In the Name of Art

Surburban Geography

Some of you probably remember riding around in these station wagons, and some of you don't. My friend Gretchen gave me a pile of old photos that her family didn't want and many of them were pictures of the construction of a suburban house. There were also shots of interiors, presumably to showcase appliances, fixtures and furniture, all from the late 50s, early 60s. Oddly, with so much more stuff, people don't take these kinds of pictures anymore. These seem wistfully proud to me, as if they were absolutely certain that better living was assured from an accumulation of stuff. And the photo itself seems to be a trophy related to that accumulation. I wanted to create the same kind of enclosure with threads that I did for the portraits.

Caught

I decided to put bits and pieces of random stuff in the cabinet card compositions. One of my favorite arrangements is of small things floating in large spaces. Kids do that in their art when they're not aware of how things "should" be done. For whatever reason, they can't focus on a larger scale and can only bring their attention to scattered tiny drawings. 5 year olds do this a lot but even older kids enter a trance-like state where they don't give a fig about the viewer. That quality in a work of art invites me into the artist's state of mind (and I love it there).  I can't say that I've perfected that phenomena, but I'm working on it here. 

Late for the 4th

Jan Saxe is my muse, since I forgot to bring my camera she mailed me these shots of the 4th and the annual bash at the Saxe household. If I missed anyone (and I know I did) apologies, I've been sitting at the computer too long to be thorough.

Thanks for the Comments!

Just to let everybody know, I haven't intentionally been ignoring comments. Typepad had been sending me a notice of each comment on my email but apparently that has stopped. I got into my blog and noticed comments and couldn't remember any email notification. So I've been catching up and will get back to y'all. Dratted technology, its like the golf t-shirt: "I hate golf, I hate golf, I hate golf, whoa, nice shot, I love golf!'.

From the Collage a Day Files

The title lies. I'm really not doing a collage a day but am doing as many as possible. Sometimes the papers do all the work, they are just laying there in the right combination, sometimes I'm using up the pile of papers that accumulates on my table and sometimes the papers for the stitched collages are drying and I've got some studio time on my hands. The photo is from an Akron University yearbook and once I pull out a page these things scream to be used.

Whole fam Damily

Pastor Steve (the one responsible for the eggs that follow this post) is the one in the white t-shirt. The rest of the fam is out for an excursion in Ravenna, Oh at Guido's. I highly reccommend the food and the prices.

Reverend Bro's Eggs

Thought you might like to see what another part of the family does for their art fix. These are examples of my brother's psanky (oh bother, I don't know how to spell it but it's pronounced pissanky). He'll just have to look at my blog to correct me. Steve is a Lutheran pastor in S. Carolina and he does these eggs and sells them at farmer's markets. His table is called Psanky by Pastor. If you're ever around Greenville SC stop in to the farmer's market and see him. Tell him I'm plugging his business.

Spooky

This one is a little spookier than usual (though most of the stitched pieces have this sense of being off kilter)  and I intentionally tried to produce that effect for a show coming up in October. The collage elements were more difficult to place than usual and I covered some of them up to temper the creepiness of the combination of child and organic elements. But it is spooky so all went according to plan.

If It's Not Stitching

it's strips of paper arranged like stitching. I think the work with paper weaving and then trying to figure out how to make that less geometric and more organic has morphed into all these pieces with warp and weft gone wild. Its been a long journey from fiber to collage to fiber again, but I'm finally getting the rhythms right I think. A friend asked me if the stitching wasn't tedious (as the separate application of paper strips may seem tedious on this). For whatever reason, the randomness of the application works against tedium and seems like meditation to me.

Maple Man Returns

I'm officially obsessed with stitching on photography. The cabinet cards and other photos are the mundane variety but their quality as documents leaves them wide open for interpretation. This one has a very faint image but I liked that, it seemed to emphasize how ephemeral the image is. It may continue to deteriorate and leave a void where the face is now.