TABLE TOP FOOD SHOTS from Tassos Boulmetis on Vimeo.
As a craft geek, I'm always interested in process. If you want to babysit me, just leave me with a marathon of one of those basic cable TV shows that take you on factory tours. I could watch twinkies being wrapped or paintballs being made alllllll day.
Today's New York Times had a great article on the art (and artifice) of tabletop food videography. I knew a lot of this stuff--I've even visited the studio of a master food photographer, but I instantly found myself in "How Stuff Works" mode. Substituting lard for ice cream to avoid melting under bright cameras? $500 custom-made silicone "ice" cubes? Fork glue? Hypodermic sauce dripping needles? Bring 'em on! Here's my favorite passage:
“Food has to be in motion to have character,” says Alex Fernbach, another Budin acolyte, who now works at Arf & Company, a studio in Hoboken, N.J. “It gives food a personality.”
It also gives prop men a challenge. Like Ed Fountain, who builds food-tossing devices in a large, cluttered workshop in Mr. Schrom’s studio.
“We recently did a shot where this doughnut was tumbling through the air and through a curtain of sugar,” he said. As he spoke, he reached under a table and brought out a pair of matching, foot-and-a-half-long black catapults, powered by air cylinders, which he’d originally built for a Long John Silver’s commercial in which shrimp collided.
“I put the doughnut in here,” he says, pointing to the end of one catapult. “And I had it strike a paintbrush to get it tumbling. Then I connected it to a device that bumped a table and sent up the sugar right as the doughnut passed through.”
You could throw the doughnut by hand, he explained. But with a rig, as everyone in this industry calls these little Rube Goldbergs, you get the exact same results, over and over, which means fewer takes.
That's what I'm talkin' about! My wife asked if I could possibly imagine spending all of my time building contraptions like donut trebuchets. I had to honestly answer with an enthusiastic YES! Then she asked how a person even finds themself on career trajectory like that. I think I know the answer. ART SCHOOL!
SO. If you'd like to pull back the curtain on the food porn industry, read the whole article HERE. Your life will be completely complete when you learn about the proper way to photographically showcase a nugget of fried chicken or strands of gooey cheese. Let 'em fly!
This weekend marks the newest installment of Crafty Bastards, Washington D.C.'s aptly named festival of all things craft. I was fortunate enough to do a piece for the Washington City Paper/Crafty Bastards printed program on Ian Henderson, who is a jewelry artist that blows my mind....hard. Ian creates brooches, rings, necklaces and other pieces out of repurposed aluminum wire and the rubber insulation from the wire. He's inspired by the beautiful/protective armor worn by insects, crustaceans and other creepy crawlies.
The thing about Ian's Zoa Chimerum jewelry is that it's surprising in just about every way that it can possibly be. The pieces are all made to MOVE as the wearer moves. They're also intricately/obsessively craft. Did I mention that they're SOFT? Yup... what looks like a spiky exoskeleton is made out of soft rubber insulation. It's impossible not to touch them, flex them and play with them.
Here's a short excerpt from the interview. The entire interview can be found HERE.
Are there details of your work that casual viewers might miss?
The tactile quality. Most casual viewers do not pick up my jewelry unless I invite them to, because the pieces appear delicate and sharp. When they give in to my insistence and touch them, however, they discover that they are actually quite durable and soft. They are delighted to run their fingers along the flexible spines and feel them spring back into place…Visually, the details create the rhythm in the pieces, so while they are individually unremarkable, their relationship to one another is very important. In that way, the viewer might not notice all of the individual elements, but rather the way they harmonize with one another.
What can you tell us about the line between beauty and danger that your work explores?
