Sustainability

CHARLINE VON HEYL
Woman #2
2009
Acrylic, oil, & charcoal on linen
82 x 78 inches
image from Friedrich Petzel Gallery

(Friedrich Petzel currently has a fantastic video with music installation by Seth Price)

I listened to this great podcast the other day titled "Driven by Flavor." The podcast featured Dan Barber the celebrated young chef and his passionate dedication to restore food to its rightful place vis-à-vis our bodies, our ecologies and our economies. He structures his ideas around his commitment to flavor.

What impressed me about the interview with Dan Barber was that he kept coming back to ideas about sustainability. Flavor is what sustains him and it's what is good for the planet and our health. This resonated with me on a couple of different levels as I try to survive as an artist, be a productive parent and give back to my community.

I am hosting a potluck at Hyperallergic HQ (the correct date is Monday, January 24th, 7pm), so bring a covered dish and we'll discuss current affairs in our art worlds and how we can help each other out. I've been focusing on these issues (of personal, communal, worldly sustainability) as I move toward integrating art into Humboldt Plaza with the amazing landscape architectural firm Abel Bainnson Butz, LLP.

Our developing plaza project is situated right outside Moore Street Market. This is a historic market with a bubbling local environment inside with a potential for my artist community to either exhibit in, teach at, eat at, cook with stuff bought at the market, and even open some sort of permanent market stall.

Lars Kremer along with Aron Namenwirth and friends will be making a dinner with ingredients bought at the market on February 17th as part of Norte Maar's upcoming Eat the Beat night February 18th. So here I am cooking and making art or rather trying to create "flavor" for a more sustainable community.

Later, after teaching interior earth sculpture to kids, which will include a trip to the Earth Room, it's pizza at Zach Feuer and a glimpse at Florian Schmidt's compositions of elementary shapes of circles, squares and rectangles embellished with cardboard and wires.

Sketching Anew

As I embark on a new series of sketchbooks, I'm filling and stacking them up, I've been grounding elements of my drawing process in the writings of post-structuralist French philosopher Jacques Derrida, particularly his book titled Of Grammatology. In researching Of Grammatology, I came across a great blog by John Weeden, the Executive Director of UrbanArt whose organization's mission is to enhance the cultural vibrancy of Memphis through the development of public art. I thought this was an auspicious discovery as I working in earnest on my first Percent for Art project, creating art for the Humboldt Street Plaza in front of the historic Moore Street Market.

John Weeden's post titled "Art Risk Fun" was where I came across his reference of Derrida and where Weeden's tells us, "So, don't be afraid to depart the stages and take performances to the sidewalks..." This is excellent advice as I research ways to turn a sketchbook drawing into an art piece along a plaza (conceptual model below, proposal stage):

Back to sketching, reading and guiding Maddie on all things real artworld.