What's on My Easel

I promised to show you what's on my easel, so here goes.  The piece on the left is one that was already deemed "finished"- an illustration for my yet to be written book, called, "Crow Creates the Night".

Crow Creates the Night (version 1)

Even though I thought it was finished, the crow's beak really bothered me because I felt it wasn't shaped like the one in "The Separation of Heron and Crow",

The Separation of Heron and Crow

and therefore would be too inconsistent if I ever do finish the book. Finally I decided to fix it, and here's what it looks like now.

Crow Creates the Night (version 2)

Changing it was very difficult, and at one point I was sure I had ruined it, but I'm much more satisfied with it now. 

The piece in the middle of the easel is kind of a re-do of part of an older piece which just wasn't working. I don't have a 'before' photo of it to show you, but several things were erased and a few were added. Right now I'm putting a chaotic flock of birds in the sky, flying as birds do when they're startled out of a tree or something.  The idea is to create a sense of unease here, giving the viewer a feeling that something ominous is about to happen.  I can't tell how this one will turn out, or even if I'll like it.

The third piece is the next illustration for my non-existent book, entitled, "Heron Creates the Day." I hope you're able to see the outlines of the heron, which at this point is just a sketch on a piece of tracing paper.  Hopefully, I will get to this one soon.



                              

What it's About

One of my favorite art instructors was/is well known for asking us the tough questions.  First and foremost: What is it about?
     "Yes, I see what it is," she'd say, "but what is it about?"  What it is and what it's about are rarely one and the same when it comes to art.  As artists, we want our work to communicate something to the viewer, but a painting of an apple does not necessarily mean to convey the idea, "here's an apple."  Visual art, like a written passage, is not very satisfying if it doesn't require you to make inferences.  Most readers/viewers will tend to feel cheated if the creator of the work hits them over the head with their message, and it's also just not very interesting.

When I showed my latest piece to my family on Christmas day, my son-in-law wanted to know what I was thinking when I made it; he wanted to know what it's about. A legitimate question, but for me, it's not always an easy one to answer.  I mean, I know what it's about, but it's always difficult to put it into words.  After all, if I were good at putting words together, I'd be a writer, not an artist. For me, creating meaning from color and line and form is so much easier. But it's our responsibility, isn't it, to help others interpret what we've created.

Theory of Flight

ingredients: vintage book cover; vintage book pages, ledger page, children's writing paper and book parts; image transfers; vintage stamps; vintage map fragment; found objects; brass wire; acrylic ink; hand stitching; feathers


So here's what I told him :
I was thinking about flight, and how unlikely it seems. Like, how do things fly if they're heavier than air?  I know there is a scientific mechanism, called lift, but really, when you think about it, it just defies common sense.
We talked about how there is a fundamental mystery about it, something we can't really fully understand just by using our senses.  I guess the pulley and those other metal things represent the scientific theory, the causation of something happening, how it affects something else which causes something else to happen... and you have flight.  But really, isn't it a bit like magic? The objects, feathers and drawing could just as easily represent a magic spell as something scientific.

As we discussed this, I felt like he 'got it', and was able to come to a deeper appreciation of the piece, as opposed to just seeing it as something decorative.  And I was wondering what other artists think about this aspect of being creative.  Do you think we should be able to talk about our work, or are the viewers 'on their own' so to speak?  How much do you explain, and how much do you leave to their own interpretation?






p.s. I apologize for the terrible quality of the photo, but I have tried numerous times with a borrowed 'point-and-shoot', and they never come out totally in focus. Anyone know somebody with a used DSLR they want to sell?

The View From My Window

This is literally the view from my back window - you can see the screen - because it was so cold I didn't want to open the door or go outside.

I was surprised yesterday morning when the phone rang, alerting me to the fact that school was closed.  I wasn't expecting this, nor did I expect to find another 4 inches of snow on the ground when I got up.

Scout was not pleased, as you can plainly see by her expression.  (She really does have facial expressions, odd as that may seem!)  I'm unsure why she thought the top of the picnic table would be any warmer than the ground; she was probably disappionted to find that it was not.


