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My current duct tape wallet is getting a bit old. So this will be my very next craft project — the folded paper wallet.

This is perfect. It combines my modest iconoclastic tendencies with my old love of origami and my growing love for quotidian materials such as paper, duct tape, cardboard, etc.

I wonder if this will work with Tyvek?

I am a visual learner. And I have a desire to be a better visual communicator both professionally and personally. So I was delighted to find this rather exhaustive periodic table of visual communication methods.

I am increasingly interested in information art lately. It’s like a “seam topic” that brings together my interest in art, mathematics, lean six sigma, futures studies, and even my faith.

This Lenten Season my project is a visual survey — a “map” if you will — of the four parallel Gospels. I have learned a lot so far, being able to see the four accounts of Jesus’ life and teachings in parallel like that.

One thing I have learned is that the weight of the Gospels is about what Jesus taught. I think modern Christianity tends to focus more on who Jesus is and what he did at the very end when he died. We tend to dismiss him as a teacher more or less. I don’t think the two should be separated from the same context, but they often are. We take him out of context way more than we should. But you kinda hafta see the context to get that impression. Hence the need for visual communication.

Another thing I have learned from this Lent is that, as much as I love information art, I lack many of the skills needed to execute it. I want to take some graphic design classes.

Walla!

I don’t really do art. I can’t paint. I just think up processes for producing images that mate repetition of a theme with elements that leave room for serendipity and my own mood. The hardest part is knowing where to stop.

Just like making art from trash, I am drawn to making art with MS Paint because it is so overlooked and ubiquitous. It’s a challenge to me to try to make something interesting or, dare I say, beautiful from something mundane.

If either of you folks who read my little blog would like some mail art done by yours truly (and my 4 year old understudy), you can have it.

So, for $40,000 you could have the Art Guys build you a skyscraper out of pencils. Too cool.

And I really want to go see their greatest lecture ever at Rice University on October 12th.

Once in awhile I am so grateful that I am not traveling through adulthood without children to protect me. I am newly 41 years of age, and without kids I would truly feel it. Or worse.

Once again, my kids have stumbled me over a great fun find, Who Needs Donuts by Mark Alan Stamaty. I found the book sitting on a table at the library in the kids section. I read it to the kids last night and then spent about thirty minutes myself just looking at the details in the pictures, like a kid myself. I might have to buy my own copy while it is still in reprint.

Each page of Stamaty’s book mixes the detail of a “Where’s Waldo” scene with a gently surreal absurdist outlook on life. Turns out that the absurdist style got the book panned by overly conservative reviewers at School Library Weekly (they obviously didn’t have children to protect them like I do!) when it was published in the 1970’s and Stamaty gave up children’s book publishing for a life of writing comics for the Village Voice, New York Book Review, and Slate. He was poor and needed to focus on forms that would actually earn him a living. (read a great interview about the book at Rands In Repose) Years later, one of the reviewers apologized to him and said her review was wrong, but it was too late, he had moved on.

So it turns out that if it weren’t for a few stuffy reviewers, Mark Alan Stamaty might well have been be one of the best loved children’s authors both kids and parents alike could adore. Then there would have been the animated series, the merchandising, and just maybe my kids would be watching Stamaty-toons instead of insipid-toons on cable today.

But instead, “Who Needs Donuts” is a rare gem and a “cult classic.” And it looks as if I am joining this particular cult. Thanks to my kids.

Petunia loves to play what we call “The Pencil Game.” This is a random art game where we each take turns picking a color from dad’s humongous box of colored pencils and drawing a shape on a common piece of drawing paper. There are (usually) no rules other than take turns and take care of the art supplies.

I’ve been using some form of collaborative art process as a kids activity for many years now. It teaches taking turns, colors, shapes, and general creativity. When Girlzilla was just a wee monster, we’d pass back and forth a drawing book and take turns adding critters, faces, doodles and the like to a drawing. The drawing gets crazier and crazier as you go which is the whole idea. With Fresh and Petunia, we just scribble. Some days’ results look like Cy Twombly on crack.