It’s interesting that the things we are traditionally repulsed by, when viewed in great detail, have elements within them that to most eyes are extremely beautiful—for example, the compound eye of a butterfly, the delicate veining of a dragonfly’s wings, the curvature and fractal rhythms of an uncoiling fern. There’s a certain beauty in them, and I’m fascinated by the fact that these tiny, delicate things often have poisons, weaponry, or other offensive/defensive weapons that are disproportionately severe to the scale of the animal or plant. These are tiny, fragile things that are extremely vulnerable and can be destroyed almost unconsciously by the more lumbering, overt creatures of the earth. The only way for these delicate things to have any right to exist in this world is by being deadly to the larger creatures that live around them.
Check out Ian's website HERE
Check out the original interview HERE
Check out Crafty Bastards HERE
People are amazing. That's a constant refrain of Extreme Craft--my constant wonder at the amazing things that people make when given the time, fabric, thread and gumption to turn out a masterpiece. Yesterday, Claire and I were trawling through garage sales in the Victorian village of Ferndale, looking for baby stuff. At one of the last sales we hit, we found this amazing handmade Mr. T doll.
The woman who made the doll had actually made three of them back in the day. They've been sitting in boxes for around twenty years, waiting for the right people to come and "adopt" them. I can't begin to tell you how wonderful this doll is--all of the seams are triple-stitched, the eyes have this kind Buddha-esque look in them. The bling is beautifully rendered out of chains and elastic gold thread. Magnifique!
We plan on leaving this in our nursery to perplex our forthcoming baby. May she wonder about the other babies out there with beards and jewelry.
Best. Garage. Sale. Score. Ever.
Would you like to know why I'm such a well-adjusted person? When I was little, my parents bought me the anatomically accurate "Joey" doll from All in the Family. Friends and family found it endlessly fascinating. I can't recall what the visual aids were in sex ed class in 5th grade...I'm guessing that it was some sort of filmstrip with an accompanying cassette soundtrack that beeped when you needed to advance the projector. By the time we were in high school, the local banker's wife took great delight in visiting the "adult skills" class with a huge glass penis that she used to demonstrate condom application.
Ah, the sex-ed visual aid. Etsy is full of explicit crafts (like crocheted penis cat toys and penis "koozies" for keeping your drink cold). These things are great as conversation starters, but might not be so great for scale...and their functions might be a little confusing to youngsters. Today Salon.com offered up a great (NSFW) slideshow of sex-ed dolls and toys from around the world. The above photo comes from central China, where these dolls are used to teach children about secondary sex characteristics and where babies come from.
The blog Shanghaiist describes a scene from this particular classroom: "[The teacher] asked the class how sperm swims to find the egg, with her students replying by clasping their hands together and moving them in a side-to-side tadpole-like swimming motion."
Shudder...but when I think about it, my own experiences were no less weird. Here's a shout-out to my second grade teacher, Mrs. Crockett, who was an idealistic (I'm sad to say that I probably helped squash that idealism) young teacher who didn't want to crush anybody's creativity. I was allowed to make all of the drawings that I wanted of nude people as long as I called them "National Geographic people". I would kill to have some of those drawings now. Maybe a pube doll would have come in handy.
So check out the slideshow. Will you be using the crocheted amigurumi penis to tell your offspring about the birds and the bees? I'm glad that I have a few years to mull it over.
(NSFW) LINK
Greetings from Scotland! I'm still here, thanks to the wrath of Hurricane Irene (and quite possibly the ineptitude of United Airlines). It's been nice to have an extra week to dig a little deeper into Scottish culture (like the haggis burger I enjoyed at an Edinburgh Fringe Festival gig). Mike Press, who was the chair of the conference I spoke at, is an investor in a pretty extrordinary beer brewery here in Scotland called BREWDOG.
Brewdog don't fuck around. They are one of the participants in the global arms race to brew the world's strongest beer (read: highest alcohol content). Brewdog's End of History beer, which was released last year, clocked in at 55% alcohol. If that wasn't enough to put some hair on your chest, they released a limited edition flask stuffed inside of a taxidermied squirrel.
