I couldn’t be bothered to photograph a new piece yesterday so you get this.
-JD
My legs ache. After a week of collecting masking tape without applying it to sheets of paper, I ended up sitting on the ground for 10 hours the last 2 days making sheets.
“Why did you sit on the floor if it was so uncomfortable?” you might ask. Because there was so much tape that in order to view it all to be able to select each piece to put on a sheet I had to surround myself with it.
I ended up producing a lot of brightly colored pieces, but am mostly taken with the limited palette gray scale pieces I’m showing today.
More after the jump. Read more »
My experiments with masking tape have taken on a life of their own. While these started as a way to avoid wasting paint while making paintings to sew together, these have gradually become something of a focus in their own right.I’ve been posting them daily at my Tumblr site, and currently still have 47 queued up to post, with many more likely to added.
These have become exercises in color for me. There are obvious elements of form in the dots, checker boxes or occasional letters, but most of the composition remains linear. The main differences between different sheets come from the color schemes.
While I control these to an extent in deciding what to paint when, there’s also a lot of chance involved. I may be working on 3 different quilts requiring 3 completely different types of color and pattern, but the tape used for each of them winds up together. The results may be a fairly tight scheme (top) or something more unexpectedly diverse (2nd piece down).
Sometimes pieces take a week or two to fill out, leading to unexpected combinations, like the above, which has pieces of 21 different paintings in it, I think. It’s a very useful tool for trying out these new color combinations quickly, without much risk, and will help me plan more detailed works in the future.
I’ll post several more below. Read more »
This piece is made entirely of masking tape used to make other paintings.

38″ x 38″ Acrylic on Masking Tape, Collaged
I actually cut and glued the 16 individual pieces 2 years ago when I was broke. Since I couldn’t afford any new art supplies I just used a compass and scissors the cut the sheets of tape I’d already collected. Finally this year, with access to a wood shop, I put the final piece together, then took 2 months to get around to framing it before photographing it. Not that you can see the frame anyways…
After the jump I will post detail shots of a few of the individual cells and a video of a monkey riding a tiny pig. Backwards.
Read more »
This piece was started during the first really hot spell of the year here in Berkeley. By the time I finished it this week it was raining again. But I think the original impression stuck with me.
16″ x 16″ Acrylic on Masking Tape on Paper, then collaged (aka Mixed Media)
So I decided to call it Sunny for obvious reasons. But whenever I think of that word I think of this song:
Detail and another, related piece after the jump.
When I save the used masking tape I collect after using it to create patterns on canvas, I often collect a lot in a short amount of time. If I’ve used tape to mask out a dropcloth, I could end up with 10 sheets of tape from that alone. To say nothing of all the sheets from the paintings that resulted in my dropcloth being covered in paint.
Maybe that didn’t make sense. The point is, when I’m working on other things I pile up enough masking tape to overwhelm my ability to store it unless I relieve the pressure by making art out of it.
Thus the inspiration for this bad boy:
“Tape Circles, Squares, Lines and Such” 24″ x 14″ Acrylic on Masking Tape on Paper.
Yes, I celebrate the esoteric spirit of the creative spark. Art as a way to clean your closet. Detail shot after the jump. Read more »
Because I’m using spent masking tape in the art cards I’ll be sending out I thought I’d show one of the first pieces I did in this style. It is a portrait of Jazz Trumpeter, Booker Ervin.
“Booker Little” 10″ x 7″, Acrylic on Masking Tape on Paper, Collaged
This is comprised of masking tape previously used to get patterns in Read more »