Art – Page 67 – red paper boat

Dirt on the Slide

January 23, 2006October 12, 2015 Shelly

I finally replaced my dryer yesterday, after engaging in a game of musical appliances that involved moving three–count ’em, three–dryers. Not by myself, mind you. But still, it was w-o-r-k. It was well worth the effort, though, or it will be after I finally get to dry my jeans. You see, they are so loose they’re threatening to fall off me, onna count of they haven’t been properly dried in months. I very nearly rewashed them, so that I could dry them, but I decided it would be a silly waste of water and electricity to wash and dry clean clothes.

The Virgin and Child with Canon van der Paele, Oil on wood, 141 x 176.5 cm (including frame), 1434-36

Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, I’d like to commence with today’s Art History and Rules to Live By Lesson.

Once upon a time, when I was a wee lass, I took an art survey course which comprised, in part, the study, comparison, and contrasting of Medieval and Renaissance art. To wit, Medieval art is highly symbolic and not terribly concerned with the natural rendering of forms, while Renaissance art, though still highly symbolic, fetishizes the pursuit of naturalism. In other words, Medieval art appears–to our eyes–to be two-dimensional and stilted while Renaissance art appears to exhibit depth and shading and all those things we like to think make art look “realistic.”

The Virgin and Child with Canon van der Paele, detail

So, anyway, one day in class, Dr. StuffyPants was interrupted in the midst of mumbling about Jan van Eyck’s Madonna with Canon van der Paele by a student who asked, quite reasonably, I thought, if the apparent deformity in the Baby Jeebus’ right foot was due to the artist’s ignorance of anatomy or if it was a naturalistic rendering of the model’s malformed foot. Dr. StuffyPants blinked, and replied, “It’s dirt on the slide.” At which point, the entire class of about 200 students cracked up laughing. Which caused Dr. StuffyPants to become unglued. Which made my day.

The moral of this story, because you know there is one, is that it is generally good policy not to make up shit when you don’t know, or can’t think of, the answer. Not that I don’t believe he didn’t know the answer. The man was stuffy, certainly, and arrogant, for sure, but ignorant of the subject matter he was not. He was simply unable to think on the fly, and when a student asked him a question he was unprepared for, he couldn’t pull the answer out of his ass with a compass, a map, and two extra hands. No ma’am. Not if his life depended on it. If he’d just fessed up to his momentary mental lapse, all would have been well and he would have likely finished the lecture with his dignity intact. “I don’t know” is, after all, a perfectly acceptable answer. But, no, he told an obvious lie in order to save face, and it backfired, damaging whatever respect his students had for him. (And, lordy! I just looked him up, and he’s still teaching intro and survey classes.)

So, my secondary point is to share the source of my little giggle fest this afternoon. I overheard someone complaining that there was “dirt on the slide,” which in my world is code-speak for “someone is talking out of their ass.” Heh.

Art, Journals

Soul Mapping: Chapter 3 Finished

January 23, 2006October 12, 2015 Shelly

I spent most of yesterday working on the writing portion of Chapter 3 of Soul Mapping. Today, I did the visual part, which involved a bit of finger painting. Appropriate, I think, as this chapter dealt with education, which sent me on a tangent about an experience I had in kindergarten. I remember, during coloring time, getting disgusted that the white crayon didn’t make a very satisfactory mark, so I colored the clouds blue and pink and orange and purple. I thought they looked perfect, but my teacher told me I’d done them wrong. “Clouds are always white,” she said. I remember thinking it was sad that she’d never seen a sunset.

That experience ruined art classes for me throughout grade school and most of high school. No matter how hard I tried, I never seemed to be able to finish my art projects “correctly.” I realize now that the problem was not mine; that it was my teachers who were crappy at the art of education, and not me who was crappy at art. Some people really should not be allowed anywhere near kids.

