On my last computer I had one of the oldest versions of Photoshop that it could possibly run, and that was fine because all I ever need to do is cropping and little color adjusting most of the time, no big deal. Unfortunately when I upgraded to my shiny new laptop it decided it wanted nothing to do with that PS7, something about incompatible bits, I don’t know, all I know is it doesn’t work so I downloaded GIMP and figured how bad could it be?
It’s bad. It sucks.
It’s clunky, unresponsive, and doing the simplest things takes forever. In short, I hate it. Scanning work is the only way to get it correctly colored, but then all the magazine dots show up, something you don’t see in person, photographing pieces is superior, but without color correction the look washed out and odd. Today the colors I am presenting are subtle in their interaction, so I chose pixely scanning.
Does anyone want to take pity on me and rip me a copy?
I like this springy swirly shape that has come up a few times, and usually I stick with a pretty simple formula, black background with two cut pieces on top in two subtly varying values. Then I thought it might be a good opportunity to deviate in color, use the set pattern to put that part of the thinking aside and focus on the color combinations. In theory this was fine, but when I applied my usual formula it looked a little…what? Too spare? I don’t know, but it just isn’t really working for me.
So I added another layer, and now wonder if it is too busy?
My cousin and his bride, Kate, were married in December 2011. I promised them a good piece that night and used the full year allowed by good manners to finish it. The result was their Wedding/Christmas present this year.
Each piece is 24″ x 18″, and is a quit of paintings, collages and traditional fabric quilt. Pieces of each background are used to fill in the different planes of the form within it. This is what I was testing in this post.
Unfortunately, because I had to build the frames and stretch these in Los Angeles I wasn’t able to photograph them in my studio with my equipment. While my uncle and father are both good phtographers with solid equipment, we had a hell of a time getting worthwhile photos. Two of these are too blurry to show details of, and the two that are still have problems. So, while these are some of the most intricate pieces I created last year, I haven’t the documentation to prove it. Typical. Regardless, here they are:
When I was out west visiting with Mr. Hastings I noticed a stack of unused magnets that have been sitting there for 4 years (I know this because I stuck them there 4 years ago) and I asked if I could have them. I probably could have just thrown them in my bag and they would have never been missed, but it’s always polite to ask.
In my search to find bigger things than magazines to cut up I came across an old map and thought I’d give that a try. I started by cutting out the perimeter of the land masses (the Netherlands were a bitch) and then started doing my interior cuts. This is essentially the exact opposite of what I would normally do because making the exterior cuts can usually weaken the structure of the paper, making interior cuts more difficult. In this case the paper was so large and of a more durable quality this has not been an issue so far.
The main thing I have learned from this so far is don’t take a photo of a complicated piece on a glass top table, with over head lighting, while using a cell phone camera.
Working on collages, scalpel in hand and one of my friends was telling me a story about how he used to work on his grandfathers pig farm as a kid. He said his job was to sit around and hand castrate the little boy piglets with one swift, well placed cut and sometimes he’d have to do about 600 a day assembly line style.
This last week I’ve been collaborating with co-Darteboardist Toni to combine some of my collage methods with her collage forms. Here’s a couple results. These are still very early in the process, but I think they have promise.
A similar, second version of this couldn’t be finished on time. We decided this is good enough, but the color choices obscure the form. Fortunately, you can see the form better in this smaller experiment with collaged fabric:
Here is the initial design (shifted into stark black on white):
Before starting these I had been having trouble getting started with these types of quilts. For a few weeks I’d had several false starts, or completely partial pieces that I wasn’t comfortable using on their own. Finally one night I began idly working the green part of this piece:
Each piece is 26″ x 26″, acrylic and paper collage quilted together.
I actually got a good 18″ x 18″ of it done. The next night I realized it was too green, as I mentioned last week, but the process had put me back in the flow of the process. The form in these is one I’d been meaning to return to. What followed was a relatively rapid process of completing the 3 pieces, cutting them up Friday night and finishing them Saturday.
Lately I’ve been trying to do more of the types of quilts I started the year working on, but I’ve been having issues with color schemes. I have Piles of canvases lining my dropcloth divided into rough colors (Green, Blue, Yellow, Orange, Neutral) that are supposed to help me with this, but this actually just tends to limit me to a single hue. When I try to start combining the colors together, the combinations start getting too complicated to control.
Color schemes like this work well, but are harder to herd than you might expect. Complements make each other brighter, so the pieces you thought was underplayed prior to adding it suddenly become stark when sewn together. At that point the rest of the quilt becomes a series of reactions trying to wrangle the color scheme back from noise. If you become too conservative, though, the colors wash out into uniformity. This can be good at times when you want to emphasize the pattern of a quilt, but in chaotic patchwork of a hundred tiny pieces, you lose your focal point.
My response has been to work in more uniform fields, which I can then combine in larger, easier to control forms later. That’s what these are. I need to finish another color or more and then will make 3-5 pieces out of them, with overall shapes defining them. They will each end up 28″ square, but I need to add 4 inches to the green one.
