July 15, 2008
Art Freedom Ocean to Ocean Tour, Ideas Are A.F.O.O.T., huge first day.
All the ideas and planning, the hope of somehow spinning dozens of strands of concepts into a unified project… are officially out the window… naw, just joking! – nothing could be farther from the truth – that doesn’t mean this project is easy to get a handle on.
Don’t worry, the project is intact – and is proceeding basically as planned… the only missing particle is the sound bite that explains the whole thing. That, I’m sure, will evolve eventually. I’m reminded how so many of the more experienced participants in Burning Man have been at a loss for words to ever describe exactly what it is all about.
So here it is: We are two artists, Tatiana Iliina and me, Offroad Artist. We both turned 50 this year, making it our Centennial, so we wanted to come up with a way of celebrating that would allow us to frolic ~ yet have some substance to it. Maybe even an epic frolic!
We are viewing this as a work of art. The end result is far from evident. Some of the parts are. For one thing, we’ll be taking thousands of photos and video clips and sharing a lot of these using blogs and who knows maybe some other media. Another really visual aspect will be the tablet sketches that Tatiana is working on every day. Since we are concerned about the environment, we are interested in exploring the natural assets of the road we travel, as well as some of the ways that we see people taking action to save our planet. We are interested in culture, how in its many, many forms it nurtures our civilization. That’s what this is about – not a whole heckuva lot more than that.
Sculpture park in St-Jean Port Joli, Quebec. On the lower St. Lawrence River there is a town that is an old wave cultural economic node. With over 50 thriving sculptor’s studios in the small town, St-Jean Port Joli’s artists and artisans follow in the footsteps of predecessors who defined the traditional wood carver in Quebec.
