d’Arte Board

If you’re in the mood for something a little more interesting than my masking tape musings, the New York Times is currently running a 5 part series written by a “Marine Corps Artist,” which seems to be the same thing as a courtroom artist, but with bullets flying around him.

My immediate reaction is surprise they have people like this. Photographs exist and are quicker, but I guess they see some value in a more subjective treatment of the scene. I dunno. Maybe they’ll explain it.

-JD

I currently have about 5 different projects sitting at home 90% complete but not yet ready to post. So instead I’m posting some of my earliest experiments at recycling masking tape that I’d used on paintings.

At first I took the tape directly off the painting and would try to stick it onto the paper in a premade composition. In this case a Clyfford Still type thing:

In this case I was using tape from a dropcloth, again composing it as I removed it:

The problem with this approach is that it took forever to remove tape from paintings I wanted to get to work on. So after 6 months to a year I started putting the tape on paper without regard to composition and collaging them later. This has become a mainstay of my collage work, particularly what I’ve been doing with my Pazzles machine the last year. This piece was done prior to the machine:

The colors aren’t that pretty but at the time I only had what colors I had on hand, so made due. Now that I have drawers full of sheets of tape I can be more discriminating. And with the pazzles machine I’m able to make more nuanced designs:

So that’s the brief history of my use of tape. Some day I’ll finish the stuff I’m working on and be able to post something new.

Until then,
JD