The Genre Explored

I happened, quite by accident, upon this website the other day:

http://www.postitnotestories.com/

Which contains a collection of stories illustrated by Arthur Jones with drawings on post-it notes. This piqued my interest for what else is being done in the post-it note genre. A few google searches revealed:

http://www.keyholemagazine.com/sherrie-flick/post-it-note-stories

http://www.rictus.com/post-it/

The emphasis for both of the above seems to be on post-its as a way of limiting word count, and perhaps as a way of disrupting the feeling of preciousness that can make writing difficult.

And here's a visual post-its piece at UCSC that uses the sticky squares as pixels:

http://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~inio/dk/

Here's a really odd office supply website (there is a version of lolcatz done with chairs that I kept finding in various connected pages) that has posted a nice collection of mosaics made out of post-its.

http://blog.shoplet.com/office-supplies/post-it-notes-art/

Oh, and wait, here is yet another cool Web Urbanist post that has quite a few nice examples of Mosaic type works:

http://weburbanist.com/2008/01/24/more-unusual-art-from-everyday-materials-16-post-it-note-pranks-sculptures-and-murals/

I have yet to find any pieces displayed or referenced that seem very close to my post-it note books in concept or execution, which makes me happy in that way that I probably should try to rise above or something.

New Post-its for a New Book: The Little Stranger

I've finished my symbiotic story for the new Sarah Waters book. Unlike her previous novels The Little Stranger has no lesbian romance whatsoever. So, in a move that I hope doesn't suffer for being obvious, I've inserted a lesbian love story. Or, to be more precise, a lesbian flirtation story.

Since I've been feeling pretty uninspired when it comes to writing (still puzzling out what to add to the Mercedes Lackey book I checked out of the library over a month ago...) instead of creating a new story for the occasion I simply altered the first story that I wrote, for Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, substituting a girl protagonist for a boy - and of course changing the references to the host book that are part of the story. Changing the gender of a character in an already written story was an interesting exercise. The primary challenge was differentiating between the characters when they were suddenly both "she"s. I also changed both the characters appearances, but left their interactions pretty much the same. I'm curious if the scenario seems strained or not.

Here is the scan of my entire addition to the Sarah Waters novel.

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.

Some Progress

A few more progress shots of the figurative painting I'm working on:

People with Problems

I have just returned another post-it note book, The Paris Review Book of People with Problems. At the suggestion of a friend, this time around the post-it notes that I added were not drawn in Times New Roman, but instead rendered to appear as if they were actual notes to ones self, accidentally left in the library book. I scrawled them quickly and cryptically, and doodled on many of them as I do most notes that I write to myself.



Some of the notes are basically description and scene setting - most of these are the sort of notes written as reminders of professional tasks, little to-do lists, etc. - and exist as an armature for more personal notes, which are mostly things like phone numbers, addresses, shopping lists, etc.

The personal notes are intended to work as the narrative arc of the story, although I am not sure that the intended narrative comes through at all, given how much is written as I actually write notes: with the bare minimum of information required. If you give it a read, let me know what you make of it. As usual, the full PDF for the post-its that I added to The Paris Review Book of People with Problems is here.

Next Sticky Pages Book: Joshua Ferris' Then We Came To The End

I finally finished adding post-it notes to Joshua Ferris' Then We Came To the End and returned it to the library. By my estimates it takes me about twenty minutes to draw-write the text for each post-it note, which means that for a story such as this one, which had 39 post-its total, that's about 13 hours of draw-writing. That's not counting actually writing the script for the story itself, or all the false starts.


My point is, these little post-it notes add up to a more intensive project than I had realized. And I did't even redo all the ones I messed up...



If you'd like to see/read a PDF of the entire story I added to Joshua Ferris' novel, you can find it here and here. (It's split into two parts for ease of upload.)

More Fun With Sticky

I decided to make a larger version of the little canvasless paintings that I had been making and occasionally sewing into clothing recently.

To do this, I spread a large layer of acrylic gel medium over a glass table top, placed colorful scrapings of old paint from my palette (also, a little confetti here and there) in the wet gel medium and let it dry, then put down another layer of gel medium on top.


The medium is white to start with, but turns clear and glossy as it dries. Once it's fully dried it can be peeled off the the glass.





I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it yet. I've considered stretching it over stretcher bars, cutting it up to make jewelry or other crafts, or using pieces of it for more clothing insertions, covering an older unloved painting with this painting like a shroud, or tacking it to the wall as is. This is one of those times when I make something just to make it, and whether any art that I am particularly happy with will ever come out of it is entirely unknown.

One fun property of these all-medium paintings is that when dry they still adhere to glass, like a giant color-form. I tried mine out on the window, but feel like it would need to fill the whole frame to really look right there.

Going Back a Little

Since writing the text for my Then We Came To The End sticky notes is taking longer than expected, I haven't had much to post, so lets go backwards a little.

Here are a couple of process shots and then the final product for the last painting I finished:




(I'm particularly embarrassed by the bad coloration and lighting of this last photo - I badly need to get a new camera/photos skills)

When I first conceived of this painting the idea was that when finished I would cut it up into a bunch of two or three inch by two or three inch squares that I would then send to galleries as "samples", along with my portfolio, so that they'd be able to see the rich surface of a painting that a photograph just can't convey (especially when there are stickers in the mix). Subsequently, the overall image or narrative of this painting was much less important to me than usual - the priority being instead that every square two inches had enough visual interest to stand on its own. Here's a detail shot.



As you can see, after five or six unsuccessful attempts, I used the choppy future of this painting as an excuse to give up on the nose entirely, covering the space instead with a butterfly sticker epicenter. Hopefully you can also see a little better how the strokes of the palate knife that I use to paint look, though the way that the stickers mix with the paint is still difficult to discern. Just imagine what a good idea of the final effect you'd have if part of this chunk had been exacto-ed out and mailed to you...

I've been feeling more recently that the whole slicing and sending plan may not have the most efficacy, which is a long winded way, I suppose, of saying that I've wussed out on the cutting.