Daily Art Project as Dialogue: Daily Mail, part II

Kathy Loomis and I participated in a joint daily art project from September 15, 2010 to April 8, 2011; you can read her first report about the project here, and I have first posted about it here.

Kathy started off her Daily Mails with several days of pictures from her recent trip to Japan, to which she then would repeatedly return throughout the project. My favorite picture of those first ones was this one: 

Kathy's picture of boats on the moat 

Later in the month I sent her a few pictures of reflections on water, which she took up eagerly, and which continued until the very end of our exchange, soon expanding to other media in which reflections are possible:

Reflected/upside-down city hall

Kathy's reflection from Nürnberg

Reflecting glass

Reflecting glass by Kathy

Me, reflected in mirror of artwork at Stuttgart Staatsgalerie

In quick succession we than came up with new themes that would be returned to every now and then, and sometimes would 'meet' each other:

• sunsets (always good for a colorful picture, though in the end we didn't have too many of those)

Sunset by Kathy

Sunset by Uta

• bricks
• shadows

Combination of shadows and bricks by Uta

• artwork by other artists
• some of our own artwork in progress or finished

and, a recurring topic for which we needed some time and discussion as to how it should be referred to: 
I wanted to call it ‚art or not art?’ because I liked the game of guessing that would be included under that title, Kathy preferred the title ‚found art’ as she claimed that most of the pictures would be taken somewhere else than in a gallery anyway. We had lots of those, and I willingly confess that that has meanwhile become my favorite object when taking pictures: finding beauty/art in unexpected places, and documenting them by photo.

Found art by Kathy: dumpster markings

art-or-not-art by Uta (solution: art in the making!)

Found art  by Uta

And then, for more than two weeks, Kathy treated me to an extensive stretch of Halloween-documentation, that most American custom which, although it has been exported to other parts of the world by now, still is most virile in the US.

Halloween decoration by Kathy

The taste of Halloween by Kathy

In reply, I gave her a deep insight into my family’s Christmas customs all through Advent and December, which you can read about on Kathy’s post today here.

Further report on the project coming up in a few days.