Soul Mapping, Chapter 3
acrylic, gel pen, oil pastel, and collage in composition book

Art, Journals

Soul Mapping: Chapter 2 Finished

January 20, 2006October 12, 2015 Shelly

I finished Chapter 2 last night, including the visual component. At the rate this is going, I’m going to be filling up several composition books before I’m finished. Whew. But, it’s interesting to see how things sort themselves out, as well as seeing trends and themes emerge. I guess I find it especially impressive, because it seems so chaotic while I’m going through it. To have a moment of clarity at the end of each section is rewarding.

Soul Mapping, Chapter 2
9 3/4 x 15 inches
collage (Gepe mount, brass brads, copper wire, worry dolls, paper towels, hair, dress pattern, knife blade, key, fortune, sandpaper, fragment from algebra book, magazine clipping, cork, and acrylic paint) in composition book journal

Art

Strange Associations

January 19, 2006October 12, 2015 Shelly

I was recently reminded of someone I went to college with. He was a fellow art student, studying drawing. I was only in one class with him–a disappointing watercolor class[1]–so I really didn’t have a good idea of what sort of work he did. His watercolors were nice, but pretty mundane. I recall lots of still lifes and landscapes. Certainly not anything to get granny’s knickers in a twist.

Imagine my surprise when, on viewing his senior show, I was confronted with dozens and dozens of large-format, carefully rendered self-portraits of him–nude, mind you–with all manner of fantastical equines. Male equines. Very obviously male equines. The drawings themselves were in Prismacolor, and had a distinctly Precious Moments Meets Black Light Velvet Painting feel about them. The horses, unicorns (yes, unicorns), and centaurs (yes, those, too) were all of the large-, liquid-eyed variety, with exaggerated Arab heads and delicate feet.

Can you just imagine it? A room chock-a-block with homoerotic bestial fantasy art? Don’t you think, at some point, someone would have taken this poor kid aside and told him, “Dude, your kink is not okay”? Hard as it is to believe, I have to assume that this guy was actually graduated. The thought that such work would earn him a degree in fine art is more than a little mind-boggling.

As a funny aside, the reason I even saw his senior show is that it was held at the University Museum of Art, where I worked, and I happened to be on duty that weekend. Weekends at the MoA were when folks from the local community stopped by. Old folks from the local community. Old folks who were really not amused by the My Little Porny Exhibition. We got more complaints about that show than any other, including Sylvia Sleigh’s nudes, which made the local patrons all sorts of pearl-clutchy and cranky.

So, anyway, now, whenever I see fantasy art that involves equines, I think of My Little Porny Boy. Which is a roundabout way of saying that, when someone on Paint-L mentioned centaurs, I started giggling uncontrollably.

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[1] I think I’ve vented my spleen about the unsatisfactoriness of that class in the past.

Art, Journals

Soul Mapping

January 16, 2006October 12, 2015 Shelly

Soul Map, Chapter 2

Last year, I started working through the book Soul Mapping. I got a few chapters into it, and the going got rough, so I put it aside. I picked it up a few weeks ago, and have been trying to do a little work in it every day. I’m not big on self-help books, but this one is geared toward artists and finding motivation and inspiration, so it’s a little bit different.

One of the goals of the exercise is to develop a visual vocabulary that can be implemented in one’s artwork. So, it’s helpful to artists who feel they have run out of inspiration or who are having trouble finding their voices. The exercises require a lot of of both written and visual journaling. Each chapter culminates in the creation of a small soul map, which together will ultimately form a large soul map.

Unsurprisingly, the beginning exercises deal largely with childhood and formative issues, which can be incredibly difficult for some people to sort through. When I started the book, I was working through it along with a group of people on one of my art lists. We all did really well with the first two chapters. When we hit chapter three, everything fell to pieces. I guess everyone felt it was just too damned hard.

Well, I’ll be damned if I’m going to let it get the better of me. I guess that’s why I picked it back up again. Just based on how large an impact the first couple chapters had on me, I know there is a huge amount to be gleaned from persevering and forcing myself to finish working through the book. Boy, is it ever hard, though!

Soul Map, Chapter 1

And, on a lighter note:

There’s a commercial for a local personal injury attorney that cracks me up. Apparently, the best selling point they can offer up is that they will argue your case in court using Power Point. Oh yeah, that impresses the hell out of me.

