An old friend from Baltimore just left after visiting with us for a week, Doug Retzler.
http://www.artandeffects.com/
We both attended a private Fine Arts College in Baltimore now called MICA. What do people do with a Fine Arts Education? Mine traversed from photography to illustration, to flowers to many, many years of painting, and back to flowers (the constant was nature and flowers as subject matter).
Doug went from still photography to working on special effects in film (creating rain, wind, fog.... etc.- no blowing things up, thank you) and creating large scale art events that everyone can participate in. His intention and hope is to empower people to make art and to educate them on environmental and cultural topics while having fun.
Baltimore is not Berkeley on the
Green Richter Scale and his work is especially relevant there. He especially likes to work with kids who have not been given a lot of opportunities to make art or know where a tomato comes from or who can't wrap their minds around the fact that parks belong to them.
Here's an example of one of my favorite projects, THE GOURD PALACE.
Doug finds the site and community/school to work with. He designs the structure and builds it with with some helpers out of bamboo, reinforced with rebar (all this plant material is heavy). The participants learn about the ancient culture of growing gourds, then plant a bunch of varieties from seed. When they big enough, they transplant them to the base of the Gourd Palace.
When the vines take off and grow they need training up the palace walls.
Here's the Palace all grow in. I'm admonishing Doug to get some better photos on his site. These are truly magical, fantastic structures.
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