In and Out of the Box

Woohoo, I got into In and Out of the Box exhibit with The Medium is the Baggage! You can see some process photos here. The acceptance letter started with (paraphrase) "there were so many qualified applicants and unfortunately...", so I figured I didn't get in, but then it said "I am pleased to let you know that the juror selected your work to be included..."! So woohoo!

Here's a shot right before I packed it all up:



This was the statement I sent with the piece:

The Medium is the Baggage examines the reality of product vs. the medium it is packed in by inverting the relationship between the two entities.

Practical or aspirational, the products we purchase often have limited live spans – they break down, wear out or we simply move on to the next new thing; they are, in effect, disposable. In mail-ordering, we have found something that will last generations. With the exception of biodegradable starch foam & paper packing, most packing materials are various forms of plastic that do not biodegrade and recycling is limited. When recycling is available, the materials are recycled into other forms of plastic.

In short, these packing materials are the heirlooms that we leave for future generations. By presenting 20 packing materials in a clamshell box packed in shredded mail-order catalogues, The Medium is the Baggage puts product and packing in their rightful places within the historical context.

Made mostly from repurposed materials that had previously arrived by mail - one Amazon shipping carton, various packing materials and mail-order catalogs. Other materials include recycled paper, repurposed mylar and packing tape.

Now lets work on books for a bit

After finishing the last of those 7"x7" panels, I'm returning to books for a while.

Here's one that I thought would be a fun, quick project, but I sunk 40+ hours into it, most of that time was spent on researching the various packing materials that are commonly found in mail ordered products. I tried contacting materials scientists, I looked on the web, and I called a foam/plastic manufacturer.

Now I know the difference between polyurethane, polyethylene, polystyrene, expanded polyethylene and expanded polystyrene. Phew! I wonder how long that information will keep in my head...as opposed to how long the actual materials will keep, which is basically forever.

The book is made from mostly repurposed materials that had previously arrived to me via mail — an amazon box, various packing materials, mail-order catalogs (indirectly through a neighbor); and then there's also recycled printer paper, mylar rescued from the JWSC trash bin and packing tape.

I wanted to make a sampler box of packing materials. So here I'm putting together the tray.



Here's the completed clamshell box made from the amazon shipping carton. On the left is the index to the samples, and the samples in their little cubbyholes on the right.



The clamshell box will be shipped, packed in shredded mail-order catalogs.

29th & 30th panels

Cosmic Bowling, gouache & acrylic on paper mounted on birch panel, 7" W x 14" H

These are the last of the 7" x 7" panels I got for myself as a 49th birthday present! A year and half later (almost two years), I'm finished! Yay! If I've been consistent, then clicking the tag shut up sit down paint will bring up the whole series. Of course, I've also worked on a few other pieces in between, and if you click the tag painting then you should see those too.

I started these two panels at the same time I started Lichen and Ancient History, and you can see that they started life more or less the same. (Although now that I'm looking, I see that I did not include process photos for Lichen...well, you'll have take my word for it.)



But pretty quickly, I turned it vertical and it became a very different beast, lobster claws and all. Here it is about mid-way:



I really wanted to get this done today, before I head to Seattle for the opening of the Gallery 110 exhibit, so I've been working on it pretty consistently for several days. And of course, the top image is the completed painting. It does not yet have the acrylic on it; I'll do that when I get back. I have several pieces batched up waiting for the acrylic and the edge finishing, all of which I'll do at the same time.

Gallery 110 exhibit, Seattle, June 2011

Here are the four sculptural books I will be showing at the June exhibition at Gallery 110:



Clockwise from top left: Superfoodland!, Tenuous Connections, Random Cruelty and A Dog's Tale.

Exhibition details:

Past Journeys/Present Tense
Gallery 110, Wed-Sat, 12-5pm
Artists' Reception, June 4, Saturday, 5-8pm
110 3rd Ave. S, Seattle, WA 98104

You can read more about the three pillow books on my website following these links: A Dog's Tale, Random Cruelty and Tenuous Connections.

