Inspiration

& (as always), Tim Walker: 

Bruno Catalano bronze sculptures

Nov. 25

Nov. 20

Cy Twombly: "Nine Discourses on Commodus", 1963

Art Con 9 Beneficiary, My Possibilities

Art Con 9 was this past Saturday; a little info on this year's awesome beneficiary:

My Possibilities is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization serving adults with disabilities (including Autism, Down Syndrome, Aspergers, Prader-Willi, and head injuries). The organization is the first full day, full year continuing education program in DFW for Texans with disabilities that have “aged out” of secondary education, and is considered a leader in the local community and throughout North Texas for meeting the needs of adults with special needs. The Create program features hands-on art education and creative programming that helps their clients discover hidden talents and encourage artistic self-expression.

Since October 2011, My Possibilities has facilitated the Create program for their clients, who are lovingly referred to as HIPsters (or, Hugely Important People) to help them discover hidden talents and encourage artistic self-expression.

The programming utilizes a variety of approaches, including instruction on specific periods of art history, learning about prominent and historical artists, and instruction on specific styles and techniques.

“It has been a tremendous joy watching these individuals explode in personal, skillful and social expression; the artists in the Create Program, and their growth throughout, are the heart of our mission,” said Casey Parrott, head of the My Possibilities Create Program.

My Possibilities will use the grant money provided by Art Conspiracy’s 2013 fundraising efforts to purchase the supplies they require every day – from construction materials and art history books to paintbrushes and clay. They will also purchase supplies for their community-based art workshops and murals as well as art-based field trips to galleries and museums such as the DMA, Nasher, and Trammell Crow.

Margaret Evangeline and Me (!) at The Ashton

I am SO excited for this!!! It sincerely is an INCREDIBLE honor to have work next to Margaret Evangeline's...and the fact that they are in windows directly across from Stanley Korshak is the cherry on top. .....Very, very, very sadly--I won't be able to go to the reception on the 14th but I'll be putting together another sometime in December. If you can, please go on the 14th!!! It'll be awesome and you can meet Margaret Evangeline!

"American Painting Now"

Featuring paintings by Hense

WAAS Gallery, Dallas TX

November 2 - December 4, 2013

Coming soon to FACTORY GiRl

So excited to have some of my paintings hanging soon at Factory Girl!!!

factorygirlstyle.com

About Factory Girl: 

Beautiful clothes for beautiful people—that’s Factory Girl, Dallas’ premiere vintage clothing boutique. Founded in 2011 in the iconic downtown neighborhood of Deep Ellum, Factory Girl curates a specially selected collection of designer apparel and accessories from the ‘60s to the ‘90s by the likes of Christian Dior, Jean Paul Gaultier, Lanvin and Alexander McQueen. Factory Girl also offers the best in emerging young designers from across the globe, and showcases original artwork from local and international up-and-coming painters and photographers.

Visit Us

2923 Canton St.Dallas, TX 75226
info@factorygirlstyle.com
Phone: (214) 980-8484

Yin Zhaoyang

these paintings....so cool

Oct. 9

I'm up on the WAAS Gallery site now! Official WAAS Gallery Associate Artist :D

waasgallery.com/artists/caroline-oliver/

Thailand

This time last year we were in Chaing Mai, Thailand visiting my sister-in-law and her husband. We miss them and it :(

Oct. 2

Oct. 1

The object isn't to make art, it's to be in that wonderful state in which makes art inevitable." 

-Robert Henri

Kristy Heilenday's sketch books...

Sep. 26, Richard Beck

My husband read this to me last night...i love it!! (aaand i think ive done that before w my own blogging..?)  it's called

"Self-esteem as Violence"

Blogging isn't good for the soul.

I have a rule about blogging. Don't blog about your blogging.

Some of this is just consideration for you, the reader. You came here today to read some thoughtful content, not for me to talk about my plans for this blog, or that this is my 1,000th post, or that today is the blog's anniversary, or that I made some "top blogging" list. You came here to think and reflect, so
I try to keep my eye on that ball. 

But the main reason I stay away from blogging about blogging is that most posts of that sort, for me at least, come from a not very healthy place.

Take, for example, a post about appearing on a "top blogging" list. Such lists appear from time to time and sometimes you're on them and sometimes you are not. And even when you are on them there is your place on the list. All this can create a rush of pride or envy or resentment, depending upon how it all sorts out. And none of those feelings are particularly healthy, perhaps especially the pride. So I try to move on, emotionally speaking, from such lists. And not blogging about them is one way to move on. Don't indulge the demons.

I bring up this example not to make a point about narcissism and blogging (a topic I should address someday), but to use it as an example regarding the relationship between violence and self-esteem.

One of the things I've learned from writers like James Alison, a theologian deeply informed by Rene Girard, is how rivalry is intimately associated with our self-concept. Specifically, most of us create, build up and maintain our self-esteem through rivalry with others. Our sense of self-worth is created and supported by some contrast and opposition to others. I am a self in that I am over and against others. Better. Smarter. More righteous. More successful. More authentic. More humane. Less hoodwinked. More tolerant. More insightful. More kind. More something.

