Hornet paper, bee combs and other weird media

Wood carving: horses were a recurring theme

Not a part of ArtPrize but I love the detail on this building

This was part of a 20 piece installation of animals. I love this boar

Made entirely from lip prints

A very small part of a huge installation of a fantasy garden

glass and found object mosaic about 20 feet long

Hornet nests and hornet paper sculpture

Hornet lady collects paper from both hornet and yellow jacket nests. Her husband pictured with a prize hornet nest collects them for a living. The frame uses hornet paper.Near it, unphotographed, is a purse and a vase from hornet paper

same object a few seconds later. I have about 10 more

This case is full of honey bees. They build honeycombs on the pictures or maybe pictures form around the honeycombs they build Too tired to read details

Close up of a bee creation

We have seen this realistic guy in the Stanford Art Museum. His old lady on him is extremely realistic down to the varicose veins and toenail fungus

One installation was a series of shattered glass pieces in the Grand Rapids art museum. They looked real

These bunnies in the middle of Grand River are up for a prize...go figure

The sun came out and it was early evening making photos difficult I do like the scuba bulldog

a take on American Gothic from tin cans

Grand Rapids is beautiful in the fall

Huge agate rocks with ceramic sails

I love reflections

This huge eagle, hard to photograph is made of many papercuts in a single sheet of paper One of my favorites

The eagle again

More reflections (I have a lot of these)

I love these wood carvings (there are about 6 but the sun right behind them made photography impossible)

neon lights

detail of a huge felt installation

2 faced ceramic tile sculptures

Paper box village

dress made from discarded 35 mm slides

small part of a huge painting

One of my favorites. There were about 10 infinity boxes you put your head in and see forever
Hard to photograph the effect

my friend in one of the boxes

Suspended assault rifles making up our country

Yesterday I learned the difference between yellow jacket paper and hornet paper: the former is lighter colored and thinner than the latter, which I am more familiar with given all the hornet nests I've encountered (lots of them this year). Never saw the inside of a wasp's nest as they usually are in the ground. But I never saw art work made from it.

It was a beautiful day for our annual pilgrimage to Grand Rapids for ArtPrize. We were gone more than 12 hours, spent hours walking around and I am sure we only saw less than a third of what was there. I took many photos draining my phone to zero and my friend with her fancy camera took 3 for every one of mine. Some experiences can not be captured by camera; the music and performance art and film. One entrant had us hold a stiff piece of paper against a spinning wheel. You then heard with our crude phonograph needle All you need is love.

And some installations are only interesting at night. We left as the sun was setting (beautiful sunset in my rear view mirror). Bonus: our lunch was comped as our waiter kept screwing things up.

Meanwhile I've made lots of progress on several different fronts so yay for me.

Update: Not long after I published this, Google plus doctored one of my photos: