LJ Idol Season 8 Week 12 - Peeking Through Her Keyhole
o/` She's got everything she needs
She's an artist, she don't look back
She's got everything she needs
She's an artist, she don't look back
She can take the dark out of nighttime
And paint the daytime black. o/`
-- She Belongs to Me performed by Bob Dylan
For me, artwork and writing had always been synonymous; most of my earliest memories, if they are not of books, have been of a fat little hand curling around a crayon or a pencil, of the combined scents of butcher paper and poster paint. Whether words or pictures (and sometimes both when I learned about the Book of Kells, iconography, and illumination), both crafts told the stories dictated by my mind. I still have my first typewriter, an old powder blue portable by Royal which had been my mother's when she went to college, and my first set of real artist's watercolors. The watercolors, by Grumbacher, each came in their own plastic palette which popped out for easy replacement and stored handily in the enamel and steel tin. I spent an entire summer painting mountain landscapes on the dimpled watercolor paper which had to be held in place by a sticky rubber edge that never did seem to keep the colors from running and always tore no matter how hard you tried to make it otherwise.
I drew my last piece of artwork about seven years ago --- closed the palette for the last time, picked up all my brushes, pens, pencils, markers, and even crayons and put them in a cupboard. My creations were nice, I'd been told by an artist I respected, but they'd simply never amount to anything and no one would ever give them a second look. No one could fault my anatomy but when compared to a sea of gyrating anthropomorphic bodies doing naughty things to one another, the anatomy didn't matter. I had to drop what he called my ridiculous Victorian morals and learn to produce pornography or...well...it just wasn't art.
Two separate but important incidents helped change that rash decision, forced me to pick up the pieces of my bruised artist's ego and reassemble them into something made of sterner stuff.
Earlier in the summer, Dorie and I were downtown at the new Chamblin's munching on sandwiches from the cafe and bemoaning the fact that no matter how much we might want to do so, there was just no way we could afford the vintage five volume set of Thoreau's On Walden Pond. We paid for our purchases and on our way back to the car we noticed a flier on the Museum of Modern Art advertising an exhibit by the famous folk artist, Howard Finster. I had never heard of the man and modern art isn't usually my thing but Dorie seemed so excited by it that I agreed to return the following week so that we could view the exhibit.
Finster's works fascinated me. In most of them, he had taken bits and pieces of common items and then re-purposed or rearranged them to suit his artistic vision. Most, if not all, of his works featured a Biblical quote or reference on which he had loosely based the work. Looking at each piece and going from work to work, a man's spiritual journey as told by his artwork unfolded...and there wasn't a single anthropomorphic nude or even people doing naughty things depicted! The style of the art couldn't even be considered realistic; much of it spoke of either pre-columbian or central American influences. He could draw realistically when he chose to (his art journals and diaries indicated as much) but he'd obviously chosen another media entirely with which to tell his story.
I opened the cupboard that night, inhaling the familiar smells of oil pastels and a myriad of other scents reminiscent of a grade school art room, and then closed it without touching any of the contents.
The next weekend the entire family went out on errands and we stopped at the county's main library branch. As we'd never been there (and, as usual, I had library fines to pay) we went inside. The window of the children's section was plastered with little 3x2 index cards covered with brightly colored art. Many of the cards had similar themes --- mushrooms, for instance, or butterflies or birds --- but they were all done by individual artists. I thought at first it might be a children's project but as we read the information about it, I discovered otherwise.
"They're ATCs...artist trading cards," Dorie explained. "People make them for themed swaps and then send them to each other. The piece of art cannot be any larger than the card. I used to belong to a group which did these but" she shrugged "not too many people actually sent out the cards so the group died."
I peered more closely at the brochure explaining the project and noted that it listed a web site, not a LiveJournal group or an e-mail group. I had no intention at the time of doing anything for myself. "You might give this a try," I told her. "It looks like it's a reputable group and it seems like it's been operating a while."
To my surprise, she not only agreed to look at the site but immediately enrolled in several swaps. Soon the kitchen table filled with bits and pieces of paper, markers, paints, and bits of ephemera. After I'd spent half an hour giving suggestions, rifling through her supplies, and generally making a nuisance of myself, she finally said with a wry smile, "Try it yourself. If no one likes the art on the cards, you won't get any feedback and people won't ask you to join swaps. It's that simple."
"I'm not an artist," I muttered.
"You could be," she said and left it at that.
I signed up for the site that night, picked two Halloween themed swaps, and then confronted the blank pieces of bristol board.
