Meet Me at Etsy

I have an online shop, Art by Raber, at Etsy, a great site where you can buy and sell all sorts of wonderful hand-made stuff such as jewelry, clothing, fine art, you name it.

Mary Magdalen Icon

Quality prints of this icon may be had at my Etsy shop. Reminder: Tomorrow is Mary Magdalen Day on the Roman Catholic calendar.

This is the first in a series, inspired by Byzantine mosaic and other traditional sources--not to speak of the lives of the saints themselves.

The Blue Staircase

21" x 20" x 4 3/4" mixed media box construction. A sculptural unit composed (?) as far as possible subconsciously. The viewer will have to decide if it is just an inchoate mess or something interesting to look at. Give me $350.00 plus shipping and call it your own. Your heirs will thank you when it sells at some hotsy-totsy New York auction house for several million dollars (though I make no promises on this score). Go to Art by Raber at Etsy.

Magic Wands

Here are some magic wands, like the Harry Potter ones but a lot fancier. Some of my wands are available at the Clinton County Arts Council shop in St. Johns, Michigan, and others are up for sale at my Etsy shop on the web. Watch for price cuts coming soon on these fine collectible art wands.

It's a New Day

Three cheers and a cupcake for the individual who can tell me the artist who created this lovely altarpiece. (I'm not teasing--I forgot.) And is that God the Father pictured there, or Christ?

I had never realized until a few years ago that God the Father has been pictured in Western art. I had thought that was a no-no (make no graven image and all that); and it is, more or less, but it has been done. He is almost always pictured, as far as I can tell, as an old man with a beard--surprise, surprise.

How would God be pictured today? Perhaps as Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime. Donald Trump with good hair. Rush Limbaugh at a weight within his category on the weight-height chart. Donald Rumsfeld if the Iraq war had gone as he imagined it would have. The Supernanny. The latest American Idol (God as Boredom personified).

This is getting silly. But it is a new day, and a worthy day for looking at a beautiful picture.

O Joy

Right up there in my announcement I talk about the joy of making art, but it's not always joyous, is it? If you are an artist of any stripe, you probably know it.

When things aren't going well with the project at hand, or even with life outside the art transaction, working on the art can seem tedious and pointless.

And then there is the obsession. Feeling driven to create is most often a good thing and a fine feeling, giving you purpose and energy; but at times the unfreedom can feel like addiction or slavery.

Also when one's art seems to be going nowhere in the marketplace--that is surely a downer especially when compounded with any of the above.

Given the character of these gray ideas of mine--can you tell that it's been a long winter here in Michigan? On the bright side, we haven't had any flooding or suicide bombings lately.

If none of this is helping your own mood, please come back when I'm happier! That will be tomorrow.

A New Table

This table is about 19" wide, 29" long and 23" high. The top is covered with a sheet of galvanized steel and should develop an interesting patina over time, especially if folks are not too fastidious about putting coasters under their glasses and cups, and it is only lightly cleaned once in a while to get the gross crud off. In this way, you can let this table record a little bit of your life.

The rim around the top is a thick piece of poplar stained dark and the legs are of pine painted with a dark red shiny enamel. The legs are turned, all to different shapes, wavy and sensuous. See this piece soon at Absolute Gallery in Lansing, Michigan.

I Had a Bad Day

The title is added by me; the art is a by creative young friend of mine, done with Paint software. It's pretty gruesome but admirably colorful, and would make an interesting T-shirt.

A Work in Cut Paper: "Anatomy of a Dream"

I like to take a genre and then do something with it--fill it in, so to speak; fill it to overflowing, I guess (as I have done with "magic wands"); maybe filling it with stuff that doesn't necessarily belong in that particular shell.

The "Coat of Arms" or family crest is a unique genre in art (something like the commercial logos we see everywhere today) with a few straightforward elements to be set up and filled in. That's where the idea for this piece started.

I haven't done much conscious thinking about the parts of this composition and how they relate--or I've done some thinking and not let it develop too far--which is intellectual laziness or a canny strategy for letting "inspiration" kick in.

The motto says, CONVIVIUM MAGNUM MULTI MORSUS, which I'm pretty proud of because I think the Latin I have come up with is correct (as far as I can tell with my 12th grade Latin--thanks, Mrs. Rens) and also because the Latin meaning is clear on the face of it, but could also be taken in another interesting way (again I say this based on my 12th grade Latin, so CAVEAT EMPTOR).

I'm thinking this piece might have gotten out of hand. I'm not sure how good it is. You be the judge.

More Magic Wands

See previous about Wands.

Thinking Like an Insider

I've caught myself thinking like an insider artist, theorizing about what I do.

The idea I come back to over and over is the notion that symbols or ideas (as visually represented) can be used in art as purely decorative (or perhaps purely "artistic") items, just as basic shapes combined with color, etc., are used decoratively in fashion, furniture, architecture, wallpaper and such.

The reception of the kind of art I'm thinking about here would require responding to the thought-items only up to a certain point, i.e., not taking them fully as thought items to be understood or made sense of. The whole composition would not cohere in a thought message but just as an overall impression.

I wonder if this line of thought has appeared anywhere in the insider art world.

A Work in Cut Paper: "Sunrise"

The bottom image is a less-than-perfect reproduction of the original cut-paper picture. The top image is something funny I did with it on my computer.

There is nothing like cut paper work. I like working with those flat solid vibrant colors. You have pure color, pure line, and then some texture with layering-on or textured papers--plus as much added detail as you choose with pen and ink or some paint. It is a painstaking medium--or at least tends to that unless you consciously go at it without a preconceived design, I suppose--and yet it is very rewarding.

Question: How much of our reaction to a work of art involves our knowledge or impression of what sort of effort went into the making of the work?

The Art Buzz

Some folks suck white powder into the nose, some pour alcohol down the throat, some seek love in all the wrong places, and some do art, like M.C. Escher, for example, who said in particular of his work with regular patterns in a plane:

"It remains an extremely absorbing activity, a real mania to which I have become addicted, and from which I sometimes find it hard to tear myself away."

That's what I'm talkin' about.

A question comes to mind: How is the way we "appreciate" or enjoy art not our own related to how we make our own?