Mother Russia/Happy Holidays to You

cover of Russian Laquer Box

Светлого Рождества и счастливого Нового Года!

  The Russian laquer boxes are always so exquisite and beautifully detailed.   The skill of the artists is amazing.  There is such a rich and wonderful folk history in Russia.     

Tales of Santa Claus/Around the World

When I lived in Izmir, Turkey I heard the most wonderful tale about Santa Claus and his origin.  I even went to Myra visit the site.  For years after I told the story to the Children in my art classes, and with delight their younger siblings would ask for me to tell the story year after year.  I was looking for the story when I discovered this site to share with you about Santa Claus stories from all over the world.  Enjoy, our world is rich with imagination and delight!
Santa Claus Stories From Around the World(click on this phrase and it will take you to the link with all the stories of Santa)

Fröhliche Weihnachten

Fröhliche Weihnachten!

Merry Christmas to our German friends. Here are a few pictures I took in Stuttgart and area at the wonderful Christmas Markets. It brings back such wonderful memories of Germany and good times with wonderful friends.

Wow This blog is doing well!!!!

6,000 Hits!
A new benchmark reached at Rabbit's Moon Studio Blog!
Thank you all for your readership and interest.  For a little blog that started in August with just me, a computer and Da Vinci dog at my side we have done very well.  We thank you and feel humbled by your interest and loyalty! 

I love Japanese Woodblock prints. I have a collection of some old prints and of woodblock print post cards. I thought I would post art from different countries that had to do with the holiday season in the next week. I know there are many religions that celebrate during this time, but my intent is to celebrate the human spirit, your country and culture, and art from all over the world. I also want to wish everyone in Japan a special Holiday season after such a difficult year with the earthquakes and tsunami. You are certainly in everyones thoughts. We are amazed by your community spirit and resilience.


                                                                          

This Week Look Who Visited Rabbit's Moon Studio Blog!

As we approach another banner day here at Rabbit's Moon Studio Blog We want to thank all the artists and art lovers across the world for their continued readership and loyalty!  We should hit 6,000 hits today and that is another benchmark for us!  Thanks again artists of the world and those of you who support the arts!

Australia 
United States
Russia
Ukraine
Germany
Canada
United Kingdom
Italy
New Zealand
Slovenia
Thailand

James Rosenquist/Aripeka Studio

This is James Rosequist in his Aripeka studio. I first heard him speak at an event for the Tampa Museum of art. He is an affable man with a generous spirit. He always seems to have time to help out in the local Gulf Coast area to support the arts. This is one section of his studio, there is a much larger section that is the size of two football fields to hang his massive canvases as he works on them. He travels between his New York studios and the Tampa Bay area. I read once he chose the area for the clear sunlight for his painting. A fire destroyed one of his studio's and a large portion of work several years ago.

I believe he has since rebuilt. Another article written about him references Rosenquist as the "King of Pop".

Some of his canvases are massive tracing back to his experience as a sign painter in his earlier years, not unlike, Jackson Pollack.

Florida has been fortunate in having some really wonderful artist reside here....I especially love the two R's...Rauschenberg, and Rosenquist!

Quirky Florida Holiday Drive

Aripeka, Florida

is a tiny dot on a map. It might be easy to miss if you didn't know where to look, but is a wonderful old Florida town that time has left by, and kindly so. There is only one or two stores that sell everything from bait to snacks. No chains stores, no condo's, and there is still a quiet beauty that has been left fairly unharmed. These pictures on a holiday drive a year ago. Florida is not snow, sleds, and hot rum drinks around the fireplace. Real Florida is palms rustling in the gulf breeze, beautiful clear sunshine, cool evenings in the winter and pleasant days, egrets and herons wading along the shore.

Florida can be quirky too, red beach chairs, a Christmas wreath that holds a pack of cigarettes just right, a creative naive painter who captures the beauty of the tropical environment that they inhabit, a store that defies any hint of organization or Madison avenue advertising placement, and all of that right on the front porch of nature. It did not go unrecognized by a famous New York artist. James Rosenquist made it his home away from home, built a huge hanger size studio the size of two football fields here, and paints in the clear crystal light that cannot be found on cloudy winter days in New York City.

Lets take a look at Finish Museums, one of our newest countries!

