I’m excited to announce that Kristin Beeler has graciously agreed to illustrate our upcoming 2011 winter/spring issue! Kristin earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Berea College in Berea, Kentucky and an MFA from the University of Arizona, Tuscon. She most recently had a solo exhibit titled Beauty and other Monsters at Velvet DaVinci Gallery in San Francisco.
Her artist’s statement:
If I could, I would make pieces that were so beautiful, they made people uncomfortable, touching off an itch of vague desire. Beauty, it seems, is the heat generated by friction between that longing and relief.”
I have long admired Kristin’s keen eye for design and the mood and feeling that she coaxes out of otherwise lifeless objects. She is best known as a jewelry maker and metalsmith, but is also an avid collector of striking /images (digital and otherwise), antique/unusual spoons, and random castoff bolts and other metal bits and pieces. She is attracted to found objects with an unknown (and therefore mysterious) history.
These characterizations are my own, mind you, not part of her official bio, and based mostly on a morning walk we took together about a year-and-a-half ago. We were walking along the sidewalk of a one-stoplight town in the county that we both lived in and left during the 1980s. During the course of that walk, we stopped at a small antique shop to search for interesting spoons (found one, acquired it) then paused in the parking lot of of an old jewelry-store-turned-used-car-lot to admire and then also acquire a bit of rusted cast iron that caught her eye.
And I guess the point I’m making is this: Kristin’s eye is keen, eclectic, all-encompassing, and generous. I cannot wait to see the /images she offers up to accompany the fine work that will be forthcoming in our next issue. Thank you, Kristin!