Sep 17, 2008

I love funny-duck Alexander Calder


"It was early one morning on a calm sea, off Guatamala, when over my couch-a coil of rope-I saw the beginning of a fiery red sunrise on one side and the moon looking like a silver coin on the other."

I love this man. I selected Monsieur Calder for my first episode of a weekly series of "Celebrity/Artist Guest Grandpa". Calder is a dream and lives in his own. He gets 5 stars in the cute, creative, hardworking, dreamy, mystified, eccentric/weirdo/genius categories, all contributing to making him A+ handsome in my books. As a child he made beads for his sister's dolls and kinetic sculptures for his parents from found objects, he went on to become a mechanical engineer, and then decided to start making children's kinetic toys. Eventually he became a full-on artist and invented the (famous) mobile. He passed away at the age of 88, coincidently on the same day as my grandfather. He explains how he took on his special way of talking that developed while training for the Army; "I learned to talk out of the side of my mouth and have never been able to correct it since." He uses his voice for my favorite of his creations, the "Cirque Calder", a traveling circus that grew to eventually take up 5 suitcases. I really love him. Check him out.





Here is a Calder quote:

"Nothing at all of this is fixed.
Each element able to move, to stir, to oscillate, to come and go in its relationships with the other elements in its universe.
It must not be just a fleeting moment but a physical bond between the varying events in life.
Not extractions,
But abstractions
Abstractions that are like nothing in life except in their manner of reacting."
AC- From Abstraction-Création, Art Non Figuratif, no. 1, 1932.

Sep 10, 2008

Hurricane Hazel: The King of Ducks




This is my mom's father, my Grandad Hazel. He was a fighter pilot in the war who loved to hunt with my dad. He was a real man's man with a temper that earned him the nickname Hurricane Hazel. I have some great stories about him and some great photos that I will be posting soon and boy was he a looker. Handsome enough that my grandma felt the need to leave the baby at home with her mom so she could follow him from base to base to keep her eye on him. The first time my Grandad took my Grandma on a date he took her to the dump with a 22 to shoot rats. On the way home he flipped his truck and she broke her ribs. She hid the injury from her parents so that she could keep seeing him. 30 years later she ended up giving that same 22 to my brother for helping her walk her dog while her ankle was broken from a car accident. My brother and I still shoot that gun when we go camping together and I love thinking of my Grandma and my Grandad on their first date.