hellziggy

Day 17 — An art piece (painting, drawing, sculpture, etc.)
Woodrow, with bonus Moose & Monkeys.

Woodrow looks like he is made of wood...

...even up close...

...until you touch him. He is cast bronze.

He lives at the Walker Art Center's Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. Here's what their site says about him:

WOODROW
DEBORAH BUTTERFIELD
1988
bronze

"In the 1970s I made horses out of real mud and sticks. They were, in part, meant to reflect how much a horse is part of his environment--I combined the figure and the ground."--Deborah Butterfield

Deborah Butterfield's remarkable interpretations of horses are constructed from such materials as crushed metal, wire, mud, straw, and fragments of wood. The sculptor has several horses of her own on a ranch in Montana, where she studies their movements and form carefully. Unlike Marino Marini's sculpture Cavaliere (Horseman) (circa 1949), in which the horse is portrayed as a stylized creature, Butterfield's sculptures are portraits of individual animals. For Woodrow, the artist took a selection of sticks, tree branches, and bark that she cast in bronze, then assembled and welded the pieces together into the form of a horse. Even though Butterfield's sculpture is made of many fragments, its spare and elegant structure is very lifelike. Woodrow blends easily with the natural setting of the Garden because the artist patinated (colored) the bronze branches and twigs, making them look like natural wood.

Text Citation
Text for Deborah Butterfield, Woodrow (1988), from the curriculum guide The Minneapolis Sculpture Garden: A Garden for All Seasons, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 1998.
Object Details
Dimensions: without base 99 x 105 x 74 inches
Inscriptions: N.A.; N.A.
Classification: Sculptures; Sculpture
Physical Description: Horse constructed of bronze sticks and branches
Owner: Walker Art Center
Accession Number: 1988.375
Credit Line: Gift of Harriet and Edson W. Spencer, 1988

(And bonus art. The user pic I used is a painting I did for art class.)

( The whole list )

So, I haven't really posted much in the last few days and I only just finally got caught up on reading too. Feel free to blame the Nibleys. I do. If they weren't so darn fun and cool I wouldn't have spent as much time out with them!

I think I will just do quick bullet point updates for now because my brain is tired.

*

kniblet &

dibsy drove to Mpls for the Jasper Fforde reading and book signing. When we found them in Barnes & Noble on Wednesday it was the first real life meeting 'tween us & them. (Us is me &

genevra)

*They got immediate bonus points by bestowing Vosges chocolates & mix CDs upon us!

*My collection of cover songs in iTunes practically doubled! Hooray for

dibsy's obsessive love of covers that matches mine!

*BTW Simon, you had one band mislabeled. The Gin & Juice cover is actually by the Gourds. The attribution to Phish is actually because back in the days of Napster it was incorrectly labelled. Wikipedia info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gourds

*Jasper Fforde is a very charming & funny man. Kind of a warped sense of humor too.

*Thursday evening

hellbob and I got dinner with

kniblet &

dibsy. We decided to go with fast & cheap on the food and so got gyros at Santana's right near the U.

*Dinner was followed by the performance of Die, Clowns, Die! by Joe Scrimshaw at the Fringe Festival.

*It got a good review from the Nibleys, but we got a better one:

Another fantastic evening. It turns out that hellziggy and hellbob are an insane comedy duo in disguise. And Joseph Scrimshaw wasn't too bad, either.** Yes, the clowns do in fact die.
**Deliberate understatement for comic effect.

*People I Know who we saw at the show were: (in alphabetical order)

cajones,

chebutykin,

dewey921,

eldogo,

joshuwain, &

stark0228.

*The show ended with

eldogo kissing the sad clown.

*Clowns died. This is good. There was no actual clown makeup. This is very good.

*Unlike the previous day when I didn't go home before meeting them, on Thursday I actually had Stuff to gift to the Nibleys. They received the first adult size Jayne Cobb hat that I've made, and a CD of all the cover song MP3's I had. Also after talking to them on Wednesday, a bottle of HellDad's homemade cranberry wine was added to the stash as well as an audio CD of all the covers that I had from the iTunes Music Store that couldn't be burned as MP3. Grrr. Stoopid DRM!