Process photos for Superfoodland! are here: gocco'ing the cards, painting the board, polymerclay utensils and polymerclay blueberries.

Process photos for the pillow books (among other things) are here.

Mr. Seahorse

This is the result of a failed experiment. But yes, I like it. I see some possibilities for it.



Gouache & white pastel pencil on gampi, sandwiched between 4 sheets of gampi glued together with GAC 500. So there are 5 layers of gampi all together. Shot on a window.

In my previous experiment, I played with using Chinese mulberry paper to paint/draw on, and then attaching it to a gouache/acrylic surface. The mulberry paper is thin, but only slightly transparent (as you can see in this entry; it was also really easy to handle, and it dampened very easily and evenly.

So today, I tried doing the same thing with a gampi paper that is known as 'Japanese silk tissue.' It's not silk, it's a gampi fiber made into a super thin, fairly transparent paper. it's often used in conservation work.

So first, I made 2 sets of 2 swatches, one of the Koh-i-noor watercolor pencils and another of the gouache (I didn't bother with the pastel pencils this time). Attached it to a gouache/acrylic scrap using the spritz & dust method using wheat paste. For the most part, it's really hard to see where the swatches even are! And it was very difficult to dampen the paper evenly; the paper was also harder to handle after dampening. And with the paper unevenly dampened, it's not uniformly transparent throughout. It's pretty much impossible to see the Koh-i-noor swatch (on the left).



While the swatches were drying, I also started the seahorse with gouache. The paper puckered and stayed puckered. I started with a very watered down black+brown pigment and finished it with a white pastel for highlights. This is shot attached to newsprint.



At this point, looking at the swatches drying, I decided to not bother collaging the seahorse onto another drawing/painting. Instead, I decided to sandwich it between more layers of gampi, and the result is the top image.

I can definitely see some possibilities for this, maybe in a book, or in a sculptural work.

Ms. Potato Head

My friend and fellow artist Catherine Alice Michaelis of May Day Press planted some potatoes. And she said that if it was true that you are what you eat, then she would be a potato. So this is the kind of potato that I think she might be:



Gouache & watercolor pencils on Chinese mulberry paper.

It's actually an Ernst Haeckel image that I've shaped into more of a potato shape. It's part of a new experiment that I'm trying. So here it is, earlier in the night, when it's mostly just sketched in with the gouache and I've just started to draw the 'blooms.'



Remember that drawing of a peony that I didn't use for the the 27th & 29th panels? I used it here. The larger drawing was a doodle I made a few weeks back in gouache.

I spritzed the back side of the peony nice and wet (it's done in koh-i-noor watercolor pencils and it did not run when I spritzed it), dusted it with dry wheatpaste powder, flipped it over and pasted it down on the larger drawing. Since the larger drawing was not dampened, it is now slightly warped. The exercise was to see if the spritzing and wheatpaste powder would work as a glue for collage on gouache painted surface when I can't or don't want to brush on the glue. This was a trick Jane Pagliarulo of Atelier Meridian taught me for chine colle, and it works really well here too!

(If I were doing this for real, this would be on a board, or I would've dampened the substrate so it wouldn't warp.)



The experiment started with this -- I made 2 sets of 3 swatches with pastel pencils, koh-i-noor watercolor pencils and gouache. I pasted 1 set onto a scrap (painted w/ gouache & acrylic) using the spritz & dust method, and compared the result to the control set. None of the mediums had problems with being spritzed on the back side, even on the thin mulberry paper. The pastel pencils did rub off easily, but the water caused no damage that I could detect.

27th & 28th Panels

Ancient History, gouache & acrylic on paper on birch panel, 14" W x 7" H

Another diptych, but this one actually started out as a vertical. I was playing around a lot with this. This was created with dripping a lot of paint onto the paper and then using a hard brayer to move the paint around. There were several iterations of this, each time with a different color, all fairly thinly mixed. Sometimes I would let the paint sit for a bit before I took the brayer to it, other times I'd do it while it was fresh.