Art, Artist Books, Collage, Meta, Music

A Mid-week Bundle of Non-sequitury Goodness

January 11, 2006January 16, 2016 Shelly

Skirting the Issue
child’s dress pattern, used sandpaper, dried plant fibers, and hemp twine
8 3/4 x 11 1/2 inches

I haven’t finished this one yet, but it may not be fit for public consumption once I have, so I thought I’d scan and upload it while I could. I don’t know when I got au fait with Teh Punny, and it needs to stop rightthisminute, but what can I say? It’s an illness.

As you can see, I’m still stuck in Brown Land. I guess I’d better just face the fact that everything in this book is going to be some shade of blech, and stop worrying about it. Maybe if I tell myself it’s a reflection of the winter landscape, it won’t bug me so much. And pigs might fly.

The new Earl Brothers CD is out. Wheee! The Earl Brothers are goth bluegrass at it’s very finest, with a blend of humor and menace that can be found in some of Nick Cave’s best work. Their first CD was one of those rare gems that is an excellent companion for cleaning, arting, or driving. If their second release is half as good as the first, it’s worth every penny and then some. (Guess what I’m getting myself for my birfday?)

Speaking of music… I’m sure everyone has suffered having a song stuck in their head, and been unable to get rid of it. It happens to me regularly. Well, yesterday I had one so firmly lodged, that it stayed there all day, then showed up in my dreams, which consisted of various efforts to dislodge the damned thing. That’s right, I wasted my precious REM time getting rid of Generation X’s Kiss Me Deadly. Not because the song itself was bothersome, mind you. I quite like it. But, it had thoroughly outstayed its welcome.

This just in from the Things Could Be Worse department: Be thankful that you don’t own the green Pontiac that mysteriously rolled out of its parking slot this afternoon.

I’m in the process of installing WordPress on my main site. If I get time over the extra-extra long weekend (four days, onna count of MLK Day), and if my connection cooperates, I’ll play around with it (as in, I’ll try to break as many templates as possible). Right now, it is Teh Vanilla. My host also has some interesting looking image gallery packages that I’m going to have investigate. Because, you know, I need to complicate my life like I need another hole in my head. It’s that time of year, though. Spring cleaning is overrated. Personally, I’m a fan of mid-winter cleaning.

Art, Paintings, Poetry

Who Can See the Wind?

January 8, 2006October 8, 2015 Shelly

Who Can See the Wind?
by Christina Rossetti

Who can see the wind?
Neither I nor you
But when the leaves are trembling
The wind is passing through.

Who can see the wind?
Neither you nor I,
But when the trees bow down their heads
The wind is passing by.

This weekend has been sunny, warm, and generally gorgeous–a welcome contrast to last week’s typical Winter in Indiana dreariness. It’s windy, though, so even though it’s in the mid-50sF, it feels a little brisker than it actually is. Yesterday, we had bright blue skies, but today, even though the sun is out, it’s hazy and the sky is a pale, bleached blue. But, the wind…! It\’s howling and gusting and thundering, by turns. I swear, it’s more solid than not, so that you almost feel as if you could see it[1].

Anyway, no new art today, at least not yet. Perhaps later. After a four-day weekend, most of it spent hacking up bits of lung tissue, I realize that I have had precious little in the way of actual ass-sitting. Sure, I’ve talked about it, but the sitting itself has actually yet to materialize. So, maybe, that’s what I’ll spend the rest of the day doing.

Speaking of not sitting on my behindermost, I did finally manage to finish mucking out the laundry room yesterday. Even though the stuff destined for the Mission is still in there, it’s taking up about half the space it did pre-mucking. I can actually get to the washer without falling over things. The point of the exercise was that the dryer fairy may, at any point, decide to visit. I wanted to make sure I could actually get the old dryer out, before she arrived. I even pulled it out and cleaned behind it, so that I won’t have to do that when we swap out machines. (You would not believe the assortment of junk I found back there!)

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[1] I had a book of poems when I was little, that included several by Christina Rossetti. I’ve always loved this one, in particular. It wasn’t until a college art history class on the Pre-Raphaelites that I realized she was the sister of that Rossetti.

