AUNTWAVE: a funky, love-filled trend for crazy-making times
Blessed Trend Alert
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For decades, my aunt Ellen has painted beautiful abstracted landscapes onto and into colored-glass panes. Back in the ‘60s, she worked on canvas, but eventually gravitated toward her own version of stained glass, “painting with light” and exhibiting work over the years in vibey places like college libraries and church gallery shows, while taking on architectural commissions …
Ellen has skills & vision, and her name rightfully RINGS OUT in the tight-knit glass-art community — but anyone in that community would probably tell you that glass art does not get the widespread critical consideration its practitioners and devotees believe it’s due !!
Erin and I have thought a lot about Ellen’s work, in no small part because she’s kindly blessed Spyplane HQ with a few pieces. But RECENTLY we’ve been thinking about her in the context of an ongoing, highly popping trend…
We’re officially articulating this trend today for the first time, but it’s been a bubbling leitmotif in this newsletter more or less since day one:
AUNTWAVE.
“Blackbird Spyplane,” we hear you saying, “holy s**t, you’ve done it again profoundly — but, real quick, what’s Auntwave ??”
The boundaries are porous. Erin is a proud, actual aunt who likes to craft colorful funky s**t in her spare time, which helped this idea germinate, but an Auntwave jawn-maker doesn’t need to be a literal aunt — their work will, however, contain such stereotypically aunt-like characteristics as “ZANY FLAIR” and “KOOKY SWAG” … It will strike a compromise between domestic utility and pure, whim-chasing decorativeness, but tilted definitively toward the latter … It may reflect tender, nurturing qualities of the sort we broadly associate with motherhood, but its maker is concerned first & foremost with exploring and expressing their own personality and view of the world … It is palpably the product of love, but also the product of a sly and slightly strange wit … It tends toward a colorful and elaborately patterned aesthetic, and / or unlikely mediums (like glass art) and even at its most virtuosic there’s something about it that feels homemade, unselfconscious and like the result of a series of idiosyncratic and maybe even defiantly “wrong” decisions…
We R talking about the kind of crafting-adjacent “on its own trip” vibe that you might encounter in its rawest form in a crunchy town like Sedona, AZ, or Gualala, CA, popping into a surprisingly good roadside gallery, community arts center, U.G.H.Z-style coffee house, or (shout out to Ellen) community church and seeing what’s up with the local visionaries…
“No doubt, no doubt, wow, you are great at writing newsletters,” you’re saying. “What are some examples of Auntwave?”
We’ve covered many makers who fall under the AUNTWAVE UMBRELLA, even if we didn’t realize at the time that we were hashing out a preliminary SPYPLANE AUNTWAVE CANON… Drawn roughly, that canon might include: