Love is a Battlefield

I was so excited last week; we were finally going to work on boxes in collage class! But all week long I couldn’t think of what to do! I was so demoralized–this was the reason why I wanted to take the class! In the end, I loaded up my bags full of whatever I could find, grabbed the smallest of the cigar boxes I had lying around and headed to class only with the vaguest notion that I wanted to do something with gold wedding bands and making them look like chain mail.

Well, the result was somewhat surprising. The inside is a warm, inviting tableau with roses and a deep, rich purple color. The outside is wedding band-chain mail and .38 special shell casings.  I’d like to be able to say that this represents a tough attitude outside, protecting a soft interior, but I think it is actually more reflective of the idea that love is a battlefield. Sigh.

Since last week when I shot this, I have cleaned up the purple edges with some paint so it doesn’t look so sloppy.

Clio, Athene, Urania

The fourth week of collage class was “found-object” week. Now we were starting to really speak to my interests! One of the reasons I started doing this kind of thing in the first place was because I am an insufferable pack-rat and on occasion I look around and see patterns within the things I keep and try to create with them. (I was much relieved to learn that Joseph Cornell was the same way!) Found-object creations are definitely right up my alley.

There’s a little store over on Melrose near LaBrea and they are a wonderful source of all kinds of oddities and biological specimens called Necromance. I’ve been there a few times, so between things I had lying aroud from there and things I just had, well, lying around, I knew that I had more than enough material for the project ahead. But I decided to take some teeny little canvases I had lying around and collage on them artworks found in museum newsletters, just to give me even more options.

When I stood back to look at the bags of stuff I had collected for the project, I realized that I essentially had the contents of a little cabinet of curiosity–one of my favorite things in the world.

At the paper store, I found the most amazing oiled paper that had twine criss-crossing throughout making little compartments. The look, feel and smell of the paper reminded me of sealskin parkas or floats and the grid made by the twine was going to be just perfect for adding to that sense of museum display and classification for my 2D cabinet of curiosity.

The main question was: how to group my found objects? I could have done it according to flora, fauna, inorganic and man-made, but that seemed too clinical and would have resulted in an uneven look. In the end I tried to group things according to color and texture and that seemed to work a lot better.

I also tried to flatten and dye some of the porcupine quills, but I only had some more of the bleeding tissue paper with which to do the dying so the quills ended up only vaguely dyed, whereas my hands were all sorts of colors. I ended up using the non-dyed quills on the actual collage.

For the coins I have both antique Chinese coins and a single Roman coin. Yeah, that’s pretty old. The whale head is the broken part of a carving by a Northwest Coast Native American artist. I was heartbroken when my little whale broke, but I’ve tried to give it new life here.

The title comes from the names of the muses of history and astronomy and the goddess of arts and crafts. The natural history museum where I used to work had a statue of the “three muses” of art, history and science in its rotunda building; that’s where I got the idea from.

2008

Sometimes: Self-Portrait

The third week of collage class was self-portrait night. I’m a big journalizer and personal essayist, so I prepped my board by writing all over it and included transparencies made from drawings in a journal from my travels throughout Europe a few years ago. I have some wonderful rice paper with Japanese writing on it so I used strips of that and also used that to make one of my ubiquitous paper cranes. I used newspaper and imprints from newspapers to keep on with the writing theme and then tried to give it all a little more depth by adding some color with both transparent rice paper and more of the blotting and sponging techniques from the week before using bleeding tissue. The text of the background is as follows:

Sometimes I get lost on my way across town and I’m no longer at 14th and Olympic but on 23rd Street headed east across town back to between 1st Avenue and the River or I’m on McLaughlin about to turn up Holgate, but in either case I am headed towards homes that are no longer mine instead of to the restaurant or whatever place of business I am actually on my way to. I get lost and then I miss my turn and I swear a little under my breath but not like I did that one time on the FDR Drive when sweet little me shocked everyone else in the van with my profanity. And by kissing James. James with the long braid down his back and then the shaved head, with the piercings and that funny laugh. I told him I would love him forever and I meant it and I do. I love them all, carry them around with me in my heart and they jingle together in there like change in a pocket only I never lose them, the little fragments of my life and theirs intertwining, lacing and unlacing and sometimes breaking apart but scattered all throughout my consciousness like the little scraps of paper that line my walls and carpet my floor and are the fabric of my life, weaving together my thoughts, hopes, loves and ambitions. I can remember who I was and by extension who I am today when I read the words “Fun with Tesla Coils” on a post-it or see a ticket stub for Nightngale and remember how I ran home that night inspired and overjoyed and wrote to Lynn Redgrave that I too would start to live now, that I too would soar. And she believed me.

2008

Till I Loved, I Never Lived Enough

The second week of collage class, the aim was to experiment with using “bleeding” tissue (I might be tempted to refer to it as “tissue with fugitive color,” but that may be technically incorrect). So  I made the tissue bleed and I tried using the bleeding tissue to sponge the board, and I created tie-dye-like strips of tissue and generally had a ball making a complete and utter mess of both my board and my poor fingers. Seriously, if you ever work with “bleeding” tissue, wear gloves or be ridiculed for your multi-hued fingers for the following days.