I’m still working on these minis in between experimenting with larger paper not quite ready for viewing. This color combination was provided by a beer ad. Now I wish I had more time to say something about it, but it’s Minks to Sinks again and I really need to be down at the tents getting rained on. See you guys later.
This is a piece I made using leftover parts for another portrait of Miles I made that is being used as part of a longer term piece. My vague intent with this was to convey the sense of an album cover from the early to mid 1950s.
It doesn’t imitate any exact label, but personally I’d place it somewhere in the Prestige or Columbia spectrum. Next to these examples, I’m afraid the piece doesn’t hold up as well as I’d like, but it got me studying it, so I’m happy.
Anyways, having done this research (after the fact), I thought I’d offer an informal guide to Jazz Album Art style across different labels. The site http://www.birkajazz.com/archive is absolutely invaluable in this, and I recommend studying their extensive collections by label.
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Blue Note
When people think of jazz album art they immediately think of Blue Note Records, and for good reason. Designer Reid Miles and photographer Francis Wolff gave them a consistency of style and voice that allowed the full label’s stable of artists to present a unified visual identity.
This piece is representative of the early Blue Note style, which often fits the mold of photos fit into random shapes with text randomly arrayed aligned it.
This image kind of fits the same vein, but the parts are all simplified, and the sense of design is more confident all around, leading to a period when the photograph would be allowed to dominate the proceedings more freely.
This is the quintessential Blue Note cover from this early period. An expressive photograph is given the majority of the space, with an overlay of blue used to flatten it somewhat while the title shouts itself from the perimeter in a stand-out white that boxes the photograph in. It’s perfectly simple and yet also perfectly manipulated.
An early typography experiment that points towards the future.
An example of the line drawing you will find on some albums, in this case, if you can read the signature it belongs to a young Andy Warhol.
I’ll continue this at length after the jump. Read more »
What I wrote before still applies to these. In fact these were actually assembles prior to the pieces in that post and looking at them now, there’s more that I like in this batch. A few of these have some issues where the bottom layer is wavy, or some of the layers got rubbed raw in the gluing process and that’s made me ambivalent toward them, but this morning I was pleasantly surprised.
I’m also very tired. Last night I had a dream that was such a Matrix rip-off I found myself thinking in-dream “Not another Matrix rip-off!”
During one of the discussions on how best to approach reproducing these for the internet the point was brought up that they look different at their actual size. My thought at the time was to post them larger so they would be more easily seen, but that also magnifies the flaws that aren’t as visible in person. Now I have a 17 inch screen, and I am sure that if yours is bigger, or smaller it might throw this whole idea out of whack, but if that is the case you can just grab your average 2.5 x 3.5 inch baseball trading card and imagine this image over it. They are small.
I like this one by the way, it’s going in the direction I was hoping for more of in my last post. The lines are delicate loops and the gradated pink over the gray adds an uneasiness that reminds me of glare on a photo, but which is really only the color as it is.
These are the remaining Volcanos I made last month. They probably aren’t as good as the originals, and I forgot to scan 2 of them better ones cutting them up again, but such is life.
In this series, like all of my recent collages, I’m experimenting with issues of context and representation. The subject of any art piece brings it’s own context and background to that piece’s interpretation. Andy Warhol’s portrait of Mao Tse Tung is highly informed by the charged identity of it’s subject matter. His Marilyn Monroe portraits are created in a very similar style, yet produce an extremely different effect because of the huge difference between the perception of her and Mao. The viewer can’t help but bring their pre-knowledge of either to their viewing.
At the same time, however, how the works are made is also charged with context. Those same Warhol screen prints were as notable for the quick form of reproduction used, and what that said about modes of production and the consumer object. Taken together these formalist qualities interact with the qualities of the subject matter to create the general identity of the piece. (Over time, the Warhols have also gained context specific to themselves, their own history and existing within the public consciousness in their own right.)
Every aspect of an art piece (or possibly anything) has a level of context that informs it’s interpretation by a viewer.
My recent series of collages (and works based upon them) is an attempt to exaggerate that relationship to the breaking point. Each piece is representational, yet represents their subjects with other materials loaded contexts that compete with the represented. Whether appropriated printed materials or other artworks that I’ve made, each layer of each stencil can be isolated and interpreted in it’s own right. The overall effect of the added noise of the competing materials is to drown out much of the effect of the represented subject.
In the case of J Dilla and now this series that transforms this piece by Roy Lichtenstein, the subject matter is self-reflective: Lichtenstein and Dilla both specialized in the re-contextualization of prior works of art. The context they bring to these pieces is intended to reflect on these pieces themselves. How I reference the subjects with the source material is meant to be fluid, ranging from complementary to a feedback loop of pure noise (a plane wreck, if you will?..).
The source material in these varies from completely arbitrary (Sample voting ballot in the second piece down), to referencing the subject matter itself (the purple and blue dots in the 8th piece down), to ironic absurdity (the childrens’ illustration of the 7th down), to imposed relationships between different abstract patterns (patterns themselves being an intricate series of relationships between parts- 4th and 5th piece down). I’ve appropriated art publications, other artforms (music, quilting, literature), or non-art-forms (science publications) and even art making materials (used masking tape, cover of a watercolor pad in the 2nd down). I even appropriate the drawings of my own computer.
