Its all in the punny names!

Well, I was happy about most of the day today.  I had some good chats with some students.  My coworkers and I prepared for the start of second semester.  I got a ton of stuff done and then I came home totally prepared for today's art assignment.

I decided to wait for my next food master work in the kitchen, it will be tomorrow, but today's project sent me to the fridge anyway.  I was to take the first fruit or veggie I found and make my art with it.  I thought about potato prints, little broccoli forests in  the fruit bin, but thoose feel by the wayside.  I made this...

To quote a famouse british artist, "can you tell what it is yet?"  Yes that is indeed one of my extra bosco pears.  But what have i done to it?  That is certainly no tree.  oh well, you have to see it in context to understand if you haven't got the joke yet...

Okay it is totally a bad pun, but today i made  "a partridge in a pear, tree."  I am such a word geek.  I can't believe i took a simple assignment and forced it into such a horrid pun!

And for those of you who need to hear it..."screw them, you are far better than that.  I love you and you should love yourself.  I am always right here beside you, no matter what."

I love Wednesday!

It is Wednesday which means NEW comics!  This week was a big comic week, 10 issues of brand new happy.  Oddly the project for today says, "Work with a collection of objects you have in your home.  I tried to build a tree from old archie digests.  If i had about 4 times the number this would look amazing...

It has some branches and a leaf layer.  It ain't big but it works...

Here however is what I really created tonight, mizo chicken with Italian green beans and potatos and a baked pear with a grapefruit spritzer.

This was a fabbo dinner and I made enough to have seconds tomorrow at school.  The chicken is moist and flavorful. The potatos are rough mashed and I wish I had made more of them, the beans are just perfect crisp and bright on the tongue.  To contrast with the slightly salty miso on the chicken, grapefruit spritzer was just tart enough to be fun.  The one fail would be the roasted pear, I needed smaller or riper fruit because this one didn't cook through enough for me.

I have been out of the cooking habit for reasons I won't go into so it was nice to be back in the kitchen making a full meal.  Cooking is one of the most fun things I get to do and I need to do it more often.

cold dark walk

I was so busy tonight!  I ran all over the place trying to get chinese 5 spice blend for a roasted pear thing I am making and then I had to go to the ONLY butcher in town to get some ground lamb for a greek burger I'm making later in the week.  So by the time I got home tonight it was dark and 20 degrees outside and I still needed to go to the library AND take my 5 minute walk to make my 365 project.

So i did my walk.  I know about where I will end up since I have walked everywhere.  I went down to the parker group building.  They have an amazing property but it was dark and COLD.  so I did a very basic little thing, after failing to get sticks to go into the frozen ground.  I was so unhappy with today's project.

Sticks and stone

As I walked back home, pissed off and feeling uncreative, I saw a couple of things I normally would not have noticed. The first was a... tree!

Isn't that just an amazing trunk?  It is like a giant sea anemone with its stinging tentacles waving about.  It just struck me dumb.  How amazing is it that such a thing occured with no help beyond the planting of a seed?  I love this tree and it cheered me up.  Maybe today was not all about making my crappy cobbled together stick array in the park maybe it was about seeing this tree.

A block or so farther on I noticed this homemade system to warn people that there is a driveway...

The headlights reflect off the pie tins in the dark.  It was such a simple idea. Someone came up with this.  A brain thought what can i do to solve this problem with what i have here and came up with this.  So, I have a tree and a homemade safety guard and a bad project, but all in all it was really a great walk.  Today's moral is from Jack's mom in "into the woods"..."The sloted spoon won't hold much soup, but it can catch the potato."  Didn't hold much art soup today,but I got a huge chunk of inspiring potato.

Fixed

Okay so this morning I thought, "wait I have another way to get that image into my computer"...so ladies and gentlemen, I present yesterday's project ...a tree reconsituted by spit!  you can see where i had to bite the green, and the huge spit stain at the tree base.  Enjoy!

Today I have to do some public art, as in walk 5 minutes from the house and build/create something right there with what is available...we shall see what becomes of that!

chewed up and spit out

ARG!

I am really annoyed with my camera, it is back to doing this strange thing where it refuses to connect to the computer and download anything  (though today it added a new twist and makes my mouse freeze when it does it) so you will have to wait to see my new tree.  I am hoping that my netbook will allow the download tomorrow at work.

Today I went to a caching event in Mitchell.  It was fun running around the city for the door prize game.  About half way thorugh, I stopped and looked up at the clouds opposite the sunset.  It was amazing.  There was this perfect hole in the clouds and the sunset had made them a beautiful dusty rose.  So it was this one deep blue oval surrounded by this pale rose.  I took pics but like i said no download right now.

The tree assignment from 365 was "make something from paper but don't use scissors, glue or draw on it."  I thought of about a dozen ideas but at the end of the day my last class made me realize what i needed to do.  I make a spit wad tree.  No cutting just chewing.  nothing holding it together except some saliva.  Fun!

Bird in the hand

So, I am starting to think about what I really do when I think of art.  It comes down to bird in the hand. I have tons of paper in all sorts of forms so I think about how to combine things into my new creations.  Paper is the bird in my hand, I am hoping that I can change it into a second one in the bush.
That said today the 365 assignment was to use your favorite animal as inspiration.  Wait, what? my favorite animal?  I don't really have one.  I have least favorite animals (dogs) but I don't really have favorite animals.  I enjoy the forms of insects but are they my favorite animals, not really.  so I was thinking about animals and art in general.  My brain finally fell on MC Escher and his birds and fish.  I love the visual play of Escher's work, it is a great deal like the verbal play I engage in all the time.  but how to use that...

The tree in the birds.

I know it is hard to see, but basically I took my trusty box of 64 crayolas and colored a tree trunk onto the page.  Then I took a pair of printings of Escher's birds and added some green to the lighter images.  To me, they are like the boughs of leaves in most trees.  But they are really birds.  I found the tree inside the birds.  I am still thinking about how this might work with the fish...

Day 1: The PALM of your hand

Okay so today was the first day.  I went out and did some geocaching, nearly got stuck in the mud at some back hills cemetary, saw an AMAZING train tressel, a covered bridge, and a building side painted to look like an old town square.

The Tulip Tressel

All this is painted on one building except for the awnings.

I find bridges like this fascinating.

So what does all this have to do with the build a better Bret project?  It hopefully will be the start of me seeing things in new ways.  I tried to see my trip beyond just my favorite hobby and more as places and things that could change me.  All of this is about improving my creativity.

The first project assignment for the 365 was to basically start something, but make it small.  It had to fit in the palm of my hand.  Since I wanted to do trees as my main theme,  I couldn't ignore the idea of a PALM tree.  I might later make one out of palm prints but to fit in my palm I had to basically just cut some paper.  Actually the trunk is from a carmel hot chocolate box and the leaves are from some useless paperwork for my x-box.

The palm tree that fits in my palm.

I feel more creative all ready.