Shrinky Dinks Art Project

I had the good fortune to teach some art lessons in my daughter's 6th grade class. I started off the series of lessons with a talk entitled "Warning! You may have art in your home that you are not aware of". I tried to communicate that art and design are all around us and that we often don't realize how much of our world is art and design - from the chair we sit on to the clothes we wear and the magazines we read. Middle school kids often connect with the term art only the "boring" paintings in museums or consider making art a "childish" past time that they did when they were little. To get them interested again in making art I brought in different "art" objects: a photograph, an iPod, a skate board with graffiti, a tie-dye rock t-shirt and more. we talked about how all these objects have a deliberate visual language applied to them. in the following two lessons we practiced drawing perspective. The last lesson we made our own key ring charms by drawing on Shrinky Dinks plasic material which shrinks when baked. Here are some samples that my daughter and I had prepared for the lesson.

Rita's Graduation

Everybody was involved in our friend Rita's retirement party. My job was to make the party decorations. After visiting the site where the celebration would be held, I realized that any decoration needed to be simple and bold. Here I am working on two types of garlands. The top one spells out the title of the event and can be read from a good distance away. The garland on the floor consists just of circles in different patterns. I also worked on a visual time line or bio of Rita's life, scanning in old photographs and hanging them up like on a clothes line.



Rita's bio hangs from a cloth line

Close up of her bio


As a special surprise Rita's couch was moved from her classroom to the park where she could sit and enjoy the well wishers.


We baked and decorated 300 poetry cup cakes as dessert for the party

Lisa's Birthday Jewelry

I like this photo of my husband and me at our friend Lisa's wonderful birthday bash. Below you can see a necklace of sterling silver and smoky quartz that I made for Lisa.

TRAGIC KINGDOM: THE ART OF CAMILLE ROSE GARCIA

Black Dawn Rising, giclée print with hand-applied mica glitter on archival paper.


Antarctic Suburban Outpost, 2006. Acrylic and glitter on wood



The San Jose Museum of Modern Art is showing a fabulous exhibition of Camille Rose Garcia's work. She is part of the whole LA Pop-Surrealist or Lowbrow Movement. Her art is spooky-cute! A strange and enticing combination of sadness and naive kitsch. I can recommend the beautiful book that accompanies this exhibition (published by Last Gasp) and my husband bought my daughter and me two of Camille's dolls. Here is a picture of Lulu and conjoined sisters Sadie/Katie.

Camille paints a child's fairy tale with all the pains that we inflict on our world by destroying the environment , killing animals, fighting wars. She named a cycle of paintings aptly "The saddest place on earth" , a reference to Disneyland, that is billed as the "Happiest Place on Earth" - and indeed we see a sugary sweet realm, but understand it is fake and it's reality is based on pain and sadness. Click here to read about her on the San Jose Museum Of Modern Art web site and watch Youtube video interviews with her.