artist

Next time you're in Cancun, take a day off from the usual distractions to view something truly amazing: more than 400 life-sized figures, sculpted from concrete and rebar, congregated together on the sea bottom.

Created by artist Jason deCaires Taylor, the sculptures, known collectively as The Silent Evolution, make up a new underwater art museum located in The National Marine Park of Cancun, Mexico. The Museo Subacuático de Arte (MUSA) will use the sculptures to create artificial reefs for marine life to colonize and inhabit.

Since the National Marine Park of Cancun attracts over 750,000 visitors each year, the existing natural reefs are under huge pressure. By creating this sculptural artificial reef, tourists will be drawn to the new attraction, allowing the natural reefs to recover and regenerate. The sculpture reef is located in clear shallow waters to afford easy access by divers, snorkelers and those in glass-bottomed boats, who can book tours through Aqua World.

I had the chance to ask Jason a few questions last week about his work, including how he finds motivation for the overwhelming work he has in front of him with reef restoration. Jason offered, "It is very easy to become overwhelmed as coral reefs face so many different challenges. I try to focus each step at a time and am a real believer that change sometimes only requires the smallest of movement to gather momentum and snowball into something greater."

Keep reading to find out what else Jason has to say and to see more photos from the new sculpture park.

Artist Patrick Dougherty fashions large-scale art installations from the simplest of materials. Using tree saplings as his medium, this Chapel Hill, NC, artist manipulates trees into a variety of shapes and structures. Over the past few decades, Dougherty has created over 200 sculptures in places including the Max Azria store on Melrose Avenue to the American Craft Museum in New York.

The sculptures themselves look like natural extensions of the landscape and twist upwards and around buildings, trees, and facades, as if they were living breathing things. I'm also fairly certain that Where the Wild Things Are set designer K.K. Barrett must have been influenced by Dougherty's work when creating the nests for the film — they're just too similar.

In a recent New York Times article, Dougherty described his "Natural History" installation at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden (shown here) as "lairs for feral children or wayward adults." This description strikes at the heart of what attracts many people to Dougherty's work: its connection to the wildness in each of us.

Check out a gallery of photos, as well as a time lapse video of one of Dougherty's installations when you read more

While I've featured knit deer heads, DIYs on how to knit your own pouf, and photos of rogue knitting and crochet projects, I have yet to feature a truly large-scale fiber arts project. That is, until now.

Kate Pokorny, who's worked in fiber arts for many years, is preparing to crochet a house — a yurt, to be exact. Kate started crocheting small dome shapes, and then realized that she could translate the small shapes into a much larger one, and decided to make a crocheted yurt. (Yurts are traditional Mongolian nomadic homes that are dome-shaped.)

Kate began crocheting about four years ago, and since then her needlework ambitions have soared. In part, she notes that she was inspired by Margaret Wertheim’s TED Talk and saw how crochet can be used to represent hyperbolic space and coral reefs, and became very interested in oversize knit and crochet work by artists like Kwangho Lee, Claudy Jongstra, and Christien Meindertsma.

Kate will start "building" her yurt as soon as the weather gets warmer at her parents' farm in Jaffrey, NH, and hopes to complete it by this Autumn. Kate notes, "This past weekend I sourced the rest of the wool for the project from a Mack Hill Farm, a farm about 45 minutes away from my place, and now I'm starting the process of getting it all cleaned and blended so that I can begin hand felting the two-inch diameter cord and crocheting it using my arm as the 'hook.' If all goes according to plan it will be self-supporting and made of a single cord."

To hear more about the plans for the yurt, and to check out some photos, read more

Widely regarded as the father of underground comics, the famously T & A-obsessed R. Crumb surprised many by deciding to take on the first book of the Bible, the Book of Genesis.

How to reconcile the sacred with the profane? The Book of Genesis Illustrated, which contains all 50 chapters, comes with a warning: "Adult Supervision Recommended For Minors." And it's not because R. Crumb changes or adds words to the original, but rather because his art graphically depicts what he calls the the Book of Genesis's inherent violence:

"[It's about] ruling elites, victimizing people in sadistic ways, which is human beings at their nastiest. They have power over others, and they derive pleasure from inflecting pain on other humans. That's about as nasty as people get."

Crumb's French publisher, Jean-Luc Fromental, thought Crumb might be able to achieve an interpretation of Genesis only through "blasphemy." Now? He thinks that he was trying to "[r]eread the whole text from a humanistic point of view . . ."

In a press conference for The Book of Genesis Illustrated, Crumb said that although he "seeks knowledge" of God and believes that there is a force ruling us, we can't ever truly understand it. As for regarding the Bible as a sacred truth? He thinks it's crazy, adding, "But the human race is crazy if nothing else." (If you're interested in R. Crumb, check out the amazing documentary about him and his crazy family, titled, simply enough, Crumb.)

For those of us who daydream over shelter magazine spreads and redecorate in our heads, the paintings of Stratford artist Janet Hill are tempting eye candy. On her Etsy site, she notes, "As a result of living in a cold climate for six months of the year, I've developed a strong interest in the beauty of interiors. My inspiration lies in interior, furniture, and fashion design, as well as films. I love the glamour and beauty of interior surroundings."


Perhaps my favorite print of Janet's is this Zucchini Blossoms Print ($11). The open shelving in the center of this photo features elegant dishes, and the cool, green cabinetry and countertops overflow with a Summer garden's bounty. Janet certainly has a talent for portraying a home's beauty. Check out her Etsy site for more paintings or preview some of my favorites when you read more