Holiday Rituals
Wednesday, November 12th, 2008
3 Ornament Display
Julie and Ken Girardini
A guest post from Artful Home Marketing Manager Elizabeth Tucker
All the activities around decorating for the holidays are steeped in ritual and memories. Taking out the holiday ornaments each year from storage is one of my favorite rituals. We haul up the box of ornaments from the basement, open a bottle of wine, and begin unpacking. And we tell and retell the stories behind the special ones. There’s the cobalt blue blown glass orb that was a wedding gift from a favorite family friend; the faded red fabric strawberry that I’ve put on the tree every year since childhood; the ceramic star that once belonged to my grandmother. I cherish the memories that are embedded in each of these tiny objects, and love taking the time every year to reflect on the people and events that come to mind as I pull each ornament out of its box.
This year, as Marketing Manager at Artful Home, I feel lucky to have become part of what has now become an annual holiday ritual for us and our customers: the Ornament-a-Day Giveaway, where we give away one beautiful, artist-made ornament each day to a lucky winner. It’s fun to play “elf” during our busy holiday season, doing the daily drawings, and notifying the winners who are always thrilled to hear that they’ve won. This year, we’ve also added a grand prize: one of our new “3 Ornament Display” stands created by metal artists Julie and Ken Girardini, which will surely become a family heirloom for one lucky winner.
You can enter the daily giveaways at http://ornamentaday.artfulhome.com. And, who knows, maybe you’ll be one of the lucky ones who will have the “Remember how excited I was when I won this beautiful ornament?” story to tell next year.
Artful Home Glass Artist Bernard Katz Among 2009 NICHE Award Finalists
Tuesday, November 11th, 2008
Bernard Katz
A guest post from Artful Home glass merchant Kathi Collins
It’s not so easy for an artist to get recognition for his or her work. Selling is one way. Exhibiting is another way. Being recognized through a prestigious award is yet another. We are atwitter at Artful Home as 30 of our artists, including glass artist Bernard Katz, have been nominated for a 2009 NICHE Award! This is a really big deal, as only 151 entrants out of 1,000 have been tapped as finalists! Katz’s nominated work, “The Avelino“, is characteristic of his sculptural glass forms. At 27″ long and 13″ high, this piece uses positive and negative space to create a sense of graceful movement. The sandblasted surface diffuses light and creates a soft glow about the sculpture, while revealing a contrasting layer of color at the base. Some compare his forms to Arp and Brancusi, but I find his approach to be, in fact, his own – organic, graceful and dynamic. And so, obviously, did the NICHE judges. You can see his exploration of glass art forms on the Bernard Katz artist page on the Artful Home website.
The NICHE Awards originated in 1990 as a means of recognizing the achievements of North American artists. The criteria for selection are: technical excellence, market viability and exceptional creativity. Awards will be presented in a ceremony on February 15, 2009, at the Philadelphia Buyer’s Market of American Craft. In the meantime, I will continue to post about many more of these exceptional artists who are among the 2009 finalists.
Paul Hawken’s Blessed Unrest Reminds Us of the Importance of Artists
Wednesday, November 5th, 2008
Blessed Unrest
by Paul Hawken
Paul Hawken, one of the wisest men on earth in my opinion, has published a new book that I’ve just finished reading. Titled Blessed Unrest, the book describes the convergence of the environmental and social justice movements, and “how the largest movement in the world came into being.”
Paul Hawken is an entrepreneur (one of founders of Smith & Hawken) who has devoted his life to environmentalism and the journalism that reports on it. In this beautiful, soulful book, he makes the case that we are all part of the earth’s immune system each time we exercise our active compassion in the name of social justice and ecological health.
Hawken lectures tirelessly on this subject, and he writes of giving groups the task of designing a spaceship that could leave earth and return in one hundred years with an ecosystem and crew that is healthy and happy. The top designs, he writes, are the ones where the passengers of the spaceship create a culture rather than simply consume one. This requires that a significant proportion of the passengers be artists, musicians, actors, and storytellers.
Blessed Unrest is an incredibly relevant book for our time. It reminds us that now, more than ever, we need our artists to help us envision and create a totally new culture – one that remakes, restores, renews, and revitalizes society and the earth.
