Greetings, Distinguished Art Critics and Art Lovers,

Just a heads-up that we will be making some changes to the guts of the website over the next little while. We’re going to try and make this as quick and painless as possible, but my apologies in advance if you encounter any technical glitches or poor layout, or just plain don’t see the site, on one of your upcoming visits!

The background changes to the NESW / studiosavant website are now complete. For those of you who are interested, a WordPress backend has been installed in order to make it easier to update and maintain the site. If you have any comments or questions in this regard, or find any problems with the site, please feel free to contact me at winston [at] blackriders [dot] com

For the rest of you, we now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

Thanks!

Winston

I spent this morning labelling the 500+ posts we’ve published here over the last few years. By sorting through the hodge-podge in this way, I’ve come to see more clearly what studiosavant actually does.

It turns out that, mostly, we’ve been posting on The Local Scene, with a focus On Sculpture, and other aspects of Art After Postmodernism.

At times, we note various items In Other News, and give a glimpse of what we do When Not Sculpting.

Sometimes, we post something inspiring from one of our favourite Great Minds, and occasionally we’ll publish the odd Call For Entry.

Aside from a few posts (like this one) on the Blog Life itself, and a handful of Rants on Grants, that’s basically it.

Thanks to Black Riders for the tip on Wordle.net, ‘a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.’ The image above was created using text from the recent Vue Weekly profile on Common Sense. The image to the left comes from an earlier VAAA profile on the North Edmonton Sculpture Workshop.

…. which, as all literate Polynesians know, means “House of the Green Garden“. Given the location in Edmonton, the “Māla” outside the “Hale” is none too “Ōma’oma’o” this time of year. Oh, but just you wait… In the meantime, Nola Meme’s new blog will document artwork, textiles, and other inspiring elements of the sweet life.

Odalisque, Peter Hide, 1992-93

Yet another attempt to publish this image may prove futile, so I’m not going to put much effort into composing this post. Very good sculpture: AFA-owned, GMCC-sited, 105 St & 104 Ave.

I just spent an hour putting together a post on locally exhibited sculpture, after a couple of other hour-long tries at the same post earlier in the week. It was lost by Picasa; apparently, clicking the “publish” button means “you’ll never publish this ever“. Picasa (highly not recommended) is the only way I can get photos off my computer to stick to the “create a post” page, but it nearly crashes my computer when I use, and making hyperlinks or moving text around becomes a chore. As though composing my thinking into a coherent written form weren’t difficult enough. Yargh!

After passing the NESW’s rigorous (and yet subliminal) psychological screening process, and accepting my low-key offer, Studiosavant is proud to welcome the entity known as “k.” to our “Illuminated Manifesto” blog-team.

Unlike us Northerly Edmontonians, k. is based out of Southern Alberta, and brings to Studiosavant a wealth of experience and insight stemming from a passionate yet critical perspective on the provincial (and worldwide) arts ‘mileux’, from a ‘non-artist’ point of view.

Welcome aboard, K.!

While most of the traffic on Studiosavant tends to come from me and Ahab, we do get occasional visitors from some far-flung locales around the world. In addition to a few Albertan readers, and a visitor from BC, our last one-hundred visitors include Canadians from eastern provinces like Quebec, Newfoundland, and New Brunswick have stopped by; as have a few of our neighbours to the south, in Indiana, Ohio, Louisiana, California, Missouri, Florida, Maine, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and New York; and even a few visitors from the UK, Ireland, Germany, the Philippines, and China.

Thanks for stopping by, everyone, even if it’s only for a moment. All are welcome.

I moved a sculpture today, man was that fun. But now I’m too tired to tyype. And Blogger’s image upload isn’t working. I’ll try getting Woman [Carrying] a Basket added to this post tomorrow – an as yet unfinished sculpture that I intend to finish and expect to install later this summer.

Other exciting post topics in the works: a colourful drawing from Canada Crit Day, but no digimage or text to go with it just yet; design projects overlap with [read: simultaneously interfere/facilitate] art making – some of my furniture and railings and signs and stuff. Real-life responsibilities leave insufficient time for tediously slow blog post composing these days.

Just gotta keep one good foot in the ’sculpturing’. Somehow.

[EDIT] The accursed picture (I cursed at it just a second ago) refuses to upload.

[FINAL EDIT] Blogger must have a filter that censors bad pictures; but I finally found a loophole through which to smuggle in this p—poor image of Woman Carrying a Basket.

Greetings, studiosavant regulars. Just the web guy poking my nose in for a moment. You may have noticed some recent changes to studiosavant, and its “parent” website for the North Edmonton Sculpture Workshop. As a result of these changes, please clear your browser cache and update your bookmarks for the pages as well as for your RSS feeds.

If you run into any problems with the tweaked site, or just have feedback generally, please let me know!