Found Art Friday 83

Well Blogobuddies,
An irritating thing has happened in bloggerlady's technical process.  The google program which provides our formatting, etc. tells us we can no longer change the picture of the drain in the sink.  Nope. We have exceeded our allowable limit for image uploads (but just in that part of the blog).  So we're stuck with that arugula between our teeth.  And so far, we haven't found the advanced menu warehouse in iceland in the cloud where all my drain images are sitting there taking up server space.  Go figure. Limitations change everything.

sitting and thinking while not wanting to pay $ to add images of dirty drain strainer

Stilllife with bench and found sweater: Richard Piscuskas

THE ART RANGER IS finally an IPHONE operator!  Yup, she is one half a week into her smartphone era.  She already erased 155 apps. Sure is the most powerful rectangle we've ever carried.  It already has sunscreen on. The camera face-you setting shows us things about her neck that we didn't want to know. Cameraphones and the whole sense of identity, personal geography, and spontaneity that these devices have made possible is a foundation for this very blog;  about half the images we have seen at The Department of Homeland Inspiration have come from iphones or droids. These smartphones and pads and pods depend on rare earth minerals that are beginning to get fought over.  We shall see how the relationship of time and gadgets interlock. How our thumbs and neck will adapt. How delight in images may evolve.  We see now how iphones are a fuzzy stuffed animal for the teenager.  How the inbetween moment can now be eliminated. TBContinued.
 For Today:
Two sets of images - not taken by iphones - but by better lenses.  First three by Susan Needleman of Corral de Tierra

Call and Response to last week's swallows nest

Where's Waldo?

The Art Ranger wouldn't mind also seeing this upside down.

 Now a triplicate from Jim Lindenthal in Pacific Grove: Usually using a Nikon D-90

With the great caption: "Do starfish do yoga?" 
And Art Ranger also wonders if they crochet jewels underwater

And to top it all off with wonder at looking, a paragraph from Barry Lopez:  About this Life :


"Sunlight flexes too rapidly, too complexly, on the river's skin for the eye to spot a recurrent pattern in it, from the bench or window, but I believe one is there.  It is not anything I feel compelled to find, I don't believe I must know it's meaning.  I know that the design inherent in such things is orderly according to some logic other than the ones I know.  It is akin, I think, to the logic that makes one's life morally consistent despite certain lapses of judgement."

Phew!  Enjoy the enjoyment, or the scrappy let-it-go facts of your existence.  And please send evidence to FAF@homelandinspiration.org

Chicken Diaries

Or BIG USEFUL BIRDS episode 3. What we have learned from chickens.

Lila, Shelby and Hidey

 By now, our  sense of landscape edges and domestic tidiness has been decimated by chickens and their "free range" time which amounts to scratching earth with big legs and feet while pooping, flinging debris and digging bowls of dirt throughout the yard. Meanwhile, these near dinosaur-age creatures are purposeful, entertaining, and not much trouble at all, while providing daily nutrition for our family.  With their lima bean-sized brains, they notice changes. They have moods. They have rituals. The most surprisingly great and under-reported thing about chickens is the little sounds they make: like three month old babies just waking up when you hold them. Other times just cooing and muttering. Sisters bickering. Waiting for the egg to drop. Impatience, Etc.

Okay and then there are the BIG SOUNDS they make. Riotous soul rendering squwawking, rhythmically persistent in sets of 27 or many more. Sometimes a syncopated duet.  Often about nothing visible to us. Other times about how they just laid an EGG egg egg. Or about the bluejay jay jay robbing. Or who got to eat the snail snail snail. Recently,  a dormant brain fold remembered a poem by William Carlos Williams which so captured my imagination at age twenty:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

From "In an American Grain".  How we can differently appreciate the words today.

before

Chicken Architexture, part III:  Another sculptural challenge taken on by Art Ranger.

For months, their living space was in flux as though in a natural disaster.

This fall, shortly after she turned a half century old, the days got short and the chickens stopped laying eggs.  Nada.  This time moulting meant menopause instead of adolescence or coming of age.  For our eldest chicken, Hidey, as soon as a few feathers had fallen out, her ability/desire to go upstairs was impaired.  It was too sad - okay!  After no chicken had lain a single egg for two and a half months, we began in earnest our design and construction of the Senior Housing Remodel. Luckily we had already fallen in love with “redwood dogeared fence pickets” advertised on the radio, so we knew what lumber to get.  As a slow-learning stewardess of the chicken species, fragmented and distracted by a variety of household tasks, Art Ranger inadvertently put these big useful birds through an extremely slooowwww remodel. Sometimes, you just have to sculpt the heck out of something.  This dang pop-top, sidekick building seemed to take on a bit of chaos theory,  growing ever more complex and absurd, like a shifting puzzle.  We now understood the realestate concept of “scraper”.  Adding on to an already quirky structure was a tricky insideout miniature chicken-centric maneuver.  We need perch space for five new chicks in order to be sustainable.  We need their food not to get crapped upon.

