Happy New Year, 2019!

Happy New Year!

Into the Hat Cave with Art, Commerce & Wabi-Sabi

2019 has hatched & we are on our way — hopefully not IN our way. There’s much work to do (what else is new!); new plans to unfold; the road is stretched out ahead (though the destination is not always clear) and that’s part where fresh, unseen adventures are to be had. For me, a lot of the adventure TRAVELING will more metaphysical than actual: now that the “Hat Cave”, my home studio, is pretty much up & operational one big goal is to follow up on the notion to do more work with still life and motion capture in the service of both art AND commerce.

So, time to roll up the sleeves and get to work. “The Egg” is Project One. It’s an ostrich egg that for decades has been a prized “objet” of mine. Of course, that begs the question as to how & why do I continually find new ways to drop it, break it and, like with Humpty Dumpty, try to put it back together again. This time, though, rather than feel the tragedy I was able to see the opportunity. This ability was revealed to me a few years ago while doing some old-school analog reading (I’ve always found that I’m much more likely to find something interesting to learn simply by turning a page in a newspaper than is the case when flipping thru digital news feeds where we are spoon-fed whatever some algorithm determines we’ll be interested in.) In this instance, I stumbled upon the mention of an author, Leonard Koren, and his series of small books, in particular “WABI-SABI - for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers” which I proceeded to acquire & read with eye-opening delight. Wabi-Sabi can most easily be correlated to ‘patina.’ It is the added value brought to something or someone by virtue of the visual physical transformation that occurs over time. Something invisible is added when there’s a story that can be seen lurking beneath the surface. And so, the broken egg became a story and a photograph because sometimes the broken thing is more interesting than the perfect thing.

Okay, now where’s the glue?