The gift of the extra time, plus sunlight reflected off the snow meant I could finally try to photograph one the pieces - now finished - from my previous post. It's not the greatest photo, being taken inside the house, but it still gives you a pretty accurate idea what the piece looks like.

Untitled 

ingredients: vintage book cover and page, vintage ledger page, vintage envelopes, decorative paper, hell note, vintage map, image transfers, colored pencils, Caran d'Ache crayons, found objects, milagro, vintage lace, brads, beads, stitching

I hope you're enjoying your weather, wherever you are!

Time Management, Forward Momentum, and a Revelation

Since I started working on several pieces at once, I've found my productivity has greatly increased.  This shouldn't come as any great surprise, of course, because it's really just common sense, but I was always afraid that if I had more than two pieces in progress at any one time, I might become scattered and unable to focus my energy on anything long enough to finish any of them. In the last year or two, though, ideas have been coming at me so fast and furiously that I feared I'd lose them altogether if I didn't at least get the pieces started.

Happily, this shift in my working habits has really worked out well, allowing me to work on a piece until I got stuck, then let it rest, ideas percolating quietly while I forged ahead with something else. I don't get bogged down or frustrated with one piece.  I don't obssess. To put it succinctly, I am wasting lots less time than I did previously.

I thought it might be nice to share some of this process by showing you what I was also working on while finishing The Spell is Broken.

Here are three pieces I've been working on.  The tall one standing up behind the book is one that went oddly astray.  It might be due to the fact that I had no real clear plan, but only a nebulous idea of "an old map", which came to me while looking at a foxed and stained vintage book page.  The parts around the perimeter of the piece came together pretty quickly and easily, but the main focus - the map part in the center - did not. I knew I wanted the rivers to be done in embroidery, but had little else in mind.  I fugured something would occur, as it usually does.

 

Nope.  I tried a figure, a dragonfly, maybe 8 or 10 other ideas, but - nope. Anything I could come up with was only overshadowed by the now too detailed (I thought) perimeter.  Everything I tried had to be ripped off, if I had gotten hopeful enough to even glue it down.  So there it sat.

I started working on an idea I'd had for a long time, called Book of Secrets.  Finally I'd been able to find a black book large enough for the project, which had been my major roadblock up to this point.  I cut out the part of the front cover where I inteneded to insert the smaller book cover, and bent some copper sheeting around the edges. Meanwhile, I also did some alteration on the design on the small cover, and found a keyhole escutcheon to put in the center, as well as some locks and things that will go on later.

The hardest part thus far has been attaching the snakeskin; despite copious amounts of acrylic gel medium, I'm not sure how well-secured it is, or how well preserved.  The stitches around the bottom edge are there as much to hold it in place as for decoration. I'm not sure I would reccommend sewing a snakeskin onto a book, but if you do, it would probably be best to split the snakeskin so it's flat instead of tubular.  I'm just sayin'.

One Saturday morning when I got tired of fighting with the snakeskin, I started the piece in the back of the photos.  This one came together pretty smoothly; the thing that slowed it down was just the huge amount of stitching.

Here is the finished piece, entitled Revelation. I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out. I'll be showing you further progress on the other two soon, along with another new one!



What processes, methods, or approaches work best for you in the studio?  I'd love to hear your ideas!

A Short Interruption

Well, it's not really much of an interruption, since I'm still working on the Book of Dreams, and have almost finished the second page spread.  I had this little collage- which I had just about given up on- laying around the studio, and suddenly got the urge to finish it.  Perhaps I was inspired by a movie I watched about a week and a half ago, called "Capitalism: A Love Story."  If you haven't seen it, I'll just say that it's essentially an explanation of the hows and whys of the big financial crisis and bailout.  It could also be because of (almost constant) news that the stock market is very unstable, and well, you get the picture, right?   And I think it definitely has something to do with all the eggs in my recent work.

The piece was going to be entitled Extra Blame, because of some of the text on a vintage book page, but in the end I decided to call it Don't Put All Your Eggs in One Basket.  Come to think of it, that would also be a good title for one of Lynne Ciacco's weekly maxims, wouldn't it?  (How about it, Lynne?)
So here's the collage; enjoy!

