so, it’s been a bit doldrummy.

Nothing all that much to report. I’m woefully behind in the whole cleaning/packing effort. I’m dragging my feet on the website I’m working on (for actual money, no less! I haven’t had any of that come my way in months). So what do I work on? Why, a new piece, of course! That’s what a real artist would do. Christmas. I wonder when, if ever, I’ll be able to refer to myself as an “artist” without cringing a little, on the inside. I mean, it’s not like calling oneself a “doctor,” where you get a degree that officially permits you to refer to yourself as such. Any damn schmuck can self-identify as “artistic.” That pisses me off. What good is a title if there’s no licensing? No oversight? Shameful.

Anyway! Moving on. This is what I’m working on. It’s to be called, I think, “FDP (for Joan Didion and Félix González-Torres).” It’s those two shallow copper dishes I bought a couple weeks ago. I’ve since oil primed the bacs of them, and am presently engaged with glazing (and glazing and glazing and glazing and glazing) them until they’re a nice, deep black (the glaze is actually a mixture of raw umber and indathrone blue–I don’t know the rationale, really, but I still avoid using tube black, like they taught me in the learning-house).

Not much to look at, right now, I know. But in time. In time. I gave up on actually using a brush to glaze them. My fan brush is getting on towards needing to be replaced, and I couldn’t get an even coat. So I just mixed up a whole jar of darkness, and have been pouring it on directly. The title. Right. “FDP” is medical shorthand for “fixed and dilated pupils.” When a patient’s pupils are fully dilated and unresponsive to light stimuli, it’s almost always a sign of imminent and inevitable brain death. Joan Didion talks about it a couple of times in The Year of Magical Thinking, and, if you’ve had the misfortune of ever seeing it, you’ll know it can be the kind of image that sticks with you. González-Torres because it’s going to be two circles, and as I’ve already said, two identical circles always equal Perfect Lovers (aka probably the best, if not the most “important,” work of art in the history of just about ever).

The surface is a bit mottled, at the moment (dust, air bubbles). I’m hoping that a couple liberal dousings of varnish (probably damar with a boatload of stand oil to thicken it up) will take care of that.

In other news, I’ll have my first appearance in print, soon. Sort of. Kind of. Not really. Err, since I’m assuming print-on-demand doesn’t really count. That magazine cover I mentioned. I send the final image to the coordinator-woman this morning. I think it came out pretty handsome.

Now, since I don’t live in Winnipeg, I won’t actually get to see the thing unless someone decides to mail me a copy. But ‘tevs. It’s still nice.

cheats and swindlers

So, despite not having the money for these things, I went out and bought them anyway. I do hate buying art supplies here in Tampa, as I’m invariably swindled, at some point in the operation. That stupid little bottle of damar? $6.50. That beeswax? Fourteen bucks. It’s criminal. And what’s more, that beeswax included the most unsettling product warning that I’ve come across in years: (not as disturbing as the running should that warned that the manufacturer would not be liable for any injury or death that occurred while using the product) “Yaley’s natural beeswax is so pure, it may contain honey bees and/or parts of honeybees.”

Begging your pardon, M./Mme. Yaley,  but I would, and I feel I’m justified in this matter, consider parts of insects to be an impurity, as what I purchased (or thought I was purchasing) was 100% natural beeswax, not 100% natural wax and bees. The copper plates were a lucky stroke, though. I’ve had a small piece in mind for some time now, and I wasn’t sure how I was going to make it until these came along. More on that later.

Oh, right. Because maybe committing to it in a semipublic form will actually encourage me to see it through, I think I’m going to take a crack and submit work to this particular call. I don’t think I’m really who they had in mind (not Canadian, not a woman), but maybe this painting would work for their purposes, at least. I’d rather submit one of the birds, but I’m worried that the link might seem too tenuous. I’d need to write an artist statement (something I haven’t done in years and have never done particularly well) and a bio (something I’ve never had to do, period), and I’d probably have to give cam’s address in Winnipeg so it looked like I was actually living in Canada at the time of the deadline. But it might be worth it. I don’t know.

Oh, and lastly, I’ve been pegged to design the August/September cover of this magazine. It’s nice; small print run (3500), but full color, and something legitimate to put on a CV (I’m really hoping that I’ll be able to start taking off the filler material I’ve included on there, to date). I have no idea what I want to do for it, mind you, but it’s still a nice thing. Anyway, I have, like, two months to come up with something, so I should be fine. No sense in fretting.

Snatch the cat back

So this is the cat after the initial gesso grosso layer. When I was working on the birds, I started with the usual thin gesso, and eventually had to go in with a more paste-like mixture to fill in some of the areas wherethe underlying crochet stitches were still visible. This time I thought I’d save myself some of the work and do an initial layer of gloopy gesso that I could sand and shape before applying the tougher, smoother layers on top.

All in all, the process of making the cat has been much more “sculptural” than the birds were. Even though I still made a stuffed animal to work from, the cat is a lot less stylized/anthropomorphized than any of the animals I’d made before. I’m still not entirely sure how I feel about that. And, ideally, I should have crocheted it in gray yarn, since the finished work is going to be painted gray. I just didn’t have any gray cotton yarn. Oh, and I used an armature. There’s heavy aluminum wire in both the front and hind lets, and an armature wire “spine” that extends from the tail all the way to the tip of the snout. All of this feels like cheating, somehow. But such is life.

