Make Art, Not Vegetables!

Although I don’t’ believe I am, there are those who think I am…. a hoader. Yes, OK. I admit it. I collect lots of weird stuff. Why? Because you never know when it might come in handy. Recently in honor of Earth Day there was a call from the local library to collect plastics caps and lids, not to throw them into a recycling bin, but to make art. Well, over years of teaching and painting and never being able to let anything go, I accumulated bins and bags of plastic lids, cups, tops and marker caps, scraps of wood and who knows what else. Well, it finally occurred to me that after of years of trying to coax my scraggly tomato plants into baring even just a handful of fruit, it was time to try something entirely new. I decided that this season there would be no more weeds and vegetables growing in my garden. This year it’s time to go back not to nature but to my bins and bags. It’s plastic and wood scraps all the way baby.

Raw Faces

After cutting up canvas that I staple around the wooden stretchers that eventually become paintings I am frequently left with long thin strips of material.  The wider remnants I resew together  and  am able to ‘reuse’ again to be  restretched  for another painting.  But what to do with those pieces that are too narrow to be resewn?    Weave them, of course, loose threads and all.  My default is the portrait.   

Mosaics

This series began with a painting called The Romantics that I  had made into a giclee print.  I cut two of the prints into strips and wove them back together to create the  checkerboard texture visible in the portraits.  The two figures in the prints  were used  as points of departure for the portraits.  After cutting the portraits in half I paired them separately creating a conflicting kind of dissonant.  

Brothers

 I love exploring issues of identity and diversity. In this series I riffed on the same kind of process that I’ve explored numerous times before. I drew similar but not identical portraits which I then I divided and cut into similar but not identical rectangular shapes. I then mixed up the rectangles and reassembled them into new portraits which accounts for their rather distorted shapes and dissonant features. Then I added color to the portraits divided each face into four parts that I cut apart once again. After reshuffling the components I reassembled them into new portraits that once again are different yet still all related to each other, just like siblings in families, from one generation to another.

  

Skype Attack

So my daughter and I were Skyping. She was half way around the world and suddenly the phone connection began to pixelate. Both her voice and picture became distorted. But there was something very intriguing how the abstract and broken the image became. So I whipped out my camera, much to my daughter's objections, and began to point and shoot. The images were both intimate and detached at the same time. In short, quite interesting . I also saw them as points of departure. Using Picasa, a digital photo enhancing site, I reinvented Clara. Here are some of my experiments.

Transformations

There is something absolutely liberating and transformative about digital photo enhancing apps like Picasa and Photoshop. They enable me to take 'ordinary' paintings, drawings, etchings, collages, and transform them into artworks that I could not only never imagine but even if I could, I could not create in a million years. It is an exhilarating process. I love the element of unexpected surprises. With only a click of a button, an image can be completely reimagined. It is absolutely magical.