Tag: Art
Amy and I collect contemporary art. We often make friends with the artists who we collect. Occasionally people who are our friends become artists. Jessica Schallock fits into this category
We’ve been friends with Jessica for a decade. Her family lives next door to us in Homer, Alaska and we’ve known Jessica since she was 12. We’ve watched, with much joy, as she’s grown into an amazingly talented young women.
One of those talents is art. Every year she gives us a drawing as a gift. It’s been amazingly fun to watch her get better at drawing, as she turns it from a childhood hobby to a profession. She’s currently experimenting with of realistic portions of a face that blend into “unfinished” sketch-like outlines.
The piece in this post is called James and is 16 1/2″ x 20″, graphite on Bristol board. Jessica is looking for a gallery to work with along with people that are interested in her work. If you are interested, please email me and I’ll put y’all in touch.
If you walk in my office, you’ll notice a lot of art on the walls. Amy and I are huge art collectors and are always on a quest for new and beautiful things. Over the years we’ve tried to collect photographs and sculpture in addition to contemporary art – I view us as complete novices as collectors in these two domains.
However, Amy has always been a great photographer. She carries a Nikon D-100 around and captures amazing pictures. I don’t have the eye she has so when I snap things on my cell phone they always feel ordinary to me. But I love to scroll through the endless stream of photos Amy has taken.
Recently, I got an email from Abhi Lokesh, the CEO of Fracture. He reached out in response to a post I had written (What’s Your Product Cadence). We went back and forth a few times on email, I answered a few questions, and he offered me a free Fracture. The awesome Alaska Brown Bear above is the photo I used (from an Alaska trip in 2004) and it’s now hanging on the wall in my office next to my couch.
Fracture’s goal is to inspire a renaissance in photo products and printing, replacing cheap frames and overpriced services with a practical alternative that helps you tell your life’s story visually . When I asked Abhi how he came up with the idea, he said:
“We actually came up with the idea while doing field work in Africa during the summer of 2008 for a non-profit that we created in college. It was a life-changing experience in innumerable ways. I was on my way to med school, and my partner was heading to PhD engineering school. But hey, we’ll never have less to lose and more to gain than right now, and we decided to go for it.”
Fracture is tackling the retro challenge of manufacturing and shipping a real product along with creating a digital experience and platform that makes it dead-simple for anyone to Fracture an image. My experience with the service was great, and when the Fracture arrived the packaging was well thought out, minimal, and included everything I needed to hang the Fracture on the wall.
I encourage any of you who have a favorite digital photo to give Fracture a shot.
I love my mom’s art. Whenever she has a show, the openings are always fun, and she’s got one coming up on April 7th in Denver at the Translations Gallery.
My mom (Cecelia Feld) has had a huge positive impact on my life in many ways. I like to think that I’ve also had a huge positive impact on her life, although I’m sure there have been times that she wanted to hide in a closet from me and scream at the top of her lungs.
Cecelia is an amazing artist who has worked at her craft her entire adult life. As kids, my brother Daniel and I understood that between 9am and 5pm “mom was working in her studio” and was not to be bothered. Among other things, I learned the notion of focused, passionate discipline from her, but I also figured out how to keep myself entertained until she was done working for the day.
One thing that I’ve pestered her endlessly about is being a more shameless salesperson for her art. So, it’s with much pride that I see her now doing her “art pick of the month” where she’s selling one of her pieces for 30% off and promoting it through her email list. I can’t get her to do a blog, so instead I’ll promote it here.
This piece is called (#984) Kimono Series #6 and is a collagraph monotype sized 22×30”. Cecelia did this in 2002 which makes me think of the chaos that was in my head as I continued to unwind the mess that was my world from the collapse of the Internet bubble. It lists for $950 so with the 30% November 2010 discount it’s only $665.
If you are an art lover and this piece appeals to you or you want to be added to Cecelia’s email list, send her an email. I’d love to be able to tell my mom “see – my blog is worthwhile – I sold a piece of your art through it.”
Emily Eveleth, a favorite artist of mine and Amy’s, was profiled in the Boston Globe this weekend in an article titled It’s Time To Paint The Doughnuts. My long time friend Shawn Broderick (who runs TechStars Boston) knows about our Emily doughnut obsession and pointed it out to me.
Amy and I are huge collectors of Emily’s work and have tons of doughnuts, some hula hoops, and as of this month, a magic eight ball and a dinosaur which Amy bought for me as my life dinner present on July 1 this year.)
If you want a quick feel for her art, a Google Image Search on Emily Eveleth will give you several pages of doughnuts. I asked Amy how many she thought we had in our collection – she guessed 10. Yum.
Amy wrote a post in 2005 titled Emily Eveleth Paintings that has one of our hula hoops on it. She also pointed to the two galleries that we buy Eveleth’s from – Howard Yezerski Gallery in Boston and the Danese Gallery in New York. They are both awesome galleries – if you are in either city stop by and take a look.
My favorite Emily Eveleth moment was a Zippy the Pinhead cartoon from 1994 which I’ve been trying to find forever. Of course, it’s there – front and center on Emily Eveleth’s bio page!
Now I’m hungry for doughnut.
If you are a fan of my mom’s art (Cecelia Feld), she’s part of an exhibit at the St. Julien Hotel in Boulder called Splash. The opening is this Wednesday July 7th from 6pm to 8pm. I won’t be there as Amy and I are hiding in Homer, Alaska for the month, but my mom is coming down from Keystone and I know she’d love to see my friends if you are around. It’s a real exhibit opening, so there will be food and wine for anyone that shows up!
I’ve always been a huge Van Gogh fan. Starry Night is one of my favorites and is also regarded as one of Van Gogh’s best (or most) important works, even though he apparently didn’t like it very much.
This morning, when cruising through my Daily folder which includes the Astronomy Picture of the Day site, I came across a new reproduction titled Starry Night Scavenger Hunt. Using Starry Night as a backdrop, it includes a bunch of stuff including a comet, a spiral galaxy, an open star cluster,a supernova remnant – well – and the rings of Supernova 1987A, the Eskimo Nebula, the Crab Nebula, Thor’s Helmut, the Carhwheel Galaxy, and the Ant Nebula. And some other stuff.
Deeply awesome.
There’s a huge profile of my mom (Cecelia Feld) in this month’s Texoma Living Magazine. She’s one of the five highlighted artists for their third annual art issue.
If you’ve ever been in my office or in my house, you’ve seen a lot of my mom’s art. As a kid, I was completely surrounded by art. In addition to my mom being an artist, both of my folks have an incredible nose for collecting and have built an amazing collection. Whenever we travelled, a big part of our trips were visits to art museums and galleries. As an eight year old, this often got really tedious and boring, but it sunk in and today one of my favorite things to do is stroll quietly thought a museum or gallery.
One of the things I’ve always loved about my mother’s art was how she used colors. She’s got a great line in her interview that reflects this – “I have a sense of how color works with color.” I’ve never really thought hard about this, but I love colorful stuff and would always rather be surrounded by colors than by black and white. I guess I’ll start attributing this to my mom!
If you are interested in art and want to see more of her work, take a look at her online gallery at Studio 7310.