New Method

So I was figuring out the text on the pages that I had done in InDesign the night before crit. It was really REALLY frustrating because it didn't look great. At all. And in order to split the text up in a way that doesn't completely ruin the painting, I would have to do weird stuff with it and reading it became labyrinthine and confusing. People in crit agreed when I showed them the final printed off version. So I've made a decision. The text is no longer going onto the pages.

These paintings are different than anything I've done before. They are huge, but full of negative space. Because I was thinking that they would end with text on them, I decided to focus on a single central subject. They are also incredibly layered so I feel there is a lot of depth (visually, not subject matter-ily) to them. I couldn't stand to ruin this SPARSENESS that was creating such an atmosphere. I mean, the POINT of the paintings was to create an atmosphere to go along with the text. So, here is my new game plan:

I have extra white pages at the beginning and end because I was planning on doing twice as many huge painting pages. I even have extras on top of them because I was planning on having collages at the beginning and end as well as a title page, etc. SO. I am going to use these extra pages and fill them with the text. I'm not sure how I'm going to put the text on the page yet. Maybe screen printing still, maybe the old version of etching. Maybe Van Dyke prints. Letterpress would be the coolest but LORD I don't feel like dying at such a young age. The idea of setting all that type physically repels me. Plus my school has apparently decided that art students can't have access to the facility that has all the alternative process dark rooms and letter presses and etching presses this semester even though it's SITTING RIGHT THERE WITH ALL THE MATERIALS IN IT. Ugh. Seriously, how effing ridiculous that we HAVE resources and I can't use them.

Anyway. I'm still doing the collages of violent religious imagery--in particular of Joan of Arc and Jeebus--but there will be text on those pages as well. I will integrate the collages in with the text. Then the story will be split in the middle by the watercolor paintings I have done, which will have screen printed onto them just a sentence of the text that I find particularly powerful. I think I will begin the book with a watercolor painting that just takes up parts of a double spread, but has room on the bottom and top for text as well so the middle isn't strange and sudden and so you start to feel that sparse landscape atmosphere at the beginning.

Whew! Lawd, so much work to do, so many decisions to make! Hopefully I'll have this somewhat figured out by the end of next week. Now here is the painting I just finished recently:



In other news, The Office was awesome. Hurray for the return of fall television! Also, a post on my collage inspiration, Kara Walker, is pending, but there are SO many images that it will have to wait until this weekend. If I'm not puking all over the place, that is. I think I have caught something horrid.

HELLO LADIES ARE YOU CREEPED OUT YET?

Pages 9-10. Hurray! Also, it is Friday, so that is exciting. And now pages 9-10 with the potential text as done in In Design with my new favorite font, Adobe Jensen Pro. It's cool enough to look like it's sans serif, but it's totally serif:

This text is by NO means set in stone. I was just playing around and getting ideas. I'm going to pass all my text by the graphic design prof here who is evidently a type nazi before anything gets printed on my precious precious paintings.

My friends, having internet in the studio is a blessing and curse. While I can now research images and such with ease, I also can spend too much time looking at things that are amusing but distracting and watching The Daily Show and The Colbert Report on magical, magical Hulu. But I do find some pretty ridiculous/awesome things. For example, I'm pretty sure this is the only way Wuthering Heights will ever be interesting to me:



There is also this educational comic on the Japanese language and culture. You know you love it, ladies.

Via Yes But No But Yes. There is a glorious list of ancient ridiculous comics going on over there.

Finally there is a fine specimen of manhood seeking out a very specific wife on Yahoo. His "Quick Disqualification List" of 19 bullets includes "You have to go to the bathroom more than once during a four hour date where we first have dinner at a restaurant then see a movie." He then goes on to create a "Quick Qualification List" of 12 bullets:

Besides those things that can be ascertained from the "Quick Disqualification List" above, the following is a list of things I seek in my future wife.

1. My preferred height for my wife is between 5'4" (162 cm) to 5'8" (172 cm). However, if you are very thin, shorter is fine, and taller is fine if you are slim.
   
   
2. Though most men like large breasts, I don't. The larger the breasts, the more I'm turned off romantically. Bra size 32 B is my preferred, but any size up to 36 C, depends on your height, is good. Any larger than that will depend on the rest of you. I've seen women with 36 Ds that are fine. But if you are in the 40 Ds and above, forget it, a total turn off for me romantically.
   
