Le Palais Ideal

In 2007 I made a journey to the Palais Ideal, a place of dreams built by one man, a village postman in Hauterives, France, who collected intriguing stones on his rounds and using these finds, commenced in 1879 to build the hauntingly beautiful palace in his spare time. Ferdinand Cheval labored for thirty-three years to bring his palace to completion and it is truly one of the premier sites of visionary art in existence, a site beloved of the surrealists and Picasso, and a place of pilgrimage for many artists like myself. The Palais is so intricate and detailed that it is difficult to narrow down the selection of photos and since I would like to explore it in depth I may dedicate another post to the images --if you'd like to see more.

Urban Fae

I have begun to make a new series of miniature faery furniture for my Etsy shop, Pandora Jane. These pieces are part of the "Urban Fae" series and they combine my love of natural materials with the equally fascinating world of the found object (already an important part of my larger scale works).

"Lurking beneath the alley's spindly saplings or along the sidewalk where a dandelion breaks through concrete to mirror the sun, crouched at the edge of a pigeon's nest in the niche of a cathedral arch or among the window boxes on the 5th floor, they are the urban fae, those who have chosen to live in this most human of environments and offer subtle encouragement to the natural world. These fae can be a bit tricksy to deal with, although contrary to much popular belief they are not adversarial to humans. They do have a difficult role to fulfill and at times there have been incidents...
They are experts at blending human cast offs with materials from the urban natural world to create imaginative homes and furnishings. This chair represents a prime example. It combines the remnants of a blue enamel pan, broken crockery bits and a rusted bottle cap with twigs, mica, lichen and a duck feather from the city park. The throne measures 18 centimeters high to the tip of the feather x 5 cm. wide."

And another urban fae piece, a bottle cap, pottery shard and twig chair and tea table.

Under Construction

A marionette (of papier-mache and natural materials) in progress-- and yet another film still.

Fairytale

Sometimes when traveling we stop rather randomly late at night wherever a good place to park the van presents itself. And sometimes I am fortunate to catch a glimpse through the darkness of a lovely witch hat tower faintly reflected in black water so that when morning comes I am up and ready to experience the changing light over yet another fairytale castle along the Loire River. This is the chateau of the Dukes of Sully, nestled where the water divides in two, embracing castle and an oak park populated with crows who noisily scold me for trespassing in their domain.

Across the water and into the village...

 

 A former mariner’s cottage along the Loire.

Fishing for something different in a garden along the banks of the river.

A Found Object Puppet

I fabricated this puppet last year for a stop motion animation. It was inspired by the twin faces of the Roman deity Janus, gazing in two directions, looking both forward and back, past and future, here and there. Its hollow torso represents the blind windows of the crow inhabited multistoried temple of Janus ruin in Autun, France.
If you look closely you will discover butterfly wings preserved between thin sheets of mica, a demitasse spoon found flattened in a parking lot, a pocket watch case that lay many years at the bottom of a great river, a porcelain doll leg of late nineteenth or early twentieth century vintage, snapping turtle bones, almond shells, slices from deer antlers and so on... I love the stories that one can spin around such objects, the histories known and imagined. And the weird synergy of attempting to bring together so many disparate objects into a coherent and evocative whole.

On High In the Ardeche

Here are a few random shots from a tiny village perched high on the pine covered slopes of the Ardeche region where the air is crystalline and the resulting color of the sky an amazingly intense blue.

Film Still

Medusa In the Surf

On the Isle of Noirmoutier

At the edge of the gentle morning surf

A mythical creature

And the abstract beauty of a tide pool ...