So As Not To Entirely Loose The Habit

I'm in the midst of drawing up the post-it notes for a Sarah Waters library book, have somewhat stalled in my endeavors to write the text for a story to add to a really unimpressive Mercedes Lackey novel, have a pair of American Eagle jeans waiting for additions inspiration to percolate, and haven't touched a palette knife in weeks. Since none of this is very post-worthy, I'm going to stray from my own work to offer up a few links.

Here is the work of Rebecca Campbell - probably my favorite contemporary painter.

Campbell grapples with beauty and transcendence, without straying into the cheesy or maudlin.

And here is an article from the New York Times that I read today - the renegade cabaret it describes seems nicely in the spirit of some of the guerrilla art I've linked to before.

Gap Dress Return

Today was the first good chance I'd had to return the black Gap sundress since I altered it, and so was dismayed to realize that I was one day past the receipt announced thirty day limit on returns. Of course, I know that Gap often has very lenient and forgiving return policies, and it seemed unlikely that the clerk would even check the date, much less do the math, but still, any hitch in the returning process revs my nerves into high gear. So I summoned all my artistic fortitude, gathered my courage... and got a coworker to return the dress for me. She wasn't nearly the stickler that I was for return dates, and had no trouble at all.

Even if the dress had been unreturnable, it would not necessarily have been a loss. I've made two other pieces that I haven't gotten a chance to return before the deadlines were quite past, and so I kept them. One is a dress from H&M where I painted geometric patterns on the underskirt:



The other is a pair of pants with an elongated pocket, also from H&M (the preponderance of unreturned H&M sprouts from a thirty day return policy plus stores that are inconvenient to my usual schedule).



I imagine that if I were to show Shell Game in a gallery setting, aside from the photographic documentation, one component of the display would be a rack with a collection of clothing that I altered, but either didn't get a chance to return, or was for some other reason unreturnable. The clothing on this rack would have art prices on their tags; hundreds or thousand dollar prices, instead of the twenty to eighty bucks that my altered pieces go for at the Gap, H&M, etc... in the instances that they are presumably successfully resold.

Gap Black Sundress

In case you were racked with suspense, returning the shorts with the lip paintings went just fine. I now have a new piece ready for return: a black sundress from Gap.

I chose the sundress because although it had a nice substantial underskirt, the top layer was not at all diaphanous, making the space between the two layers relatively secure for my purposes. I sewed a zipper to the top side of the underskirt with a little fold of fabric in between gripping sides, to which I then added a strip of bright white lace. Here's a shot with the skirt hiked up so that you can see the underskirt, and the added zipper, in its zipped state:


Here are some shots of the zipper opening, peep-show style:




And another shot, to give you a sense of overall placement and scale:


Visually, the addition is nearly imperceptible, since nothing shows on the outside, unless you pull up the skirt (and even then it is black zipper on black fabric), and when turned entirely inside out, you would only see the black stitching used to hold on the zipper and lace, which is again highly unnoticeable against the black fabric. I am, though, less certain about how obvious the addition is in tactile terms. Thankfully, the fabric is rather stiff, so it is less likely that odd bunching, or a little more weight on one side than the other would give me away.