Coop Remodel

Friendly ramps and stairs, plenty of exercise but no demoralizing leaps. In keeping with our reduce re-use philosophy, we also incorporate reclaimed redwood from an old gate on the property.  We strive for a feat of unconventional yet indigenous looking construction, a home/ muse that keeps chickens feeling fresh and happy to lay eggs.  Around February, the three tree-year elder chickens began laying again.  About two a day.  And that warm shape is again magic in the palm. They really aren't senior citizens  at all yet.

Shelby at the door

It turns out  that with good  wire snips, and if you wear the right gloves, and long sleeves, you can attempt a wrestling match with the chicken wire. Add cable ties or wire as fasteners, you can form/ forge many shapes. With a sledge hammer still more shapes.

NEXT EDITION

Of the Chicken Diaries will involve literally designing a “crapshoot” drawer for easy compost collection. Plus how chickens are the ideal dieticians, magicians of digestion. How chickens will make you solve problems.

Found Art Friday 82

Today's input:  Found in cemetery by Jim Lindenthal in Monterey, California

"very broad strokes bring forth an unusual grace" While Art Ranger notes the poignant metal heaviness of the lawnchair wings that want her still on earth. Great patinas.

And from Colorado arrived some images from her awesomeness, The Aunt Madge:

Fish head in a tree

Large cable in suspension

swallow nest as hairstyle

See how words and images enjoy each other and travel well on the internet.  See what your Homeland has in store for you. Share Inspirations: FAF@homelandinspiration.org

Sky Scar Sky Snake from Anony Mouse

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Found Art Friday 81

Today's pick of images have in common being wordcentric.  Are they really "art"? well that is our inquiry:

 And a subset called "birds and signage":

 Remember a while ago when The Art Ranger rhapsodized about the birds' nest in the Bagel sign. On each facet of the building.  And how it was the superior architecture of the a over, say the B for nest building that captured our imagination.

A few month later shows up this comfortable bird relationship: harmacy hmmm, interesting indeed. The way images are framed can make or  break it.  And a few months after that, this:

Which makes us not need any of their burnt sterilized coffee either.  The O might have worked quite well as a nest though.

From the Department of Homeland Inspiration Archives. Is he coming or going?

When viewed as a series,  the images are getting there. It's the subtle things such as dirty raindrops that can tip the scales toward "art".  Keep the peace. To be continued:  send images to FAF@homelandinspiration.org.

Found Art Friday 80

Dear Blogo folk,
How does memory affect our relationship to images?  Seeing is cumulative, what do you keep?  Now that we have been in residency at The Department of Homeland Inspiration for over two years, many images refer to earlier images from Found Art Fridays gone by.  Friend in the Bay Area, who contributes regularly, also names her photos! This allows for easy access. Good poetry as well.
A triplicate:

Sausage Man

and Ceramic Yoga Tableaux

Which geographically takes Art Ranger to a photo, previously posted, from a day in San Francisco with her dear friend who recently passed.
No one else could have appreciated it the way the two of us did.

How often does one see "street art" as sculpture?  The scale, the ambiguous syrupy materials. the restaurant idling craftsmanship somehow draws you in. Deliberately displayed on top of a trash can with a convincing transmitter look.  Are aliens trying to talk to us through our coffee waste?

Photo by Jim Lindenthal.  Commentary by The Art Ranger: Is everyone on board now, about the moon having a navel?

So both to continue our study of patina, and tribute to pinochios nose, we sign off for today and leave the rest up to you. To have a point of view.
Contribute by emailing to: FAF@homelandinspiration.org.

Found art Friday 79

Dear Blogofolk,
This week's FAF box was nice and full. Thank you, tribe of technologically brave sharers.  These images by chance wove themselves together in an unexpected way:

Colors Patterns Textures

holes and reflections

IMAGE KEY:
1, 2) Bonnie Hotz, Salinas CA 
3) Jim Lindenthal in Pacific Grove. "criss-cross"
4) Susan Needleman: "birds of a feather"
5) A Friend in the Bay Area: Yarn bombing example
6) Jim Lindenthal. Bluebird.

In order to see, we have to isolate something for just a moment.

May you have a vital regular week and continue to see FAF@homelandinspiration.org.