Favorite Artist From Chicago

I've never been to Chicago but I love this image of the city at night with the clock tower and the full moon.

Chicago is the stomping ground of Tony Fitzpatrick, one of my favorite contemporary collage artists. Formerly a tattoo artist and semi-professional boxer, self-instructed Chicago artist Tony Fitzpatrick is a renegade in the contemporary art scene. He includes lots of ephemera in his work which has been described as visual poetry exacto-bladed out of old matchbook covers.

Davidson Galleries offers some of his older work from 1992-2000, and this Poetry Foundation interview includes a nice slide show of thirteen of his more recent collages. I wrote about about him in an earlier blog post here.

And Tony has a blog called No. 9 - An Artist's Journey which I enjoy very much.

"Art is a kind of rebirth. It is what elevates us above darkness, tragedy and furious loss. " (T. F.)

"Art is how we cheat death: We make that which outlasts us." (T. F.)

Happy Postcard Friendship Friday to you all!

Ritual Object, Perhaps

I've been playing with triangles and materials close to hand. That green feels like it should be something else.

Here's that quilt again with some red:

It's just so cool how easily colors can be changed in Photoshop!

I think I like this the best so far:

Something Cool

Many thanks to Grain Edit for introducing me to the art of Mark Weaver. Check out his portfolio and be sure not to miss Make Something Cool Every Day to see over 150 amazing works. I love Mark's mix of vintage color images, old engravings and sans serif type!

From Scott to Obock

I'm off on a triangle tangent. It started with the Hemingway cover I found. I'm making it into a collage that is so far limited to blue, yellow, black, white and gray. I couldn't find the right map of Spain so I started looking for postage stamps.

I love the type face on this dump find:

Flipping through I began to wonder if all triangle stamps have a camel on them. I adore these fantastic ones from Obock:

Looking Out the Window

Twice today I was amazed by what I saw from my shop window. This morning at 10:00 I saw two foxes in the back yard. They were just loping around, playing with each other and with the dead stalks from the cat-o-nine tails.

Now it is a little past 4:30 and the wonderful color of the sunset sky made me grab my camera to record it. Amazing!

I could paint this last one.

Friday the 13th - Perry's Nut House

Perry's Tropical Nut House on scenic U.S. Rte. 1, Belfast Maine was one of my favorite stops along the beautiful coastal route through New England. The back of the first card reads:

The Original Perry's Nut House. Perry's Nut House founded on May 27th, 1927 by I. L. Perry. Started in one room and grew to its present size thru the idea that "If a man sells better goods than his neighbor, the world will make a beaten path to his door." Over one hundred exhibits in our museum, admission Free. Most interesting place on Maine Coast. Visitors are always "WELCOME"

Here's the text from the second card:

World Famous Nut Exhibit. Over 150 different nuts in this exhibit from the four corners of the earth. Visited and exclaimed over by thousands. Just one of the many unusual exhibits at Perry's Nut House. Admission Free. The only Nut Exhibit of its kind. Photo by Win Sommerfeild.

As a kid I didn't take much notice of the nuts, but that huge crocodile skin certainly caught my attention.

According to RoadsideAmerica.com Perry's was closed in 1997 and the artifacts were auctioned. It is reported that some continue to be displayed in new public locations. For example, the owners of the Colonial Theater in Belfast purchased Hawthorne the elephant and Baby Hawthorne (seen in the first post card) for $1,600. Hawthorne, with his eleven-foot-tall trunk, has been placed atop their roof, while Baby Hawthorne is now in the theater's lobby.

Perry's Nut House re-opened in 1998, minus its historical artifacts. The new owners have a web site that documents its fascinating history. Their fudge looks pretty good!

Happy Postcard Friendship Friday to you all!

Little Scenic Views of N.H. - Part II.

Here's the second installment (check out the first installment here) of my little New Hampshire photos measuring 1.75 x 2.75 inches. Each one is numbered on the back in pencil.

No. 11 - Flume Cascade, White Mountains, N.H.

No. 12 - Ammonoosuc Upper Falls

No. 13 - Lower Ammonoosuc Falls, White Mountains, N.H.



No.14 - Echo Lake, Franconia Notch, N.H.



No. 15 - 42. The Flume, White Mountains, N.H.

No. 16 - Eagle Cliff, Franconia, N.H.

No. 17 - Indian Head Camping Ground, White Mountains

No. 18 -Glen Ellis Falls, White Mountains, N.H.

No. 19 - Mt. Willey, Crawford Notch, N.H.