The point of this is that every component of each version of each image can be related back to the facts of the creation of the piece itself, to it’s subject matter, or to the intellectual history of that subject matter, or even to me, my personal history and the constant influx of information flung at me by society (the paper Trader Joe’s bag in the 3rd down didn’t need to be branded and populated with folksy ephemera, yet they felt obligated to impose themselves into my mental space, which ultimately can’t help but influence my interaction with the rest of the world in whatever minor way). The inclusion of each component is intended to make this web of relationships explicit- to force it to the surface as much as possible instead of allowing our brains to simplify it into a sensible silence, as they usually do.
Finally, all this explanation is meant to explain the pieces I posted a few weeks back, the “Irony” series.
“A does not equal A” is the literal definition of a logical contradiction. It is also arguably the modern definition of irony. When something is used figuratively to represent something other than itself, that contradiction is a form of irony. These series of collages, by focusing on the web of context everything in the universe exists within implicitly challenge the ability of anything to existence outside of context, which is usually how things are defined. Change the context in which something is presented and you change that thing itself. These images are not “about” a plane exploding. They are about being images, and specifically to the difficulties of images fulfilling the roles they are meant to fulfill.
The difficulty of understanding “things,” defined outside of context, can lead to intrinsic logical fallacies, yet our minds aren’t equipped to cope with the concept of A not equaling A. I definitely don’t want a structural engineer to start deconstructing his own work product to better examine the historical context in which he works. But in my recent work I am trying to find a new form of logic- or illogic- that can analyze the world with less focus on cleanly defined “things” to focus more on the relationships between those things.
The reason I want to do THAT, however, is a whole ‘nother story.
I’m sticking with the minis for a little while because they are giving me a platform to figure out how to eventually work with these on a larger scale, potentially by combining multiple small pieces, or finding bigger paper (posters perhaps?) and cutting that.
These are two experiments from this week where I wanted to use more limited colors, and bolder, thicker patterns. There were as always mixed results, this one below is not working.
It’s too blocky, lacks elegance, the cuts aren’t that great and the top of the perimeter is askew. It’s a big fat NO.
This was more successful, the shapes were more graceful, the pop of color behind the gray pushes it forward, and keeping the thickness of lines similar kept them from competing.
I learned something here, I am not exactly sure how to articulate it but it will come back to me in peripheral awareness as new ones are made.
At the end of a project like last week’s I feel good and productive. That feeling may lead me to want to finish something else quickly to keep that feeling going.
The rush to have something finished is unproductive in its own way, though. I see some artists who get so focused on having something new to show that they never slow down to produce something that might maximize their talents.
The way I work, this is a particular issue. My raw materials are pre-made things. Without them I can’t finish anything. In addition to that I’ve found that trying to predict the materials I’ll need for a final piece (and therefore working from step 1 to the finish in linear fashion) never works out. I need options. Messes like this happen because I can’t imagine the perfect piece to solve a puzzle before I see it and have to try out 50 before making up my mind (if then).
The result is that sometimes I have to commit myself to going nowhere. I have to decide to make things for which the end goal is hazy, if it exists at all, just to have something to file in the back of a cabinet somewhere to be found 2 years later.
Sometimes I have to make things to go into the things I make to go into things I make to go into the final piece. I don’t know how many times these things will be processed, which will get accidentally destroyed, which will surprisingly “make” a piece, and which will be thrown out because they just didn’t work in the context I tried to use them in.
This weekend, I consciously put aside the idea of continuing to work on stuff I might finish quickly because the last project depleted my stocks and I needed more fodder. Some of the designs I started using in the last month worked and I could see them being useful for quilts I won’t even start until next year or beyond. That’s what these are (not all of them are from this weekend, but all are pieces I made in the hopes they’d help something else).
I do NOT mean this as some sort of “the journey is a reward unto itself” cliche. Taking these breaks where nothing final gets produced annoys the living hell out of me. Not knowing where I’m headed with these makes me feel adrift. The point is that conceiving and pursuing a single, unified goal assumes a level of control I don’t think it’s natural to have. Some people can accomplish great feats by that method, but more often my experience is that those who pursue such things limit their own conception. Entropy is the guiding force of the universe, and working against it only creates heat.
My alternative is to embrace chance. Instead of trying to limit it, I try to work within it’s confines. I don’t know what I’ll need when I need it. I may not even recognize what’s going to work right up until after a project is done. Taking weeks or months to produce a wide range of “useless” crap increases the odds that what I need is where I need it when I stumble upon it on the route to a more certain end point. Taking risks and being willing to fail allows for probability, entropy, may ultimately work in my favor.
Ultimately, seeing those chances bear fruit is the most rewarding part of this practice to me. It’s what makes the finished product so rewarding and it’s why I put up with these half-finished, unpolished pains in the asses.
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