Art Museums in Finland

Museums with fine art collections and an online presence

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Espoo • Gallen-Kallela Museum Helsinki • Valtion Taidemuseo (Finnish National Gallery) • Amos Anderson Art Museum • Ateneum • Didrichsen Art Museum • Finnish Museum of Art and Design • Finnish Museum of Photography • Helsinki City Art Museum • KIASMA Museum of Contemporary Art • Museum of Finnish Architecture • Sinebrychoff Art Museum Hyvinkaa • Hyvinkaan taidemuseo Joensuu • Joensuu Art Museum Jyvaskyla • Alvar Aalto Museum and Foundation Kuopio • Kuopio Art Museum Oulu City • Oulu City Art Museum Pori • Pori Art Museum Rauma • Lonnstromin Art Museum Riihimaki • Riihimaki Art Museum Rovaniemi • Rovaniemi Art Museum Tampere • Sara Hilden Art Museum • Tampere Art Museum Tornio • Aine Art Museum Turku • Waino Aaltonen Museum of Art

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Welcome Finland!

Welcome Finland it is so nice to add you to our list of countries! We look forward to hearing more about Finish artists, museums and culture.

Support the Arts This Holiday Season!

It is easy to go to stores and buy mass produced articles and things that are not made by hand with care or creativity, but it is not as satisfying as buying art. During this holiday season support the arts: give a gift of original art, an art museum membership, a ticket to a play or symphony, an art workshop to learn a new skill, an instrument, or music lessons. The Arts need our support in this difficult economy and artists who are self supporting need our help as well. Support locally and nationally...but do support, by making a commitment to the arts. Here are a few favorites to consider:

Dali Museum

Moma

Tate Museum of Art

Whitney Museum of American Art

Van Gogh Museum

Louvre

Ogden Museum of Art

Florida Craftsmen Guild

Miro Museum and Foundation

Musee D'Orsay

Chicago Art Institute

Chihuly

St.Petersburg Museum of Art

Mom on a Good Day

This is my Mother on a good day, not far apart in time, from the Madonna in Blue Pictures. I know many of my friends and family read this blog so I did not want them to worry about the picture I took of her on a not so good day. As all aging parents there are good days and bad. Miss Lela looks pretty good for almost 99 you have to agree!

You can still see the power of grace and love in her face...and strength. She had many accomplishments, but she counted motherhood as her most important. She taught until 72, for over 50 years she was a public school educator of highest acclaim. Her love of all things beautiful and graceful led me into the arts. Her love of people, justice for all, and education led me and my brother into education and making a difference for people in their lives. Her love of the underdog, the neglected, the poor led us into working in programs that lift impoverished peoples up to the light where they may shine.

Her love of science and nature help us appreciate all the wonders the world has to offer and the curiosity to understand what is unknown nor apparent. I could offer up Carl Jung again and this time the archetype would be SuperWoman!

Blue Madonna/A Portrait of Motherhood

BLUE MADONNA/A PORTRAIT OF MOTHERHOOD

Why do we do art, what motivates us as artists to do what we do? Joy, love, anger, pain, sadness...emotions and shared human experiences are certainly one of the things that motivate all artists.

An artist is like a sponge that absorbs experiences around himself/herself and then expresses them back to others using color, shape, texture, line and space. Dance, drama, music, poetry, and visual arts can elicit feelings that are difficult to express in any other way. Complex feeling can be expressed through art...think of the aria in the movie Philadelphia when Andy knows he is dying and has no other way to express the sheer pain of leaving life and loved ones, other than to play his favorite opera La Mamma Morta, at full volume, sung at by Maria Callas until it encompasses his whole being. Or think of the play a Street Car Named Desire by Tennessee Williams, when Stanley cries out Stella in a soul riveting pleading sob. Contemplate the ballet Swan Lake, its tender tragedy and love story. These are the ways artists interpret and give back our inexpressible emotions to us.

Aging of our parents and loved ones is not easy to look at and experience. It is a journey we all go on, unless a parent dies young. There are moments of joy, tenderness, and sadness on this journey. Everyday I go into my Mother's nursing home, into the alzheimer/dementia unit I am bombarded by sights, sounds and smells. I come away with feelings and emotions I do not know what to do with. The nursing home can be a drama of emotions on any given day. Adult children visiting alzheimer parents who no longer recognize them, patients who are robbed of their memory by dementia, the frustration of nurses trying to be patient when a patient screams and screams caught in a moment of confusion of where they are...sometimes it is no more that a tear sliding down a cheek or a head bent lost in a world of boredom...it is a bombardment of images and impressions. The smells of medicine, food, urine and antiseptics and the sounds of old movies droning away in the background effect other senses. One cannot walk away without feeling something and for an artist it is a hundred times so. Sometimes I think of Picasso's "Guernica" or Munch's "Scream" and then I think of Leonardo Da Vinci's pictures of aging or Renaissance pictures of Motherhood and religious icons.

