Thursday, November 25, 2010

Monks little book

A couple of years ago my friend M., who is nicknamed Monkie or Monk, and I visited a gallery in Rotterdam where we saw the incredible work of Jean Tinguely. Look him up on the web, he made fantastic enormous sculptures that look like intricate machines, except they have no purpose but be art. It's wonderful to see those machines actually move and we had a wonderful time admiring his work.

Next to all these huge machines were of course smaller bits and bobs of his. Photographs, sketches, films and...letters. It was the letters that caught our attention, because they were pieces of art by themselves. He sent these beautifully illustrated notes to friends and other artists often containing sketches and a very loose handwriting that we really liked too.

Being the creative gals we are we of course were both inspired by this and before we even left the building I think both of us secretly decided to send the other some mail art. That was the start of a correspondence of art that's been going on ever since. We have no rules and no deadlines or anything. We just send something when we feel like it's about time we send something and that works just fine. There's no pressure.

I often use my mail art to do little experiments or to use materials I hardly ever use just to get a feel for them. It's a lot of fun and of course it's a lot of fun to receive Monks works of art as well. I hope we will keep it up for a long time!

As I told you in my previous post recently I received a small but lovely booklet from her containing her sketches which were mostly done during a sketching class she took and since she doesn't have a blog I asked her if it was okay to show it off on mine. So here we go!








Is that cool or what? I love handmade books and if its filled with so much personal art it's even better. So thank you again Monk!

If you want to see more of her work or her photographs please check out her flickr (which she should update more often, grumble) and her fotothing. Enjoy!