Folk Feather Art

Yayyyy feathers! So I found something very similar to what we saw on my trip to Panama and Costa Rica - and that's using feathers completely as the medium. Not really what I'm going for, but inventive and innovative none the least. Keep in mind that as poor as American artists are, Caribbean artists are in a much worse situation. For many of them it's not about being an artist to be original, it's about being an artist to support their family and going about whatever means possible to do it. So really it's about art for survival, and in so these people create around the only thing they know: what they see around them every day. And for many of us out here in mega highway American paradise, their everyday is our idea of exotic.  Trippyyyyyyyyyy.

Disclaimer: the pieces we bought were much better than this. I'll post them as soon as I dig them out.

Corporate Color

I love watercolor. Absolutely love it. And for the majority of college I thought I was going to center my Senior Sem around watercolor. Nope. But, nevertheless, the results of watercolor when the artist knows what they're doing is AWESOME. And I found an artist who is using watercolor in a modern way, no old artsy fartsy still lives. Her name is Stina Persson and she's a successful watercolor artist. Her corporate clients include Absolut Vodka, Godiva, Macy's, Bloomingdale's and Target. And if you look at her portfolio you can see why. She uses the medium and a variety of color to create subtle organic patterns in her work. Color Theory in real life, what do ya know?!

Coral People!!

So I was stumbling on StumbleUpon, and came across this artist, Jason de Caires Taylor, who made all of these life-size cement sculptures of people... and put them on the bottom of the ocean. His concept is Sinking Beauty, but what I'm interested in is his end result. The sculptures grew coral on them and several of them became one with the ocean floor they were placed on. The coral is what caught my eye. It's not like Taylor could control where the coral ended up on his pieces, but it turned out totally awesome. 

I'm all about color and texture. And I'm all about the fusion of culture and nature in both costume and art in the Caribbean. The end result of what happened to Taylor's cement people fascinates me. They went from plain simple cement people to awesome coral people. Total transformation and it's beautiful, and literally portrays people connected to the land (or in this case the land inside the water). Baller.

Carnival

So you've heard of Mardi Gras, right? You know, chicks flashing their boobs for beads, gaudy costumes, lots of drinking, it's a good party. Well wouldn't you know that New Orleans isn't the only city that likes to party? Caribbean cultures have their own shindig that they throw down once a year, and it's been around a hell of a lot longer than dinky little old Mardi Gras. In fact, it doesn't last one day, it can last up to a whole week. How people go about celebrating carnival varies from culture to culture, but it involves a lot of dancing, elaborate costumes, constant music, and amazing food. Like Mardi Gras, Carnival was started by Catholic Italians who wanted to have a last hurrah before Ash Wednesday kicked off Lent (we know this day as Fat Tuesday) and the notion of a blowout party was so popular that the French and Spanish caught on fast. When conquests began in the Caribbean, conquistadors brought with them not only Catholicism and disease and warfare, but CARNIVAL TOO! Eventually the Caribbean natives, being a go-with-the-flow kind of people, began to accept the new traditions that Europeans brought to the table, but continued to practice their own traditions under the table as well. This created a medley of culture and ultimately created the Caribbean culture we know today. (for example, Santeria!) Cool right? So Carnival goes on all over the Caribbean and basically it kicks off a Catholic practice with motifs from their ancient cultures. 

What I'm trying to get at here is the costumes. They're HUGE, they're elaborate and ornate, and they stand as individual pieces of art. Especially the headdresses. Across Pre-Columbian cultures, headdresses were badass - the Mayans, Aztecs, Inca and Taino all went all out when it came to feather headdresses. 

Ancient people would spend their lives hunting down ornate feathers and creating headdresses. Feathers are precious to Caribbean people. I'm going to be looking at feathers in that precious material manner, not so much with the approach that it's just something that came off a bird and therefore it's cool to turn it into art. And with how long it's taking for the feathers I special ordered to arrive... it's starting to look like they're about to mean a lot to me when they finally arrive. I'm thinking about fashioning a headdress as one of my big pieces. Ambitious.... but possible.

Llewellyn Xavier

Soooo let me hit you guys with some background. Who are we as artists without some mentorship? Probably just a bunch of blind recluses doing whatever we want without giving a damn what people think of it. That sounds great and all but that doesn't fly in art school. So I contacted my student mentor at CNU, Ashley Remington yesterday absolutely freaking out about my Senior Seminar project. And she helped me out by helping me with research (because I'm challenged at finding artists). So I took a deep breath, gathered my thoughts, and took the day off of work to get some serious work done. Because let's be serious, when you work 70-80 hours a week, finding time to eat and sleep is the first thing on your mind, not making art (just being real here). In a perfect world, I wouldn't be living paycheck to paycheck and I would have all of this done by now. Instead, I've accepted the fact that instead of the usual 6 hours of sleep a night, I'm going to cut down to 2-3 in order to get this all done. My life is such a joke.

Meet Llewellyn Xavier, a Caribbean artist from St. Lucia who has some serious talent when it comes to working with color. I love his work, and if it were at all possible for me to afford his work, I'd hang it up on the biggest wall of my apartment. But I'm broke, so the best I can do is honor him with my first in-depth blog entry on how inspired he makes me feel not only in what he makes, but in how devoted he is to his heritage. You can visit his website here. So HERE WE GO!