I think I turned it horizontal fairly early on though. Having decided that it was a landscape, with a bit of sky showing down the middle. I brought out the land formations. Then the last issue of the Thursday Home & Garden section had a story on peonies. I saved the photos and was doing some drawings based on the photos. Heck, I might as well put the peonies right on the piece...



I was watching a video of another artist working and was inspired to try some of her techniques. She works in encaustics and makes drawings of individual elements and then collage them onto her final piece. I know a lot of artists use this technique, but her work was the first to really knock me over. Her pieces are cohesive, integrated and complex, all the while maintaining that luminous look. (See Lori Field's website.)

Although I don't use encaustics, I figure I'd try out the technique — not sure where I wanted to go with this piece at this point, I made a separate peony drawing on mulberry paper, cut it out, and was playing around with placing it on the image. In the end, the additional peony wasn't doing it for me, and I really wanted to see the land/rock instead.



I considered putting a couple of giant praying mantises on there, but in the end decided on some pre-historic looking ferns. And that's the top photo. If you click on it, you can see the details on the larger version.

Thumbtacks...a lot of them!

I have no idea where this came from, but for a couple of weeks, I kept on seeing drawings and paintings of thumbtacks in my head. I tried to ignore them, but I kept on seeing them. I hope I'm not developing something weird. But anyhow, I finally decided that I should just do a drawing of thumbtacks:



Took me over 10 hours to fill up this sheet of 26"x40" Rives Lightweight with little drawings of thumbtacks; they're roughly life sized, although I would not say precise — some of them look just like the letter T, and some look like those tags you find on cloths. The color variations and color shapes are random. I mixed 3 colors: silver with red, silver with turquoise, and then charcoal gray, and just started putting down thumbtacks on paper. Now I suppose I'll have to count to see how many thumbtacks there are.

19th through 26th panels...

Lichen, gouache & acrylic on paper mounted on panel, 7" W x 14" H

OK, yes, I'm still working on those 7x7 panels. Lichen was finished tonight, and they would be the 25th and 26th (out of 30).

These two below were finished last October, and comprised of panels 19th, 20th, 21st, 22nd (seen here, here and here), and also 23rd and 24th (in progress here).

I made 2 triptychs out of them.



Hummingbird I, gouache & acrylic on paper mounted on panel, 21" W x 7" H



Hummingbird II, gouache & acrylic on paper mounted on panel, 21" W x 7" H

I actually started two more hummingbirds, but they didn't make it. They turned into Lichen! See above.

Something about a peacock?

Untitled yet, but might be something about a peacock. [OK, this really looks way more like a duck, so maybe something about a duck?]

Gouache on paper mounted on board (will soon have a coat of acrylic over it too)
12" x 12"

So this piece took me less than a year to complete! (Took about 12 days from start to finish, and I was up until 3am on many days working on it.)

I was inspired by this dress, called "The Wave", and you can see the ad I clipped out of the paper on the left. I'm obviously using the image in a rather, ahem, loose manor, as it barely has any resemblance to the dress. I really wanted to do a piece where the colors are not so intense (like the last piece); and I also wanted to do a piece where I leave some white space. I seem to be incapable of leaving white space, so I wanted to do that. And that turns out to be barely manageable—leaving white space, that is—but I left some. Maybe I'll do better on the next one.



I love the idea of looking at what seems like an infinite world, either through a microscope or through a telescope; I don't think I'll ever tire of doing that. Even without the aid of a scope, the world we can see through our naked eyes is so full of life known and unknown. I like the ambiguity of not knowing what I'm looking at, the juxtaposition of possibilities, of the microscopic, the cosmic, and of the everyday garden variety of life.



I also like the ambiguity of animate and inanimate objects...are those flowers or rock formations? Or maybe mushrooms.



At this point, I was thinking maybe this was a rock that was blowing fish eggs out of its mouth, but it really just looked too much like a peacock for me to ignore it. So a peacock it became. (See top image.)