July 7, 2021

My Blockhead Adventures with Blockchain Art, Part Two

This was originally published on June 14th, 2021 on Vasari21.com

YOUR MOVE

After getting acquainted with the basic elements of NFTs (see PART ONE), my next move was to purchase some Ethereum cryptocurrency to pay for the “gas” fees to have each “minted” and put up for auction. That could run $50 to $100 per piece. I purchased some through Coinbank.com, and my initial buy tripled a week later. Cryptocurrency is highly volatile and rises and falls at disorienting speeds. Two weeks later it had fallen but I still had my initial purchase amount (as of this writing, it’s moving up again). Since I’m not focusing on cryptocurrency investments but rather, just preparing my NFT art, this did not upset me. I’ll reserve crypto investing for later, once I make money with NFTs. Sounds like an infinity loop, doesn’t it?

Next. I had to actually create the NFTs, and wanted to make pieces separate from the work I’m currently doing. I’m unable to tell you where the idea of chess came from – perhaps it lodged in my noodle after watching The Queen’s Gambit on Netflix. I only know that I decided to have some fun. Fun during a pandemic? Was it even morally correct to actually have fun? Methinks so. Some levity against the terrifying backdrop of a global scourge. And that is the context in which one should put NFTs: fun art that also makes money. Once I could ingest that, I went and had some fun.

I’ve always been smitten by Japanese design—kimonos, Samurai gear, high-lacquer black furniture. Since my work has to do with cloth, I developed a Queen, King, Bishop, Knight, Pawn and Rook for the Dark side and later, will develop versions of those for the Light side. Each piece will be animated with a morphing technique (meaning that different angles of each pieces were rendered and then each render will slowly move over the other), and ultimately, there will be six Darks, and six Lights, plus a chessboard for all of them. My Millennial son will score the music. That’s another great aspect of this new platform. Collaboration. More more NFT makers are collaborating with musicians, writers, other artists, etc.

There’s a tremendous amount of information online about how to prepare and submit artworks (some are in the links below). My particular submission will be mp4s – morphing images with music, and I will submit under the handle, “Cybernun.”

Here are four of the six Red (dark) Chess Collection pieces I’m working on:

NFT – The Red Queen (Chess Series) ©Sandra Filippucci 2021

NFT – The Red Queen – Chess Series Collection ©Sandra Filippucci 2021

NFT – Red Bishop Chess Series Collection ©Sandra Filippucci 2021

NFT – Red Bishop Chess Series Collection ©Sandra Filippucci 2021

NFT – Red Knight Chess Series Collection ©Sandra Filippucci 2021

NFT – Red Bishop Chess Series Collection ©Sandra Filippucci 2021

NFT – Red King piece in Chess Series Collection ©Sandra Filippucci 2021

NFT – Red King piece in Chess Series Collection ©Sandra Filippucci 2021

ENDGAME

There are numerous NFT platforms (websites) to submit you can submit your NFTs, but I’m going to choose Niftygateway.com because it’s better curated than the others. I have no idea how long the process of curation will take, but in my next post, I’ll describe what it was like to actually submit my NFTs, include the link to my Chess Collection, and tell you if I made money on this venture. If nothing else, I will have created a 32-piece art chess set that I can cast and actually turn into a physical object. But what about that money…what can I expect? How do I price each piece in the Collection?

It appears that every conceivable tier of pricing exists. This is based upon your Following, what platform you’re on, what work clicks with younger collectors (mostly male but that too will change) and, of course, the Goddess Serendipity. But let’s say each chess piece is part of an edition of 20 at $1,500 each in cryptocurrency (once sold, I can convert this to dollars) for a total of $30,000. All I had to do was pay the “gas” NFT Fees in the submission process, and I will let you know how much that comes to. I keep it all since there is no gallery to take 50 percent. I don’t know what the magic NFT pricing formula is, or where the sweet spot lies. Perhaps there will be only one sold for $12,000. It’s the Wild West of the art market.

