Tom Friedman

I don't know much about Tom Friedman except that he makes me laugh and his art has something to do with commercial products and repetition maybe. I'll look into it more tomorrow, but here's a few photographs. The last 2 in particular would make me lol if I didn't hate it when people wrote lol. He also seems to like the circular form, which I'm interested in myself. The artwork in the last picture is not actually the block - that's just the plinth. It's a sphere of space above plinth, which has been cursed by a witch. What makes it more real, the idea of it having been visited by the witches physical presence or the introduction of the idea of a sphere shape (of  nothing)? Anyway, it makes me laugh. Job done. 

1. Untitled 1995 Toothpicks 66 x 76.2 x 58.4 cm 26 x 30 x 23"
2. Untitled 1990 The artist writes his signature repeatedly for the life of a pen 106.7 cm
3. Tom Friedman, Untitled 1999/2002 wooden school chair, 35 x16-½ x 24-½ inches Courtesy Mary Boone Gallery
4. Two By Four 1990 A 2 x 4in wooden plank painted in acrylic to look exactly like itself 121.9 x 9.5 x 4.5 cm
5. Untitled - A Curse 1992 An 11inch sphere of space floating 11inch above the top of a pedestal cursed by a witch 133.4 x 28 x 28 cm

David Nash - Ash Dome

This is something I looked at during my circle project at Uni. Just thought I'd post some pics. It's 22 Ash trees planted on the property of David Nash, an artist who lives (or at least did in 1977) in Cae'n-y-coed in North Wales. Over about 30 years he grew them into a circular formation.

丸 (Circles)

Mum and sister are going to read this, so I thought I'd try and write something intelligent. The above is the Japanese character (Kanji) for circle. I don't know why. 円 « This is also a kanji for circle and is also the kanji for en (or yen), the Japanese currency. I don't know why that is either. But at least it shows that kanji are interesting. 


Anyway, the point I was thinking about was about circles. I did a project for university on circles and while I don't remember too much of it, I do remember that it's an important symbol in the human brain. I'll try to remember more another time, but Freud (or maybe Jung) studied circles and got people to do the painting equivalent of automatic writing, which was to ask someone to paint and draw until they weren't really thinking about it and subconscious thoughts came out. The symbol of the circle was quite prominent from what I remember and, also, the brain likes to work on repetition (I think, in terms of both making us feel comfortable and also making us feel eerie), in line with the symbol of the circle. 

So, I found it interesting that when I was trying to teach students (I'm an English teacher to adults) pronunciation, the letter 'o' seemed to be really strong in Japanese peoples' heads. Japanese language has a few less sounds than English and Japanese is pronounce words phonetically (exactly how they're written). So, in words like 'cussion' and 'lemon', it's difficult to get some students to say 'lemern' rather than 'le/mon' or 'cushern' rather than 'cu/shon'. There's a lot of other examples of sounds that are difficult (f and h, s and sh, s and th, u and a etc) but I found that the hardest for a lot of students to shake out of their head (as oppose to just wrapping their tongue, or ears, around the sound) was 'o'. It even produced fits of laughter for a couple of students. We broke the words down and they could say the sounds separately, but when a word was put together again they couldn't stop themselves saying the letter o. One student in particular found it very funny. It wasn't every student (some found it easy) but it was quite a few and I might be talking rubbish but it was interesting to me that 'o' seemed to be really heavily fixed in their brains. That is all. Now I'm going to bed.