I think my favorite from this group is the shot of the old Indian Head Camping Ground. Those tents behind the automobile remind me of the ones we used to sleep out in at Camp Paradise with the Girl Scouts. They leaked in the rain, blew down in the middle of the night, and make todays ultra-light improvements seem like nothing short of a miracle!

Another interesting detail is the appearance of the numerals 42. on what was marked No. 15. I guess this is a portion of a larger set of images. Happy to be part of this Postcard Friendship Friday!

So What If She Was An Old Maid, She Was Pretty Funny, Otherwise

There's a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply calisthenics with words. (Dorothy Parker)

Well, I'd guess that this is calisthenics with Photoshop. With apologies to Dorothy Parker and to Jim Linderman. ( SHHHH! Check out Jim's blog, Dull Tool Dim Bulb to read about his new book.)

The Walt Whitman Trio

I was tempted to add another layer or two to this, and some thread, but I'm starting to like it just the way it is. I'll begin another and leave this alone for a while.

Head Dress Attack

I must say that for me, blogging has helped to foster my faith in the connectivity of things. I sat here yesterday wondering how I could get an interesting post out of the fact that I was re-reading an old high school assignment from the dump when, before I knew it, I was looking at a fictional portrait of myself from a book I had never heard of.

Come to think of it, I did skim Hemingway's classic the night before the test. Thank heavens there was no question like: "What color was the sinister land?"

I was tempted to move on to Steinbeck, but then I remembered finding Birds & Men: American Birds in Science, Art, Literature, and Conservation 1800-1900; with 40 illustrations.

Gross numbers of birds were slaughtered in the name of fashion. And our fury friends were subject to physical violation as well as evidenced by Fig. 10. -- Black velvet muff; in the center of the muff there is a kitten's head (Godey's Lady's Book, November 1883).

Here is the author of this blog back in the unenlightened '50's sporting a rabbit-fur pseudo-cat.

Dump Stuff Run-On

The thing about the dump is to go with an open mind. I never know what I am going to find. From this time of year until "mud season" book pickings are somewhat limited mostly to paperbacks. But I managed to find a couple of interesting ones:

I'm actually reading The Sun Also Rises for the first time since high school. And after that, I might tackle the W.H. Hudson book that Hemingway mentions:

"The Purple Land" is a very sinister book if read too late in life.

I'm tempted to skip ahead to Hudson's book as soon as I can find a copy. I'm not getting any younger so it could be dangerous. I wouldn't mind a copy of the University of Wisconsin Press edition:

This facsimile of the 1904 Three Sirens Press edition includes striking woodcuts by Keith Henderson illustrating the characters in the novel and the fauna of Uruguay. Ilan Stavans's introduction offers an opportunity to revisit The Purple Land as a "road novel" in which an outsider offers reflections on nationality and diasporic identity.

I had to look up the word diasporic and it took a few tries before I found a dictionary that included it:

I might take advantage of this copy of "The Purple Land" in the Internet Archive before rapid decrepitation sets in. There's even a character in there named Anita:

Poor girl, someone cut her bangs too short! Might be the fault of the illustrator, Keith Henderson, who I suspect holds some sort of grudge against womenkind. How else could he depict something like this found on Artnet, titled "A young man making a frenzied attack upon the head dress of a woman":

Longest Covered Bridge in the World

Here's a picture of my mother, Irene, taken around 1940 standing in front of the "Longest Covered Bridge in the World." I love the jagged edges of the photo.

I wonder if this speed limit is still in effect today? This is in response to Mary Tomaselli's post on New Brunswick Covered Bridges for Postcard Friendship Friday!

Little Scenic Views of N.H. - Part I.

I bought a set of tiny New Hampshire photographs some years ago in an antique store up in Ossipee for the picture of the Old Man. Here are the first ten in a set of nineteen. They measure 1.75 x 2.75 inches. Each one is numbered on the back in pencil.

No. 1 - Observation Tower, Indian Head, N.H.

No. 2 - The Three Bears at Indian Head, N.H.

No. 3 - The Basin, Franconia Notch, N.H.

No. 4 - Mt. Chocorua, White Mountains of N.H.

No. 5 - The Indian Head, White Mountains of N.H.

No. 6 - Old Man of the Mountains, White Mountains, N.H.

No. 7 - Hall of the Ships, Lost River, N.H.

No. 8 - The Guillotine, Lost River, N.H.

No. 9 - Crystal Cascade, Tuckerman Ravine, White Mountains of N.H.

No. 10 - The Flume Cascade, White Mountains, N.H.

So there you go, New Hampshire beautiful, even in black and white. I can see Chororua from the highway. Sadly, the Old Man is gone now, along with the Three Bears. (continue to Part II.)