It's Only Part Two? An Almost Perfect Moment

I feel like I've been working on my serial post-it note story about road-tripping grandma/granddaughter for ages, and yet I've only just returned to the library the second installment, secreted inside of Binnie Kirshenbaum's An Almost Perfect Moment.

I'm not sure why I'm having such a difficult time with this story. Perhaps the serial nature of it makes me feel locked in, like I can't do any other post-it books until I'm finished with this tale?  Or perhaps it is just that I don't have as much appropriate experience to draw from?  At any rate, you can read the Kirshenbaum borne part here, if you want to.

Plaid Gap Skirt

The Gap just got this skirt back: 

 

With this slide:

Of this painting that I did when I was going through a non-objective phase:

Sewn into the underskirt:

 

Over a little window that I had cut into the fabric:

Which means that it's one of my rare clothing intrusions that can't be reversed. The slide is pretty subtle, visually, but I imagine it may be odd on a tactile level.  Here's one with the skirt turned inside out. The slide is at the lower left corner of the underskirt:

  

I like it.  Now I need to find more of my old slides.

Being One of Those People to Joshua Ferris

Joshua Ferris gave a reading from his new novel this week, and it occurred to me that this might be a chance to give him a copy of this Post-it Book that I did based on Then we Came to the End.  This is very much against my nature, which is very uncomfortable with self-promotion or even anything that could be considered self-promotion, and tends to view people who approach more successful strangers about their own work with an unfair level of scorn. (This blog doesn't count, because it is so easy to ignore if you are not interested in what I'm doing.) The thought having occurred to me though, I knew that if I wussed out and did not actually approach Joshua Ferris, I would go home feeling disappointed with myself and vaguely depressed.

The reading itself was really good. The new novel, The Unnamed, seems compelling and well-written, and Ferris was refreshingly opinionated during the Q&A afterward. (He was quite strident on the point that the disease in the novel is a disease, not a metaphor for anything else, and mentioned how high school English teaches people to read all wrong). Once that wound down, he signed books, while I stationed myself in a nearby chair, catching fragments of the fragments of conversations he had with book-buyers and trying not to clutch insanely at the envelope enclosing the print out of my project, with a brief explanatory post-it on the front.

After the line was exhausted, I made my approach. The conversation went something like this:

Me: Hi
Ferris: Hi
Me: I'm really nervous.
Ferris: Why are you nervous?
Me: I want to give you a copy of an art project that I did based on your last book, and it's weird.
Ferris: That's not weird.
Me: It is weird. (I put the envelope with the copied project on the table in front of him)
Ferris: Is that it?
Me: Yes, it's a copy. I liked your last book a lot, by the way.
Ferris: Oh, thanks.
Me: I was nicer to it in my project than I was to other books.

And then I basically bolted for the door. I was very nervous and self-conscious throughout, and
by the time I was sitting watching the last few people get books signed, my nervousness had reached the pitch of discomfort that I feel when waiting in lines to return clothing that I've altered for Shell Game. The sensations were so similar (the sweating, the feeling that I'm creeping toward panic), that it made me think that the Shell Game nerves might be not so much fear of being caught, but rather a strange reaction to the act of giving my work to someone else. But I still don't want to get caught.

Hhh&mmmm

I just read this article in the New York Times about H&M destroying and then throwing out unsold clothing.

I have done my shell game returning at that H&M location on multiple occasions. So aside from ridiculous waste and corporate greed issues...they may be trashing the art! I'd assumed that if my pieces failed to sell in a timely manner they went on to other lives at outlet malls or something. I didn't realized they were threatened by the dumpster!

Green Dress from H&M

I'd been sitting on this party dress from H&M since November, but luckily return policies are in my favor this time of year, so even though I've only just taken it back, I didn't run into any problems. I was rather nervous about braving the Christmas season shopping scene - the claustrophobia of lines and crowds compounded by the claustrophobia of being much too over-bundled for indoor temperatures.

Perhaps as a result, my alteration this time around was quite subtle: a painting of a pair of eyes on the underskirt, at right around lap height. I kinda like the idea that someone could pull up their skirt to flash a look:

That image has the dress pulled up and pinned to reveal these:

My main concern about this piece, is that someone could actually mistake it for part of the clothing design. At a store like Anthropologie or Urban Outfitters, shoppers would be almost sure to. I considered sewing buttons, beads, snaps, or some other interrupting object over the pupils to make them a little stranger, a little more obtrusive, but it had been a while since I'd painted a nice detailed pair of eyes, and I kinda couldn't bear to disrupt them.

Grandma in Brush

Although it is not a crowd scene in the way I'd earlier envisioned, I finally started painting the long-prepped canvas I'd been neglecting since, what, September?