   
3. Weight wise, for the following heights, the indicated weights, give or take 10 pounds, are generally best, the less weight the better. However, depending on your build, an acceptable weight may be quite different. For example, I have heavy bones, in high school, I was 20 pounds over what the charts said I should be, but there was no fat on me whatsoever. I've known girls that were very slim but weighed 10 pounds more than the average girl her height and build. Whatever your weight is, you must be somewhere between thin/slim to a lean athletic (meaning, not much fat). To help you better understand, in American sizes, if you are a dress size bigger than 8 or in plus sizes, it would be highly unlikely that I would be interested.
   
   
   1. 5'0" - 90 lbs or less
   2. 5'4" - 120 lbs or less
   3. 5'8" - 140 lbs or less
   
   
4. You are under thirty years old. My preferred range is between 24 and 29 for such girls have generally finished their formal education and have a good idea of what they want for themselves in life. However, I will consider younger and older. If you over 29, you will have to be pretty and slim.
   
   
5. You have no children, will not have children and do not want children. I have already raised four wonderful children and do not wish to raise anymore.
   
   
6. Sorry, but when it comes to turning me on, light chocolate to white skin color is needed. However, there are exceptions for darker skin, but they have to be very beautiful.
   
   
7. As my wife, you will have no desire for a career of your own, since as my wife your career will be working side by side with me starting and running our own businesses (Yes, I’ve started and ran my own successful businesses in the past). Only my future wife and me will know the details of the businesses until they are started. All you will know now is that they will be financial in nature, they will help others financially.
   
   
8. You are a hard worker. My wife to be and I will work hard together, play hard, rest well, and enjoy the fruits of our labor. Our work will have us traveling all around America. The fruits of our labor will enable us to travel around the world if we choose.
   
   
9. You are content in humble circumstances. My future wife and I will live humbly at first and as our businesses grow and flourish, so will our lifestyle. Therefore, if you are looking for an easy life of play and leisure then I am not the one for you. This eliminates virtually all girls of well to do parents for such girls are used to getting everything they want and have an expectation of instant gratification. My joy will come from watching my wife’s enthusiasm and excitement of growing businesses that provides the financial freedoms to do the things she so desires to do.
   
   
10. You must be able to get yourself, at your own expense, to anywhere in America.

ETC.

Then comes a wordy tome that has paragraph titles like: "An obedient wife is NOT the same thing as a slave!", "Do NOT fall in love with me until I say so!", "When a Wife Becomes a Whore" and "Multiple Wives". Unsurprisingly, he has been searching for several years.

And lo, I leave you with a glorious abomination of God that could only be a Dürer:

All Aboard the Gettin' Things Done Express. Next Stop: 1/3-DonesVille

Bwahahaha! Okay, I'm currently pumped on a three espresso shot caramel machiato. Perhaps this was a questionable decision seeing as I have a packed day tomorrow and class starting at 9 am, but whatever. I'm getting things DONE.

First? Pages 7-8! !kaPOW!


The next two pages are already taped down and on their way to getting done. They should be finished by tomorrow AT THE LATEST.

!sha-ZAM! mock up for pages 9-10, pages I've already started painting.

11-12 are already figured out, so 13-14 will be my goal tomorrow. Gettin' stuff done is pretty fulfilling. Also for some reason there is a girl in my narrative writing class whose name is Precious Angel. I don't know if her parents named her that or if she decided on her own that that was her name, but I don't know which is worse.

Poor Rosie!

I was pretty aghast to find this photo shopped horror of a classic piece of Americana feminism, generally because people are trying to pretend like Palin is a feminist when in reality she is anything but. She is a woman conservatives like because she touts every ideal--particularly gender ideals--that they hold dear in a pretty package that really has no substance.

We can do what, Sarah Palin? Charge victims for their own rape kits upwards of $1200? Create abstinence-only sex ed programs while criminalizing abortion, even cases of rape? Ban books in libraries? Start faith-based wars?

With each new thing I hear, the more disenchanted I become.

Hey look! I'm alive.

Back into semester now. The trip to England made me not want to be in school anymore. And then I came back and I was and that sucked. Especially because I missed a whole week and everything was going on and I had to catch up. After a fairly stressful week, I'm back into it and I even have a prospective finish date for My God: December 1. I plan on having all of the big pages finished by October 5, which gives me 3 weeks to paint 8 pages out of 12. Also, I plan on having no social life. Fortunately, after a dry summer imagery has been coming really easily and I already have another 3 pages mapped out and 1 about halfway done.

Mock up for pages 7-8.

Pages 7-8 being transferred onto big pages.

Mock up for pages 9-10. This will probably change a bit when it hits the big pages, there is something lacking. I think I may have applied the water colors too thickly over the entire thing. It will be a slower, more thinly layered process when I get to the big pages for it.

In other news, Tina Fey and Amy Poeler rock.

Also, so does Jon Stewart.

