Art – Page 37 – Ellis Hollow

2009 Dragon Day

2009 Dragon Day One of the rites of early spring here is Dragon Day on the Cornell Campus. Every year, on the Friday before spring break, first year architecture students create and parade a dragon across campus, to be met by a phoenix constructed by engineering students.

In the past, the dragon was ceremoniously burned on the Arts Quad. This year, in order to comply with environmental regulations limiting open burning to wood and agricultural wastes — the dragon was spared the pyre. Instead a wood and straw nest was offered up to the gods.

I’m fond of Dragon Day not just because it’s a harbinger of spring, but because it gives the students a bit of a creative outlet mid-semester: According to the Cornell Chronicle, “Dozens of costumed student revelers — in outfits including orange highway cones, the bunny from “Donnie Darko,” and a lithe reptilian figure in head-to-toe green Spandex” joined the parade.

Wikiepedia has some great images of Dragon Days past, going back to the ’20s. University Photo pulled together a video montage that captures the spirit of this year’s event. Below are some screen captures from the Cornell.edu website celebrating recent Dragon Days.

‘You can’t spell smart without art’

On the NYTimes Measure for Measure blog, Suzanne Vega explains Whatâ€™s a Melody For? I won’t say she buried the lede, but the post ends with Tom Chapin singing his testimony in Albany to protest cuts in state funding for the arts:

Vega concludes:

The right combination of words and, yes, melody at the right moment can have a powerful effect. The latest news is that $50 million has been allocated to the N.E.A. as part of the recovery package, in part because of the organized lobbying efforts of arts advocates across the country.

Just think of a world without art, without song â€” how would we celebrate? What would we dream of? What would set our imaginations free? How could we express our emotions for our husbands and wives and children? Celebrate a birthday? A melody is for expressing emotions: delight, passion, sadness. It reminds us of what we have felt and experienced before, in our own personal code of emotion and history. Priceless!

Say something once, why say it again?

Byrne on Colbert Report.

Interview.

Performance:

Same as it ever was.

Darwin art

From today’s NYTimes, Darwinâ€™s Wake Splashed Artists, Too and the accompanying slideshow profiles the exhibit Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts at the Yale Center for British Art.

… you may not learn anything new about his theories, but you will come to see differently, or at least begin to understand that our ways of seeing have evolved because of the power of his vision.

“Cattleya Orchid and Three Hummingbirds,” by Martin Johnson Heade, 1871.

Nectaroscordum sculpture

Who can figure where artists will find inspiration? One found found a very, very marginal shot of a canna flower I grabbed one day and turned it in to this glorious quilt.

I just got an email from Iris Sebba, a 3D art student in England, who says the image below inspired her to try to render it in metal and felt.

nectaroscordum opening

It’s not one of my best images. (There are better Nectaroscordum images in this post a couple of weeks later.) But I’m honored that Iris saw this image and then spent hours and hours and hours creating this sculpture.

I wish I could point you to Iris’s website, but all she has for now is a Facebook page. She writes:

[I have] no other images on the web except me in welding gear on facebook. Art is a slow process and really want to enjoy it rather than be pressurised by market forces (that is if anyone would be have the slightest interest in buying anyway!!) so hence no publicity. Having said that my family and friends may well find they have large metallic donations in the future. My husband is already set in fibreglass in the garden (not literally). I have done the degree for intellectual satisfaction as well as practical skills and may go on to do an MA.

Oh Iris. If only you were closer I would drive to pick up any donations you cared to make to my humble garden.

Here’s the fiberglass sculpture of Iris’s husband. Creepy or cool? I vote the latter.