The Web World of Ellen Goldschmidt

I had the great pleasure of working with my fellow artist and dear friend  Ellen Goldschmidt on her new web site. I was a wonderful collaboration, an intimate way to get know her work, and learn from each other.

Plus it looks pretty sharp!! check it out!!

This could be the beginning of a whole new realm of aiding the artist of Portland.

A NOTE FROM ELLEN

Dear Artist Friends,

I'm excited to announce the launch of my new website,  ellengoldschmidt.com
Please take a look.  I built it from a template on Squarespace with the guidance, tutelage and genius teaching of my friend, artist Arielle Adkin.
As some of you know, I am NOT a techno wizard.  And yet, with Arielle's help, I was able to build a well designed, highly functional website that far exceeded my expectations.    I'm delighted with the outcome.

The best part is I learned what I need to know to manage the site from here on out by myself.  I did not pay an arm and a leg up front for a design and am not dependent on a designer to update the site.  Arielle has a great eye, is fun to work with and enjoys working with artists.  I highly recommend her services (arielleadkin@gmail.com).

Thanks for taking a look at my site.

Best,
Ellen

The Master of Animals and Fireworks

This is one my all time favorite artist.

Using Nature as theme he create a palatable beautiful amount of tension in this work. Creation living along side destruction and unbridled instincts existing together. The closest permanent instillation to a Portland dwellers is at the Seattle Art Museum, where he installed full size "exploding" firework white Fords.

What follow are images form his new show and an essay a wrote when I first saw his work in collage.

http://www.caiguoqiang.com/

Constant Complicated Time of Destruction and Creation

“We live in complicated times.” is the opening statement made in the promotional brochure for the work of Cai Guo-Qiang showing at Site Santa Fe. However, this work entitled ‘Inopportune’ is not necessarily about this general cliché statement. Cai Guo-Qiang’s artwork including the use of scale, material and subject matter speaks profoundly more to the idea that destruction is creative and beautiful.

Material is one of the strongest aspects of Cai’s work that resonates with the ideas of positive destruction. He works with fireworks, the quintessential controlled explosion made to invoke beauty and celebration.  Cai paints the sky with choreographed firework displays, films a car being destroyed by colorful explosives, and most astounding Cai gives the viewer lasting evidence that these highly temporal explosives can create lasting images with his gunpowder drawings on Japanese rice paper. Had these “drawings” been made by any other means they would never capture the power of ethereal destruction, an act of explosion that is impermanent and performance based.

He also employs a thematic use of subject matter in ‘Inopportune’. Images tigers and car are repeated over and over in Cai’s work. The tigers call up references to exotic myths and heroism, a glorified destruction, while cars reference the true life of destruction on a daily bases: car bombs car crashes. The use of tigers was an extremely eloquent choice to show the beauty of a certain kind of destruction, hunting, and an extension. Had Cai use the human body, for example, instead of tigers the viewer would have been far less involved. We are desensitized to that type of imagery and most of us can feel stronger compassion for an endangered species. The car imagery installs in the viewer a more threatening since of destruction as if a car bombing could happen to you.