Paper cut outs projects

It may seem that painting or drawing exercises have more value for children then paper cut out projects. From my experience children can pretty easily put the image in their head on paper simply because they don't need to think about constructing them.
Now think about paper cut outs. You have to have an image in your head, you have to divide that image into shapes and colours. Those separate shapes have to be drawn on coloured paper. Neatly scissored. Then glued to paper in specific order. Child has to think what goes first, what's second and so on.
So from my perspective paper cut outs is far more challenging task for children and even teens. And it is a great exercise for their minds too. 

AGO and Frida exhibition

We had a wonderful trip to AGO to see Frida and Diego exhibition. We totally loved their paintings and story.

AGO also has mind blowing exhibition of Evan Penny. It features realistically made human faces and parts of human body, some of them a little distorted. I had a very strange experience: when you first look at those sculpture your head feels dizzy and you can't focus your vision. It took me a while to realize that our perception doesn't want to take in distorted information. We're so used to see live objects in a certain form that our mind can't process it in any other way. Highly recommend to visit the exhibition. Entry to AGO is free on Wednesday nights.

What if money didn't matter

A saw this wonderful video (click to watch) that made me think about our career choices. I totally agree that majority of people do what they don't like doing which doesn't lead to happiness. And the question comes: what the point of all this?

Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera exhibition at AGO

Rivera, born in 1886 in Guanajuato, Mexico, was academically trained and prolific. By the time of his death at the age of seventy in 1957, he had produced hundreds of large-scale frescos acclaimed for their sweeping historical themes and dense figuration as well as numerous oil paintings, watercolours and lithographs. Kahlo, born in 1907 in Mexico City, was a novice painter when she married Rivera, twenty years her senior, in 1929. Self-taught and painstakingly measured, she completed fewer than 150 small works — mostly self-portraits and still-lifes — before she died at the age of forty-seven in 1954. During their life together, Rivera was the more celebrated of the two artists, lauded as Mexico's greatest muralist. In recent decades, however, Kahlo's posthumous fame has eclipsed Rivera's to enshrine her as one of modernism's most iconic women artists. Her paintings embody the physical pain she suffered after a debilitating bus accident at the age of 18 and the spiritual anguish caused by Rivera's infidelity and by her inability to have children.

Rivera's mission was, in his own words, to "to reflect the social life of Mexico as I saw it and, through my vision of the truth, to show the masses the outline of the future." Kahlo, who famously declared "I paint my own reality," affirmed her independence as a woman and her mestiza identity through an autobiographical lens. Where Rivera depicted the rural protagonists of the 1910 Mexican revolution as the heart and soul of mestizaje, Kahlo embraced her dual heritage by referencing the popular folk art tradition of anonymous retablos or ex-votos — small paintings on tin asking for divine intervention or recording a tragedy. For Rivera, nature was aligned in harmony with an indigenous Universe and represented by flowers; for Kahlo, it oscillated between parched earth and enveloping vegetation. While Rivera idealized the revolutionary masses and the pre-Columbian past in his murals, Kahlo kept company with animals and dolls in her self-portraits. When paired together, their distinctive oeuvres — Rivera's, expansive and historical; Kahlo's, inward looking and intimate — find common ground in their "vision of the truth" of Mexico's post-revolutionary culture.

During Kahlo and Rivera's life together, their admiration for each other's "vision of the truth" never faltered. In 1938, Rivera wrote to an American art critic to recommend her, "not as a husband but as an enthusiastic admirer of her work, acid and tender, hard as steel and delicate and fine as a butterfly's wing, loveable as a beautiful smile, and profound and cruel as the bitterness of life." In 1949, Kahlo wrote an essay to accompany Rivera's fifty-year retrospective at the National Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico in which she penned an impassioned defense of his communist ideals and "love of the Indian" as "the living flower of the cultural tradition of the Americas."

— Text by Dot Tuer, excerpted from ART MATTERS 2012 – No. 4

Be Smart about Art

I have recently met an old person who was selling his art supplies because he stopped doing art. I saw a perfect example of "failed artist" who is about to loose his mind because of his ideas and opinions. He seemed so agitated, he couldn't even stand at one spot, walking back and forth in the room and talking non stop.
He was telling me that he used to do surrealistic painting and tried to get into galleries. And all the galleries were telling him the same thing: they liked his stuff, but it won't sell. And he was blaming Canadians for not understanding real art, saying that real culture is in Europe. He was spieling all this word about people not wanting so see art and not caring about it at all. There was so much madness in him. The ideas and desire to be appreciated for what he is doing literally made him crazy.
But why should anyone care about someone' picture? After all its just a picture. Craving for publicity is a very ego-centred goal.
He asked me how I survive being in the art industry myself. I told him that I don't struggle because I treat art as a job, not as a lifestyle. If I wanted this to be my lifestyle I would paint because I love it. I am aware that I won't be able to make a living doing it. I would probably have to work somewhere to survive. But if I would hope that my paintings would feed me, then my life would be full of disappointments. I use art in a way that people need and buy, then my job is full of success and pleasure. Any artist has to adopt to a situation in order to make it a source of income. We have to be flexible in what we're doing. Then disappointment won't be a part of your life. 

Quality of art supplies matter

When I was a kid I was drawing all the time. In daycare we used cheap paint and brushes and I didn't know any better. When I was 7 I got enrolled into specialized art school. As was requested my parents bought me nice watercolours and squirrel hair brushes. I remember this feeling as it was yesterday when I used those materials for the first time. I had a blast. All of a sudden it felt like a totally different experience. My work looked better and I felt like a real artist.
I'm pretty sure you can draw a parallel in your experiences as well. Women of course can feel the difference between Christian Dior and Cover Girl make up. Or driving Buick and BMW? We all know that quality matter. So don't cheap out on art supplies. And believe me, kids also know the difference.
Katia.