art #40

I like art to make me see things in a new way and make me think, but it can be beautiful at the same time. I like new kinds of beauty, resonant. I like some conceptual art (and made some as an undergrad, like the installation piece Bathroom of Love).

I like bookarts and collage, altered books, letter-pressed cards. I love mail art. I got my first artist’s trading card (ATC) a few months ago and was absolutely tickled.

Most large public sculpture looks ugly to me, an eyesore and wasted space. Public sculpture is obtrusive, and my eye can’t avoid it the way I could avoid a painting I didn’t like. I feel the urge to climb on things I shouldn’t. But well-done sculpture is very pleasing, something three-dimensional and very much in space.

I have a hard time appreciating modern building architecture, but I love almost any bridge, cathedrals.

I love everything by Frida Kahlo, and Georgia O’Keefe’s flower paintings. I like Chagall’s dream paintings.

I like religious--old Christian art, paintings of Mary, anything of the Virgin of Guadalupe, stained glass, headstones, angel statues in cemeteries. Christian religious art does fabulous things with light. I also enjoy Buddhist and Hindu art for the evocative images.

I like murals, graffiti, art in unexpected places. Old ads, old ads painted on the side of a brick building.

Folk art, outsider art—photography. Folk art from Latin America. Chicano art. Quilts. I have a weakness for photos of old condemned buildings, especially hospitals. Antique black-and-white photos of people, especially groups, a picture of the whole class at school, the expressions of the children and their old clothes.