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.

The Artist is Present: An Appropriatly Exhaustive Account of Staring at Marina Abromovic

When I learned that Marina Abromovic was doing a performance piece at MoMA, I knew I had to go see it - to go participate if at all possible.  Abromovic is one of the few performance artists whose work I've bothered to know and respect.  When I first learned about her in art school, I was particularly arrested by this image,  from Rhythm 0, a piece where she provided a table of various implements, then stood totally passive for six hours, allowing the audience to decorate, pose, and abuse her:

For her current piece at MoMA, Abromovic sits in a chair, and museum-goers take turns sitting across from her.  The edict is to be silent and still, simply gazing at one another, until the museum-goer decides to leave and the next takes their place.  Abromovic stays seated in this way from open to close, every day for months. Here's a link to where you can see a live feed of Marina Abromovic's performance, whenever MoMA is open.

I arrived on site (in the atrium on the second floor) at about 10:35AM - five minutes after MoMA opened. There was a line, but not a long one - about fifteen people.  However, with a piece like this, length means very little.  Rumors moved up and down the line of a previous visitor who had sat for seven hours.  How quickly the line would advance was going to depended upon how long visitors sat, and how many people dropped out after it became clear that this was not a speedy endeavor. 

Detailed account of the experience after the page break:

Painting Progress

I've done some more work on this painting.  It didn't feel like it had been that long since I'd worked on it, but it is a bad sign when you need to dust your pallete off before use.

Here's the current status:

I have always loved cropped details of my paintings. The way that the colors and textures interact always feels surprising to me - like something I didn't intend, but just happened upon when I wasn't paying attention. Here's a detail from my recent efforts:

I tend to feel like details like this make really nice abstract compositions, and yet I very rarely paint abstractly, and when I do, the results lack interest for me.  Abstract painting in general lacks interest for me.  As with poetry, where I love a good turn of phrase or pairing of words, but cannot get into work that is all about the aesthetics of words without any larger story or image involved, I love the abstract details of interacting paint, but need it to be couched in a discernible narrative, image, or idea.

For a as long as I've been painting, that larger image has almost always involved the human figure, but in this painting so far, and in my last one, I actually ended up paying much more attention to the background. As if the figure was an excuse for painting bushes and wallpaper.  It makes me wonder if I should try doing some work that is not abstract, but not figurative.  Work where I abandon the figure altogether, and focus on what I've been putting behind them.

Turquoise Esprit Shirt with a Little Pink Fur

I just returned a shirt to Esprit that cost under $20.  As I was on my way there I started to wonder if I would actually raise more suspicion returning such a cheap clothing item.  I was never one to return clothing before doing this project, so I still don't really understand the culture of it in a normal situation.  When the clerk at the register asks "why are you returning this?", I'm never sure what seems like a strange answer... "It didn't fit"... "I changed my mind"?  I have come up with much more intricate stories, like "I got it as a present for a friend, but then we had a falling out, so now I don't want to give it to her".  It is probably a good thing that I am generally compelled to brevity by nerves.

Here's the Esprit shirt, before returning, after alteration, right-side-out:

The turquoise shade guided my purchase.  I thought it would go really well the pink fake fur that I like to use.  I sewed little tufts of fur into the seams.  I wanted to give the feeling that it was sprouting from the interior of the shirt, like something organic spreading.  Here's an inside-out shot:

Just little bits of fur, tucked into places that the clerk wouldn't see when I returned it, even if they had to look into the shirt's neck a little to find the tag.  Here's a detail shot:

I had considered also adding some little branching forms, the sort that I would cut out of the little sheet paintings I've made with palette scraping and acrylic gel medium:

But once I'd sewn in the fur, I felt like there was a nice simplicity, an almost parasitic feel to it that I an additional element might disrupt, so I returned it with only the pink tufts inserted.  What do you think?  Should I have added more?

You Are Not a Market

Even favoritism aside, this video by musician Scott Alexander provides a critique of branding and marketing that dovetails nicely with some of the shopdropping work I do.

More Maps of Every Place I Can Remember

A few more places that I remember:

 

I don't evidently don't remember very much of that one.

The strange collection of shapes mid-top of this one is supposed to be a playground, but I found that as I was drawing my memory of how parts connected shifted and blurred.

Please pardon the off-kilter nature of these photos. These drawings are currently in a sketchbook, though ideally Maps of Every Place I Can Remember would be displayed differently.  I think I've mentioned it before as an internet-based project. If displayed on a wall, I imagine an expansive smear of maps all pinned overlapping and crowding one another, like the crazy collage on the wall of a servial killer in a movie, or the committed detective.

Grey Banana Republic Skirt

I was so happy with my last Shell Game alteration, which used an old slide of one of my paintings, removed from its casing and sewn into an underskirt, that I decided to do something similar to the pocket of this skirt from Banana Republic.

I went through my old slides, and soon realized that I had so many that I wanted to use, that I could easily stop doing other kinds of alterations altogether, and start just adding slides to things.

To resist this temptation I decided to glut myself on slide additions for this one skirt.  I sewed as many as I could fit to the underside of one of the pockets.  (To the left are photos of what the skirt looked like, turned inside-out, after I added the slides, with the pocket pinned back)

When I returned it, the salesperson who handled the transaction was very concerned about my experience with it.  It went something like:

Salesperson: Why are you returning this?

Me: Oh, uh, it didn't fit.

Salesperson: What was wrong with it?

Me: It wasn't the right size.  I didn't try it on before buying it.

Salesperson:  Oh, I'm just asking because I had the same problem with this skirt. It looked really cute, but didn't fit like the tan one.  Did you get the tan one?

Me: No...

Salesperson: I had the tan one, but it was sized differently, and this one bunched a bit in here.

Me: Oh, that's weird.

Salesperson (looking at the receipt): Oh and you just got it!

And so on.  Apparently my attempts at showing genuine interest in the fit of the skirt were unconvincing, because I looked back from outside the store as I left, and saw her hold the skirt up to the light for scrutiny.  She didn't turn it inside out and flip the pockets, though.