On Holiday

I'm going to be in the UK until the 27th. B'ham, Bristol, London, and Edinburgh.

Moving is Horrible

I think I am this robot (click to enlarge):



A la Gunnerkrigg Court.

So I've been packing up my apartment. I have entirely too much crap, but it's a little tough not to when you're an artist, especially when you watercolor, oil paint, sew, knit, build, print . . . I will always need a ridiculous amount of supplies. My new place is pretty amazing though. It's a house apartment in an old Victorian. A huge step up. I'm really looking forward to decorating it.

Aw Shit.

A la John Cambell.

If I wasn't so sure I was going to be rich someday, I would be getting headaches all the time thinking about how much higher education costs in this country.

Summer Reading II

Currently I am doing research on the United States, mostly pertaining to race and gender relations. I was always interested in historical gender relations and how they are relevant to gender relations today and how we can continue to move equality forward, but I recently also became interested in race relations. I think it may partially have something to do with the coming election as well as the disconnect I feel with the side of America that is still full of racism and sexism. I was also prompted to research because of my fascination with Faulkner, who chronicles both antebellum and postbellum south in his novels. Absalom, Absalom!, his book I am reading at the moment, is the story of Thomas Sutpen's attempt to create an antebellum southern legacy from low class standing as narrated by Rosa Coldfield (his much younger sister-in-law and later, fiancee) and Mr. Compson to Quentin Compson of The Sound and the Fury fame. During the war, Sutpen leaves his two daughters, Judith and Clytemnestra alone in this great southern mansion on a plantation he built years before to fend for themselves while he went and fought for the Confederacy. Judith was his daughter by his wife Ellen, a "true" daughter while Clytemnestra (Clytie) was his by a slave and therefore was a slave owned by her own father. Rosa, her own father having passed, comes to live with Judith, her niece (Ellen was her sister). One of the most fascinating portions of the book for me is how these three women, all related in some way, live together and survive together in this sparse room yet hardly speak, hardly know each other. They are kin but one (Clytie) is considered hardly so. Rosa is Judith's aunt, yet Judith is older than her.

"We are three strangers. I do not know what Clytie thought, what life she led which the food we raised and cooked in unison, the cloth we spun and wove together, nourished and sheltered. But I expected that because she and I were open, ay honorable, enemies. But I did not even know what Judith thought and felt. We slept in the same room, the three of us (this for more than to conserve firewood which we had to carry in ourselves. We did it for safety. It was winter soon and already soldiers were beginning to come back--the stragglers, not all of them tramps, ruffians, but men who had risked and lost everything, suffered beyond endurance and had returned now to a ruined land, not the same men who had marched away but transformed--and this was the worst, the ultimate degredation to which war brings the spirit, the soul--into the likeness of that man who abuses form the very despair and pity the beloved wife or mistress who in his absence has been raped. We were afraid. We fed them; we gave them what and all we had and we would have assumed their wounds and left them whole again if we could. But we were afraid of them.), we waked and fulfilled the endless tedious obligations which the sheer holding to life and breath entailed; we would sit before the fire after supper, the three of us in that state where the very bones and muscles are too tired to rest, when the attenuated and invincible spirit has changed and shaped even hopelessness into the easy obliviousness of a worn garment, and talk, talk of a hundred things--the weary recurrent triviata of our daily lives, of a thousand things but not one. We talked of him, Thomas Sutpen, of the end of the War (we could all see it now) and when he would return, of what he would do: how begin the Herculean task which we knew he would set himself, into which (oh yes, we knew this too) he would undoubtedly sweep us with the old ruthlessness whether we would or no . . ."

(Faulkner, 126-127)

Because of the way the society is structured, these women become little more than paper dolls for Sutpen to command. Without him, they are merely surviving, with him they are miserable and aware of his brutality, but have a purpose. The war has stripped these societal gender roles to their barest roots with the men cast as objects of fear (yes, objects, for violence in our society can objectify men just as much as sexuality can objectify women) and the women as ghostly figures for their use. It's creepy and haunting, but undoubtedly accurate.

Along the same lines I am also reading the following:





I'm not exactly sure what I'm going to do with all of this information, what book will come of it, but hopefully after more research I will be able to focus my brain and create something interesting. I guess we'll see. Really, right now, I need to focus and finish creating all the imagery for My God, so it's possible all of this will become a side project real soon.

Holy crap that was the nerdiest post ever. Also, only three and a half weeks until classes start up again.

Stationary.

Ho-kay. So the stationary is (finally!) up in the shop. Here are some photos! As per usual, click on the photo to make it larger.

Late Summer Hydrangea Stationary:






Late Summer Tulip Stationary:






You can order as many as you want HERE.