Art By Tali Landsman

When I was a child, perhaps 8 or 10 years old, someone showed me how to make an origami swan that can flap its wings and a frog that can jump, from folded papers. I memorized it and carried it inside me with a sense of pride. I knew that I can take an ordinary piece of paper and whisper life into it. Later in life with the joys and storms that comes from living, I forgot how to fold paper into creatures that can delight me. I always intended to get a book about origami and refresh my memory. This year for the Holidays, I got myself some origami books and learned how to fold a giraffe, a lion, deer, tiger, gorilla, swans, owl, unicorn, dragon and more. I decided to use my paper friends in my email holiday cards. I arranged them on the snow that has accumulated abundantly outside my studio door. Wishing you all a wonderful Holiday Season and a wonderful New Year.

Yesterday I watched a wonderful movie called: "Herb and Dorothy". I highly recommend this movie to all art lovers. The movie document the Vogels who became very prominent art collectors in the USA. They reside in Manhattan and collect mostly conceptual and minimal art. What is so surprising about them is that he is a retired postal worker and she is a retired librarian. They have amassed an extensive art collection not through wealth but through loving and honoring living artists and the art world. You may think that all they needed to do is to sell some artworks of artists that became extremely famous with the passing years, but it is not so. They have never sold a piece of art. Dorothy's salary was used to pay the rent (they live in a rent control apartment in Manhattan) and all of their modest living expenses, while Herb's salary was used in its entirety for collecting art. Every month they will visit living artist's studios and will negotiate low prices on pi...

I am currently reading the diary of Rachel Corrie. The book is called "Let me stand alone". While reading it, I reflect on the similarity between reading some one's journal and looking at an artist's sketchbook. I also realized how raw and enjoyable it is to actually see the process and not to be handed the "final" product, all polished and groomed. Sometimes books or paintings that are too well crafted and executed, could be alienating and cold maybe even a bit boring. There is freedom in the pencil or words when you think that nobody is going to read or see. They are less politically correct, less "offensive" (as if you should get offended by words or art) less pretentious, less ambitious, less fear, less is at stakes and therefore it is free and true. We spent a long weekend skiing at Beaver Creek. It was a wonderful break to stay on the mountain and ski all day. It has not snowed here like it did on the east coast of the USA. We are expecting s...

The second piece that I finished is called "Ready Set Go" (you can click on the image to enlarge it). It is done on a large canvas (48" by 60" or 1.2 meters by 1.5 meters) In this piece I created the lines of a sketchbook page (which I actually do use). I felt like doing some pieces in shades of white and charcoals, not to introduce any bright colors to them. I always work in bright colors and I needed a change and some time off from colors. I came upon this idea when I was back in NZ. My neighbors John and Marilyn brought over some friends to look at my art. They asked me why do I do the grid on the sketchbook paintings. I realized that it is not obvious that I am trying to create a graph paper and decided to imitate the lines of a more familiar sketchbook with the perforations and lines. I plan to use this new format for future sketchbook paintings. I know that after a short period, I will go back to adding bright colors. For now, I will only do the horizontal li...

I spent the last two days in the studio painting. The good thing about winter is that I can get a lot of work done. In the summer, I yearn to be outdoors, gardening, cycling, swimming and all these activities cut into my studio time. If I did not enjoy skiing so much, I would live in an eternal sunshine, dividing my time between New Zealand and Colorado which offer opposite seasons. I love the long days of summer and the light is so wonderfully bright. I put the finishing touches on two paintings that I was working on. I will elaborate here about one of them and blog later about the second one. I called the one above "Tiger Leaping" - (pretty obvious, I know but I always believed that a painting should speak for itself regardless of its name). I painted it on a regular bed sheet. I primed the sheet with few layers of heavy black gesso. I left some of the beige color sheet showing at the bottom. I stretched it on a 48" by 60" canvas stretcher bars (1.2 meters by 1.5 ...

I am adding some photos from my weekend in Art Basel Miami. This weekend we had the opportunity to go skiing in Beaver Creek. It was lovely to be on the mountains again. Not all the lifts and ski runs are open yet, due to lack of snow accumulation, but we still had some fun skiing the ones that were open. Believe it or not, the mountain was packed with people. We could hardly get a parking space and were finally directed into the employee parking lot to park. We also had a hard time finding two chairs to sit on during lunch time, despite the fact that the open sitting restaurant has hundreds of chairs. So much for a bad economy in the USA.

I wanted to write a little bit about our weekend visit to Art Basel Miami. The art fair had grown up so much in the past years that now it sprouted more than 15 satellite art fairs around the city. On top of this, most museums and galleries around the city run special events on the same weekend. You can also visit some major private art collections like the Rubell family's collection and Margulies family's collection. Both collections are housed in vast warehouses with a great amount of cutting edge contemporary art. If you do go to see this major art event in coming years, I strongly advice you to visit some of the satellite shows which carry great work. With booth fees reaching six figures, most galleries take less chances with bringing experimental work to the main Art Basel affair. In contrast, the smaller fairs, charge much less (five figures) and the work tends to be more interesting. The smaller fairs are also easier to walk through. Here is the list of the fairs going o...

No need to worry about the lack of snow. We spent the weekend in Miami Art Basel while here in Colorado we had so much snow that we needed to enlist the help of a neighbor with a plow just to drive up to our house. Our flight to Vail got canceled twice due to snow storms, so we rented a one way SUV and drove up to the mountains.