not.) It's 32 feet long and 10 feet high, to give you some idea of its impressive size.

The animals may be realistically painted, but obviously this scene is not. It makes me think of what might happen in Africa if the dude pictured had a magical flute to summon all surrounding animals. ;^)

My favorite two panels are on the far left, where the 3 kinds of zebras (Grevy's, Mountain, and Plains) are hanging out with an (extinct) quagga.

Off to the side was a key informing the viewer of the name of each animal species. Mom spent a considerable amount of time here, as I no doubt would've too.
And now for another small recap. My birthday was this past Monday! I know, a Monday birthday is not exactly ideal. Everybody still did their best to make it special, though, and I've got to say it was one of the best Mondays I've had in a while. We were all busy, but I still made time to visit HI2 for a few minutes and flute my birthday wild horse. I rode the noble Onyx out near the end of Line Isle for this, hopeful that such a handsome dark stallion would attract a beautiful mare...

...but instead we lured in another handsome stallion. XD

I figured the odds weren't good that my birthday horse would be roan, but I kept my fingers crossed for a bay.

The moment of truth came when I ventured up to Mom's room:

Drat, foiled by light grays! Oh well, at least they're quite clean, good-looking light grays. I'm out of time today, but check back later if you're curious to see who end up winning the various prizes in our birthday flute contest!

Julie's Favorite Art

This isn't exactly how it went this week, but you get the idea! It began with humid, 80+ degree days. Wednesday was soggy and still fairly warm. By Thursday and Friday, it was in the 40's, and out came the winter coat and gloves for the second time this fall. *Sighs* I guess West Michigan doesn't want anything to do with "average" this fall.

West Michigan is pretty much at its peak of vivid fall color right now too: the leaves are turning, yet it hasn't frozen yet, so we still get to look at green grass and flowers. We're enjoying it while it lasts and trying not to think too much about how the Farmer's Almanac predicts a colder, snowier than usual winter for us this year.

Ugh, enough of that! Let's move on to some cool art!

Jelly Smack

These 4 jellyfish are digital prints on light boxes. I won't pretend to understand the process involved, but they end result was colorful, multi-layered, glowing jellies, and they changed colors depending on where you were standing to view them. From some angles they looked like they do in this photo, but from others they looked multicolored or like they were alternating fuchsia and turquoise.

Freeland

I love this painting's artistically messy edges: a refreshing change of pace from perfectly rectangular artwork. The dramatic colors and chunky blending work great together to depict this already gorgeous scenery.

A.N.T.S
The same artist who's made intricate scenes out of "recycled materials" (a nice way of saying "trash") in past years was back again. His entry this year was a collection of large-scale animal sculptures scattered throughout a landscaped area outside a museum, including many ants but also lots of other creatures. The ants are supposed to stand for the dangers of "automatic negative thoughts." Like ants at a picnic, a couple of negative thoughts that invade your mind aren't a big deal, but if left unchecked, they can multiply and wreak havoc. I found it hard to think of anything negative while looking at any of these guys, though, especially the little green aphids. =)

some of the ants

mosquito

ant with aphids

ladybug on a mushroom (and spider in the background)

snail

Lions

This family of lions is a hand-quilted masterpiece. If it looks a bit like a paint-by-number, it's because each different shade is a different section of fabric. The artist says the hardest part is finding the right fabrics for her projects: searching stores and sometimes dyeing material herself to get the colors she needs. 20 different fabrics were used in the male lion's mane alone!

Rescued!
This year, several artists entered ArtPrize with artwork of rescued pets. All of them were awesome, but I was especially fond of this collection of watercolor paintings. The wax-on-wood surface these were painted on gave them a unique, textured look.

Of course, Mom especially liked these two, since they resembled her family's previous dogs, Pepsi and Summer.

I only have one piece of HI2 news to share, but it's a happy piece. That little Eriskay mare that we've been holding onto since January? Well, it's finally official: she is ours for keeps! Meet Ebb! She looked good in every color we tried on her, as light grays tend to do, but we ended up choosing green and yellow. <3

ArtPrize 10 Winners

ArtPrize 10 has been taking place in Grand Rapids, Michigan over the past few weeks. As usual, Mom was able to see a lot of the art in person - nowhere near all 1,263 of this year's entries, but a decent number nevertheless. We dolls, of course, have not seen any of the art in person, but it's still fun to experience it vicariously through her and through all the photos and videos that show up online. 

