Ah, the things one can accomplish while the tea is steeping. Geoff McFetridge does just that in his whimsical 2.5 minutes for Bigelow Tea Company, which is part of “a collection of films exploring a moment that tea drinkers around the world can appreciate: the time we spend steeping. We ask the question: ‘what can be created, imagined, or crafted in the time it takes to steep a cup of tea?’…
…thanks Uppercase Magazine…
Filmmaker/animator Alice Dunseath has made a lovely little film, ‘Hunting For Hockney‘, She says of it, “To escape from the realities of bereavement, two friends travel across Yorkshire to look for David Hockney. Grief heightens their senses and their need for adventure”. Inconguously poignant, colourful and witty, with a very Hockney-like sense of line, colour and fun, this wee film is a delight, made while Alice was a student at The Royal College of Art…
Hunting for Hockney from Alice Dunseath on Vimeo.
thanks It’sNiceThat...
Artist Katherine Dunn of Apifera Farm shares her art and her knowledge of illustration in her book ‘Creative Illustration Workshop‘, which is filled with her colourful, expressive art…
…and check out Katherine’s Kickstarter book project, ‘Donkey Dream‘, which goes until March 24th…
Theo Jansen is a Dutch artist who makes wind-powered sculpture, the Strandbeests, or beach animals, which are kinetic sculpture made from plastic tubing and water bottles, gracefully lumbering (or is that an oxymoron?) across the beaches of Scheveningen, Holland, by the winds of the North Sea alone…
He describes them here as, ‘Self-propelling beach animals like Animaris Percipiere have a stomach. This consists of recycled plastic bottles containing air that can be pumped up to a high pressure by the wind. This is done using a variety of bicycle pump, needless to say of plastic tubing. Several of these little pumps are driven by wings up at the front of the animal that flap in the breeze. It takes a few hours, but then the bottles are full. They contain a supply of potential wind. Take off the cap and the wind will emerge from the bottle at high speed. The trick is to get that untamed wind under control and use it to move the animal. For this, muscles are required. Beach animals have pushing muscles which get longer when told to do so. These consist of a tube containing another that is able to move in and out. There is a rubber ring on the end of the inner tube so that this acts as a piston. When the air runs from the bottles through a small pipe in the tube it pushes the piston outwards and the muscle lengthens. The beach animal’s muscle can best be likened to a bone that gets longer. Muscles can open taps to activate other muscles that open other taps, and so on. This creates control centres that can be compared to brains’.
A.SCHLICHTER5 from Strandbeest on Vimeo.
…Jansen has also created 3D printer miniature model beasts and the kits can be bought here. Read an article by Ian Frazier in The New Yorker on Jansen and his articulated beasts here and another of their articles on Lena Herzog’s photographs of his sculptures here. When asked what she found most unexpected while photographing this project, she said, “That it could make an optimist out of a Russian. They make you think and they make you dream. In this disenchanted world, they re-enchant you, not in a falsely sweet or obvious way but in a special form of enchantment. I have even seen dogs go wild and horses balk at the sight of the Strandbeests. What more could you possibly ask of a work of art?”…