Here’s a shot of it after the gesso had dried and I’d gone at it for about an hour with my Dremel tool, sanding blocks, and an assortment of rasps and files. You can’t really see it in the picture, but I actually broke the tail; this is the first time I’ve broken any of the pieces, and that’s kind of an accomplishment, given how fragile they are and how roughly I have to handle them when sanding. I’m not sure if I’ll start the final gesso layers today or tomorrow. I’ll just see how I’m feeling. There’s no hurry, since I can scarcely afford the beeswax and damar resin I’ll need to make the paint.

Things I’ve learned:

1. Horseflies do not like the sound that a Dremel tool makes.
2. 20-foot-range wasp and hornet spray easily dispatches horseflies.

duuuuuuuuuude!

From the Wikipedias:

“A collection of gesso sculptures is properly called a gypsotheque.”

That is almost, almost too awesome for words. Awesome!

Things

These are just some things I’ve had kicking around for awhile. The first photo is all of my little brother’s unwanted soccer and science fair trophies. I took them apart to remove the little plastic genie lamps and soccer players, and I took off the name plates. I don’t know what, if anything, I’m going to do with them, but they’re nice things to have around. I’ve actually never won a trophy, though I’ve always wanted to. Quite desperately. I’ve won a few ribbons (for some reason they’re always pink. I don’t know what that’s about), but never any trophies. I don’t know what I would have gotten a trophy for, mind you, but that’s really neither here nor there.

I’m beginning to think that, if all of my work were to be shown together, it would have the effect of resembling nothing so much as a kind of pathetic, miscarried child’s birthday party (that was meant to mean a miscarried party for a child, not a party for a miscarried child, but either sort of works… though the second reading is way creepier). Between the sadly distorted party decorations and the ambiguously dead stuffed animals,  it’s all getting to be a bit too melodramatic for my liking.

The second photo are some things of Mom’s that I gathered together. The blue saucer on the left is from, I believe, a tea set that she had as a girl (it was in a box with all of her old dolls); the one on the right is a piece she bought a couple years ago, when she was very much into collecting Limoges porcelain. The tag at the bottom is one of her old calling cards. There was a nearly-full box of them in her office. I don’t think calling cards were that frequently given by the time the 60s came around.

I don’t know if I want fix everything in place and seal it up (the box is the backing for a shadowbox frame), make it a “piece,” or whatever. It’s just nice to have. There is sort of a Perfect Lovers feel to it, as it stands, which I appreciate. But I just don’t know. I don’t really have a framework in mind for working with found objects. I’m pretty rooted in labor. Meticulous, repetitive labor. So things like these feel like cheating. Which, in a way, they are.

Anyway, speaking of Félix González-Torres, if you haven’t seen my friend Jack’s work, I think it would be worth your while. “Friend” is a bit of an overstatement–mostly we spent three years at school just smiling awkwardly at one another whenever we’d pass, but, suffice it to say, I think his work is probably the best that I’ve seen come out of MICA in… ever. Anyway, the connection is just that there are González-Torres references throughout. The work is very smart. And cold. But also incredibly sweet, more often than not. Basically, it’s everything I wish my work was.

So that’s that.

quick thought

<rambling>
For some reason I never fully thought about how important eggs are for a lot of the work I’ve made. I mean, my paint is made from eggs, obviously, but when I fist started making my tempera paintings of animals, one of my central aims was to make paintings that were very much like eggs. Physically, there’s a bit of a resemblance: they’re rounded and white and whatnot, but structurally they’re quite similar as well. The gesso I use, a mixture of marble dust and rabbit-skin glue, isn’t meant to go on flexible supports like canvas: it’s too brittle, and is prone to cracking, and those paintings are on upholstered canvases. When I decided to make them, I was keenly aware of how vulnerable and fragile they were going to be, that was kind of the point. Not coincidentally, perhaps (though I’m not even sure I knew this at the time), eggshell and marble dust, chemically speaking, are the exact same thing. The egg line of thought is more interesting, I think, in the case of the birds, though. For those, gessoing the stuffed animals was a quite intentional kind of death allegory, but, in light of the eggshell reference, it was more of a “reverse birth” process, a return to the egg. Painting the faces back on end up being a rupture in the death/gestation metaphor (memory, re-presentation), and that brings us neatly into the territory of “compulsively reënacting abjection trauma,” Freud’s fort/da game, and all of that business. How tidy! It extends nicely to the exploration of representational schemes (basic simulacrum humbuggery) which is where I see my focus heading.

Oh dear. This is going to get me on a “surface” tangent, and then I’m going to have to think about the fetish object, and that’s going to take me back to my old blackface paintings, which I didn’t think I was going to have to think about, and that’s going to mean I’m going to have to take another crack at Homi Bhabha. And that, gentle reader (assuming you’re still with me), is not something I was planning to do or, indeed, was looking forward to doing. One thing after another. Although, it does make it abundantly clear that, at the heart of the matter, my core process is with covering one thing (skin, stuffed animals, or canvas, so far) with another thing (makeup, gesso, paint). Which means that there’s actually what would seem a highly improbable link between my older work and my the newer pieces (it’s actually nice to see some kind of continuity, no matter how tenuous). Also, it means I really am a painter, after all. Crap.
</rambling>