Llewellyn Xavier

Llewellyn Xavier is considered one of the Caribbean’s modern geniuses with a paintbrush. As an artist from St. Lucia, a small mountainous island in the Caribbean, his subject matter reflects his roots to the land where he was born. For example, pieces from his Emerald Piton series portray the soft hazy mountain peeks that make up the majority of the terrain on St. Lucia. From 1961 to 1987 Xavier travelled to Barbados and England during which time he made a name for himself in art and developed as a Caribbean artist. He took in influences from his time in England, and transitioned from working primarily in watercolor, to working in collage. His collages, comprised mostly of recycled materials, stood as conservation pieces, and earned him his current reputation as a conservation artist contributing to the Commonwealth. His contribution has been so great, in fact, that the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Smithsonian Institution have featured him.

Not only does Llewellyn Xavier’s work as a whole speak to me, but his story as an artist about leaving his home and discovering art inspires me as well. Xavier found his talent elsewhere, but everything he did in art related back to his roots as a Caribbean artist, to the point where he became an advocate of conservation with his home’s interests in mind. Xavier’s work as always stayed tied back to where he came from and he never strayed from his identity as a Caribbean artist. As someone who is trying to reconnect with her roots, I appreciate his strong connection to where he came from, and his care for where his home will be going.

Aside from concept, I’m really into Xavier’s use of color. His early work uses a limited but saturated palette with bold figures, such as Untitled (The Emerald Piton Series), while his later work uses a variety of saturated color in organic shapes, as exemplified in his Environment Fragile series. I’m a fan of his range in color use. I think it shows that he works very successfully with a simple palette as well as a busy one. I think his use of color immediately identifies him as a Caribbean artist. He creates a tropical atmosphere with his use of color, painting deeply textured skies and hazed out mountains.

When I was 17 I visited St. Lucia with my family, only days before Hurricane Dean hit and desolated the island. The first thing that came to my mind when I saw the majestic mountains was that this island was the Hawaii of the Caribbean. It was my first experience in a jungle, and I saw texture and volume in nature that I had never seen before. Xavier conveys both the simple enormity of the mountains, and the volume of texture in his artwork.  The moment I saw his work, I knew what Caribbean island it was speaking of. I want to strive for that strong identity in my work. Visiting the Caribbean has allowed me to see Caribbean art as a reflection of the unique terrain and foliage that only the Caribbean possesses. In poor countries and islands, such as St. Lucia, the people are very much so dependent on the land that they live on with a relationship of give and take from not only the land but the stormy hot climate. Caribbean artists, no matter where they are from, identify themselves as Caribbean artists within their inspiration of the powerful land that both gives and takes life.

Xavier, Llewellyn. Artist Llewellyn Xavier. 2007. Web. 2 August 2011. <http://www.llewellynxavier.com/artist.html>.

COLOR!

Okay, so I ordered over 500 duck feathers over 3 weeks ago and they have yet to arrive. This is freakin' frustrating. I want to get going with some experimenting here.

Ugh. Anyway, I'm struggling with finding artists who have done anything relatively similar... specifically artists who aren't just painting a bird on a feather and calling it a day. Which is also frustrating. I'm frustrated. So I'm pondering my summer away wondering how I can take something that could walk the fine line between art and kitch and turn it into something that is edgy and artsy fartsy (kinda).

BOOM! Color Theory. Meet Jen Stark, an artist in color and my latest inspiration for how to approach my idea. Oh hey, what do you, Professor Harris's class might pay off and make my project. I really appreciate Starks organic shapes and her bold use of color. Although, I also find it fair to say that in looking at her work all together, her portfolio appears sort of repetitive in how she uses color: she makes interesting rainbows. But the sculptural aspect of her work catches my eye, along with the fact that Caribbean artists are ALL about the dramatic use of color, from big names like Wifredo Lam to little guys like Abel Garcia Matos. I think this could work. I'm not a big color person. In fact, my favorite colors are all neutrals. But I'm doing some reconnecting here, and color could be my way to go.

FEATHERS!!!

I went on a cruise with my family for 10 days last week and we traveled to Cozumel, Costa Rica, and Panama. It was actually my 7th cruise and I was not expecting much although I'd never been to Costa Rica or Cozumel. Not only did I end up having a great time, but I felt inspired like I never have before. I was most excited to see Panama... we were docking in Colon which is where my grandmother was born and raised... but I ended up feeling a heavy connection to Costa Rica. The people, the landscape, the culture (but mostly the people) came together in a surreal way. My mom and I were walking through the streets of Puerto Limon talking about Caribbean culture (I know, I'm a geek) when we came across a street artist painting on feathers. I thought, oh my God how cool! Before I knew it, I was sitting there asking him questions left and right about feather artwork. He told me that it's very common amongst Caribbean street painters and now it's a big sell to tourists. They'll paint local birds and wildlife, which is very kitch. But I plan on taking the Caribbean concept of feathers as a canvas and applying it to my own concept of exploring my Caribbean roots and identifying myself as a semi-Caribbean artist. Panama only reaffirmed my excitement when I encountered more feather art and more amazing people (despite Colon's enormous drug problem). During our time there I felt a connection to my grandmother, who was born in Colon and lived there until she was 15. In 1975 my grandmother returned to Colon and was heartbroken by the change. Being so close to Columbia causes drugs to literally wash up on Colon's shores, making it a drug capital in Central America. I felt my grandmother's pain as we drove around and saw streets guarded by police with machine guns next to streets where children played. The effects of drugs damaged the integrity of my grandmother's heritage.

This woman is actually from Alaska. But the artists I experience in Costa Rica and Panama don't exactly have open computer access, let alone the ability to upload their artwork to a website. I think she's a great example of kitch art and she's exactly what I plan to avoid. My work will be big and bright and vibrant and hold the integrity of the feather.

http://www.featherlady.net/index.html