The Arts and the Raven/Crow

This weekend my sister and I went over to the lakefront of Milwaukee to see the Milwaukee Art Festival. We almost ended up at Polish Fest but made our way North towards the Art Museum (past the Sumerfest stadium). It was a great time, lots of walking in a big tent and many great and unique art creations.

My favorite artist was: Sam Spiczka
http://www.sculptorsam.com/galleries.html
From rural Minnesota, Spiczka uses influences from bone structure, rural technology, and natural geometric shapes on a wood or metal medium. Spiczka has come up with some beautiful shapes and shows high end mastery in many of his works. Including some which hold a ball of wood inside of it (never removed from the original wood). This is something that is difficult for even the most-practiced wood-workers.

"In a Polyculture, the yield of any one activity is less than that capable of being produced via Monoculture, but the overall yield of all activities combined is much greater. This is due to the inherent complexity of the system. What appears inefficient is in fact the ultimate in resiliency. 

My life is becoming a Polyculture. That is both terrifying and completely natural." Spiczka

Two other great artists were Matthew Hatala, a woodturner (his work is depicted straight above http://matthewhatala.blogspot.com/), and Gary Curtis, a painter.

One of the other artists (The Michigander, Mark Orr) had all of his objects featuring a Raven/Crow and shared more mythology behind the bird. One of the tales is that the Norse god Odin had two ravens, Thought and Memory which flew around the world by day to report back to him events in the world. The artist still sees these birds as the unfolders of our universe and constructors of fate.

Here it is more raven mythology on his website: http://www.scavengerart.com/raven.html

We also made our way into the newest Art Museum (temporary) exhibit which held a piece of Chinese historic artifacts that a Dynasty leader was saving in a garden for his retirement. Sadly, he never made it to retirement and now, many years later, his objects are circling the globe in displays before they find their final place back in their homeland of China. (This display was awing through its historic perspective, but artfully, it seemed to be just a bunch of furniture.)