ann wood

OK, I took full advantage of the legal holiday and did not make a horse yesterday. I figured I had it coming since I pretty much worked all weekend and it was, after all, a National Holiday. Today’s horse is another baby - Bitty.

I like bitty’s little flower button. I think I’ve had it my whole life.

Hope everybody who had a holiday had a nice one. This little painting /drawing is part of something I was doing a while ago and abandoned but started thinking about again this weekend.

I was poking around in my old half broken imac and found this picture of a ship diorama I got at the NYPL Picture Collection. The picture collection is one of my favorite places, it has saved me again and again; a little of it is online now. I love dioramas but I think I love photos of dioramas even more. This one has ships in it so what’s not to love? It’s sad and sweet, creepy, nostalgic and precious.

This quote from “Small World: Dioramas in Contemporary Art” talks about the fascination with miniaturization:

” The urge to create small worlds, however, is primordial. Humans seem genetically engineered to want to simulate the terrain of life and to see the world in miniature, or preserved as if in a time capsule. In dioramas, the concrete and the imaginary, the authentic and the artificial become magically intertwined. Writing about miniaturization in her book On Longing (Duke University Press, 1993), critic Susan Stewart notes that the atmosphere in a diorama is charged; mood and time are crystallized, and the viewer is given the extraordinary opportunity to step outside of his or her time and place to view life.”

I have a ton of work to do on this fine humid Memorial Day weekend but I’m still going to try to sneak in some ship building. I also need to finish cleaning out my old imac
before it dies entirely and there might be some interesting stuff to post about, old work and research; today I found a great picture of a ship diorama I’ll post tomorrow.

I’m dying to work on my pink ship but just really don’t have time for a couple days at least and this one is going to require a trip the the fabric store. I think it’s going to be a little different than the two finished ships, brighter and mostly contemporary fabrics.

Horse #25 picnic

Another great batch of projects, tons of really original stuff and I’m so happy there’s going to be a round two. No whiplash = no “ballerinas dancing with ponies”. I love what Laura has to say about whiplash in her post
” Yarn - and a small rant” .

77 horses to go

I end up liking the horses I make when I’m tired and distracted and don’t really feel like making a horse the best. #22, Lorraine is the beginning of an idea for a new ship. Thanks for the comments on the whiplash ship “Perseverance”. After I clean up the giant ship mess I made this morning, I’m looking forward to checking out all the other final whiplash projects. I’m going to miss the weekly assignment and seeing everybody’s interpretation.

For the final whiplash I made a little ship. She’s fully underway with colors flying. It features the colors that have been on my mind most lately- teal and green.

A really excellent haul today - great sail and bird fabric, fantastic plastic horses
and little dishes to hold all my important little stuff.

I hung two ships with paper skins to dry overnight.
They looked liked creepy cocoons
blowing in the breeze.

The Winner of the whiplash acorn drawing is Kathy. Congratulations!! Kathy created the incredible art quilt for the whiplash yarn challenge. Thanks to everybody who participated, that was fun and I’ll probably do it again.

Today’s horse, #21, is Betsy, daughter of Betty.

Sorry to everybody who has been getting the Wordpress error message. It’s a Yahoo problem and I don’t think it’s 100% fixed yet. I spent an hour + on the phone early this morning (again) trying to get it permanently fixed with no success so I’m going to make birds for an hour to restart my day on a happier note.

This little bird looks like she’s saying ” What the fudge Yahoo? Get it together!!

I got pretty derailed today by a variety of really frustrating technical difficulties and didn’t accomplish anything even close to what I had hoped to. When all my technical issues finally got resolved I was distracted by my residual annoyance.

I did get today’s horse and a little ship work done though, I made a couple frames and just now got a layer of paper on one side of each frame.
.
I love waking up to a nice dry layer of paper mache.