I love this picture of my Mother, it is sad, it is tender, it is vulnerable. Mother is almost 99 now and at times aware and at other times not. She still knows me and my brother, she can still express her unconditional love she has always had for us. I have looked at this photo many times and felt a myriad of emotions. I have been reluctant to write and share because it is so close and personal to me. But like art ideas that come over and over to me, telling me they need to come in to creation, this one calls to me. It won't go away, I keep going back to this picture and thinking about it. Something about it seemed universal, beyond just an ordinary moment in the nursing home with Mom, it transcends the everyday to a shared human experience...it is persistent in my mind. What is it that I am being called to create, to express? Then I realized that the photo of my Mother wrapped in a blue blanket reminded me of Renaissance paintings I had seen before in art history studies and at the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida that has a large collection of Renaissance paintings. The photograph of my Mother takes on an iconic form to me, the Jungian idea Motherhood as an archetype, as a perfection of love and sacrifice-for my Mother truly embodied those qualities.if

I know I will do an art work from this photo, from these experiences..but it has not yet completely formed in my mind as to how. But it keeps calling me, and I cannot ignore the call for long. I have thought about would my Mother mind me using pictures that show her in a vulnerable state, and I know in my heart she would not. She would tell me to reach out to others, help in anyway you can, touch others lives, give to others...that is the kind of person she is. So when I do this artwork it will be with her in mind, and with her guidance and love.

The Journey of Learning must begin with Experimentation

Art is Discovery

All discovery must begin with experimentation and trial and error. My problem in this piece is how to make a larger hole to allow for a larger necklace cord. Glass is not easy to manipulate to your needs. I built up the height with clear glass pieces and made a bridge with dichroic glass, but it looks clunky and bulky. I am not happy with the effect and need to experiment more. Which brings up an important thought.

If we cannot fail as artists, we cannot learn. It is the same in all disciplines. There was a time when the Medici family supported artists for long periods of time. An artist was allowed to develop, to have periods of trail and error, in which there would be success and failure. As a result we had many successful and talented artist during the Renaissance period. Thomas A. Edison said it best, in his struggle to invent the light bulb, when a reporter ask him how he could stand the failures....

He said, "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."

Thomas A. Edison That is how we must approach art and all learning, it is a path to success that we take as we experiment.

On the last attempt there was not enough glass to span the bridge and it did not make complete contact. Could I use this still for a necklaces? I think so, by passing the cord through and wrapping to the back with silver wire in a decorative pattern. I am still not happy with the look and will try more techniques and glass combinations.

So these are the samples of experimentation, not failure. From here I can record what I did and try again. I can do more research and consult with other fused glass artist. I am on my journey of learning!

More on Leonardo Da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci was left-handed and his personal notes were written starting at the right side of the page to the left. This special technique called “mirror writing” made all the people who wanted to read his notebooks to use a mirror. However, when he was writing something for the others he wrote in the normal direction. It is also said that Leonardo da Vinci possessed an amazing dexterity being able to write with one hand and paint with the other, in the same time. And even when suffering from a paralysis of the right hand, Leonardo was able to draw and teach.

Rabbit's Moon studio: Leonardo da Vinci

Rabbit's Moon studio: Leonardo da Vinci: Leonardo Da Vinci, the dog in his Renaissance Outfit I have always felt an affinity for Leonardo Da Vinci, so much so I named my d...

Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo Da Vinci, the dog in his Renaissance Outfit

I have always felt an affinity for Leonardo Da Vinci, so much so I named my dog after him. I call him Vinci. Leonardo was born in April under the sign of Aries, as I am. I love that he is a scientist and an artist and a visionary thinker. Artists who are intellectual in their work are of great interest to me. When art is beyond representation and takes much deeper forms is impressive to me. We continually learn more, even centuries, later about this mysterious man who was truly a genius. As our science has improved we have learned more about his work using x-rays and looking at the under paintings of his most famous work. His use of symbology continually offers new insight into the political and religious issues of the time. Leonardo's ability to be so talented in so many areas made him into what we now coin in terminology as the Renaissance Man. I found this interesting facts to share with you . Enjoy.

answers.com

• Leonardo dug into graveyards at night to steal corpses and study human anatomy
• He was a left-handed dyslexic and procrastinating perfectionist who left many paintings unfinished and destroyed most of his work.

