Straight up cool

I mentioned Val Britton was in Harper's this month. Here it is. That is pretty bad ass.
Why, you ask?
Well, this is particularly cool to me, even though I don't know Val -- for all intents and purposes, we were barely acquaintances in school, she being a serious artist and me a hobo dilettante out for a lark -- because Val was one of the very first artists we thought of commissioning for EbM. That was tasked to someone who knew her better than I and I think maybe never happened. The commission was for one of our first, actually maybe our very first, speculative projects. She was definitely the first artist whose work I photoshopped onto a landscape in an effort to share the scope of our vision, back in the early days of the project.
Val creates these stunning, complex, beautiful collages. Each is a map, a very personal map, as you can see. A map, nonetheless. She maps time and space and experience. Well, obviously, an artist who can do that and do it so beautifully and intelligently is going to be a hero of mine. I spend a weird amount of my time trying to map these things in words and images in my brain. She gets them out of her brain, something I can only truly succeed in doing conceptually, sometimes performatively, not physically. I am always struggling, but rarely do I succeed, I fear.
Someday EbM intends to commission Val. In our business plan I have her scheduled to travel to hundreds of beaches around Earth in the near future, collecting the different colored sands(tons of sands) of our planet as they disappear under the rising seas. Then, using two teams, each consisting of a boat, a few helicopters, and her blueprints/instructions, I am hoping Val will create a diptych: two maps, one on an iceberg in the antarctic sea, one on an iceberg in the arctic sea. Her maps will slowly drift towards each other, dissipating as they do. That's my fantasy, anyway.
Oh, and don't hate me because I photographed Harper's on top of a pile of other magazines I won't find time to read... that's the best light in the house, hence the reason we keep stacks of magazines and print-outs and books in there.