What I’d like to do is think up some random art games that get incrementally more complicated as our kids developmentally progress. Maybe teach some math skills along with art play and colors. Does anyone out there do that kind of thing? Does anyone know of any resources that might help?

I guess I could make up a bunch of silly art games, but it’d be nice to see what other people do.

Speaking of silly art games, here’s a scribbly art toy that is pretty fun. Maybe I’ll try to make a “pencil game” out of it.

Okay, here’s my agenda for an afternoon date:

I am wanting to go see the Jean-Michel Basquiat exhibit at the MFA.
Then stroll over to browse the Thornton Dial exhibit.
Cross the street and go see Andrea Zittel’s Critical Space exhibit at the CAM.
And right before dinner, we can whet our appetites with the Art Guys’ Food Sculpture at the Art League Houston.
And since we’re over that direction, do dinner at Daily Review, our favorite cafe.

And then we can be home in time to put the kids to bed and read them stories.

Sounds great to me. I just need to figure out when I can get a whole afternoon off, with babysitting, for Heidi and I.

If you’re in Houston, feel free to steal my date idea. I may not get to use it before some of those exhibits turn into pumpkins.

This is what happens when you let artists from the Houston Art League get hold of a house that’s about to be demolished. Pretty wild picture from Gerry Mancasa. Check it out.

I am totally inspired by the Box Doodle project. I got a buttload of cardboard at home just waiting for some attention.

Oh, and check out their online box doodle tool. Totally cool interface.

Boy this slideshow feature at Slate takes me back. back to being a kid.

When I was a kid, at a point before I can very clearly remember, I loved painting and making art in a kid-like fashion. But I was a mess. I got paint everywhere. I missed spots. I strayed from the lines. I’m not talking at an excuseable three-year old age. I’m talking age eight, when my contemporaries had art hanging in the school halls, winning child art contests. I was a klutz – my attempts at crafts always had a little glue showing, a step missed, a visible “mistake.”

I just didn’t know they were mistakes until people pointed them out.

“That’s ugly.” “You missed a spot.” “Stay in the lines.” I came to know my artist self by others’ assessments of me. And early on I put my artist self in a drawer and strived to be a scholar, since that was something I could easily fulfill to everyone’s expectations of me.

Thirty years later, I am making art. And you know, it is what it is. The mistakes and all – all part of the creation. It all says, “Take my offering, mistakes and all. Or not. I enjoyed making this, for what it’s worth.”

That is also why I find such a kindred spirit in the art of Cy Twombly. His retrospective is on exhibit at the Whitney right now. He captures a spirit of pre-art, childlike, that defies any interpretation and criticism. His paintings are often unmistakeably purposefully huge, containing doodles and scribbles that stand, to me, as a monumental “Fuck You” to the critics and the assessors who instist that all art must meet standards, must “mean something,” to be considered art. Cy Twombly’s art is what it is and that’s all.

There are lots of artists whose work I like to go and see, but no one’s art makes me want to go right out and paint like Cy Twombly’s does. Luckily we have a shrine to his art right here in Houston. I can visit my muse at will. I stand before one of his wall-sized scribbles and he speaks to me. It’s like he’s saying, “Sure kid, go paint. Offer it up for what it is and nothing more. Defy criticism. It is what it is, mistakes and all.”

Agnes Martin is dead at age 92. Martin apparently wished to have no obituary written about her, nor any memorial services. But I will say this, news of her death hit me like a punch to the chest. She is one of my favorites ever.

Lorianne’s eloquent labyrinth entry over at Hoarded Ordinaries got me hankering to toe the line on one myself. And we have a rather nice one right here in the Clear Lake Area, as I recall. So that got me to wondering about the story behind the labyrinth at Sylvan Rodriguez Park and I came across the site for the local artist who created it. Turns out I had stood and stared at her haunting, ethereal sculpture before at a local art museum. I just didn’t know they were connected, the sculptures and the labyrinth. I love it when connections jump out at me.