ArtPromote

• Leonardo Da Vinci was one of the icons of the renaissance. Together with Michelangelo and several other great artists and artisans of the period Da Vinci left a legacy of art, thought, science, and culture which has profoundly affected all ages since. Like all (well – most!) humans he was interesting and we share with you some interesting facts…

  answeringgenesis.org

  • Leonardo drew the plans for the first armored car in 1485.
  • He also designed the cannon, a machine gun, gliders, turnspit for roasting meat, canal system to irrigate fields, and invented the parachute.

  EBSQ Self Supporting Artists

  • Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo Buonarroti were not the best of buddies.
  • One of the quirks of Leonardo was that he wrote many of his notes using mirror writing. Some believe this was to keep his thoughts secret.

  buzzle.com

  • It took Leonardo Da Vinci about ten years to paint Mona Lisa’s lips.
  • He never married or had children and had a reputation of being a man of high character.

  about.com

  • Paper was far more expensive and harder to get hold of in Leonardo’s day than it is today. Which is why he made more intensive use of it, “filling” most of every page.
  • Unusually for the era in which he lived, Leonardo Da Vinci was a vegetarian, for humanitarian reasons.
  Leonardo enjoyed purchasing caged birds so that he could set them free
• Da Vinci is best known for his masterpieces; Mona Lisa, Madonna of the Rocks, and The Last Supper.

Leonardo Da Vinci Quote: When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.

Making the World a Better Place through Art

I would love to have feedback from all of you in your area of the world as to the ways we can use art to make the world a better place. It can be for an individual, a group of people, for the globe..it can be for a greener world, or a more peaceful world, or a world where we bypass politics and reach out to each other. In living in many other countries for extended lengths of time, the one thing I learned well is people are wonderful everywhere, it is the governments that divide us and make us feel distance from each other. I have learned so much from other cultures and learned quickly that my culture is not the center of the world, but that I am a citizen of a larger world and we are all a member of the human race. We share a planet, we breathe the same air, and depend on the same resources. We all love, feel pain and sadness, we all hurt, and we all struggle and suffer with bad times and obstacles. We are more alike than we are different. I truly believe art can make a difference as a flux for people to work together in a peaceful hopeful way, learning and sharing. When I lived in the Philippines I learned how close family relationships can be, I learned how loved a child can be by all the members of a family, I learned that patience and a soft voice can go a long way. I learned what being a host was, when a guest was present. I also learned the loudest people in any room were Americans.

When I lived in Turkey I learned what hospitality was truly about. I learned loyalty to friendship were paramount. I learned religions different from my own were not threatening, but interesting. I learned about the value of tradition. I have learned the value of traditional functional arts.

I have learned from where ever I have traveled and lived. It is the university of the world, if you are open to learn. I learned no matter how small the country, how rural the area, there were things that were superior to civilized countries.

Here is a site I recently saw on line that supports local artists in rural areas and supports indigenous cultures. It is called Better World Arts. Another positive idea that is helping end gang graffiti and promote a more peaceful environment is the Philadelphia Mural Project. To see all the murals takes three different tours and several days. The key to the success of the program was community involvement.

If you have difficulty leaving comments on the site, just e-mail me directly with your ideas and suggestions. My e-mail address is rabbits5@aol.com

Please join me in this quest, together we can do a lot! Lets reach out and make the world a better place through the arts!

Rabbit's Moon studio: Outsider Art/New Orleans

Rabbit's Moon studio: Outsider Art/New Orleans: Outsider Art I mention New Orleans a good bit in my blog because I have friends and family that I go to see often there. I have seen New Or...

Outsider Art/New Orleans

Outsider Art

I mention New Orleans a good bit in my blog because I have friends and family that I go to see often there. I have seen New Orleans before and after Hurricane Katrina devastated a large portion of the city. Tv coverage could not convey the total expanse of the destruction, street after street, block after block and neighborhood after neighborhood. It looked as if an atomic bomb had gone off. I remember flying in to the city at night not long after Katrina wondering where all the lights were and then it dawned on me how much of the city was gone. People are tough inNew Orleans and it is a city that is far too unique to lose. Jazz and blues are back, the wonderful restaurants in the French Quarter have reopened and the city is coming back, but it has taken much longer than people thought. The struggles were tougher than anyone imagined. I admire New Orleans and the people. They love their city and their culture and they did not give up.

In my many visits to New Orleans through the years I have become enamored with the Outsider Art that I have seen on the streets, in galleries, cafes, and museums. The Hard Rock Cafe in New Orleans has a wonderful collection and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art also carries outsider artists. I love the combination of words with image, wood with metal, and the honest naive imagery. It gives all people access to art and expression who have not had art training. I love the pure honest approach to this art, it is expression at its most basic form....no pretense....it is what it is.