Sand Sculpture Competition (Oregon 2009)

Don’t know who’s responsible for this one, but I hope they won something:

This one is by Jeff Strong:

Shadow Art

by Tim Noble and Sue Webster

Artists among us

The heretofore unknown (to me), original artwork of Charlie McDanger.

Infrastructure public works?

Pavement drawings by Julian Beever

Self-actualization (literally)

by Mark Jenkins

This is not a painting of a pipe

“Dancing 2008″ by Matt Harding

This is one of the greatest things I’ve ever seen. (I would embed the video here, but you need to see it in high definition.)

There is still magic in the world. Check it out . . . “Dancing 2008″

(I’ve watched this several times and keep discovering wonderful details.  After you think you’re saturated with it, go back and watch it again, but try to ignore the location names and just focus on the places, then watch it again and focus just on the people dancing….Wow.)

Ancient satisfaction

Nice article by Judith Thurman in The New Yorker (6/23) about ancient cave paintings (excerpt here). I try to imagine the first artists, crushing charcoal and colored minerals to create the beautiful images that have endured 32,000 years.

What must it have felt like to have been the very first artist, discovering that you could re-create the fantastic life forms you saw out there in the terrifying world? They invented “the very concept of an image. A true artist reimagines that concept with every blank canvas – but not from a void.”

Striking is the discovery that the earliest known cave paintings are just as sophisticated as those created 25,000 years later. These artists “transmitted their techniques from generation to generation for twenty-five millenia with almost no innovation or revolt,” which leads one student of these paintings to surmise that “for the conventions of cave painting to have endured four times as long as recorded history, the culture it served…must have been ‘deeply satisfying’–and stable to a degree it is hard for modern humans to imagine.”

That was us, passing knowledge and technique down, adult to child, for 25 thousand years, without significantly changing it. Now we laugh at what our parents wore in the 70’s, and wonder always how we’re going to “make our mark” by doing things differently, which of course begs the question, “Are we satisfied?”

“Pride of Lions”