Another discovery on that hapless laptop that is now enduring someone else's touch typing.
I may amend this bio shortly as I slowly move into stage three of my life as an artist.
BIO
I started three years ago after having spent most of my life in front of a keyboard as a reporter writing about vehicles. No new stuff: vintage, classic, exotic, racing cars.
Progression into art came when I took what I was using every day, a keyboard, and turned it into something else. Can’t call it repurposing as there is no purpose to the Quirky B’s but for art’s sake. Some are ironic, some are beautiful, all are quirky. I am not doing functional art. Although they embody function, these boards will never type again
Ottawa is a government town and we rise and fall with the output from thousands of keyboards every day. Taking a familiar object and adjusting it in our view has the power to perturb, sometimes, to mystify, always to delight.
When a predictable object, something with which people are familiar, takes on a different face, such as Warhol’s Campbell soup cans that are perfectly rendered but empty, content devoid, it is the state of souplessness that becomes exemplified. Warhol creates cognitive dissonance and dissipates it in an instant.
Cans in people’s larders do not become art yet people accept his illustrated version and celebrate it. People rationalize and ratify Warhol’s art even as he crows that art is anything he can get away with.
Using the common keyboard as a canvass or spring board for creation marries form and function with significance and implication the result of which is, well, quirky.
I think of quirky in terms of synonyms: eccentric, odd/awed, peculiar, strange, upbeat,
unconventional, individual, extraordinary and, even, weird and wonderful.
