[image_with_animation image_url=”6410″ alignment=”” animation=”None” box_shadow=”none” max_width=”100%”] Vote for your favorite Seattle Artist League mascot! The winning entry could end up on a poster, or as a mural on our building. Please see entries below, and use the comments to cast your vote. Forward to your friends, this is open to all. Still want to submit an idea? Late entries accepted. Voting ends at midnight Sept 16, 2017.
Artist’s entry: “A Bower Bird (a satin bower bird to be exact) chosen because of their artistic abilities. Using local materials of various colors, shapes and sizes the create beautiful bowers to attract mates. When that doesn’t work they dance.
In some places they’re tall towers made of sticks resting upon a round mat of dead black moss, decorated with snail shells, acorns, and stones. In other places, they’re woven towers built upon a platform of green moss, adorned with fruits, flowers, and severed butterfly wings. Individual Vogelkop bowerbirds have their own tastes, preferring certain colours to others. The males place each item in their bowers with great precision; if the objects are moved, the birds return them to the original arrangement.
“Decorating decisions are not automatic but involved trials and ‘changes of mind,'” wrote UCLA physiologist Jared Diamond, one of the first researchers to intensively study the birds’ complex bowers. Diamond discovered that bower building was not innate, at least not entirely. The younger birds had to learn how to build the best bowers, either through trial and error, or by watching more experienced birds, or both. Diamond concluded that bower building was a culturally transmitted creative process where each bird had his or her own individual tastes and preferences, and where each decision was made with intention and care. Bowerbirds, in other words, are animal artists – at least in sense that they take care in producing unique works that humans and birds alike find aesthetically pleasing. My thought is that SAL is place (a bower, if you will) where art is both taught and created using the tools at our disposal and community (mates in the platonic sense) are drawn together to produce unique works.”
[image_with_animation image_url=”9505″ alignment=”” animation=”None” box_shadow=”none” max_width=”100%”] This is the fifth part of a multi day series, sharing work by my beginning figure drawing classes. Many of these students have never taken a drawing class before, nearly all of them are new to figure drawing. Rather than learning one style, we study a different approach every …
R. B. Kitaj 1932 – 2007 Edited from https://artbios.net/5-en.html R.B. Kitaj was an American artist who championed figuration in the aftermath of expressionism. Kitaj was an influential figure in the London art scene and was intimate with Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon, coining the term “London School” for this group. His art was unabashedly erudite and often accompanied …
One year ago in March, to protect our students and teachers from a new coronavirus, the Seattle Artist League moved our classes online. The virus was declared a national emergency, and we went into quarantine. We have now been in quarantine for thirteen months. Through this year, we have met each other online to draw, …
I recently posted about my happy obsession with The Great Pottery Throwdown. Rich Miller is one of the regulars on the show; first as the kiln technician, then later as a judge, holding equanimity while the other judge bursts into tears. I liked the clear style of his critiques so I looked up his work, …
Help Us Choose Our Mascot
[image_with_animation image_url=”6410″ alignment=”” animation=”None” box_shadow=”none” max_width=”100%”]
Vote for your favorite Seattle Artist League mascot! The winning entry could end up on a poster, or as a mural on our building. Please see entries below, and use the comments to cast your vote. Forward to your friends, this is open to all. Still want to submit an idea? Late entries accepted. Voting ends at midnight Sept 16, 2017.
New Mascot Entry:
Artist’s entry: “A Bower Bird (a satin bower bird to be exact) chosen because of their artistic abilities. Using local materials of various colors, shapes and sizes the create beautiful bowers to attract mates. When that doesn’t work they dance.
In some places they’re tall towers made of sticks resting upon a round mat of dead black moss, decorated with snail shells, acorns, and stones. In other places, they’re woven towers built upon a platform of green moss, adorned with fruits, flowers, and severed butterfly wings. Individual Vogelkop bowerbirds have their own tastes, preferring certain colours to others. The males place each item in their bowers with great precision; if the objects are moved, the birds return them to the original arrangement.
“Decorating decisions are not automatic but involved trials and ‘changes of mind,'” wrote UCLA physiologist Jared Diamond, one of the first researchers to intensively study the birds’ complex bowers. Diamond discovered that bower building was not innate, at least not entirely. The younger birds had to learn how to build the best bowers, either through trial and error, or by watching more experienced birds, or both.
Diamond concluded that bower building was a culturally transmitted creative process where each bird had his or her own individual tastes and preferences, and where each decision was made with intention and care. Bowerbirds, in other words, are animal artists – at least in sense that they take care in producing unique works that humans and birds alike find aesthetically pleasing.
My thought is that SAL is place (a bower, if you will) where art is both taught and created using the tools at our disposal and community (mates in the platonic sense) are drawn together to produce unique works.”
Read more:
https://blogs.scientificameric
Vote for your favorite mascot, using the comments below.
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