When Futurism Collides with Sailing Cargo
A headline from “developing” Africa, “Sierra Leone Drafts a Development Plan for the Next Fifty Years.”
A forum loosely organized around traditional craft has a discussion about sailing cargo vessels. There are links to proposals for container ships sporting lofty, computerized, automated sail plans, “working” counterparts to the latest sailing cruise ships, themselves intended as fantasy havens for fantasy seekers.
Schools & Museums
For me, both as an artist and as someone involved with traditional boats, schools and museums have gone hand in hand and they have both been vitally important to me over the years.
Today, I keep coming back to a hunch that schools and museums need to change. They need to change and they need to change for the same reasons and in ways that might end up making them indistinguishable. This is true of all schools and all museums, though here let’s focus on the institutions within and around the community of boats.
A Cross-post from Fine Lines
Craft is Technique with Context
Craft, like Art, has been in exile for a long time, put in a ghetto where it’s been held at the mercy of wealth. In a way I suppose we should be grateful, they might have disappeared entirely without patronage; but on the other hand, if it hadn’t been for the creation of poverty and its spread due to the predations of “wealth generation,” Art and Craft might have remained vibrant, integrated aspects of life.
One of the most dispiriting concerns I have – in a time of plenty in this regard! – has been the way so many who should know better continue to confound Craft and Technology. The epitome of this might just be the halleluiahs surrounding the advent of the 3-d printer. I don’t share in this enthusiasm.
The Schooner Boat, part I
There are different kinds of thinking. I’ve been focusing on the forms of thought involved in Craft recently, beginning with an insight that we are motivated to Craft out of an awe for the abundance of quality that surrounds us in what used to be called the Natural World. Technique is about getting something. Craft involves us in immersing ourselves in a relationship with our physical surroundings and then responding in kind to the quality of what we find there. Looked at in this way, Craft is a practice, or more precisely, a series of practices that engage us with our reality and help keep us from wandering off into realms of wish-fulfillment. Technique claims to be neutral; but it fails to mediate between our desires and reality. Adding more powerful technologies overwhelms our capacity to see our deviation in time, leading to overshoot. Practicing Craft exercises our capabilities and hones our judgement; making us fit; physically, mentally, and emotionally.
Horizons of Significance- Stone Soup, Countering the Spectacle
- Fine Lines
- Light on Canvas
- Recent work
- What Happens When Avant Garde Leaves the New Academy Behind?
- My Entry in the PAAM Winter Members’ Show, Small Work
- Learning to See, Scratching at the Truth
- Lamp & Dhalias
- Self Portrait
- Notes on the Sources of Art
- A suite of Marine Paintings
- Stages of a Painting, Lee Shore
- Stages of a painting, Mattakeeset
- Antonio Dias Design
- Antonio Dias
