I went on a bit of a painting binge last month. The result was a lot of used masking tape. Usually I use the tape to get simple line patterns like this:
But this time I also used the odds and ends to make patchwork stuff like the pieces below. I generally like the effect. These will end up collaged into some quilt some day.
More after the jump. Read more »
Still very much work, still very much in progress.
These will not be paired with “Ends.”
-JD
Last night instead of preparing art for today I ironed shirts. I have no regrets, but I also have nothing to post. I don’t know if I’ve ever posted this before.
“Woven Watercolor Cross” 2005 It’s like 30″ wide or something. Watercolor soaked through canvas, woven.
This is a woven piece made out of a dropcloth that I used a lot of watercolor on. I then flipped the dropcloth, where you could see where the watercolor soaked through. Toni hates me for this because it’s so light sensitive I won’t allow it out of my closet.
-JD
This week my mind has been racing with all kinds of thoughts, usually unfriendly ones, but hey it happens from time to time and when it does one of the most soothing things to do (besides cleaning everything) is to find something repetitive that distracts through a form of monotony. I had a little side project from JD tucked away for just such an occasion, transcribing lengthy text.
What I really loved about this was it was all text I would have never really read on my own, and even better still haven’t. Even though I faithfully copied Lovecraft and Robespierre faithfully I couldn’t really tell you what either was about. I was so focused on one word at a time that they never formed any cohesive sentence in my own mind. I do remember writing the word “liberty” and “virtue” quite a bit.
As far as physical process there was a learning curve. Find a pen, it is the wrong pen, look for another, remember how to write clearly, contend with adverse paper textures, wonder about placement…all of this kept me plenty distracted from the obnoxious chatter of my own mind for awhile, but I’ll be needing more paper soon.
Finally getting these to where I can spell words. However, these are actually the only letters I have enough of to do so. This will be the background for a stencil to be added hopefully this weekend.
Clearly legibility isn’t this style’s strong suit, but I can live with it for a repeated phrase like this. If I ever do longer texts it’s something I’ll have to manage. Perfect for ransom notes though.
-JD
First things: I’ve started a Tumblr to post some of the pieces I make that will go into future quilts, and other progress shots.
This is a test of work I’ve been doing with stencils. I can use individual letter stencils to then create words and more.
Towards that end, here are 1000 Es that I created.
More after the jump. Read more »
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:
-JD
On average, the New Years weekend is probably my most productive of any time of the year. Decembers are usually spent finalizing Christmas gifts and rushing around trying to finish a variety of things. Then the Holidays come and I’m usually separated from the studio for about a week. By the time New Years comes, I am alone in my apartment without any near term responsibilities and all I want to do is play. Around this time last year I had just bought a new Sewing Machine and was experimenting with the form of quilt I played with all year.
This weekend may have been the most productive of my life. I started playing with stencils, and different colors of paint. Because these hues are ridiculously expensive, I started diluting them and creating my own mixtures. The result of these 2 things was a weekend of painting or preparing to paint (making stencils/mixing paint) near non-stop. I learned a lot in these 3 days, but may have to force myself to slow down to prevent burning myself out.
What I didn’t do much of was document what I was doing. So for now you’ll have to trust me and accept these 2 stencils of a passage from a poem by Baudelaire that I am working with to become accustomed with text:
(This one got cur off in the rush to scan it at midnight last night. Apologies.)
-JD
Every year I have the opportunity to run away to the middle of no where, take a break from daily life, weekly blogging, and any art making at all. I love making art but I love my sanctioned break from it just as much, there is a relief to being able to put it all aside and not feel it hanging over your head. That time ends up being useful to reflect and consider the previous years efforts and loosely plan what might come next.
This year I had some time to work with JD Hastings, where we thought about ways to team up using my marks and his quilting. One of the things we tried was using some of his pre-painted sheets and layering the same design repeatedly. It’s not something I can do with my usual materials because of the thinness of magazine paper, but the thickness of the painted paper means I can trace and reuse the same squiggle as many times as we like. He took over the color choices in these while I took care of the mark making and cutting. The enduring challenge in working on these came in the form of a very numb index finger, a consequence of the pressure applied to get through the materials. It took 3 days to wear off.
I put this together this weekend to try to use up some fabric I had left over, to help make room for other fabric that Toni kindly donated.
I’m not sure if I’m done with it or will continue expanding it.
-JD
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):
-JD
These are all made of masking tape made to get patterns on canvas. They’ll be used in future quilts. Clearly it’s time to switch up the straight lines I’ve been using with some curves, dots and such.
More after the jump Read more »
This weekend I finished working with the quilts I posted last week.
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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.
-JD
Whoever is in charge of setting up my scanner should really get on that. And buy me a new printer. This is getting annoying.
I’m not sure I’ve posted this before. This was originally created as a wedding gift for a close friend. Because of it’s dimensions, I’ll post a smaller version with a some bigger versions of 2 of the components after the jump for anybody looking for details.
Each part of the triptych is 10″ x 10″. While I didn’t really try anything radically new in these, it’s still one of my favorite pieces in terms of color relationships that I’ve made.
Yesterday was the first real rainy day of the season out here in California. We only have 2 real seasons here, so this more or less marks the beginning of Winter. With it I found myself looking under my bed for something. While there I found this scrap of an old drop cloth, squirreled away like an acorn.
These are always hard to display because of their dimension, so I’ll post one small that will fit in your browser and one larger so you see more of the details.
Larger after the jump Read more »
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.
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 »
Last week I was having energy and anxiety issue. Finally, one day at work, I forced myself to draw this:
As I said then on tumblr, “When the world seems particularly stupid I get an obsessive urge to make perspective drawings to assure myself order still exists, even if it’s just the illusion of such.”
Since then, my computer has refused to acknowledge my printer/scanner combo, my cable television cut out and as of this morning, my building’s water didn’t work. Possibly due to a crackhead stealing it’s pipes. Clearly, a fancy cube wasn’t going to cut it. Thus I present you, the “rhombicuboctahedron,” a term I had to look up on google this morning. I had been calling it a 3D octagon, but will now pretend I knew it’s real name all along.
(I apologize for the appearance of these photos. Due to my scanner being out I used my camera and apparently messed up the entire enterprise.) This version was inked with drafting pen on vellum (the vellum I’m using is basically high quality tracing paper). This allows me to preserve states of the original so I can go different directions later if I choose.
This is an earlier state of the same drawing showing the completely transparent rhombicuboctahedron. It may take a while to understand it as such, but I assure you it’s true.
The next 2 drawings are blurry. I apologize, but they help give context to the above 2 drawings.
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!”
More after the leap. Read more »
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.
More below the jump.
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