Tag Archives: Werner Herzog

Mar10

Mars Bar Mural

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Ori Carino

With Alphabet City a pale shadow of what it once was, I wonder if anything from the vestiges of the Punk Era can be salvaged by means of fresh needlepoint design ideas.

Specifically, I was thinking about Ori Carino’s famously doomed Mars Bar mural, which was inspired by his experiences, as a child in the 80s, growing up in the neighborhood, when it was a very different place from what it is today.  Carino is a fascinating, young visual artist and street iconographer. You can view his website and bio here.

Imagine his Lower East Side mural as a departure point for a needlepoint canvas… a sort of modern-day Cave of Nightmares, in some ways a version of what Herzog talked about (see my Canvas of Waking Dreams Part II post) in his recent documentary about the prehistoric cave found at Chauvet-Pont D’Arc.

Not by any means the usual subject of a commercial needlepoint canvas, Carino’s vision is of an urban hell of drunkenness and drug addiction and grotesque hallucinations being left behind, or trampled upon, or maybe even saved, by the central image of a young woman — the entire panorama commented on with the enigmatic phrase “And it is all for you.”

Why not have street graffiti suggest a different approach to needlepoint art that is superlasered thematically onto a modern setting?

It might make for one heck of an edgy canvas, or, if not that, at least a rather eclectic conversation piece.

© Erin McGrath and Needlepointland.com, 2012 – 2016.

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Mar5

Canvas of Waking Dreams – Part II

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Helen Winthorpe Kendrick

There is an intimacy to needlepointing, to holding a canvas, threading a needle, stitching a design, that is completely unlike the disconnected experience of Simple Touch-ing your way through a Nook.

Call me a digital Neanderthal.

Anyway, the other day, I was at B&N to graze at the needlepoint section, and delay the torture of concluding my Canvas of Waking Dreams think piece, the one that will cause no one to ever read my blog again after I publish it, and came across a wonderful book, Helen Winthorpe Kendrick’s Stitch-opedia.

More on this book in a jiffy.

Soon, I was eagerly standing in line, book in hand.  I noticed a salesperson who was working a Nook booth that was practically in the checkout line.  She was trying to convince a customer to buy a designer Nook cover to make the device sorta look like a book.  Talk about ironic.

Call me out of touch, but I don’t want to pretend that something that looks like a nerd’s clipboard is almost a book.  I actually want the real book.

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Feb29

A Pageantry of Patterns

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Sherlee Lantz

I’m doodling with my next couple of “feature” post ideas.

Needlepoint Land has two types of posts:  light and breezy quickies, usually humorous (or at least, trying to be so), and longer, serendipitous pieces that are designed to cover some interesting subject that you might not normally encounter in a traditional needlepoint blog.

There are plenty of sources about particular stitching techniques, so I won’t focus on these as much here.  I won’t ignore them, of course, particularly as I have some surprise old-school goodies coming down the pike.

In the meantime, I’ll mention a seminal reference book, in which stitching techniques are covered more or less exhaustively.  More on that at the end of this post.

One of my upcoming features will be a review of a book about what happens when you “go online” to visit an e-commerce site.  I alluded to this book in an earlier post.  It’s called The Daily You, by Joseph Turow, and it was published in 2011 by Yale University.

It’s a very dry read, but I will give it the Needlepoint Land treatment, which means I’ll try to review the book in an off-the-wall way, for your entertainment, dear viewer, sometime during the next week, unless life gets in the way.  Anyone who visits a web site or blog, whether it’s about needlepoint or not, ought read this book, or, absent that, check out my standup routine review.

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