All of this is a roundabout way of introducing another squirrelly confection from the UK that showed up on BoingBoing this morning. The video (posted at the top) is a profile from the late 1960s of rogue British taxidermist Walter Potter, who spent his life as a professional taxidermist who specialized in stuffing cherished pets. On the side, though, Potter took armies of cute, dead tiny animals (including a horde of fluffy kittens) and created intricate dioramas, including toads playing leapfrog and a bunch of rat police raiding an animal gambling den (which can be glimpsed in the video).
Sadly, the collection was auctioned off piecemeal in 2003. Fortunately for us, the video lives on thanks to YouTube, and the work is occasionally displayed in exhibitions, including one last year at London's Museum of Everything. Would it surprise you that Damien Hirst is a big fan? I didn't think so.
One can only wonder if Walter Potter was as voracious a hunter of kittens and bunnies as John James Audbon was of birds.
If you'd like to relive an Extreme Craft classic about Albino Squirrel Heaven in Madison, Wisconsin, click HERE
LINK to Walter Potter video via BoingBoing
Greetings from Scotland! I'm writing this at 5:30 in the morning from my hotel in Glasgow. I'm jetlagged from a journey that spanned three days, one canceled flight and one missed due to some bad weather. i'm here, and I couldn't be more excited. I'm in Glasgow for the Craft Connected conference, which is being hosted by CraftScotland. It's still possible to register for the conference, which is being held on Saturday, August 27th at the Collins Gallery in the heart of Glasgow.
I've been here less than 24 hours, and Scotland is already blowing me away with its vitality, its history and its hospitality. One of the major highlights was a visit to the Glasgow Cathedral, an interesting palimpsest of historical periods, leaders and movements. I was especially moved by the stained glass windows in the cathedral, most of which date from the 1940s, '50s and '60s. They're austere, they reflect their medieval predecessors, yet they're infused with a strong sense of 20th Century design. The lancet windows above were particularly stunning--especially the central one featuring Glasgow's own Saint Mungo.
Iconography from St. Mungo saturates the cathedral--images of fish, bells, birds and trees are everywhere. There were other religious objects sprinkled throughout that weren't slavish replicas of medieval pieces. One of my favorites was a series of embroidered seat covers in the lower church that spelled out the bible verses from Genesis 9 that gave Noah permission to eat meat...something the Scottish take to heart.
Speaking of which...... I ended my day at the Ubiquitous Chip, an inventive Glaswegian restaurant that likes to honor Scottish culinary history by updating it and slicing and dicing it with other traditions. I had their venison haggis with "tatties and neeps" before heading back to my hotel for a few hours of jetlagged sleep.
In an hour or so, I'm off for an epic train journey through the Highlands to Inverness and Kyle of Lochalsh today. God bless Scotland!
I love living here in Humboldt County. Every so often, a sign comes along that our community hasn't let go of some of the finer things in life. Over the past year, I've come to appreciate the art of macramé. It's enjoying a renaissance along with other fiber arts, and maybe it's time for it to be reexamined as a serious force and not just a cultural relic. Plenty of fashion designers are even using it as an element in their collections. Still, it's good to know that there is still unreconstructed Macramé out there. I just found this jewel in our local Craigslist:
Brand New Macrame Plant Hanger.
The majority of the color is Forest Green with a hint of minty green.
All the beads are wooden, some dark and others light.
There's a lot of knots here, hours and hours of work..........and string :-)
It hangs from very top to the bottom about 6.5 feet. It will hold a pot at least as big as 12 inches in diameter.
If you want to look in person we can arrange a place and time to met up.
Thanks
If you've got a plant that can deserves to be cradled in luxurious macramé, follow this LINK.
Phew! I just got done with my intense 1-month residency at the University of Hawaii-Manoa. Claire and I are taking a few days of much needed R&R on the beach. The paparazzi have been stalking us, so I thought I'd scoop them with this photo of our most ambitious project to date.
