eco art
Walk in Beauty
I joined the sustainability group at Los Angeles Valley College because two professors whom I respect are members and they were looking for volunteers. The signal achievement of the committee is the acquisition of Tree Campus status for the college, an honor bestowed by the Arbor Day Foundation. Little ol’ LAVC is the only community […]
Got Paint?
The challenge I posed myself in This is Not a Tree was to create a work of art that was durable and eco-friendly. The papier-mâché process gets you half-way there. To date, the fly in the ointment has been the paint and the final finish, both of which are, well, “not green”. While you can purchase […]
This is not a Tree
In Cradle to Cradle, Michael Braungart and William McDonough ask people to rethink the way things are made. Rather than recycling things designed for single use like plastic bottles and newspapers, which is detrimental to the environment (downcycling), he suggests that we manufacture items from ingredients designed to be reused multiple times without harming the […]
Vanity on Display at Los Angeles Valley College
Ever challenging her students, Carol Bishop instructed us to depict the concept of entropy. As background, I read an utterly confounding treatise by the artist Rudolph Arnheim called Entropy and Art: an Essay on Disorder and Order. After that, a scientific explanation of entropy and the expansion of the universe by my husband left me […]
The Jungle Book leaps off the page
From the moment I could read, I lost myself in books. Exotic worlds opened up to me from between countless pages. It was my escape, my joy, my education. Many years later, I am making the transition from print to digital. While I embrace this brave new world, it is not without a sense of […]
Hug some trees, have some fun: Arbor Day events at LA Valley College
Come Celebrate Arbor Day at the LAVC Arbor Day Festival on April 26 at Los Angeles Valley College (LAVC). Did you know LAVC was awarded Tree Campus status by the Arbor Day Foundation last year? It is the only community college in California and the only college in LA with that honor. The LAVC Associated […]
Forget Burning Man…
The event of the year is Tomatomania!–at least in this household. For the past month, Mark has been anxiously waiting for tomato planting season. (No matter that when we lived in Massachusetts that was after Memorial Day…not St. Patrick’s Day) The anticipation has been killing us. We’ve argued long and hard about which heirloom tomatoes […]
Sometimes a piece of string…
…is just a piece of string. My husband, without a hint of sarcasm, asked, “Is it OK if I throw away this piece of string?” Baffled, I looked up from my coffee and saw him holding a piece of string that I had left on the kitchen counter after opening a bag of birdseed. When […]
Uneasy being green
OK, in the vein of full disclosure, I am uneasy being green or labeled as politically correct. The risk of hypocrisy is just too great. I can picture myself at the end of my life standing in front of Ed Begley Jr. guarding the Green Gates of Heaven. He’ll pull at his long white beard […]
Cultivating my garden
At the end of Candide, after being buffeted by the trials and tribulations of life, the title character concludes that all he can do is cultivate his garden. As with Candide, it is clear to me that we do not live in “the best of all possible worlds.” While there is nothing I can do to […]