It's nowhere near as easy as it sounds, even with a theme to guide you. My first project had to have a crow or raven and a cat somewhere on each card. I had no idea how I would manage to shrink up the details of a piece and make them fit on that little card without making them look jumbled or sloppy. Eventually I figured out that marking the size of the card and then planning the artwork in the sketch book around those parameters worked best. However, that simply left me with artwork in a sketchbook which was NOT on the card where it belonged. Although I'd managed a rather good sketch of the primary elements of my creation I didn't think I could do it twice.
"Don't," said Dorie. "Most artists trace the sketch onto their canvas after they've blocked it out. At least, I do."
Well, I'd seen Dorie's inks and sketches; she could have been a professional and her inks rivaled that of some of my favorite old school comic book artists. If she said tracing was acceptable, then I supposed I could trace the main elements and transfer them to their papers. If my esteemed artist friend had been wrong about art needing to feature pornographic anthropomorphic creatures, he might also have been wrong about tracing being cheating. Hell, I was tracing my own original work so how on earth could it be cheating?
There is an art in an of itself to assembling collage work and there's a big difference between the stuff you put together in grade school out of magazines and an artist's collage. I chose my background paper, trimmed it to fit the cards, and then glued it to the bristol board. While waiting for that to dry, I traced my other elements onto a second piece of bristol board, colored them with inks and pencils, and then cut them out. My hands shook too badly to draw straight lines and so I would have to find something else from which to fashion a cemetery fence. Dorie had a lovely fleur-de-lis hole punch which, when applied to glossy black paper, produced multiple pieces that, when laid together, would make a whimsical and unique fencing. I pasted those in a row across the center of each card. Some illumination of existing folds in the background paper produced a glowing harvest moon. I'd originally intended to trace the final element onto the moon's face but, colored with pencils and tacked in place with an adhesive spray, it made a better impression left whole.
Even though I'd had to draw the main elements of the cards, I remained skeptical and told myself it couldn't possibly be considered art. After all, you couldn't just tack something together even if it was made of carefully crafted original pieces and call it art...could you?
Everyone who received one of my cards gave me positive feedback and expressed their joy over my clever artwork. The gal who hosted this swap immediately invited me to another one and sent me a private message telling me that I would be welcome in any of her swaps any time. I have since produced over one hundred pieces of art which have traveled all over the world to live with other artists. I guess that respected artist was wrong; art is art, whether it contains snips of paper or took hours to ink by hand and the subject matter extends far beyond anthropomorphic creatures of any kind.
What I do IS art.
My first ATC project:
She's an artist, she don't look back
She's got everything she needs
She's an artist, she don't look back
She can take the dark out of nighttime
And paint the daytime black. o/`
-- She Belongs to Me performed by Bob Dylan
For me, artwork and writing had always been synonymous; most of my earliest memories, if they are not of books, have been of a fat little hand curling around a crayon or a pencil, of the combined scents of butcher paper and poster paint. Whether words or pictures (and sometimes both when I learned about the Book of Kells, iconography, and illumination), both crafts told the stories dictated by my mind. I still have my first typewriter, an old powder blue portable by Royal which had been my mother's when she went to college, and my first set of real artist's watercolors. The watercolors, by Grumbacher, each came in their own plastic palette which popped out for easy replacement and stored handily in the enamel and steel tin. I spent an entire summer painting mountain landscapes on the dimpled watercolor paper which had to be held in place by a sticky rubber edge that never did seem to keep the colors from running and always tore no matter how hard you tried to make it otherwise.
I drew my last piece of artwork about seven years ago --- closed the palette for the last time, picked up all my brushes, pens, pencils, markers, and even crayons and put them in a cupboard. My creations were nice, I'd been told by an artist I respected, but they'd simply never amount to anything and no one would ever give them a second look. No one could fault my anatomy but when compared to a sea of gyrating anthropomorphic bodies doing naughty things to one another, the anatomy didn't matter. I had to drop what he called my ridiculous Victorian morals and learn to produce pornography or...well...it just wasn't art.
Two separate but important incidents helped change that rash decision, forced me to pick up the pieces of my bruised artist's ego and reassemble them into something made of sterner stuff.
Earlier in the summer, Dorie and I were downtown at the new Chamblin's munching on sandwiches from the cafe and bemoaning the fact that no matter how much we might want to do so, there was just no way we could afford the vintage five volume set of Thoreau's On Walden Pond. We paid for our purchases and on our way back to the car we noticed a flier on the Museum of Modern Art advertising an exhibit by the famous folk artist, Howard Finster. I had never heard of the man and modern art isn't usually my thing but Dorie seemed so excited by it that I agreed to return the following week so that we could view the exhibit.