The winners of ArtPrize 10 were announced last night. As has been the pattern over the last few years, a jury of art experts gets to choose their winners, and the public gets to vote for theirs. The juror's picks were, as usual, rather out there and not anything we got very enthusiastic about, so I'm not going to go there. I will share the winners of the public vote in its 4 categories, though:

Time-Based Public Vote Winner ($12,500):
Moving Experience by Robert and Tim Shangle

Robert entered ArtPrize as a "living statue." He made himself look like a comic book character who has escaped the pages and ventured into the real world. The above video was playing on a loop in one venue, the police department, and it was filmed by his son Tim. Robert (AKA "Trebor," his name for his character) also wandered around downtown GR during ArtPrize itself - Mom saw him on two separate occasions. Mom appreciated how much he did look like a comic book character but also found him slightly creepy. Hence, she voted for him in the first round of voting (to determine the top 5 in each category) but not in the second round (to determine the winner.)

Her clear favorite time-based entry was this one, Transcendence, but alas, it didn't win. Possibly because it was tucked away in the basement of an old building and didn't get as much exposure.

Installation Public Vote Winner ($12,500):
Sonder by Megan Constance Altieri

The artist took random snippets of conversation she heard over the past two years and turned them into this installation. She hand-stamped each snippet onto an article of clothing to match what each speaker was wearing and then hung them up on clotheslines. In addition to some of the snippets being quite entertaining, this entry is intended to make viewers more aware of, curious about, and empathetic towards the people around them. Hence the title: sonder n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as one's own.

3-D Public Vote Winner ($12,500):
The Phoenix by Joe Butts

The artist may have one of the worst last names ever, but his scrap metal sculpture is quite a sight to behold. It had location (a busy street corner), size, and complexity all going for it, so we weren't too surprised that it was a crowd favorite. Maybe because we've seen so many big sculptures made in a similar style (thanks to a decade's worth of ArtPrizes now) we were not as impressed with this as we might have been a few years back. (We feel that the elegant Lux Maxima, the metal/glass horse who won in the 3D category last year, was more unique, but whatever. At least we have an animal among the winners this year.)

2-D and Grand Prize Public Vote Winner ($200,000):
THE STRING PROJECT by Chelsea Nix & Mariano Cortez

The only one of the winners that Mom actually voted for in round 2 was this one, so she was glad to see the public grand prize go to this entry. The artists, a married couple, traveled around the world to take the 40 photographs that comprise THE STRING PROJECT. (This included a few photos taken in West Michigan, naturally.) The way the photos are displayed, it looks like the string running through each frame is one continuous piece, like all the people holding onto it are linked together. You can see where the artists were going with this, I'm sure. “We feel that besides our cultural and physical differences there are essential things that are similar in all human beings that connect us and make us more similar than we think," explained Nix on their entry's page on the ArtPrize website. 

To our dismay, ArtPrize is moving to a biannual instead of annual schedule moving forward. Hence, ArtPrize 11 won't take place until 2020. We're going to have to come up with something else fun to do next fall, I guess. Maybe make art of our own? Though that's really more Lily's thing...

We will distract ourselves from that big bummer and from the bigger bummer that is the weather's inevitable downward spiral over the next few weeks by posting about our favorite entries. HI2 stuff is bound to get thrown in too, like I'm going to throw in right now.

Our ranch's horse store is currently empty! The +4/6 buckskin Curly mare and the +5/6 gray NCT both sold!

No wonderful new +6/6 wilds to throw any party about, but we did catch double wilds on Desert Isle:

The one below us was this cool Turkoman mare:

It's not every day you find a brindle! =)

The one above us was this handsome pinto Spanish Barb:

Isn't his avatar great? I didn't realize that overo Barb avatars had colored manes and tails. If he was a she, I think we'd have a hard time saying no despite the under +80 stats. But since he's not, I think he'll hang around until he can be ridden bareback and then put up for sale.