In short, selfhood is inherently rivalrous. Rivalry creates the self. Rivalry is the fuel of self-esteem and self-worth.

Which means that the self is inherently violent. The definition of the self is an act of aggression and violence. To be "Richard Beck" is to engage in violence against others, if not physically than affectionally. From sunrise to sunset every thought I have about myself is implicated in acts of comparison, judgement, and evaluation of others, allowing me to create a sense of self and then fill that self with feelings of significance and worthiness.  

And this also applies to those with low self-worth, those who define themselves negatively in comparison with others. The violence here is simply internalized, directed toward the self rather than toward others. But at the end of the day it's the same mechanism, you are either winning or losing the rivalry, having either high or low self-esteem, but in either case the self is still being defined by violence.

Things like blogging, given its nature, can bring these rivalrous feelings to the surface making them more transparent (if you are self-reflective). But it's just a symptom of a deeper sickness, that the self in inherently rivalrous and that self-esteem is a feeling of significance achieved over against others.

We feel good about ourselves by stepping on the heads of others, physically or psychologically.

In fact, this may be the best definition of "original sin": Being a self makes you a violent person.

So how you blog non-violently? Non-rivalrously? How you do anything, think anything, believe anything--particularly in relation to the self--non-violently? Non-rivalrously?

How do you become a non-violent, non-rivalrous human being and person? 

I think the self has to die. That's what the Bible seems to think. There must be a letting go, a surrendering, an emptying of the self. All efforts to define the self by acts of justification, the accumulation of evidence and data that the self is significant, have to be renounced.

Phrased positively, the self must be experiencing as gift, as an experience of gratuitous and surprising grace.

Only there, in the midst of grace, can the neurotic knot at the root of our violence be loosened and undone.

-Richard Beck  

Fall Anthro windows

I got to help the visual team girls the past couple weeks :) One of the things I was able to help with was making the mushrooms for this window; I helped part way w the large yellow ones and made all of the smaller, white ones on my own :) there was a big time glare on the glass and the phone on my camera was having a bit of a hard time..

Sep. 19

my favorite parts of the newer ones

Anne Ten Donkelaar

Sharka Hyland

Sharka Hyland’s quiet drawings combine three of the artist’s lifelong interests, typography, drawing, and literature. In reference to the 100th anniversary of it’s publication, the series of drawings focuses on Marcel Proust’s 1913 volume Swann’s Way, the first volume in a series of seven that compose the novel Remembrance of Things Past. Hyland selects paragraph-long passages and exquisitely hand-letters the text, both in the original French and the translated English.

What Hyland articulates with the ongoing project is to suggest that there are instances of literary rendering in which the image, “is so flawlessly formed by language that it cannot be transposed into another medium. It exists fully (as an amalgam) only in the reader’s mind.”

I feel a personal attachment to her work. Reading has always been one of my favorite things to do. I can retreat into another world, guided by an author, (-and fellow artist's), hand, but its actualization is from my own mind and is only for me to see. It's simultaneously a solitary and intimately shared experience. Because what's happening in the text, (for each reader), can only be seen in that particular reader's mind, only the typeface can suffice for the literal, physical image at hand; the typeface unconsciously motions to the reader the intended feeling upon which their story will be based. I love that Sharka Hyland celebrates how powerful the written word is and allows it to be without adding anything else out of insecurity. Great art, to me, has a real presence of celebration (obviously, whether 'joyful or not') from the artist while also existing independently, giving opportunity for each individual to be guided to their own relationship with the work. No puns intended, and no pun intended by saying here 'no pun intended' haha... but in good art enough is 'said' in the work to allow for a delicate, intimate moment to happen without 'over-telling' or 'spelling it out' too much...

as written by Marcel Proust; drawn by Sharka Hyland

as originally written in French by Marcel Proust; drawn by Sharka Hyland

"I draw each passage in both the original French and the English translation. Occasionally I find that the existing English versions weaken the image created by the original text. In these cases I substitute my own translation. To render the subtle distinction between pages printed in French and English, I use a different typeface and text format for each language"   -Hyland

I couldn't find an image of her drawing of this text, but this is my absolute favorite excerpt from Proust that she's drawn:

"I opened the window without making a sound and sat down on the foot of my bed; I tried to make no movement that would be heard from downstairs. Outside too, all things seemed halted in a hushed alertness so as not to disturb the moonlight which, duplicating and distancing each object by extending in front of it a shadow more solid that the thing itself, had both thinned and expanded the landscape, like a folded map spread open. Whatever needed to move, some leaves of a chestnut tree, moved. But their quivering, intricate and complete, effectuated to the slightest nuance and ultimate subtlety, did not spread to the others, did not blend with them, remained circumscribed." 

click for Hyland's official site

Sep. 8