Revision to Choreography

I can't express how much I love working with tracing paper and being able to layer text and images.

These are close up shots from the back wall of the installation.

This is the whole wall.

I wished I had realized that two objects the same size do not appear to be the same size when one is five feet in front of the other but I may be able to adjust for that a bit.

Being Choreographed

Somehow I find myself working on an instalation. Sometimes this is exciting and sometimes it feels like I've gone off the deep end. Either way it is incredibly fun I just struggle with feeling like I am avoiding making legitimate art (oil paintings). I also realize that if I were to pursue installation as my main art form it would put me at the mercy of the Art World in a way that painting and printmaking do not. You can still sell work at galleries and art fairs, off the net if you make things people can take home with them. Installations live in museums as far as I know. I have totall faith that I will be able to find venues to share my work no matter what but I am definately in unkown waters.

Part of what is so exciting about his project is the feeling that the art has taken over. I have to let go of the things I wanted hang on the wall to allow the poem to sculpt itself out of ink, mylar, and tracing paper.

The more I let go the more I feel like the piece captures fog and solitude and the sense of layers we have in our experiences as physical, spiritual, emotional and thoughtful beings.

This was the original plan but when my teacher suggested lighter paper I saw an opportunity to create fog that I couldn't pass up.

The mylar isn't as trunslucent as I'd hoped so I am going to cut some of the spaces out to let the text show through. It is really exciting to work so big and to see my art become a space that people can be inside of.

Choreography

I am working with an old poem called Choreography. It really needs to be reworked but using it in a painting is a great way to get ideas for revisions. Part of my project this quarter is that I am trying to find a less literal way of making art with poems. I don't want to get caught in illustrating the scene or events of a poem. I want to use the poem for a starting point. It's challenging and brings up many questions:
Does the viewer need to be able to read the poem?
Does the poem need to be legible within the art piece?
Does the piece need to encompass the entirety of the poem?

Ultimately I think I could answer no to all those questions but ideally I think I would like to be able to achieve a yes to all of them.

Anyways this is the first time I have made so many experiments toward one aim and these are only my favorites, there's more. It's fun but I feel uninterested in making any finished pieces.

Choreography.

The birch branches
break the swirling sky
into a grey mosaic
with birds blooming
like black blossoms on vines.

Some squawk,
some circle around perches,
making exchanges.

They burst all at once from the birch
and scatter with the ruckus of crows.
A moment later they return
filtering into new roosts.

I crouch behind the open window, watching.
The chill of fog and solitude sifts
through my skin, unbinding shyness,
casting out charm, casting out
my choreographies of what it all means.
I will wait like a crow now,
for my wings to lift
or the flutter of another’s beside me.

Ruining Paintings (on purpose) and Making Envelopes

The closer a painting gets to being finished the more uptight I tend to get about ruining it and the less I want to work on it. Really the best thing to do at that point is to ruin the painting so I can relax and get on with it. I can always paint over it so there's really nothing to lose.


I realize they may not look that different to the casual observer but once I get attached to a piece the slightest change seems monumental. I had hoped to finish these before school starts so I can begin new projects with a clean slate but I got very stymied with moving, looking for a new job and not having anyone around to bounce ideas off of. I am not too disappointed. I feel I've accomplished a lot for my first stint working solo.


This is definitely the most problematic piece. I feel somehow it should be easy since I don't want it to be representational as much as emotional. The hardest part, though, is trying not to be representational!


Despite my half-hearted attempt to sell my hand-made papers on Etsy I still dream of having a business that revolves around making paper. today I decided to make some envelopes out of my Favorite Papers collection. It was wonderful to be crafty! I just love the way colors interact and somehow its more magical when I am arranging colored pieces of paper then when I am plowing paint around a canvas.

These are the lids, yet to be constructed into envelopes. I love metal grommets even though they are purely cute and cute is totally antithetical to Art.

When to Stop

This piece is called Stop, Stretch, and I'm not sure when I should have stopped it. I am interested in delving into a more flippant drawing style because I feel my work is too labored and not spontaneous enough. The thing I like most about this piece is that it is my way of commenting on how polarized we are for having different opinions on issues and each believing that we are right and people who disagree are ignorant.

Vacation

I just returned from a much needed vacation to Colorado to visit my sister and her husband. It was wonderful to get away, spend time with family, hike in new places and visit a new art museum. It was very inspiring to see new art, a new landscape and to get familiar with my sister's art, quilting. Fabric artists are more inspiring to me right now than painters and just going to the fabric store with Julie blew my circuits. The patterns were so beautiful, there were about 20 fabrics I wanted to bring home with me, but I hate sewing!
The piece above is too much fun, tedious but fun. I think I could make many more versions.

This is my first landscape painting of the summer, not that it's finished. I got a little overwhelmed with the complexity of the forest and the mosquitos. I love painting all the tree shapes but the leaves and undergrowth are sort of a headache that I need to learn how to abbreviate in a way that holds the piece together.

Dream, Work, Fail, Learn

I am a bit romanticized by photos of ink bottles, even in a plastic corale (Do you have any idea how easy it is to tip over a bottle of ink or how quickly that ink absorbs into carpet?)
I think I am really done with this painting. I haven't the faintest idea if it is successful or not but I can tell I am done with it either way. I actually like it, by the way. I ruined it at one point by painting too many letters over the top. I printed a photo of it at an earlier stage and tried to reconstruct parts of it. It seemed like a natural part of the process more than a mistake.
This is another heart work piece. I was exploring failure as a part of the whole learning process. We are so focused on success as a culture I think some of become a little petrified of failure but it is so necessary, we should glam it up a little bit!