STARVING ARTISTS GET TO EAT

As the New York Times reported “For decades, digital artists got little respect. To the tastemakers in the world of fine art, their work seemed more like a commercial craft — could something made with Photoshop, say, really be art?” This new concept of monetized graphics allows us all to sell directly to collectors and it comes at a time when so much privation exists among artists and creators. You decide what can be an NFT. That’s the point. Very few true creatives that I know – writers included – have escaped the wretchedness of being broke. We all want patrons, we all need patrons. Cryptoart is an opportunity to change that. The incessantly evolving world of cryptoart is an egalitarian one where you can sell what you create anywhere in the world so that you can continue creating, no degrees required. But it is also a huge opportunity for all practicing fine artists, especially those like myself who use software as part of their practice, artists who have had no place to house our electronic work.

BUT IS IT ART?

I’ve always gotten pushback for using technology, as have many others. For gallery exhibitions, my work is a hybrid combination of 3d modeling combined with traditional drawing and painting, mounted on panels to get it on a wall. Until about six months ago, there was no way I could offer the thousands of digital works I’ve done to create an ongoing revenue stream. They sleep deep in my hard drives. Electronic or digital art—to the general public–was not considered art. Period.

NFT Heaven is Water II ©Sandra Filippucci 2021

HEAVEN IS WATER II. Part of a second NFT collection I’m developing – Joan of Arc protecting the oceans.

Museums like the Whitney and New York’s Museum of Modern Art, however, have been collecting digital art since the 1960s, but to the general public it still seemed too exotic or suspicious. You push a button and the art comes out, right? I won an award from the Austrian publication Ars Electronica in the ‘80s. Since the late ’70s, Ars Electronica has been holding competitions and festivals and publishing electronic art, all to elevate the perception of machine art. But it’s been a hard climb, byte by byte.

Decades ago, when I made the transition from being a New York illustrator to becoming an artist making my own work, I had to find ways to get that early bitmappy work off the screen and onto a wall. Gradually I developed ways to do that. I saw all software as a means to an end. Another tool. Then 3d printers started evolving as well as 3d clay extruders, which led me to the “Sisters of the Cloth” series that will be machine-built as porcelain sculpture (it still has to be fired and glazed).

From the “Sisters of the Cloth” porcelain series, 2020-21, 3d model ©Filippucci

From the “Sisters of the Cloth” porcelain series, 2020-21, 3d model ©Filippucci

BYTE BY BYTE

You’d think that I would have realized a revolution was happening right in front of me. I’d been working with technology since 1984, first with an early IBM PC, then later with a Commodore Amiga 1000—a PC home computer with a color monitor offering 4,096 colors. Commodore gave Amiga equipment to Warhol and a few others, including myself, after one of their executives saw my digital work in a show in New York, This was all to promote Amiga, and the company put me in the in-house magazine, Amiga World.

Remarkably, Commodore then funded my exhibition “Hybrids” at the Museum of American Illustration in Manhattan in 1991. The museum board tried to block the show but did not succeed because some were beginning to be curious about this new-fangled way of creating. That show led to another— an exhibition at the Verbum Magazine Gallery in California. An early and classy computer arts magazine, Verbum, like Ars Electronica, was more focused on the creativity of electronic art as opposed to the technical aspects. I managed to get large format, 40-by-60 inkjet prints made and then had to frame them all. At that time it was still all about “hard copy,” actual, tangible art. Who could guess what would happened decades later?

Thirty-seven years have now passed since I first sat in front of a computer and played with infinity. What happened next happened swiftly and globally, like Covid: art in the digital world became collectible. Artists got to eat.

