Sunday, March 6, 2011

It seems like it's been awhile since I did this...

OK, so, as far as last semesters go, this one is going pretty OK so far. Well, sort of. Ironically, since this is my blog for sculpture, sculpture is the class I'm feeling the least great about. But let's talk first about the classes I am feeling great about.

Printmaking. I am having a really good semester in printmaking so far. I'm using thread to incorporate myself with figures from old family photographs, which are drawn on lithograph plates. None of these pictures are great, but they were taken quickly. They still give the general idea.

This one was accepted into the undergraduate juried show.


As was this one.

The lighting was terrible, that's supposed to be white paper.




Lots of knots.

I've started the next plate, with a pic of my dad. Which actually looks more like my brother, IMO. Which, yeah, they look alike, but it really does look more like Carlin than dad. Oh well. Anyway, yes, there is a reason stuff is coming out of his head. You'll just have to wait and see.




Painting

First off, I know awhile ago I posted pics of a large painting with a vagina embroidered in the middle, and promised to explain later. That piece is in limbo right now. I need a break. So you'll just have to wait some more because I don't wanna talk about it.

What I'm working on now is very different. I wanted to scale down, and really embrace the highly decorative. I've always had a thing for patterning and line work. I spent a good 2 hours at the MET in the Japanese and Chinese Decorative Arts section.

So anyway, I started painting these little miniature silhouettes on these tree slices that I found at Et Cetara (store in Seward).



Since I've been using family photos in printmaking, one of the things that's come up is making sure that a viewer who has no connection to my family and doesn't know any of the stories can still connect to the piece. And it just made me think. There's this craft movement (I guess you could call it a movement) that utilizes old photographs. Decoupage, scrapbook covers, all sorts of things. "Art" projects for the Sunday hobbyist. You can find packets of old photographs at some stores, or garage sales, or the internet. And people just use them, for decoration. But what about who these people are? Does that not matter at all? And it just made me think-

What if you were decorating using pictures of a serial killer?  Or something else really terrible?  

So these little miniature, anonymous, faceless portraits, are part of a series I'm calling the Jane and John Doe series. Each one will be attached to a beautiful, ornate bit of embroidery. But each hoop has a placard on it, which immortalizes the 'crime' for which this Jane or John Doe is famous for.

I started by embroidering the label.



Then I cut it out, basted it to the main piece of cloth, and started to stitch it on.



I stitched around it, both on the inside, and on the outside, to create outlines where I was going to satin stitch.



Which I then did.



After I cleaned up a few loose threads, and marked where the wooden portrait was going to go, this is what it all looked like.



So then I embroidered a frame around where the portrait will go. I thought I had more in progress pics, but I guess you'll have to settle for the finished product.


BTW, the wet spot is because the pen I use to mark everything erases with water.

And hey, look at that, I just found my close up lens for my camera!





I still have to slap everything together, and then I'll have one done. I have 6 or 7 to make (I'm hoping for 7 but one of the wood slices has a weird crack in it, which is either going to make it extra cool or impossible to work with, I'm still deciding).


Sculpture.

OK. So, yeah. It's not that it's going terrible, it's just...not quite clicking yet? Like, I still fee like I don't really know what I'm doing.

I really wanted to work with the idea of passing down information. I really love the written word, and I think it's fascinating to have something like my great grandmother's autobiography. I wanted to do something with books.

We had a show at the Eisentrager Howard gallery a month ago or so, and in it we had a Duchamp piece. It's a recreatable piece. Basically, you set up a dictionary, and people can go in and add words, or cross out words, or change the meaning of words...basically, they get to shape the next evolution of the English language. And I really liked that idea of interacting. And I wanted to set up something where the audience would get to interact, and leave their own little bit of history behind.

I don't really know how I'm doing that yet. Nothing I think of feels exactly right. But I decided to just forge on making a book, for now, so that at least I'm working and my mind is on the problem. I have the paper all torn and folded, and I started stitching the cover. I wanted to embroider the cover because that's what my great grandmother did for her book, and that made it extra special. I want it to look like something someone cared about.

I started by drawing out a frame. I sort of envision the 'title' going inside the frame, whatever that ends up being.



So then I just started filling it in.




I got the first part down and then drew on the second layer of curls.



And sewed those on.



Then I went ahead and erased the blue lines because I wanted a nice clear picture.



This is not the final design, though. This is the drawing I did. I decided I'm not going to put that final layer of scallops on the outside, but I didn't have an eraser with me when I was drawing.



So, yeah, that's where I'm at. I'll just keep plugging along now.

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