Done with Grandma

Well, I'm not really done with Grandma, of course.  She seems, in fact, to be a surprisingly persistent muse, and I am even currently working on one other Grandma-related piece: the serial post-it note story of grandma/granddaughter road-trip that I've been inserting into library books...

But I'm done with Grandma in Brush.  Here's one last process shot:

I was pretty nervous after adding that bright minty green to the foreground.  But now that the painting is complete, I think I'm happy with the final product:

This is the first painting in a long time on which I've used more brush than palette knife, and I was evidently having fun with the brush strokes.  I was thinking about David Hockney's recent work a bit, and also a little about Laura Owens, although the end result is pretty dissimilar.  Here are a few detail shots:

Grandma is Getting There

I've picked up some steam on the painting that I've taken to calling Grandma in Brush.  Here are the next batch of process shots:

Sadly, because I'd been doing so little painting recently, "picking up steam" really just means working on the piece for about three hours a day, every other day.  Between the first image above, and the second one, I spent about five hours painting.  The difference between the second image and the third one represents about six hours of painting.

Detail Shots

Given popular demand - one comment - here are some close-up images of these paintings I did a little while back:

Bonus points if you can name the poem that was used for those text fragments.

Silly Guess Pants

I chose these high-waisted cropped-leg harem-pants from Guess for my latest Shell Game alteration, based both on the strength of their over-all silliness, and the fact that they have pockets:

(I forgot that I've decided numerous previous times to stop buying black clothing for Shell Game, because the photos never turn out well.)

I also didn't know that Guess' return policy was so arcane.  They will only refund cash with a check sent by mail.  Since I'm trying to stay as under the retail radar as possible on this one, I think these pants are going to be added to the pile of clothing that I've altered and been unable to return - a pile I am saving to display alongside the documentary photographs, in a currently purely theoretical exhibition of this piece.

Here are the pants, after I altered them, turned inside out:

Pretty mundane, huh?  At least until you look under the pocket:

I had intended to use full color for this, but I found that I quite liked how I could build the image on the black cloth, simply by adding layers and thicknesses of the white gesso.  Here's a better look at the image:

 
It is my first truly figurative addition to an article of clothing.  I decided that a reminder of silly, high-waisted pants of yesteryear, was an appropriate intrusion on this particular garment.

More Parasitic Story: Carson McCullers

I've just finished the third segment of my book-jumping serial post-it project.  I've added a little slice of Phyllis narrative to Carson McCullers' slim but lovely The Member of the Wedding:

Since McCullers' story is one of youth grappling with being young, I thought an addition of the elderly grappling with being old created a nice symmetry.

 I'm still having difficulty with the task I assigned myself of creating a story that jumps from book to book, and so functions both in discrete clusters and also as an ongoing tale.  I've become convinced that no one who finds one segment of the work will put in the effort, and have the luck required, to find the next segment.  But part of me still likes that this is a theoretical possibility - that the piece could lead to a sort of cross-book scavenger hunt, however unlikely it is to actually unfold that way.

And meanwhile I'm becoming a Times-New-Roman-drawing machine.

Scans of my additions to Carson McCullers' book are available here, in three parts: one, two, three. It's been split up because I used a new scanning method, which resulted in a larger than usual file size.

Detour Posted: A Foray Into Public Art

I've spent the past week or so on a bit of a painting detour - making a couple of pieces to illustrate a proposal I submitted in response for a call for works designed to be installed on a construction fence.  The paintings are on wood panels, and draw heavily upon the materials endemic to plywood construction fences: pasted, torn and stapled posters and notices:

The bird silhouettes, for example, are made of little stapled fragments of torn magazine and newsprint.

This one used a lot of razorblading and sanding, as well as tearing and painting over the collaged elements:

 

The paintings were fun to make, although the submission itself called for such low quality photos, that I am concerned they won't come accross properly.  But on the plus side, I've become adept at making wheat paste.