Summer Reading Challenge

'Tis the season for my annual reading challenge, and my favorite part of Summer. It's simple - read as many books as you can for the next 3 months. The goal is to beat your previous amount of books read within that duration. My record still reigns at 15.5 from several summers ago. Maybe this will be my triumphant year.

I'd like to kick off this year's challenge with AAUW's 50th annual used book sale. I spent nearly 4 hours rummaging through the wall to wall tables of books...

So buy some cheap books, get pumped, and let the reading commence!!!!

Photo Series Sixteen: Chalk

Photo Series Fifteen: Double Take

Art21

My latest collage work displayed a regurgitating concept I've been planning, although it's not so much a concept as it is a fact of life. This idea of "Self-Expression through Art" which we've all heard of before, has plunged deep into it's crux.

With a collage you throw images together forcing a new context that is meant for contemplation, as any form of art is often created with the intention of provoking thought. It says something.

Watching Art21, contemporary artists take expression to an extreme level, making political, feminist, statements that are incredibly moving. You feel it, you recognize it, it sends chills up your spine like a refreshed awareness that you've unconsciously coiled your fingers around the throat of and dare not let go.

Maybe it's time I took my art to an extreme level.

Photo Series Fourteen: Laundry Room

Photo Series Thirteen: Walk in Inches

Elephant

Choosing the corner of the only empty bench running parallel to the wall length periodical display of the Barnes and Noble, I eagerly flip through the brilliant pages of a visual art magazine - Stop. Go back. - A brief perusal before I am due to work has become a fully engaged study as I carefully read Ana Ibarra's article that perfectly defines the Art of Collage and my obsessive fascination with it:

Collage is inevitably the art of stealing and the art of de-conceptualization. A metamorphosis without which collage could never exist. Collage is the art of tearing, separating, disrupting, changing an image so that it becomes unrecognizable. Cutting and pasting. Taking an image out of its original context and leaving it floating in space, playing and crashing and encountering other cast-away images, finding their way to a different narrative, an alien story, which will bring them back to life. A different life. A new life that will come out of the aesthetic impulse and conceptual connections of the artist, creating new worlds of fantasy on a playful jigsaw without rules.