The Pre-Raphaelites were an odd little group. Ruskin, and artist, poet, and critic, was shocked and appalled to discover, that women–or, at least, his wife–had pubic hair. Or so the story goes. Apparently, he had this rude awakening on his wedding night, which disturbed him so much the marriage was not consummated. I’m not sure I buy that story, as someone who had spent his life in the art world, around artists and models, should have known better. True, it was traditional to portray women with pre-pubescent, hairless nether bits, but still, surely he’d seen a real, live woman in her altogether before[2]?

Okaythen, class dismissed!

[2] This total and complete non-sequitur brought to you by NyQuil: The sneezing, stuffy head, sore throat, hallucinogenic, where-the-hell-is-my-brain cold medicine.

Art, Collage, Crankypantsing, Journals, Ladybusiness, Poetry

Hemp Bound Journal

January 6, 2006October 5, 2015 Shelly

PWT

This page was an off-shoot of the discussion about the phrase “poor white trash.” I finally spoke up, and called the original poster on her demeaning comments. After having gone to great lengths to describe what she meant by “poor white trash,” and her qualifying how she is supperior to “them,” she had the nerve to reply that she hadn’t really meant it as a slur, because, hey, it’s all a matter of semantics. Um, no, it’s not semantics, not when you’ve precisely qualified and quantified your position. She made a lame attempt at claiming that there were all sorts of meanings for the word “trash” and that “poor” is a state of mind. Neither of those points, even if they were true in this context, addresses the fact that she’d spent umpty words describing a certain group of people, and how they are inferior to her. I had to laugh at her parting shot, though, that she’d suffered discrimination, too, when she was younger, because she had been called a poor, little rich girl. Now, that takes brass ovaries!

Because I thought the “it’s just semantics” defense was a laughable cop-out, I decided to consult Mr. Roget for alternate suggestions. The column spacing sucks, which is one of those things that unreasonably vexes me. I’ll probably add something else to the far right margin of the left-hand page at a later date, just for visual balance

I’d totally forgotten that the phrenology model was on that page, because the coat of gesso makes it blend into the background. It used to be thought that you could judge a person’s character by the structure of their skull. This theory was used as the basis for racial discrimination, as well as for the theory that you could tell just by looking at some people that they were wrong ‘uns. I guess some prejudices die hard, eh?

Backbone & The Direction of Last Things

Letter from a Muse

Vessels

No matter how much I think it’s wrong to kill another living being–and I do–I cannot get past the fact that we do not legally require one person to save another’s life. It makes no more sense to mandate that a woman must carry a baby to term than it does to force people to give over their kidneys or bone marrow or livers for transplants. I can certainly choose to be an organ donor, but I cannot be forced into it. But, some people think it’s okay to force a woman to carry a child to term against her will.

Art

Lord of the Rings

January 3, 2006October 5, 2015 Shelly

I went to Indy yesterday to see the Lord of the Rings exhibit at the Indiana State Museum. Oh my! It was absolutely geek-tacular. I hadn’t been planning on going, because it was my last day of vacation and I had a bunch of things I wanted to get done, but there was an extra ticket, so I decided to be an irresponsible five-year-old. I’m glad I did, because it was the last day of the exhibit, and it won’t be travelling or be shown again.

First, the bigatures. Wow! The attention to detail on every level was stunning. One of the models was of the ruined Hobbiton mill. It gets about three seconds of screen time, during a “flash forward” sequence, and took three months to make. The commitment to getting every detail correct is clearly present in the movies, but to see it first-hand made it even more impressive. I think the set and costume designers were in many ways the real stars of the LotR movies, so I was glad to have an opportunity to show support for the folks behind the scenes.

Second, the costumes.

