F O U N D

I found this wood board in Ukranian Village on my way home from the Empty Bottle last night. I was on my bike and I saw the sea horse and I had to stop and pick it up. The back side seems to have a truck or a cargo car from a train on it.

Brian posted at 5:30 PM.

I found this in the trunk of somebody's car. I was hanging out with an old friend named Dave and his friends. Dave was in town visiting. I'd never met the other poeple. It was the night of one of the first big blizzards of 05. They picked me up. Four blocks from my house we got a flat. The five of us got out of the car. It took five of us to fix it (well, it took one of me, one of Dave, and the other three kinda watched).

Anyway, I found this pin in the trunk while we were getting out the spare.

After a couple days one of them told me that Sue Fox is some art student from the SAIC whose project was to make herself famous through the self-promotion of the phrase "I love Sue Fox."

I never heard of her. Well, of course now I have. But I got the impression that the project was old. Anyway, I liked the pin and now wear it. People ask me, "Who's Sue Fox?"

And I say, "I dunno."

Brian posted at 5:56 PM.

I was at Ikea toward the end of December and I found this one-legged figure sculpture. These are popular for artists who want a model to work from in order to draw/paint/sculpt a body in realistic contortions and proportions. I also found this red teddy bear, which for purposes of this post, is mostly a backdrop for Gimpy.

I've long had an affinity for things that are imperfect. For me, perfection is unattractive and uninteresting. People who look like supermodels tend to not only turn me off, but completely start to disappear from my view. I don't really know why.

I've thought for a long time that humanity thrives on conflict. In all of literature, for example, and with few exceptions, what makes a story interesting is the conflict. I think only in music do we tend to gravitate toward harmony. But of course this is not always true either. There are plenty of examples of dissonance in music. But generally speaking the dissonance is brief, with most of the music being melodic, withing key, and harmonious.


Anyway, there was Gimpy. And he was marked down to a mere 50 cents. How sad. So I knew he must be mine. And then he was. And so was Redbear (I ended up giving Redbear to one of my nieces for Christmas).

Brian posted at 11:46 AM.

I really like how this vaguely looks adversarial. Like there's a fight in progress. A battle of physical will. It's very subtly there, but it's definitely what I see. The way the figure on the right seems to be curling forward and the one on the left seems to be recoiling.

This other pic shows it a little more. Especially the dramatic shadow.

I've no idea where I found this piece, though it was relatively recently. Within the past month or so. I really like to place these objects in some sort of context, since I usually complete take them out of context in my art. It's just something that I'll have to work on, I guess.

Now it's winter however, and a very bad time for found objects, especially those found outside. It will be slim pickings for a while.

Brian posted at 7:23 PM.

Some may recall my reading a book called The Golden Ratio. The book was about the number 'Phi,' (pronounced "fee") which is this crazy non-repeating fractional number that has all sorts of weird and various appearances in the natural world.
At my store, we got a pointsettia plant for the holidays from the woman who owns the lab we work with and when it's leaves fall from its stem, they dry up and curl into this shape, which is known as the "Golden Spiral." There's some mathematical way to describe it - something to do with the proportion of each smaller portion being equal to the larger one minus some important number or something. Anyway, the shape is the same as that of a chambered nautilus, where mollusks make their homes.
I once had a dream that I was inside a room that was built inside a giant nautilus. It was very cool. Well, I guess it was less of a dream and more of a...trip. I wasn't on acid, but I wasn't exactly sober either, I'll say. And I was awake, but almost asleep. There were lots of steamer trunks around the room, stacked in piles. There was a window letting in a golden light too. Very beautiful dream.

Brian posted at 4:56 PM.

These guys are from the archive. I took this pic a while back at a theatre space I was showing where they were also exhibiting art. I don't know if it was intended as art or just as fun interactive stuff to do, but they'd put out Play-Doh for patrons to play with and apparently some budding sculptor created this wonderfully lewd, tongue-in-cheeky scene.

Brian posted at 2:14 PM.

Beware the shower monster. It is green and it has one giant eye and it watches you while you do your bathroom things.

It hangs near your shower and has a tough green terry-cloth hide and a little thing that hangs from its neck like a turkey's waddle. This particulare shower monster is named "Steve." He's friendly, but moody. Sometimes Steve throws Corn Nuts at me when I shower and it's very rude.

Brian posted at 2:42 PM.