From the book, The Enlightened Mind, by Stephen Mitchell

From the book, The Enlightened Mind, by Stephen Mitchell

The interconnectedness of this new paradigm shift is profound. The Net of Indra, would be an excellent Buddhist metaphor: As Stephen Mitchell writes in his book The Enlightened Mind, “The Net of Indra is a profound and subtle metaphor for the structure of reality. Imagine a vast net; at each crossing point there is a jewel; each jewel is perfectly clear and reflects all the other jewels in the net, the way two mirrors placed opposite each other will reflect an image into infinity. The jewel in this metaphor stands for an individual being, or an individual consciousness, or a cell or an atom. Every jewel is intimately connected with all other jewels in the universe, and a change in one jewel means a change, however slight, in every other jewel.”

To me, NFTs are sparkly bits much needed in the unfriendly dark of now. And if a bouncing flamingo makes you smile, those smiles can travel to infinity.

Part Three will be published shortly.

Contemporary American artist Sandra Filippucci has recently returned to Connecticut to build out her three-dimensional porcelain work, “Sisters of the Cloth,” in a new studio.  She is part of a group of New York artists working with technology since the 1980s, and was the first artist to have a digitally based solo exhibition at the Museum of American Illustration in Manhattan.

WEBSITE | https://sandrafilippucci.com
INSTAGRAM | https://instagram.com/filippucciart
LINKEDIN | ART BLOG

LINKS TO LEARN MORE
— https://www.businessinsider.com/nft-investing-crypto-art-what-is-a-gas-fee-explained-2021-3
—https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/12/magazine/nft-art-crypto.html
—https://builtin.com/blockchain/nft-cryptoart-guide
—https://www.coindesk.com/how-to-create-buy-sell-nfts
— https://consensys.net/blog/blockchain-explained/can-nfts-crack-royalties-and-give-more-value-to-artists/
—https://www.kapwing.com/resources/how-to-display-your-nft-crypto-art-collection

July 6, 2021

My Blockhead Adventures with Blockchain Art, Part One

(image above) Red Queen from Filippucci's NFT Chess Series ©2021

PART ONE

This was originally published on May 26th, 2021 on the art journal, Vasari21.com

I’m about to enter a new and revolutionary digital art market. A traditionally trained artist of the Boomer generation, I’ve been working with technology since the mid-1980s. Yet the world of NFTs (short for “non-fungible token”) has been as confusing to me as the Vietnam War. Please, somebody explain it to me! After fits and starts, I now view this new platform, also known as crypto-art, as an extension of my studio life. I did not understand crypto-anything until recently, and that journey is what this story is about.

I truly believed that this was all just leakage from adolescent male geeks umbilically attached to their play stations.

The adults in the room would surely unplug it all. A crazy fad…which is exactly what people said when Ford cars showed up on American streets and frightened all the horses in 1903. I was wrong. We are in a Promethean moment where the fire that Prometheus stole from the gods to give to humanity is now a new online entity called, “NFT’s”or “blockchain art,” supported by another new entity called “cryptocurrency.”

Although it emerged in 2009, the first time I heard the word “bitcoin” was around 2015. I was dismissive, vaguely associating it with online gaming or maybe it was online gambling. Zero interest. Six years later, I’m only just beginning to grasp that it’s part of a fast-moving, fire-breathing, inclusive power-to-the-people movement that is now inextricably linked to NFTs. It operates with cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency money is different: it’s controlled by the activities of the users, not bankers, making it a volatile medium but an egalitarian one. That alone is a revolution, but there was another right around the corner.

It was five months ago that NFTs really caught my attention. My Millennial son hammered me because his friend was successful at NFTs and why wasn’t I making some? What the hell, Mom? Suddenly, I actually knew someone actually making NFTs. Game on.

NFT creator Shapiro

Screenshot of Gavin Shapiro’s popular signature bouncing-flamingoes animated NFT with music by Yung Bae

My Millennial son’s Millennial friend Gavin Shapiro – a kind, smart, friendly motion-graphics artist – spoke in expert Elvish, or was it Klingon? Now you need to understand that Gen Xers and Millennials are the impetus behind this revolution because they were raised with animated toys, play stations, computer games, arcades, Tron, and every iteration of technology. Everything moved or lit up. They had their own language then, and they have their own language now.