Finster's works fascinated me. In most of them, he had taken bits and pieces of common items and then re-purposed or rearranged them to suit his artistic vision. Most, if not all, of his works featured a Biblical quote or reference on which he had loosely based the work. Looking at each piece and going from work to work, a man's spiritual journey as told by his artwork unfolded...and there wasn't a single anthropomorphic nude or even people doing naughty things depicted! The style of the art couldn't even be considered realistic; much of it spoke of either pre-columbian or central American influences. He could draw realistically when he chose to (his art journals and diaries indicated as much) but he'd obviously chosen another media entirely with which to tell his story.
I opened the cupboard that night, inhaling the familiar smells of oil pastels and a myriad of other scents reminiscent of a grade school art room, and then closed it without touching any of the contents.
The next weekend the entire family went out on errands and we stopped at the county's main library branch. As we'd never been there (and, as usual, I had library fines to pay) we went inside. The window of the children's section was plastered with little 3x2 index cards covered with brightly colored art. Many of the cards had similar themes --- mushrooms, for instance, or butterflies or birds --- but they were all done by individual artists. I thought at first it might be a children's project but as we read the information about it, I discovered otherwise.
"They're ATCs...artist trading cards," Dorie explained. "People make them for themed swaps and then send them to each other. The piece of art cannot be any larger than the card. I used to belong to a group which did these but" she shrugged "not too many people actually sent out the cards so the group died."
I peered more closely at the brochure explaining the project and noted that it listed a web site, not a LiveJournal group or an e-mail group. I had no intention at the time of doing anything for myself. "You might give this a try," I told her. "It looks like it's a reputable group and it seems like it's been operating a while."
To my surprise, she not only agreed to look at the site but immediately enrolled in several swaps. Soon the kitchen table filled with bits and pieces of paper, markers, paints, and bits of ephemera. After I'd spent half an hour giving suggestions, rifling through her supplies, and generally making a nuisance of myself, she finally said with a wry smile, "Try it yourself. If no one likes the art on the cards, you won't get any feedback and people won't ask you to join swaps. It's that simple."
"I'm not an artist," I muttered.
"You could be," she said and left it at that.
I signed up for the site that night, picked two Halloween themed swaps, and then confronted the blank pieces of bristol board.
It's nowhere near as easy as it sounds, even with a theme to guide you. My first project had to have a crow or raven and a cat somewhere on each card. I had no idea how I would manage to shrink up the details of a piece and make them fit on that little card without making them look jumbled or sloppy. Eventually I figured out that marking the size of the card and then planning the artwork in the sketch book around those parameters worked best. However, that simply left me with artwork in a sketchbook which was NOT on the card where it belonged. Although I'd managed a rather good sketch of the primary elements of my creation I didn't think I could do it twice.
"Don't," said Dorie. "Most artists trace the sketch onto their canvas after they've blocked it out. At least, I do."
Well, I'd seen Dorie's inks and sketches; she could have been a professional and her inks rivaled that of some of my favorite old school comic book artists. If she said tracing was acceptable, then I supposed I could trace the main elements and transfer them to their papers. If my esteemed artist friend had been wrong about art needing to feature pornographic anthropomorphic creatures, he might also have been wrong about tracing being cheating. Hell, I was tracing my own original work so how on earth could it be cheating?
There is an art in an of itself to assembling collage work and there's a big difference between the stuff you put together in grade school out of magazines and an artist's collage. I chose my background paper, trimmed it to fit the cards, and then glued it to the bristol board. While waiting for that to dry, I traced my other elements onto a second piece of bristol board, colored them with inks and pencils, and then cut them out. My hands shook too badly to draw straight lines and so I would have to find something else from which to fashion a cemetery fence. Dorie had a lovely fleur-de-lis hole punch which, when applied to glossy black paper, produced multiple pieces that, when laid together, would make a whimsical and unique fencing. I pasted those in a row across the center of each card. Some illumination of existing folds in the background paper produced a glowing harvest moon. I'd originally intended to trace the final element onto the moon's face but, colored with pencils and tacked in place with an adhesive spray, it made a better impression left whole.
Even though I'd had to draw the main elements of the cards, I remained skeptical and told myself it couldn't possibly be considered art. After all, you couldn't just tack something together even if it was made of carefully crafted original pieces and call it art...could you?
Everyone who received one of my cards gave me positive feedback and expressed their joy over my clever artwork. The gal who hosted this swap immediately invited me to another one and sent me a private message telling me that I would be welcome in any of her swaps any time. I have since produced over one hundred pieces of art which have traveled all over the world to live with other artists. I guess that respected artist was wrong; art is art, whether it contains snips of paper or took hours to ink by hand and the subject matter extends far beyond anthropomorphic creatures of any kind.
What I do IS art.
My first ATC project:
