Guerrilla Marketing in the Snow

When my 9 a.m. interview was canceled because of the monumental heaps of fluffy white crystals blanketing the city, I found myself on the Upper East Side with nothing to do.

My friend Kate, who teaches in the neighborhood, was similarly free thanks to Cathie Black's fortuitous announcement, so we decided on the only logical course of action: a snowman-sculpting contest in the Park.

Kate shaped a paired sculpture of a rotund gentleman with walrus mustache and bow tie, holding the leash of an adoring puppy seated at his feet.  I chose to create a Daumier-style caricature bust of an elderly man with a large hooked nose, bushy eyebrows, and sunken cheeks.  Our efforts attracted a crowd of onlookers, eager to snap pictures and admire our handiwork.    

After about 45 minutes, I added my tag to the sculpture, and we went on our merry way.  If by chance this inspired you to google my website, please let me know in the comments section below!  I will mail you a cookie.

Project: Website

One of my recent projects, besides volunteering for LTA, art tutoring, and other miscellaneous creative gigs undertaken for fun and profit, has been getting my personal website up and running.  The site has a great design, imagined and executed for me by the multi-talented Nikita Golitsyn more than two years ago, but I'm ashamed to say that it hasn't seen the light of day since summer 2008, mostly because of the rigors of grad school. 

With academia behind me, I thought it was high time that I made my art a priority again.  But this undertaking has challenges of its own.

For one thing, which types of art should appear on the  website?  While I'm happy with all of the pieces I originally chose to use, much of the work does not represent the directions that I'm currently taking.  Once I've photographed and uploaded more recent pieces, will earlier ones need to go?  Another concern is the design itself.  I'm still interested in creating fractal-based abstractions, but do the twisted, tree-like shapes of my earlier work mesh with different kinds of forms?  (See for example Hungry Dragon and Clever Mouse, pictured above, an early precursor to my current work.)

Besides conceptual concerns, there are of course the mundane details of website maintenance: do all of the links work?  Are the pages titled properly?  I'm still ironing these issues out with help from Nikita, but hope to have the bulk of it complete by early 2011.

Visit the page at http://www.phylandart.com for updates.