I’m a bit unusual. I’m an older dame who has been involved with technology since it went from code into cafés during the early 1980s. But here I was in 2021 feeling like a blockhead trying to understand the blockchain.

When I spoke with Shapiro, his conversation was peppered with terms like nonfungible tokens, cryptocurrency, minting, Ethereum, Nifty platform, Nifties, digital ledger, drops, paying gas, blockchain art and Coinbank. My Millennial friend heard my Baby Boomer confusion but also my resistance and concluded that perhaps this was not for me. I know he did not intend to patronize me but that’s how it felt. For me, that is a hot button, though inadvertently pushed, and it galvanized me to figure this out. I was pissed off. I will join this cultural revolution, you damn whippersnappers.

First, I tried to interpret all of the prodigious explanatory material that was appearing online daily (links are below). What is Crypto? What are NFTs, the NFT Gold Rush, Millionaire NFTers, the New Art Collecting, ad nauseam? In order to understand a revolution, you need to understand the language. I struggled. I turned away, I turned back. It gradually became obvious that the confluence of Covid-19, the world driven online, the urge to be entertained, generational computer literacy, and financial desperation had fed a perfect firestorm called, “crypto-art.” I know…it sounds creepy, like the Matrix. It also sounds like opportunity. Starving artists could now eat.

Please explain what an NFT is.

Before I do that, the big question I had was this: If the art lived in the computer, how does the buyer – the art collector – display it? Just on their computer screen? Their iPad? Nope. Turns out numerous companies are now making all kinds of electronic display screens specifically for NFTs. You would hang the screen on your wall just as you would a painting. Problem solved.

The minimalist MonoX7 is an internet-connected digital art display from https://mono.frm.fm/en/shop/

The minimalist MonoX7 is an internet-connected digital art display

So back to explaining what an NFT or “nonfungible token” is. Go slow.

“An NFT is a unit of data representing a unique asset—such as an art, music, or video file—that can be traded like any other piece of property, only in this case, they’re bought and sold in a non-tangible form. The seller puts a single, original piece up for sale in a process called minting, and the buyer gets exclusive proof of ownership through the NFT. Anyone could take screenshots, download or create copies of the item, but the original file remains the only valuable piece, because it’s represented by the non-fungible token that can be tracked on a digital ledger known as the blockchain.”–NFT Cryptoart Guide

So an NFT is a smart contract asserting that this digital piece is the original and all the others are just copies (or “digital prints,” if we were to use a real-life analogue). You can then sell this digital original (the NFT), and it will be noted on the blockchain, which is essentially a system of recording information in a way that makes it difficult or impossible to change, hack or cheat the system. If the collector resells it, that transaction is also noted on the blockchainYou have access to the entire transaction history and can see how your work lives on the secondary market.

And what about that resale? Royalties? We never get any money when a collector resells our painting or our sculpture, do we? In the crypto world, however, you can manually set up a fee (usually between 10 to 30 percent) that you get each time someone resells your work. if you sell your original work for a dollar and then someone resells it for $1 million in 10 years, you can still get $100,000 from it.

I like this kind of craziness.

That feature alone is the single best reason why NFTs are great for content creators. It allows them to focus on making art without as much concern for its initial sale price. If their works become popular, they can start earning significant sums just from the secondary market in the future.

Is Everybody on LSD?

Now that I thought I kinda sorta understood this, I started actually looking at NFTs. I went to Niftygateway.com because that’s where my son’s friend Shapiro’s NFTs are for sale, but a recent list of top NFT platforms does not include it. No idea why. Perhaps because it’s better curated than the others hence not as big as the others? I definitely want to be on a well-curated platform so that will take a bit more digging. An NFT platform is where you would submit your NFT collection for sale; however, like musical chairs, NFT lists change quite a bit as this emerging technology develops. Judge for yourself. Here are some of the top places to which you can submit your NFTs:

1. OpenSea
2. Rarible
3. SuperRare
4. Foundation
5. AtomicMarket
6. Myth Market
7. BakerySwap
8. KnownOrigin

So I studied some of those platforms and cussed. Transparent pastel Gummy Bears in a Candyland landscape. Crystal demon cats with tennis shoes. This is not art, it is lunacy.