I’ll be honest, I’m not a huge fan of tissue paper for artwork purposes, so I through in some other stuff, too, a piece of rice paper with a beautiful Chinese character printed on gold and some candy wrappers with little love sayings: “Dare to love completely” courtesy of Dove Dark Promises, and “Till I loved, I never lived enough” courtesy of Bacci. Then for good measure and to keep with the theme that was emerging, I threw in parts of an old unsent love letter to my first love. This fit nicely with the Chinese character, too, because our one and only kiss was in Shanghai on a summer night.

Geography

Years ago back in Mme Lanier’s art class, we had to do collage. I searched through the magazines provided for this purpose and carefully selected four images that caught my eye but that had nothing to do with one another whatsoever. Even at the age of eight I remember looking at my shellacked block of wood, images permanently affixed, my head tilted and my face scowling. It was amazing to me how four images that I found individually so beautiful could look so wrong together.

A few weeks ago, spurred on by my current obsession with Joseph Cornell, encaustic collage and assemblages, I started a class in collage at the local community college. My one goal for that first night was to create something better than my disaster from Mme Lanier’s class. Seriously, that was my only goal. I think I managed to at least accomplish that.

This time I decided to try to stick to the more muted colors that I tend to favor, browns and neutrals with only a splash of color here and there. I hunted down maps and flower images and used paper cranes because I use them in everything. But my favorite touch in this piece is easily overlooked. I had doodled on a fast-food restaurant napkin–filling in the dots on the napkin in a heart-shaped pattern and then adding flower drawings of my own. It’s in the lower right corner of the photo. Once the napkin had been glued down, the paper of the napkin virtually disappeared, leaving only my ballpoint pen markings. I’ll definitely have to play around with that technique more in the future.

Heart Triptych

My intention was to have this piece ready for Valentine’s Day this year, but that didn’t quite happen. I’m honestly not as bitter as this triptych implies; it was done sort of more tongue-in-cheek than anything else. I initially thought of shooting a canvas with a big heart on it thanks to those glorious hair metal lyrics of yester-year courtesy of Bon Jovi, “Shot through the heart, And you’re to blame. Darlin’, you give love A bad name.” Cheesy in every possible sense, I know, but it made me laugh and sometimes that’s all that counts.

No, in this case the reaction of the guy at the shooting range was priceless, too. (I really did shoot the thing using a Dirty Harry Special and .38 special ammo, thanks to my dad and the obliging folks at the Gun Store in Las Vegas. The emptied shells were used to make the “broken heart.” Not really sure why the gun shots ended up looking completely square. Must have been a really tight weave on the canvas.)

Gun Store Guy: So, who were you thinking of when you were shooting? [Looks at me proudly displaying my shot-up canvas.] You know what? Never mind. I don’t even want to know.

2008

Remembrance

I liked the idea of using a nicho as a sort of larger version of a locket; a special place to keep close by with remembrances of a loved one. I used my own hair and an old silver ring of mine to embellish this devotional piece to a fictional lost love.

2008

Gifts From the Sea

St. Michael graces the top of the nicho and is, among other things, the patron saint of sailors, affording protection against peril at sea. The flowers were collected at the Santa Monica beach–offerings left for the sea perhaps, or remnants of a love tryst. But I prefer to think of them, and the seashell, as gifts from the sea. The seashell was collected at Mont St. Michel–St. Michael’s Mount–in France. Mont St. Michel is a truly unique environment with tides that sometimes leave it an island and other times not. Both Mont St. Michel and the beach at Santa Monica are very dear to my heart, one being my home and the other one of my favorite places on the planet.

Nichos are a Latino tradition of creating decorated little spaces to hold and display important keepsakes. They are often devotional in content, incorporating religious iconography and relics.

The title of this piece is also a tribute to the inspirational book by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea.

…the mind wakes, comes to life again. Not in a city sense–no–but beach-wise. It begins to drift, to play, to turn over in gentle careless rolls like those lazy waves on the beach. One never knows what chance treasures these easy unconscious rollers may toss up, on the smooth white sand of the conscious mind; what perfectly rounded stone, what rare shell from the ocean floor. Perhaps a channeled whelk, a moonshell, or even an argonaut.

But it must not be sought for…To dig for treasures shows not only impatience and greed, but lack of faith. Patience, patience, patience, is what the sea teaches. Patience and faith. One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach–waiting for a gift from the sea.

pp 16-17

2008

Pie

This card is actually a study for a larger collage I am still intending to make. I learned my lesson with the card about broken pieces of wire and white glue, however; I should have realized that anything water-based would make the metal rust! Anyway, I think it was around Thanksgiving time and I was thinking about the taboos surrounding the last piece of what-have-you and got it in my head that it might be sort of sweet to express that even hell would be endurable if you were with that special someone. It’s a leap to go from pie to eternal damnation, I know, but sometimes that’s just how it is. 2007

Weapons of Small Scale Destruction

The individual components of this piece came to me over the course of several years and have vastly different provenance and provenience, however, once all were in my possession, they just screamed to be exhibited together like an old-time museum display on weapons from “small-scale” societies. Only the obsidian shard is real from the Desert Palms region of California. The dart is actually a prop from the second “The Mummy” movie and the point is an example of a new material for making replica stone pieces for museums. But put them all together in a shadow box with some weathered looking labels and they seem to work, right? 2007