Welcome to Planet SJ!
Planet SJ’s July and August
The sun is out. Let’s meet!
- New!!! Join me for “What is Perfection?” and other virtual art classes via Outschool
- Providence Artisans Market, Saturdays, 10-2 (unless too hot!)
- Made in Warren Sunday Stroll, Sunday, July 28th
- Paintings, Projections, Puzzles, Prototypes and Possibly Pie, Groundworks Gallery, New Bedford, MA, opening reception, Saturday, August 17th, with Skyjelly performance
- Made in Warren Featured Artist Reception, Thursday, August 30th?
Peace in America? Yes! Piece by piece…
For the last five years I’ve toured my “Puzzle and Pie Happy Hours”, community-building events inspired by the jigsaw puzzles I myself produce. I’m planning a national pilgrimage for 2019/2020, an initiative to bring diverse opinions to the table and simultaneously offer opportunities for self-expansion, mindful engagement with others/Others, and, of course, find the neurologically-driven joy of creative problem-solving! Previous hosts have included Brown University, Seattle Public Library System, Providence Community Libraries, Seekonk Public Library, Barrington Public Library, ArtProv Gallery, and various hospitals. I’m happy to send you more information or schedule a call with you before July’s heat melts all of our minds…This is a labor of love. If you want to contribute some coins to help me produce this project, I’ll be very grateful. Patreons receive mini-bennies, of course…
Support my Pie and Puzzle Happy Hour National Pilgrimage by becoming a Patron. Learn more here!
The digital puzzle contest is over –
but feel free to try it here
Made in collaboration with Beau Stubblefield-Tave, Michael Ferrier, and supported by Massachusetts Cultural Council and Seekonk Cultural Council we used this digital puzzle during our most February 2019 “Peace by Piece with Pie” hosted by Seekonk Public Library.
About SJL
I started drawing when I was four. On a white chair, I think. At some point I moved from chairs to paper. And then from paper to celluloid, making experimental non-fiction animations and films. The films allowed me to explore the religious imaginations and comic impulses of displaced persons, primarily denizens of Prague, among whom I lived and trained artistically during the nineties.
I hand-drew every animation, mostly with India ink and a #512 nib, a tool to which Brown University professor Walter Feldman first introduced me. I was still using this method when Walter died last spring 2017, shortly after telling me a joke. I like jokes. I like to make people laugh. So does the Universe: Mann trakht und Gott lakht.
In 2010 relocated from Seattle to New England and began producing immersive, color-rich, maximalist images, which, in one pictorial field, contained as many marks on the page as an animation. When the film labs closed I found a way to engender incremental time-based movement of these images – albeit with fingers instead of projectors. With my art as the image and cardboard as the medium, I created jigsaw puzzles from my color-intense paintings – as well as anti-fascist greeting cards from my gouache and India ink drawings, making the images more accessible to my community.
Filmmaker Charles “Killer of Sheep” Burnett once told me he viewed his film as prayers and the theatre as a kind of sanctuary. I could be making this up. My mind also thinks our conversation was accompanied by cherry pie. When I vend my work at outdoor markets or host my Pie and Puzzle Happy Hours I feel like I’m running an ad-hoc ministry – the jigsaw puzzles = prayers; the participants = congregants. And everyone is eating pie. Because everything is better with pie.
World peace, piece by piece…