Lucky #18/125 by Goldweard on Nifty Gateway

Lucky #18/125 by Goldweard on Nifty Gateway

Why was so much of it like infantile short-attention span animations in garish colors with soundtracks? Shapiro was charming and almost reassuring with repetitive loops of his trademark lighthearted flamingos, but so much of what I saw out there appeared to be awful tourist art for nitwits, including a nasty-looking Whitney Houston with engorged silicone breasts. There oughta be a law. Wait, there is. I told you this was all so new, no-one can catch their breath to catch up to the juvenile jerks out there.

What if you don’t work digitally?

You don’t have to. If you’re a sculptor, you can iPhone video your work on a slow turntable rotation and that can become an NFT. Here’s a screenshot of Year 1000 – Refurbished by the NFT artist known as “NFN Kalyan,” a sculpture that simply rotates.

Year 1000 – Refurbished by the NFT artist known as NFN Kalyan

Hour by hour, day by day, week by week more and more artists have gone “nifty,” especially after December 2020, when Beeple’s piece, “Everydays: The First 5000 Days” sold for almost $69 million at Christie’s, which is Incomprehensible. Click the link above, learn more. It’s still incomprehensible. The Promethean NFT fire had lit up the world with excitement and opportunity, but where did I fit into all of this?

My ambivalence faded once I began seeing the likes of Brendan Dawes on Nifty Gateway. Brendan Dawes is a UK-based generative artist. Generative art refers to any art practice where the artist creates a process, a computer program, a machine, or other methodology, which is then set into motion with some degree of autonomy contributing to or resulting in a completed work of art. Yep. He’s making art. That happens to be how he’s doing it. A winner of both the Lumen and Aesthetica art prizes, Dawes makes work that has been featured in many exhibitions around the world, including “Big Bang Data” in 13 cities and three MoMA shows in New York. This is Brendon Dawes, Satellites, from an edition of 10 at $1,500 each. Sold out. Others go for $8,000 and are also sold out.

NFTs Brendan Dawes

What I learned is that not everything is animated, nor a motion graphics mini-movie. The NFT market includes all manner of items coming from the world of music, writing, sports, etc. Crypto-art is in the act of becoming, and there appear to be few restrictions as to content.

In “Part Two, Make Your Move,” to be published in two weeks, Filippucci will recount how she prepares her “Chess Series”  for an actual NFT auction.

Contemporary American artist Sandra Filippucci has recently returned to Connecticut to build out her three-dimensional porcelain work, “Sisters of the Cloth,” in a new studio.  She is part of a group of New York artists working with technology since the 1980s, and was the first artist to have a digitally based solo exhibition at the Museum of American Illustration in Manhattan.

WEBSITE | https://sandrafilippucci.com
INSTAGRAM | https://instagram.com/filippucciart

LINKS TO LEARN MORE
—https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/12/magazine/nft-art-crypto.html
—https://builtin.com/blockchain/nft-cryptoart-guide
—https://www.coindesk.com/how-to-create-buy-sell-nfts
—https://consensys.net/blog/blockchain-explained/can-nfts-crack-royalties-and-give-more-value-to-artists/
—https://www.kapwing.com/resources/how-to-display-your-nft-crypto-art-collection
—https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/21/the-debate-about-cryptocurrency-and-energy-consumption

February 24, 2021

The Trouble with Pink

Large Scale 3D Printed Ceramics

THE TROUBLE WITH PINK

“THE ORDER,” a 3d ceramic series begun in the Summer of 2020 during my complete isolation during Covid, was all black and white. It sprang from memories of being put into a French convent La Rochelle at age five.

