Meet  El Anatsui . . .

Meet Rick Ladd and discover the world of bottle cap art and craft. And then there’s Kappo Kappino . . .

Wow, here we are on Vis island, in Croatia, and Thierry found the motherlode – of trash. Not the good kind of trash you can pick through for art supplies: this is the icky kind you don’t dare touch, a mountain of toxic stinkbombs wrapped in plastic bags with flies, birds and starving cats picking at it in the still-hot late September sun. Casual visitors won’t see it, of course, but if you like trekking through the hills, there are killer views of the bay just on the other side of Trash Mountain.

Hopefully it won’t just be me, Leila Darabi and Ruby Re-Usable posting our pics of decorative dumpsters. Got one? To show yours on here, send to shivita@mac.com. Oh yeah, if you need a fun logo like this one here, I can make one for you.

My contribution to triple-d day is this reminder about accumulation. If your house looks anything like this, maybe it’s time to call someone like Mr. Rubbish. And NO, this isn’t mine!

Oh, wow, look what I just found: Crackheads Gone Wild!

In the sleepy village of Grandrif, deep in south-central France, Henri Grange is in trouble for a weird trash installation he’s made in public space. You could call it large-scale assemblage, art brut, Aufhebung, or just some crazy weirdo’s mess, but he calls it “Thanatos euh! euh! euthanasié” and is quite serious about it. Thanx to Charlène Valable for the tip.

It takes a very obsessive-compulsive type to put together the richest art car blog in the world, and Costas Schuler a.k.a. The Pen Guy is our man. Elaine Merkus of Padiès turned me on to him a couple years ago when she sent me a link to some image she’d seen on his blog, and I’ve been following in amazement ever since. It’s called Art Car Central, and today I see he’s found half a Mercedes integrated into a graf wall with Karl Marx and Jimi Hendrix stenciled on. Wow. To see what I mean about obsessive-compulsive, check out his Mercedes Pens. Phew! Costas, do you ever sleep?

I used to be a packrat, but I’m working on it. This is the garage at my grandmother’s house where I store all my junk. Getting rid of it, little by little, aiming for minimalism. Accumulation is the first step in the cycle of excess. Let go.

and O is for organized

There’s still too much crap here, but I managed to get rid of some and organize what’s left.

Claudia Borgna is an installation and performance artist whose main medium is recycled plastic bags. Her work is a comment on the way we live and how it affects the environment, but she adds “… it’s a non-judgmental comment, since I haven’t really resolved for myself, and never will, its contradictory nature of beauty and danger.”

I discovered Claudia from a photo in the McColl Center artist’s section of Mitchell Kearney’s website.

…a Mercedes Pens? Well honey, you’ll just have to talk to The Pen Guy about that. Costas Schuler is one of those rare people with so much energy it jumps out at you across the internet and licks your hand. His other blog, Art Car Central, is the only art car link I keep in my bookmarks bar now. It’s a good-looking, complete and well-researched source – and then there’s the content: he finds stuff I’ve never even heard of! Hats off to The Pen Guy… and stay tuned. He’ll be part of the traveling Visible Trash expo I’m planning for 2010.

Andy Gregg’s passion for bicycles had him working in bike shops as soon as he was able. After studying design and fine art, he merged passion and profession and has been creating elegant pieces of designer furniture from discarded bike parts since 1990. His company is called Bike Furniture Design and is located in Marquette, Michigan (USA).

I went through a trashformation of my own last month when I had to go back to Charlotte, NC to clean up a mess at my grandma’s house. While I was there I worked on some of my own mess, boxes and boxes of STUFF stored in a friend’s garage. Lesson 1 (emotional) – learn from the past then let it go. Lesson 2 (physical) –  THROW SHIT AWAY!!!

There’s a line between yanbuki and packrat, and I sure don’t want to cross it. Eek!

Media alert: A piece I wrote called “Timeline of a Transformation” was included in David Barringer’s new book, “What Happened to Us These Last Couple Years?“.