Lifesize Stonehenge Bouncy Castle? Yes, please!

View the slideshow on Flickr.

What better way could there be to spend the Summer Solstice than bouncing around on this? I love interactive art installations - and it doesn't get much more interactive than this.

The title of the piece is Sacrilege by artist Jeremy Deller and it's touring the UK right now. How I wish it was a world tour and would come here!

Photo: sacrilege by hellojenuine

Only create things you can’t not create [Quote]

By Me

"Fear of protecting your platform can’t be what drives your creative process. Only create things you can’t not create. Even if that means losing some of your audience."

from Dear musicians, authors, bloggers & me. | Jon Acuff's Blog

As always, some great points from Jon Acuff (make sure you click through and read the whole post).

Making yourself miserable?

Here's an interesting list by Keri Smith. I've seen it floating around a bit lately and find it eye-opening every time I come across it. I do several things on this list on a regular basis. I won't say which I do, but I know all creative people probably do at least a couple at any given time - we're all human. We all fall into these traps. But being aware of them helps us climb out of the holes we dig for ourselves and hopefully avoid falling back into them in the future.

 via Rachelle Gardner

Wed Pics: Happy Birthday, Norman Rockwell

Instead of the usual picture of my own today, I thought I'd follow Google's lead and celebrate Norman Rockwell's birthday. He's one of my favorite artists, and was probably my first favorite artist. I can't remember a time I wasn't familiar with his work. When I was little, we had a huge coffee table book of Rockwell's Saturday Evening Post covers (I think this was it). I could barely lift it, but luckily, the book was usually stored in a low place it could be slid out of, so I could lay it open on the floor and get lost in the paintings.

I always especially loved the covers that involved a whole sequence of events, like the gossips or the "Day in the life of..." ones like "A Day in the Life of a Girl."

I almost put that as "the covers that tell a story" but they ALL tell a story, and that's what's so great about Norman Rockwell. We also see ourselves in them, despite the passing of time, changes in technology, or changes in popular culture. The people in his paintings are humans, and we're all still human, whether it's 1920, 1950 or 2010.

Odd art, revealed

While reading this article on hidden art today, I was reminded of a painting I saw in the Norwich Castle Museum years ago. The paintings in the article were a second canvas meant to fit over another, while this one was actually partially painted over, but it still has an interesting story.

Frances Mathew Schutz in his bed, by William Hogarth, was apparently commissioned by Schutz's wife "to remind him not to party too hard" (as I wrote it on the back of the postcard I bought at the time). According to the Tate Britain website, "The canvas proved too indecorous in its imagery for Schutz’s Victorian descendants. They hired an artist to paint in a newspaper over the chamber-pot; only a recent programme of restoration returned the painting to its original state."