When Biden became President, I was greatly relieved after all the tumult & ugliness for so long. I started seeing pink. That’s how things begin for me…I see a color or shape in my dreams, my walks, or doing something mundane like the laundry. 

I have an uncomfortable relationship with pink. Pink…the symbolic color of tenderness, affection, romance and peace. PAX, Latin for peace. PAX be with you. Pink the soother, has been definitively linked to toning down aggression, and its use in holding cells for violent criminals.

Pink for me however has another meaning: my mother, Beatrice. It was her favorite color and therefore I wanted nothing to do with it.

PAX of Beatus, 3d porcelain ceramic ©FILIPPUCCI 2021

PAX of Beatus (a different iteration), 3d porcelain ceramic ©FILIPPUCCI 2021

Pink is too frivolous for my pragmatic nature but far worse, painful. In 2018 I tried a few pieces in pink (you can see those on my Instagram feed: @filippucciart). Beatrice no longer walks the earth but when she did one could describe her as a wild boar in pink. A confusing dichotomy. You thought “pretty lady” but under the pink was a tough personality, a bristling, masculine Joan Crawford of judgement and meanness. The least maternal person you could imagine but there she was, a blonde in pink wearing pink lipstick.

Here’s why using the color pink in my work – with all its subtle iterations – helped me better understand her.

PAX of Beatus (a different iteration), 3d porcelain ceramic ©FILIPPUCCI 2021

PAX of Beatus (a different iteration), 3d porcelain ceramic ©FILIPPUCCI 2021

After creating numerous pink cloth studies over the last few months, some insight arrived. Not all at once, mind you. It kept tugging at me until I got it. My mother wore pink because that’s what she wanted to be. She wanted to be affectionate and peaceful and pink but because of an undiagnosed personality disorder, was the opposite. The total opposite.

I will only say this. Art saved me from pink, got me away from it, and then brought me right back to it. Finally, I did not look away. You could say that I found my inner pinkness. I am not afraid of pink any more. To Beatrice…PAX be with you.

August 19, 2020

Contemporary Ceramics

Large Scale 3D Printed Ceramics

SISTERS OF THE CLOTH

New work from the quiet isolation of the Spring and Summer of 2020. This Series is built upon the impressions of a five year old in La Rochelle, France, where – for awhile – I was put into the custody of nuns who lived in a medieval convent. 

Art Blog - Sandra Filippucci Aug 2020

Forgotten laundry in Santa Fe, New Mexico 2020

CORRIDORS & SHROUDS

Rag, Santa Fe NM Summer 2020 - FILIPPUCCI

Rag, Santa Fe 2020

The impressions began with walks in neighborhood cul-de-sacs where I noticed pieces of cloth. I would notice one, then another, and another. In New Mexico, many still put their laundry out to dry, often draped over a fence or stone wall. Sometimes, these are forgotten…left there to fade into the seasons. Couldn’t tell you why rags and laundry caught my attention but once you start noticing something, there’s a reason.

In the quiet of this pandemic, my dreaming revealed corridors and shrouds. My waking now held terrors. Abandonment, loneliness. I resisted remembering until those terrified little girl memories of flapping cloth creatures emerged forcefully, impatient with all the waiting. From bundles of rags, I “saw” fabric – copious, flowing, mysterious – rise into form.

As a 5 year old, I struggled to grasp that real women were under all that drapery. I could ask nothing for speaking was discouraged. Other than the perpetually seated Abbess, this community of French nuns was always in a hurry, dashing and darting with bundles, parcels and mops. Incessantly toiling. Like household gods, each was a silent expert at what they did. You said little, did much. They were frighteningly beautiful blurs, smudges of white and black. Everything in its place, everything in order.  

