Today’s Daily Create assignment is:
"Create a photo that represents the idea of immortality, or can you create a photo that shows us your inner landscape?"
These photographs taken at the Lan Su Chinese Garden last week shows the Chinese got to this question of how to represent both the infinite and the mortal/immortal in art and architecture a very long time ago.
The formal enclosure of the metal frame is the parameters within which I exist: schedule, language, biology.
The interior space then opens up and out to the garden of memory, dream, and reflection.
There is a spring-fed pool at the center so quiet the sun and moon can see themselves.
Seasons revolve in all their hunger and despair, yet the spring flows from some artesian source.
Consciousness itself stands like a vase of arranged lilies on that liminal calligrapher’s desktop between worlds, and here, art is made and released like a butterfly through the window opening beneath the brush.
Well, as a classroom, this downtown Portland location couldn’t look plainer, but that’s my teacher in the jeans, Courtney Hermann, an award-winning independent documentary filmmaker and film and video educator from Portland, Oregon.
Her most recent independent films include Crying Earth Rise Up (in-progress), Exotic World and the Burlesque Revival (2012), and Standing Silent Nation (2007). She is on the faculty of The Art Institute of Portland, the Northwest Film Center and NW Documentary and teaches filmmaking workshops and youth media camps. Looks like I got lucky!
LIke any anxious student, I arrived an hour early and had to walk around the Salmon St and Park Blocks neighborhood. The NW Film Center is in the same neighborhood as the Portland Art Museum.
The bar next to Swine is called Swank. I think that about covers the class consciousness split in Portland.
This is me, so excited to be going to film school that I feel like doing handsprings in the park!
Today is Cheer Up the Lonely Day – Can you do that in one photo? July 11, 2014
It’s a real holiday for July 11 because we found it on the internet. Now do it.
Yesterday, I took Mom to the Lan Su Chinese Gardens in Portland, OR’s Chinatown. The cheerful outfit she was wearing cast a pink glow up into her face, so the whole World of Mom looks bright and cheerful. She also stopped and talked and definitely cheered up about a dozen strangers during our few hours together.
I asked my DS 106 Summer Camp 2014 students to start doing Daily Creates as they can, and I’ll try to keep up. Today’s Daily Create assignment is: Draw an @amyburvall Style Message (yes, you must use pink) July 13, 2014. An example of her work is at http://my-conography.tumblr.com
I drew mine on an iPad app called Paper 53. Peter and I were out at the Sisters, Oregon Quilt Show yesterday, so that adventure was on my mind this morning—and the secret to doing Daily Creates is not to waffle over subject matter. Grab the first thing that occurs to you and go! Make art, dammit!
Anyone who knows me is probably saying I need a new blog like I need a new blue hat, but I have made my other blogs so very specific that I don’t have a daily ramble about whateverthehell I want like Alan Levine does at http://cogdogblog.com/
I am opening this blog while I go through what is turning out to be a somewhat tortuous process of moving my Mind on Fire blog from the Lane Community College server over to my new domain and hosting service, GoDaddy.com.
It is also to celebrate beginning DS 106 Summer Camp 2014 at Lane Community College where I am the Camp Counselor. I have given them some homework to do, and I thought I would do it alongside of them.
FIRST Open a blog, write an introduction, tag it ds106 and aggregate it to the DS106 primary website, where we have our own “room.” That is this post.
SECOND Do a couple of Daily Creates on the The Daily Create website.
That is a screen shot of the challenge on July 10, 2014. It says,
Our Mom is hugging the heart pillow, so this is immediately after her open heart surgery.
I didn’t exactly use a “cheesy sepia filter,” although I did use a distressing filter—it’s just a matter opinion whether it is “cheesy” or not. I think it’s an amazing look that plunges this family portrait straight back into the Italian Renaissance!
So this is me getting into the swing of things on a new Tumblr blog. My idea is this will be a more “chatty,” everything that I feel like blogging type blog.
That’s it for now, but next I want to talk about starting film school!
SANDY SPRINGS ETERNAL
This animated gif was made by Alan Levine out of a piece of a video I made called "The Current is Everything." I would like to make it my banner or sidebar on this Tumblr blog, so if anyone knows how to do that, please let me know!