*

dibsy &

kniblet got to experience many Minnesota Goodbyes (tm) while here.

*OK. So we're at Friday now? Only Friday? What a long week I've had!

*Friday night was dinner at Sawatdee and our first meeting with the Cute-as-a-Button

boliviafang.

*The food was excellent. The company was better! We have had such good luck with all the internets people we've met that I want to go hunt ALL of you down! Yes, I shall win the lottery and use my winnings to become an LJ stalker! OK. List of places I need to go: Alaska, Northern California, Texas, Kansas (I think...), Florida, Georgia, New Hampshire (or somewhere similarly East Coastish...), England, and Iceland. And I'm sure there are many more places that I am not thinking of now!

*There is a cheesecake place in Uptown, Muddy Something?, that has positively orgasmic cheesecake!

*Simon & Nicky claimed to be the most unphotogenic people in existence. I didn't believe this until I took a picture of them and as I looked at the digital LCD and back at them in real life I could not figure out at all how the picture on the screen could be of a totally different person and not the Simon sitting right there. I have never seen anything like that. It was a different freakin' person! Bizarre. There are those cultures that say that a photo will steal your soul. In the Nibley's case the camera actually photographs someone elses soul!

*Saturday morning we met

kniblet,

dibsy,

genevra,

gigglemonkey_b &

technomonkey_m at the Walker Sculpture Garden.

*The Nibleys are in agreement that the Monkeys are cuter in person than the pictures, which is saying a lot since they are darn cute in pictures!

*The Sculpture Garden is a great place to take two-year-olds because there is a lot of room for them to run while still being vaguely contained in each of the little hedged off sections.

*

gigglemonkey_b insisted on carrying Moose for much of the time. It's OK. He likes her.

*There were birds by the pond with the Cherry fountain. I am still unsure as to what kind they are. Definitely Bitterns (a small egret/heron like bird) but I'm not 100% sure on what kind. I'm thinking American Bittern (Botaurus lentiginosus) *edit* As I do more looking online I think I might have actually been right with my absolute first thought. When I saw the bird but wasn't close enough to see details I told Genevra that it looked like a Green Heron, but then when I got closer I saw that the colors were all wrong. Now I'm looking at pictures online of immature Green Herons and I'm about 90% sure that's what they were but when in doubt, email Birdchick! I got some very good pictures of them, both on the ground and in flight.

*I fell in love with Woodrow. He is a horse made of cast bronze. But, until you actually touch him, you would be convinced that he is made of wood. You can stand a foot away from him and swear that he is made of wood. Absolutely fucking brilliant!

*Then the Nibleys had to leave. *sob* Have I mentioned yet how much we absolutely adored them? Although we're not sure it is safe to have Simon & Rick in such close proximity for a length of time. Poor Nicky was trapped between them for a comic book geek session. Now we shall have to plan an expedition to Chicago at some point.

*After the Walker,

hellbob & I came home and took naps to prepare for our evenings of debauchery.

*The so-cute-together Nissa & Darek are getting married next month and so both the bachelor and the bachelorette parties were last night. For us girls the night consisted of dinner, drinks at a bar, and a slumber party at Nissa's house.

*

camel0t & the girls did a FABULOUS job planning everything. Dinner at Bellanotte was delicious! Danny, our waiter, was charming and did a great job. Drinks were down the street at the Imperial Room. I drank chocolate martinis. Yum!

*After we all got settled in with our pj's on, it was chick flick time! We started with Top Gun. Someone suggested doing a drinking game as we watched.

*Do you have any fucking idea how many times they say "Maverick" "Goose" and "MIG" in that movie? Yeah, neither did we! Thank the gods we decided not to also add "bogey" or "Iceman" or to have it count if they just said "Mav"

*Needless to say we never got a second movie watched.

*

camel0t made scrambled eggs for breakfast and then we watched The Notebook.

*Now I am home and I have napped and I've finally caught up on reading LJ, which I haven't been caught up on since Wednesday.

*And what's the deal with the little push-pin symbol on comments? Is there finally a way to track threads not in your journal when it's not a reply to you? Sweet! Must investigate!