CERAMIC | The Novitiate - Sandra Filippucci 2020

©Sandra Filippucci 2020

Wearing different habits to denote their status, there was a distinct hierarchy within this community, and you quickly learned who was at top, and who did the laundry. They all commanded their space wherever they were or whatever their assignment was – all knowing, all powerful but in fact, many years ago nuns had little to no power within the church. I’m not sure they even do now. These obedient women were consecrated worker ants, always minding the time, polishing and starching as they noiselessly prayed.

Decades later, I remember those figures of cloth rushing down ancient corridors, making sounds like the sails on fishing boats in the La Rochelle harbor.

WHY CERAMICS

The shrouds in corridors became sculptures of cloth. Since I work with 3D programs, I began assembling fabric in an abstracted manner but still figurative. Joan of Arc has been my primary subject matter for so long that this different way of working startled me. The work just became. And it wanted to be ceramic. This is what led to that.

I’d been to a lecture in Taos at the Harwood Museum in 2019 organized by Ann Landi of Vasari21.com, on the Evolution of Art Criticism, which included panelists Peter Plagens, Laurie Fendrich, Lucy Lippard and Garth Clark. Garth Clark is a distinguished writer, curator and lecturer on modern and contemporary ceramic art. I was galvanized by his understanding of this medium, which I never seriously considered. I bought his 2003 book, “Shards,” and wondered when and how I would produce ceramics.

CERAMIC | The Worker - Sandra Filippucci 2020

©Sandra Filippucci 2020

This new body of work, “Sisters of the Cloth,” can only exist as 3d printed ceramics. Some pieces appear simple, but are in fact, quite complex. Created with 3d software, they are well-suited to 3d printing. The process will involve clay extruding to the largest size, and then combining the sections into life-size sculptures. They will be fired like pottery, and then hand-glazed. They can be constructed with permeating resins for outdoors, hung on walls, suspended from ceilings. Editioned smaller pieces will come first, because when working this way, each side must translate well.

Ceramic always suggests fragility. These iterations of fresh novitiates, postulants and weary old nuns wearing extraordinary hats no longer exist in the real world. The habits they wore have virtually disappeared. These are the impressions of shapes – sometimes apparitions – from a five-year old mind. I have harbored these windswept impressions over a lifetime and, like the statuary that filled their Medieval convent, these pieces are a kind of vesper, a chant from the sanctuary of dreams. 

The Abbess - Sandra Filippucci 2020

The Abbess – ©Sandra Filippucci 2020

July 6, 2020

Greta of Earth

Greta Thunberg, Our Joan of Arc

Last year, when Greta was nominated as TIME’s Person of the Year, the jealous infant currently occupying the White House mocked her. “Trump mocks Greta Thunberg after she wins Time Person of the Year. “So ridiculous,” Trump tweeted. “Greta must work on her Anger Management problem, then go to a good old fashioned movie with a friend! Chill Greta, Chill!” ”

The president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., also weighed in on Thunberg’s selection, blasting the magazine’s decision.”Time leaves out the Hong Kong Protesters fighting for their lives and freedoms to push a teen being used as a marketing gimmick,” he wrote. “How dare you?”

Climate Change is the single greatest challenge that exists today. –Said by intelligent people around the world

When she was mocked, I realized how important she was. Greta Tintin Eleonora Ernman Thunberg is a Swedish environmental activist who has gained international recognition for promoting the view that humanity is facing an existential crisis arising from climate change.

Greta Thunberg - The world's most prominent climate activist

GRETA THUNBERG ©Filippucci 2019

Greta Thunberg is our contemporary Joan of Arc and has succeeded in turning vague anxieties about the planet into a worldwide movement calling for global change. Because of Climate Change, because of the Pandemic, because of the erupted pustule of Racism, I see countless Joan of Arc’s all over the world. They fight despair, neglect and exhaustion. They are all screaming to vote those out who would destroy the world because of their refusal to accept scientific reality.

