A New Commission, a Crazy Deadline

A friend of mine is making a very short (five minutes) independent film. In it is a scene of a girl wearing some head adornment. The deadline is this Thursday at the latest. There's a lot to do. Here's a sketch for you to see.

I'll try to post more images later. Right now I'm in the get-it-done phase of the project. Hopefully it will all turn out well. It's been such short notice that I'm stuck just using materials I have on hand in the studio. Wish me luck.

Let's Pretend I Have Your Attention

So this next post shows the work that I did last night. It's starting to come along. The story is getting louder.

And louder.

I'm starting to see things in it, so I'll start pulling and pushing parts.

There, I didn't even say very much.

Collage 4

There's a perfectly bland title for a blog post "Collage 4". Nice.

Well, here I am again. I've been making marks on a canvas for a few weeks now, with no sense of where it might go. It was a painful struggle because I desperately wanted to feel a story in me. I started imagining borrowing other peoples' stories, but Good Friend Paul talked me out of the untruth of it—the lack of personal resonance. Maybe he didn't exactly say it that way. Maybe he just texted something like, "Stick with your own story." Whatever the case, he's probably right.

Rather than go on and on about what I've been working on, I'll just do one post with a timeline of progression. I might stab a few words between the images to give you a sense of what my mind was trying to accomplish, the steps, if you will.

Step 1. Find the canvas that needs to be obliterated.

Step 2. Dig out a Sharpie® Marker and begin to talk about random things that come to mind.

Step 3. Rotate the canvas and paint over the whole thing because you can't find your way around. Heck, it worked last time!

Step 4. Glue on a bunch of images that seem like they might have a story to tell.

Step 5. Ask myself what it is that I'm trying to accomplish—ask right on the canvas.

Step 6. Glue more things down, try to reduce the number of elements, comment with Sharpie® again.

Step 7. Cover all of it up with a color that I can't bear and will want to get rid of.

Step 8. Take out a Sharpie and try to make some image marks.

Step 9. Wonder what the heck I'm doing, but try to go with it anyway.

Step 10. Start filling out the shapes that I've made with collaged paper.

The description sounds sterile, and I'm sorry about that. The whole thing is a bit like tuning into a conversation. At first it's faint, but by and by it gets louder. I can't really say that there's a story here yet, but there is a kernel of one. Paul wisely told met that I shouldn't really talk too much about the contents of the work. At first I wasn't sure, but when I gave it some thought, I decided he was right. Let's say you hear a song, and you're really into the lyrics, and you think you know the story being told. Well, let's say that you got to talk to the singer/songwriter and they told you that the story was about a furry pet hamster that they had as a kid—not your story. The song would lose its meaning to you. So, in an attempt to allow my image to mean something to you, my limited audience, I will refrain from psychoanalyzing it. You, however, are allowed to completely psychoanalyze your response to it.

The Brown Hat: on my head

I released the brown hat from its block last night. Here's a picture of it on my head. I don't really like pictures of myself, so bear with me. I love the hat though, and set about making a couple more sculpted pieces last night. We'll go to the studio in a bit to see if I managed to make anything worth wearing.

These remind me of little sculptures I used to make out of Sculpee when I was living with my then-boyfriend-now-husband one summer back when we were in college. I didn't know what I was making, or why I was making it, but I loved the shapes, the folds, and the shadows. Sadly, I don't have any of them left. They each would have fit in the palm of my hand. I remember painting then, too. My best friend from college still has a painting I did of some Peonies(back then they just looked like really big roses to me).

Back to Some Hat-Making

I made a couple of hats this week. I had forgotten how much I enjoy the process of creating felt. It's a very tactile experience, and I'm a tactile (if fidgety) person.

Right now there's a hat drying on a block in my studio. Very sculptural. I'll release it from its shackles later on this evening. The style may be an indicator of what's to come for the fall, but one never knows. Will this mean working strictly sculpturally? Just in solid colors? I don't know. I guess I'll let my hands make whatever they feel like making.