Category: Artist Books

Art, Artist Books, Collage, Ladybusiness

The Remembrancer: Default

Shelly

The Remembrancer: Default

The Remembrancer: Default
collage (altered Polaroid, anatomical illustrations, and brass brad) with Neocolors II water-soluble crayons and gesso
4 3/4 x 8 1/4 inches

I really like the way the altered Polaroid turned out. The original photo was of a stack of prints (lithographs, I think) lying on the mat room work bench at the art museum. We were discussing museum self-censorship (the director had decided not to exhibit the print of the nude, because we’d recently had complaints from a community member about nude artwork), so the preparator stuck a piece of black paper over the crotch of the woman and took a Polaroid of it. At the bottom of the photo, he wrote: Museum Censorship.

I kept the picture, intending to deconstruct it and use it in my own work. I separated the emulsion from the backing and washed out the right hand side of the image with a baby wipe, leaving just a bit of red and yellow. I then pasted an image of a woman from an anatomy text behind the photo.

Art, Artist Books, Collage

Hmmm.

Shelly

The Terrible Hours: What Each Girl Should Bring
The Terrible Hours: What Each Girl Should Bring

A comment left at Flickr for the above image:

Very creative and well done, but for me a little too morbid making it uncomfortable to look at..

It seems like a pretty innocuous statement, but the more I think about it, the more I wonder, what’s the point? If taken at face value, it seems odd to me that someone would go out of their way to leave a comment that simply states that they prefer less “morbid” work. My response is, “That’s nice, dear, but what does it have to do with me?” In other words, I don’t really care what sort of art an anonymous passer-by prefers. M’kaythen!

Or is it meant to be constructive criticism? If so, good luck with that! I mean, really, telling someone that their work is too “morbid” is not exactly constructive, in that there is precious little chance that they will find it helpful, or that they will change their subject matter or style of work to accommodate your wishes.

And, I’m sorry, but “morbid”? I think that might be true of some of my pieces, but that particular collage is not one of them.

Ironically, the commenter in question has no photos in their Flickr photostream and no profile.

Art, Artist Books, Collage

The Remembrancer: Blue Moon

Shelly

The Remembrancer: Blue Moon
The Remembrancer: Blue Moon
Portfolio water-soluble crayons, pencil, and gesso
4 3/4 x 8 1/4 inches

For some reason, I have a terrible time color-correcting blues. It doesn’t help that some media–like crayons and colored pencils–lose opacity when scanned. So, the color on this one is as close as I could get it, but it’s not perfect.

I’m also not a big fan of Portfolio water-soluble crayons. They’re super creamy and smeary and are just too mushy for my tastes. They also don’t layer very well, so just when you think you are building up nice, complex strata of pigment, you end up with bald spots. Hrmf!

Art, Artist Books, Collage

Distress Signals & The Soothsayer’s Palm

Shelly

The Remembrancer: Distress Signals
The Remembrancer: Distress Signals
collage (illustrations from old book, child’s dress pattern, and buttons) with gesso and Portfolio water-soluble crayons
4 3/4 x 8 1/4 inches

The Remembrancer: The Soothsayer's Palm
The Remembrancer: The Soothsayer’s Palm
collage (film strip, old shipping label, dictionary fragment, dried flower and brass brad) with gesso, ink, and Portfolio water-soluble crayons
4 3/4 x 8 1/4 inches

Art, Artist Books, Bookarts

The Remembrancer: A Tragedy in One Act

Shelly

100_3948

100_3944
The Remembrancer: A Tragedy in One Act
5 1/8 x 4 3/8 inches
8 signatures of 2 sheets (32 pages)
brown paper grocery bags Coptic bound with hemp twine

This one is kind of small, both in dimensions and length. It’s also nearly square, which will probably make me cry before I finish it. Too bad I got gesso on the binding, because it actually turned out pretty well. It’s nice and even, without being too tight. That’s not so easy to accomplish with rough hemp, because the twin itself is knobbly, with thick and thin bits. I’ll try to clean up the gesso splotches and get decent close-ups of the stitching tomorrow. Or maybe I’ll decide it doesn’t matter.