I had no idea Liv Tyler was so itty bitty!
Aragorn’s costume was beautifully worn.
Galadriel’s gown had about eleventy billion little crystals sewn into it.
Sauron’s costume was ginormous. I hadn’t realized that there is engraved knot-work on just about every single square inch of it, literally from the tips of his crown to the tips of his toes.
Much of the accumulated dirt and muck seemed to be left in place. I noticed a big splack of mud on a saddle blanket.
The tack and armor from the Nazgul horses was un-freaking-believable. Oh my.
There was a gallery with nothing but battle armor from the different types of characters (Rohirrim, Elves, Orcs, Uruk-hai, Gobblins, Harad, etc.). Again, the attention to detail was staggering.
There was a small model of a Mumakil, complete with war tower. Very cool!

When I grow up, I want to have a job making scrolls and books for movies. There was a display of tchotchkes and ephemera, including mountains of texts, that made my mouth water so much my salivary glands got cramps. Mmmm.

After we got out of the LotR show, we decided to take a look at some of the permanent collections. I hadn’t been there since they reopened after remodelling and extending. On our way, we ran into the world’s most bestest kid, Piper, and her parents. ‘Tis a very small world. They had 4:00 tickets to the LotR show, and were killing time before-hand, so they went through some of the permanent collection with us. Mostly, that entailed me playing with and being led around by Piper, which was entertaining. For some incomprehensible reason, Piper decided that I was her extra special bestest friend. I am so not worthy. She got all excited when she realized I was there, and immediately attached herself to me. She is Teh Cute. What a sunny, happy kid! After three hours of walking around milling crowds of people, I was starting to get strung-out and cranky. Piper was happy as a clam, though.

Art, Journals, Ladybusiness

Let There Be Lips!

December 26, 2005October 5, 2015 Shelly

“A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, God said, let there be lips. And there were, and they were good.”[1]

A Warm Welcome

I spent most of the morning going through a stack of magazines, pulling images for gluebooks. Most of the magazines were of the Women’s Day, Ladies’ Home Journal and O[2] variety, so my stack of cut-outs is full of lips and doe eyes and all manner of ridiculous girly stuff. One disturbing trend I noticed was that many ads featured women’s faces, but only from the lips down.

Big, luscious, red lips, I might add. The rest of the face is apparently of so little importance that it can be omitted.

An American

Speaking of magazines, I also scanned a few more entries from my Dada Journal. Connection willing, I’ll upload them. Most of them are just my whinging about pointless things, but there’s one (still textless) example of how to work with large, dark areas. Erasers are your friends, folks! Depending on the quality of the clay coating on the paper, it may take more or less effort to lighten/remove the dark ink. I’ve made the journal out of pages from Real Simple magazine, which has fairly good quality paper, but the clay coat sticks like nobody’s business. It was a bit of a pain in the arse to erase, but well worth the effort. Erasing would also work relatively well to lighten page text, so that it can be overwritten more legibly. Just be careful not to be get overzealous, or the paper will tear. Don’t ask how I found this out.

Erasing is also a good way to scuff up the surface of a slick page so that it will better accept ink. If you’re having trouble with ink beading up, give erasing a try. Or, try sanding lightly with super fine steel wool. Beware, though, that the sanded paper will suck up more ink, so you may end up with heavy, dark lines.

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[1] If you never went to see a midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show when you were in high school or college, you missed out on a boat-load of fun.

[2] Oprah makes me bitter. She has a huge cult following, with women the world over hanging on her every proclamation. That’s an enormous amount of power. Sometimes she uses it for good, but often, she abuses it. For example, her magazine, O. While it pays lip service to empowering women, it undermines that message by proffering advice to manipulate men (who, apparently, do not have the brains the deity promised geese), in various and sundry ways. In particular, this advice encompassed shutting your mouth around your man, not talking to him during a ball game, not disagreeing with him, etc.

Perhaps the most mind-boggling of the advice in that particular column involved advising that, if if a woman compliments a man, the man will think she wants to sleep with him. And, that the same is true no matter what the woman says to a man. A simple “Good morning” is an invitation to hop in the sack. WTF?!

The irony is that, by following the Oprah Plan, women are actually being manipulated by men into taking all the responsibility for the success of the relationship. It’s a world in which men have to do none of the work. How on earth anyone could possibly think that’s appropriate or healthy is beyond me.

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