Don't Put All Your Eggs in One Basket

ingredients: image transfers, Chinese hell notes, vintage book pages, map scraps, inkjet prints, metallic ink, other ephemera, watercolor pencils, artist pens


In addition, I wanted to mention that Mo Crow has posted a bit about her process on her wonderful illustration blog, It's Crow Time.  She has also posted some links to process-oriented posts on other blogs.  These are well worth checking out, as are her amazing drawings.


I will be posting the next section of Book of Dreams very soon, so be sure to check back.

Happy Fourth of July to all my American friends!

Deconstructed Reconstituted 3-Layer Buddha (With a Cherry on Top)

Ingredients: image transfer, vintage book pages, metallic paper, map fragment, magazine cut-outs, acrylic ink, watercolor pencils, Koh-i-noor pens.  6" x 4"

This was another of the pieces I was working on for the postcard show.  I feel like I should explain the long and somewhat bizarre title of this piece, in case you're wondering.  (And who wouldn't, right?)  So, here's the story:

1. I started by gluing down a bunch of old book pages and stuff, then did the image transfer of the Buddha grid,  using acrylic gel medium.  It worked quite well.

2. I proceeded to paint it and color it and glue more stuff on around it. 

3. After a while, it got all muddy and floopy-looking, so I covered it with more book pages and did the transfer again.  Again, the transfer came out perfectly.

4. I then commenced to mess it up once more, chiefly by way of adding some metallic crayon stuff that I didn't like.  (You never know until you try it, right?)

5. I had one more copy of the Buddha grid, so I thought: why not?  Yep, you guessed it; I covered it with some more vintage book pages, and did the transfer ONE MORE TIME- hence, the "3-layer" part of the title.  This time, the transfer didn't go as well, mostly due to the crappy metallic crayon, which the transfer didn't want to stick to.  So, I thought:

6. It looks like doo-doo, so what's to lose?  I started pulling the layers apart, just to see what happened.  Of course, most of it came apart in pieces.  This is where the "deconstructed" part of the title comes in.

7. But, I had most of the top layer, and a few other pieces that were interesting, so I tried putting them back together to form a semi-complete image, fitting them together like a puzzle.  I felt almost like an archeologist (which I have always wanted to be), piecing together fragments of some broken, long-buried artifact.  Okay, you can see how pathetic my life really is, but I was having fun!  I'm sure "reconstituted" isn't what they actually call it, either; I think that's orange juice, or powdered milk.  Whatever.

8. At this point, I started to like it more, and not just because I got to pretend to be an archeologist.  I now had a sort of pieced-together Buddha made from acrylic gel, kind of a very bumpy and stretchy decal. 

9.  I put some more stuff on the background, and then glued it down, glued on some more stuff, and- Voila!

I'm pretty sure the "cherry on top" is self-explanatory.

Re-Vision

I don't usually do collages that don't contain some of my own drawing or monotype work, but I thought I'd give it a try.  Why I thought that, I don't really know, since I'm generally quite terrible at this type of work.  In my last post, I included a collage I had made by combining different papers.  In keeping with the theme of clouds and rain, my intention was for the piece to express that mood, so I wanted to do something a bit simpler, softer, and more monochromatic than my usual riot of intense color and contrast.  (Okay, stop laughing; it is too possible!) The result was less than satisfactory; in fact, it was boring.

As I sat looking at this piece and pondering what might be done to improve its awfulness, I though perhaps I had been over-confident; maybe I should have started small.  "Go big or go home" is not always a sound philosophy.  So, I began cutting it into smaller pieces, which seemed at once to be an obvious improvement.  I worked on each one individually, while still keeping them similar enough to work as a series.

Symphony of the Rain (Overture)  4.75" x 5.75"

Symphony of the Rain (First Movement)  6.25" x 6"

Symphony of the Rain (Second Movement)  5" x 5"

Symphony of the Rain (Third Movement)  6" x 4.75"

Ingredients (all 4 pieces):  vintage ephemera, decorative papers, magazine cut-outs.

What do you think?  Better, or not?  Any and all advice would be helpful!