As happ'ly through Facebook they scroll.
The five or six of them smiling in smug delight,
They stare at my page and ponder.
Whenever that green dot shows their online
You can almost hear ev'ryone pine:
I wonder if Amanda is posting this month.
What resolutions could Amanda be breaking this month?
Her activity on her blog, it's never been so light (actually I'm pretty sure it has been)
I wonder if Amanda is posting tonight.
How goes this one last day
As she sees the month of May
Being one month closer than it was?
Well, I'll tell you what Amanda is doing tonight!
She's posting! Oh, she's posting!
10 points to anyone who gets the reference.
Anyways, yes, I'm posting! And I might even write two more posts before tomorrow is over, but don't hold your breath.
Fortunately I had to make another presentation about an artist in one of my classes this past week. (Yay for homework making posting to my blog a little bit easier!) I'm not sure if I've mentioned the classes I'm taking this semester, but one of them is a Book Arts class, which is pretty awesome. Last week we had to give a presentation to the rest of the class about a Book Artist of our choosing. There are a lot of really cool ones out there, but the one I chose was Guy Laramee, Canadian book carver.
I chose him because I was somewhat familiar with his work (as in I'd seen it around the internet before) and also partly because my teacher made a comment about him in class that was something to the effect of him not having great concepts because the subjects of his books don't relate to what he carves into them and because he's an anthropologist. It frustrated me, so I decided to do my own research and defend what I thought was some pretty cool work (and show that artists can be more than just artists). And I don't think I failed. (Guys, sometimes I don't think I have opinions until I start writing posts for this blog . . . and then I think I might be too opinionated.)
So, Guy Laramee.
In the realm of art he's both a landscape painter and a book carver. And one can see that his book carvings are pretty similar to landscape paintings.
Before I get into his book arts, here's just a bit of background. Other than "art" he's also done a lot with theatre arts - play writing, directing, composing, musical instrument construction, all sorts of stuff. He's also an anthropologist! Yes! An anthropologist. He got a double Masters in both art and anthropology and one of his main focuses is something he calls "ethnographic imagination".
Contrary to my teacher's opinion, I think the concept behind his work is very compelling. It's hard to sum up, but essentially these sculptures are comments on the world's current obsession with information. We accumulate knowledge through researching heavy tomes and reading lists of facts, but what does it all amount to? What place does spending time in the natural world have in our information-centric culture?
Laramee proposes that erosion, getting back to basics, is more beneficial and gives us more than knowledge and information.
"Mountains of disused knowledge return to what they really are: mountains."
To find out more (and have better, more accurate descriptions of what he does) visit his website: http://www.guylaramee.com/
