For Crowabout, Illustration Friday, Theme Thursday, and Three Muses...
Sometimes the lines get blurred, and it's hard to tell the heroes from the villains.
I'm extra busy right now, so there's no long post to go with this one.
Have a great day, Everyone!
Beatrice, again...
In my last post I talked a bit about ceramist Beatrice Wood. At the time I was working on that post, I was also painting backgrounds in a smaller journal with the idea of putting her on paper while I was out.
I'm not sure I'd call Beatrice a "muse" exactly, but she's more than just an artistic influence. I like her outlook and share her craving for freedom to create without the hypocrisy of, or judgements imposed by society at large. She had an enviable ability to shun convention with graciousness. At one and the same time, she was a seasoned professional and an innocent. She lived her 105 years with about as much honesty as any of us can hope for. And like Beatrice, I too have "a burning desire to be hugged".
Process...
Nothing needed to be added to this page. But this morning when I remembered the Three Muses "Hair" theme, I thought I'd see what my muse looked like with a modified page boy, so I clipped her one from a piece of black paper and liked it enough to glue it down.
And now I think I need a nap. It's been a long 20 hours.
Have a great day, Everyone!
...For Me, for Crowabout, for Three Muses, and for Pointy Hats and Wings
No Satisfaction...
Sometimes you're just not satisfied, and that's how I felt with my last collage, "Row C". The puzzler was that I liked it to look at, it was definitely "finished", but I felt personally unsatisfied, like it got there without me. After forgetting it while I worked on something else, I realized that it was nothing about the collage itself that bothered me, it was something personal. It was about the process. I felt cheated because the collage was finished and couldn't hold anymore, and I really wanted to play with pens and inks and paints on top of something. So I just had to do something else, and that's how The Tooth(ache) Fairy was born.
What I Did About It...
I chose one of my simpler layered acrylic under-paintings to begin with so that I could indulge my urge to doodle without the distraction of a multi-colored background, then I mixed some pink and started painting. First a border, then some funky flowers. Then I grabbed my tiniest black Micron and filled in part of the bottom with a million tiny ovals and circles. Then came dots, circles, squares, an object here, an object there, some rub-on numbers and stars. Before I printed him, the doggie was enlarged and adjusted in Photoshop as high contrast screen tones, and was given a pale-pink wash, which I later intensified in areas with a couple of Prismacolors. His heart (Lisa's Altered Art) was too red, so it got a dusting of pale pink pencil to tone it down. I created the box body of the fairy from items in Crowabout's collage sheet and glued on an altered pointy hat, then some wings (Lisa's Altered Art, again). The arm was the last thing I added.
In Search Of A Home...
Here's a true confession: I don't enjoy making things just to illustrate themes. It feels like work. Probably because a lot of the work I do in real life involves illustration. Even teaching art revolves around illustrating themes and concepts, and I now just want to create from what's inside of me. That's why now, when I design commercially, I choose to design for vendors of products I use, and I do this for the express purpose of using their products in my artwork rather than illustrating a product itself. It's their products shown off to advantage, but my art, my style, and my themes.
I think that's why I am so in love with the Crowabout group. Nancy chooses collage images that are wonderful and often zany, and I get to express myself using these terrific things that I might not have run across on my own, and I get to use them in and out of contexts, all my own. I know it's why I love Kelly Kilmer's A Prompt A Day. Even when I'm not actively participating, the vast stores of prompts and the infinite combinations thereof, are creative DNA that subtly find their way into the things I do!
Also, I really love web challenges. I love this wonderful community of blogging artists, and seeing what others create around various themes. But when I participate in themed groups, I usually do so when I have a piece that fits. Rarely will I create something on the fly just to fit a theme, so when I finished The Tooth(ache) Fairy, I took it around the web in search of a theme, and discovered The Three Muses "numerology" theme in the process, where it fit.
Now I'm off to:
Clean up the studio and file images
Try and motivate myself to do some long over-due blog maintenance
Get people where they need to go
Figure out what we're eating tonight, and
Get back to the book I'm reading before I fall asleep
Have a great day, Everyone!
Zetti
What makes a Zetti? We all know various components of Zetti, but how is it defined by its creators, Tracy and Teesha Moore? Am I correct that Teesha and Tracy invented all things Zetti? If not, then please set me straight. I'm really interested, not in a personal interpretation, but in the actual definition, and in how big a role personal interpretation plays in this, if at all. Why? I don't know why, must I have a reason? I just am. And not from a legalistic standpoint; more from curiosity.
At any rate, here's my Zetti, apparent in image, border and concept, but just what it is that makes these things "Zetti", I couldn't really say, at least not precisely.
Conceptual Art
I choose to illustrate concepts, not words or phrases. If I'm asked to illustrate "chair", for instance, I don't rush around looking for images of chairs, or draw a chair before I've internalized the concept and made it relevant to a part of my life. I don't find it necessary to explain the relevance, but I believe that you are more likely to find something in it that speaks to you, if something in it speaks to me. The meanings can be different for both of us, and are more meaningful if they're personal and individual. But for a piece of art to be relevant, the meaning must come from somewhere other than the observer's making it up on the fly, and while you probably won't see my story in it, hopefully you'll see something of yours. Not everyone works this way, nor should they, necessarily. It's just what I do.
Suffering
You can't study art without noticing how often the word "suffering" pops up, and in so many contexts. At some point or other, students always ask if suffering is a necessary component of creating art, and if so, why this is so. It depends on how you define suffering of course, and if your definition is ghetto poverty, then the answer is, no, it isn't necessary, in fact, it can be a hindrance, although it doesn't have to be.
But unless you're just mindlessly knocking off crafts, and hey, I'm not knocking this, it can be fun and relaxing, but in creating a piece of art, each piece has a growth cycle, and there's always some suffering involved in coming to grips with getting to know the piece and what it needs. There's a period of struggle, a push and a pull, sometimes even a fight, before you can move into the phase of peaceful execution. This type of suffering, like suffering in raising children, and working at relationships in general, carries with it an aspect of beauty and nobility.
If you separate the act of suffering, the work of it, from physical pain and the fear of death and failure, then you extract the beauty. This, simply stated, is the work of the heart. It's the added components of fear and physical pain that give suffering a bad name and conjure up the definitions that western society has saddled it with. Purely, it is in suffering that beauty is wrought, not the suffering of pain and fear, but the suffering of patience. The patience of listening and waiting, as long as it takes, for a creation to develop, working surgery when necessary to remove unwanted aspects and providing the necessary elements at the right times for growth. In Greek, "pathima".
Right now I'm:
Sitting in a public library at closing time
Getting ready to run the last few errands of the day, and
Wondering what to make for dinner.
Have a great day, Everyone!
...It's the all-weather fiber!