Fifty-eight years ago in 1962, Rachel Carson wrote, “The Silent Spring,” which documented the adverse environmental effects caused by the indiscriminate use of pesticides. Two million copies later – despite threats of lawsuits by Velsicol – the company that manufactured DDT, her brave work ignited the Environmental movement. A year later, Carson died of breast cancer.

“No witchcraft,” Carson wrote, “no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves.”

Yes, things are very dark right now. Do you remember “The NeverEnding Story,” a fantasy film from 1984? Remember how Fantasia was slowly being devoured by a malevolent force called “The Nothing”? This is what is happening now. The Nothing of Ignorance wants to swallow us up. Joan of Arc fought the English from devouring France. Greta is fighting against selfish arrogance from consuming the planet.

Last Christmas, I created a 3D Greta to send to friends over the holidays. I designed a Virtual Greta as a constant reminder to help where I can, choose kindness first, and to seek solutions, not ignore problems. This is not always easy for a half-Italian like myself who shoots from the lip.

Greta of Earth – she is here to galvanize us to do the work. Vote out anyone who is not paying attention. They will all topple like those Confederate statues. Eventually our negative relics will be replaced by statues of worthy humans who inspire us to be better. Look around. There are many. Some we have forgotten like Rachel Carson, others we are just noticing…like Greta.

April 15, 2019

Art Ancestry

Memmo Di Filippucci | fresco painter (1303-1345)

If there are no artists in your family, you cannot help but wonder where your art genes came from. A number of artists I know have an architect or designer or someone in the visual arts in their backgrounds. For my entire life, I believed that I was a unique acorn. Turns out that there was a very large oak tree in my backyard from the 14th century.

Recently, I learned from a family member that our ancestor is Memmo di Filippucci, a 14th-century painter from Siena, Italy.

That family member is my half-brother and he’s a lawyer, and lawyers like facts. None of us have ever had many facts about our distant relatives so Gunter is currently researching Italian archives in Europe and preparing an ancestry book.

Synchronicity

Now I will have to add San Gimignano to my bucket list because Memmo di Filippucci’s (whose sons also became painters) fresco of marital life still exists in the Town Hall in San Gimignano, a small walled medieval hill town in the province of Siena, Tuscany.

Memmo Di Filippucci (active 1303-1345) fresco painter.

(Seen above) “Scenes from a Marriage,” with a hot tub no less!! Memmo has an entire cycle of frescoes titled, “Profane Love,” and some are in quite good condition. The town of San Gimignano itself is legendary for its examples of medieval architecture and castle towers.

Memmo di Filippucci had two sons who were also painters, Lippo Memmi and Federico Memmi. His son-in-law was Simone Martini, one of the most outstanding and influential painters of Siena. In 1317, Lippo di Memmi received a commission to paint a large Maesta in the main chamber of the Town Hall. It is thought that Memmo assisted his son with this work. Memmo may also have worked with Lippo Memmi on the fresco cycle of the New Testament in the Collegiate Church of San Gimignano, completed around 1345.

I find this all astonishing since the primary subject in my work is the medieval warrior, Joan of Arc. She was born one hundred years after Memmo, and five hundred and seventy-four years later, Joan of Arc became my Muse.

In an article in the Santa Fe Journal, I once explained why Joan remained my primary subject for so many years… “She had no formal education, but she dictated remarkable letters about wanting peace. She was ignorant of the world, and yet she changed it. Her short life (she was burned at the stake at 19) was filled with wisdom.” Yes, these are some of the reasons. There are also emotional imperatives that drive me continually back to her but now that I’ve been introduced to Memmo di Filippucci, I can allow myself to believe that there is some genetic predisposition keeping me focused on an ancient historical figure.

What I Believed

For the longest time, I thought I was trying to find her voice. In fact, her legacy still speaks loudly all over the world. I now see that I am trying to find my voice through her. And my voice has just been amplified by some art ancestry. Nice to meet you, Memmo.

Copyright Sandra Filippucci 1980-2021. All Rights Reserved