Christmas with the family got me thinking about my grandma, a subject I've painted on multiple previous occasions. In this 48" x 60" painting she will be enveloped in a crowding riot of flowers. Below are a few process shots.




I started the painting last night, largely as a way of entering the new year on a productive note. I'm surprisingly happy with what I've done so far - all work that I had intended to be under-painting, but to which I am now growing attached. It has me thinking that I should temper my use of palette knife with more brushwork this time around, and not just for the sake of puns.

Maps of Every Place I Can Remember

One of my perennial projects - started long ago and occasionally returned to - is a sketchbook in which I endeavor to draw maps of every place that I can remember. The scale and boundaries of these maps are dictated by my recollection. I've started with the locations I my earliest memories: Grandparents houses, elementary schools, etc. As a result, though a few are quite detailed and complete, most have large gaps.
Particularly in these earliest spaces, I find myself surprised by how often a space that seems completely remembered in my mind, turns mercurial once put to paper. I will start a drawing of the first house I ever lived in sure that I recall, if not every cupboard and molding, at least the placement of rooms and doors, only to find myself rapidly flummoxed. Did my parents closet face east, or west? How large was the living room compared to my room?
My ideal version of this project is actually a website, where others could upload their own memory maps, and a cumulative diagram would form - a country delineated by the experiences of all involved. Although it would be intriguing to see how far this country would stretch, most interesting to me would be the places where the maps would overlap (although I imagine that such overlaps would often be unrecognizable without labeling).

Red Gap Shirt

Finally, I have gotten a new camera! There has been a distinct backlog as far as documenting and posting about my work recently, on account of my previous camera entirely giving up the ghost. But now I am outfitted anew, and can once again produce lovely pictures like these:


This is a shirt from the Gap, which I've sewn an assortment of ribbon loops. I'm not sure if there is a technical term for these loops. They are the sort that you often see inside shirts and dresses that have a wider neck or are sleeveless, or otherwise require assistance staying on the hanger. I've always found them kind of obnoxious and superfluous, and so thought it might be fun to have them sprouting like weeds from one arm of the shirt.

Three of them are loops that I'd cut out of other shirts, one was constructed of green felt, just to make its appearance all the stranger. The sewing was not entirely disguiseable, as there was no seam where I wanted to add the loops, and so little clumps of red thread create tiny divots that you can see from the outside of the shirt. There is an example at the middle of the picture below.

Camouflaging my stitches has been rendered somewhat moot, though, by the fact that I didn't return the shirt in time. This means it gets added to the collection of clothing that, were I ever to show this piece, I would include for sale as artwork (amid the documentation of successfully returned items, which would make up the bulk of the display).

Charles Dickens and An Attempt at To Be Continued

I feel like I need a new graphic for my posts about my sticky-note stories. One image of text on a post-it in front of text looks much like another. I did like how this one was interloping below "Interlopers" though.

I've just returned my latest sticky-note story to the library, pressed between the pages of Bleak House, A sprawling coming-of-age-ish novel by Charles Dickens.

In the spirit of Dickens' novels, which generally appeared in newspapers in serial form, I decided that this story would be a serial one, spanning several library books. At the end of the book I made a "To be continued" sticky-note:

Which means that I'm committed to this story being at least a two-parter, even though I've had a rather difficult time even getting out part 1, which you can find here, should you be interested. Let me know - do you think it deserves much in the way of continuation?

Old Navy Jeans

I so thoroughly liked how the denim birds sewn into the American Eagle jeans worked that I decided to do another piece where I sewed directly onto the inside of a leg in a pair of jeans. To the right is how they looked like from outside - a denim so dark that I could use black thread without it being noticeable, and then below that is what they looked like inside out.

This time they were from Old Navy, but doing something seafaring themed was a little literal even for me. Instead I went with an abstract pattern made up of little circles cut out of different materials:gray corduroy, blue wool, pink fake fur, and the sheet paintings that I've been making with scrapings from my palette encased in gel medium. The pink fur was the most difficult to sew into the denim without it showing from the other side, because the needle would pull little tufts of pink fiber through, that I would have to cut and pluck after I was done.

Before the pants were returned, I showed them to a friend, and got a different response than I usually get. Either because of the general demographics of the people who become my friends, or because of a uniform desire to be supportive, they are usually enthusiastic at the idea of unknowingly purchasing one of the items I'd altered. In fact, most say, "I wish I could find one of those." Not this friend. She said that if she ended up with these she would return them. Not because the utility of the pants were in any way changed, but because she didn't like the idea of some unknown person having touched the inside of her clothing so intimately as to have added things. It is interesting to me, because although it is a response that I can understand once explained, I would not have intuited it. She said that she would think an alteration of the sort were interesting if she found it in an accessory, a handbag or a hat, but in the context of actual clothing it is too unsettling.