thoughtful
lyonesse, I braved my Boston nemesis, the subtly menacing Powderhouse Rotary, and wandered around the Somerville Open Studios. A hundred artists each set up a "studio" one can poke about in - churches and cafes and apartments, tents in the street, sidewalks, masonic lounges, schools, museums, salons. Like the city was inside-out, with all the dreams and memories colorful on the surface, under crepe-gray skies.There were lampwork beads - one woman is experimenting with some of the odd seperation-happy moretti ivories, the way they "settle" into delicate strata, arcs and spirals like the inside of a rib, textured with green and blue, not the brown/yellow I remember from human dissections. Dragon bones, maybe. We had fun talking shop. :) Unfortunately, I can't now figure out who this was.
There was an oil painter, Cindy Pluciennik, who broke everything into square planes - the lines of shoulders and hands and bottles on a table, but painted light curling as soft as thistledown across them. And Stephen Michael Levinson was displaying a million pictures of very small things in snow - dead grass, sticks, bird prints - with a clarity rivaled only by Japanese calligraphy. Melissa Rocklin had very precise hammered silver jewelry (more shop talk!), coiled into squarish spirals like aztec writing.
Doreen Conners was knitting (!) 24-gauge copper wire, which I found fascinating. I'm used to working with metal - blacksmithing, machine shop, casting, "knitting" chainmail (which does not use needles or in any way resemble normal knitting) - but I have never seen any metalwork I would desribe as "etheriel" before. It looked like she was making raiment for ghosts, shining airy sleeved things with long tapered edges.
I ran into (surprise, surprise -- no wait, I wasn't surprised at all)
sunspiral, who recommended Nicholas Shaplyko's murals. If you are in Boston, I recommend them to you, too. He has taken over the entire inside of an old masonic temple, and painted every flat surface in a style that looks to me like the bastard child of Nicaraguan Primitivist (pastoral themes. REALLY bright colors) and Russian Iconography. Folk stories - Croatian bird-women, dragons, sky-maned horses, gardens, creation scenes, music and dance, sun and galaxies and fish mandalas and ships, archangels and saluting warriors, viking boats and firebirds and world-eggs and lions and bulls and a plow that sings dry land from the sea.Mural Pictures:
