Seven pieces from the Terra Nullius series found a new home this weekend at a great mid-western bank in Columbia. Thank you Jennifer at Perlow-Stevens Gallery for making it happen.
If you are interested in including a piece from this series in your art collection, now is the time. There are only three pieces remaining. Including my favorite which is below!
Terra Nullius 17, 20x20
Please contact me to check current availability.
Six weeks ago, my friend Christina and I started following a fitness program. After not running since my soccer days (and only then either chasing or being chased), we started training for the 5k ColorRun. We’re following the very sensible Couch to 5K running program and dutifully following the verbal instructions given us by Get Running – an application on our phones. As we work our way through the training intervals, a very pleasant British female voice tells us when to start and stop running, and periodically gives us words of encouragement. Her accent adds a sense of sophistication as we sweat our way around the park.
We often talk back to our British foe friend, and I would be less than truthful if I said that everything said to her was nice. In fact, for weeks we have made fun of her when she has offered one particular suggestion, sarcastically thanking her for her “sage” advice. When we embark on our longest running interval she offers in her most pleasant and helpful way, “Remember to moderate your pace, and if you find yourself flagging, slow back a little to a pace you can maintain.” This is followed a bit later by, “Don’t forget you can slow your pace a little, should you need to.” For weeks Christina and I have laughed about this, imagining a person running full speed about to fall out, but not knowing how to solve their problem. We picture the person with their hair blown back, cheeks flapping as if in a wind tunnel, painfully sprinting past without the common sense to slow down.
But, last night as I was making my way around the park, it occurred to me that what seems such obvious common sense in running is not applied to other areas of our life.
Indeed, what if in those times when our lives are running at a blistering tempo, a voice could remind us occasionally:
or
I hope my artwork can be that pleasant reminder – minus the british accent.
Mile Marker 261, 16x22
“this most amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees & for the blue dreams of sky & for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes.” ~ E.E. Cummings
Mile Marker 275, 22"x34"
One supposes something should be said
about these rows of earthen posts–
stones only in composition, stretching sandstone-yellow red
as far as wire strands will lead them, hosts
along some prairie pasture, or down deserted tractor lanes,
hunkered up against the snow and wind, lost
out in fields of swishing grain,
not rock or post to the untrained eye,
rather an innuendo of both; the plain
truth is how alone the sky
can set them off the best.
After a rain perhaps, their rich brown dye
infests the air around them as if to test
the theories of application. Whoever thought
that quarried limestone could bless
this flattened landscape, then wrought
stones from the earth and fought them–
each a squarish, irregular gem–into place . . .
his mark the winds have not erased.
Jeff Boyer
Jeff and I met last summer while I was doing a show here in Kansas City, and we had a great conversation about art, literature and the Kansas Flint Hills. Thank you Jeff for sharing your work with us – it is beautiful.
Have you seen post rocks? Are they used anywhere besides Kansas?
[muh-jes-tik] adjective
;
I am happy to report that at this point in my career these are not typically my emergencies, rather I have advanced to become the solution to said emergencies. So I might not have “solve blindness” on my to-do list like my friend Christina (who, btw, should get a huge whopping bonus if she gets to mark that one off!), but I am quite capable and equipped to render art related triage.
The result of the latest triage is a show I would be happy to have hanging anywhere (even with more than 12 hours notice), but especially since it will be in my own Columbus Park neighborhood. If you haven’t seen my previous body of work, “Collective Memories”, or you would like to revisit it, please swing by this Friday, May 18th to Columbus Park’s hottest new dinner spot, Pandolfi’s Deli.
by Chris Dahlquist
Have an art emergency or want to learn more about the Collective Memories show please contact me.
Have you had a art emergency? Oh, and have you read Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern? I finished it yesterday and it makes me want to revisit these images and treat them in a different way! The first line of the description seems to fit with my week quiet well:
“The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not.”
“Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.” Henry David Thoreau
MIle Marker 230, 23" x 35"
To add this or another piece to your collection please contact me.
You can probably imagine what the days leading up to a show look like.
Something like this:
Preparing for shows
or this:
loads of artwork
And you can probably imagine what the days after a typical show look like.
lots of miles
But one of the glorious things about doing a hometown show is that the days immediately following (which we call the “show hangover”) look something like this:
Great meals
a clean desk
a good book and a comfy hammock
and the muses
But as of today I am back in the studio, the desk will be messy soon enough, and the muses will have to tough it out on their own. So if you need me you know where I will be.
“To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, One clover, and a bee, And revery. The revery alone will do, If bees are few.” Emily Dickinson
Mile Marker 280, 35" x 51"
To check the availability of this or similar pieces please contact me.
From the painter that creates in their dining room on Sunday afternoons to the new Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts, Kansas City supports the arts and it is becoming not only local but national news. But for artists that participate in art festivals this comes as no surprise. Kansas City is host to two of the highest ranked juried art festivals in the country (based on sales and attendance), the Brookside Art Annual and the Plaza Art Fair. And I am thrilled to be participating in both of these spectacular shows. Thank goodness I’m not superstitious – it will be my 13th year in each!
So while the art community continues to grow, and get press in the New York Times, and the New York Post, Frommer’s names Kansas City one of top destinations for 2012 (the only US city to make the list). Even our “rival cities” along I-70, Saint Louis and Denver declare, “Score one for Kansas City,” and “Kansas City is a cultured place.“.
The individual artists that have long been bringing great art to the streets of Kansas City and come visit us at the Brookside Art Annual.
Art Fair Hours:
Friday, May 4, 5pm-9pm
Saturday, May 5, 10am-9pm
Sunday, May 6, 11am-5pm
While in Brookside visiting the art festival be sure to visit the other small locally owned shops that make up the wonderful neighborhood. Brookside in the KC Star
Not in Kansas City? Visit my schedule to see when I will be in a town near you. Or come visit us in Kansas City for the Plaza Art Fair and see all the great things that the “Paris of the Plains” has to offer.