Doodling Tuesdays

Ah, another Tuesday doodle on a Wednesday:

Paint the town in Polka dots

Last February, the City of Chicago took a picture of my polka-dot car going through a red light. I remember that red light. It was one of those judgement calls, it was too dangerous to stop, wah wah wah. I coughed up the fine but forever have this nifty souvenieur from the city.

Back to regularly scheduled Doodling

This Doodling Tuesday is brought to you from Chicago this week! We're back to our regularly scheduled programming! This particular doodle is ongoing and growing into 3-dimensional space. So stay tuned for further doodling developments.

Blue Beaver at Penland School of Crafts

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Blue Beaver Car at Penland School of Crafts

One of the highlights of my stay at Penland School of Crafts this Spring was meeting Jim Barrows and his creative vehicle, Blue Beaver, that he brought on campus. It makes my polka-dot car look somewhat bland. He is the father of Emily Barrows who was also interviewed for this blog in April. Here is my interview with Jim below. Be sure to see the video of a Blue Beaver ride posted above!
Jean:Can you start off by telling me what the Blue Beaver is?
Jim: The Blue Beaver is my response to the dreary boredom of all of the vehicles coming out of Detroit. As I look at a parking lot, they all look like basically squished jellybeans with four wheels on them or somewhat like a toaster oven with four wheels on them. And I thought, why not make vehicles that are interesting and have different odd shapes? Then I thought back when I was me. When I Was 11 or 12 years old, I actually was me. And I thought, well, what were some of the things that I thought about as a child that might be kind of cool? So the concept of a big blue beaver that shoots flames out of its nose and has gazillions of lights on it and a squeaky toy horn on it came about. I knew I could never make it street legal because the popo would not like lights. You’re not supposed to have distracting lights on your vehicle.

So I thought, Well, I just won’t make it street legal. I’ll make it an agricultural vehicle and then I can get all around the street legal thing because if it’s agricultural then it doesn’t really have to have a license and you can take it on the road for short periods of time. I thought I’d just get a garden tractor and then make it into this cartoon character, and that’s what I did!
Jean: And where has the Blue Beaver gone?
Jim: Well it’s gone with me to festivals and given delight and joy to all the neighborhood kids. It gets put on a trailer and it’s taken all over the country. The biggest fun is when I’m driving down the expressway with this thing and people will speed past it and then they’ll slow down and then they’ll look at it. Some people get the whole joke or feeling about it and others don’t. And to some people it’s very offensive and they’ll look at it for a moment and then immediately look back at what they were doing and try not to think about it. Sometimes I pull into a campground late at night having unloaded the whole thing off in a distance and I’ll just show up with this. And people are always drawn to it and people will ask me, Where did it come from? Did you drive this all the way from the city? Why did you do this?
Jean: And where did it come from? How did you make it?
Jim: It started off with a concept first and then I realized I needed skills to make it. So I took welding classes because I knew I needed to weld. I got on Craig’s List and found an old tractor and fixed it all up and then welded and bent steel rods to make it look like a cartoon character and then covered it with expanded metal and then zip-tied a gazillion LED lights on it. I found an ice-melter which is a propane flame thrower type thing that is used for melting ice. I repurposed that to be flame throwers for the nose of the vehicle. So you push little buttons and flames shoot out of its nose.
Jean: That’s great. So what other type of creative pieces, related or unrelated to this, have you done? And what’s led you to doing this?
Jim: Before this, I was making burning vessels. I would take volumetric shapes. These could be things like discarded water tanks or steel canisters and I cut them up with a plasma cutter and make jack-o-lantern type faces in them and put propane lines in it, fill the whole thing with wood and catch the whole thing on fire. Flames would shoot out of the eyeholes and light up the night and it would be very warm. People are immediately drawn to that and entertained by it.
Prior to that, I would go into the woods and look for trees that had been struck by lightening. The lightening damages the tree in such a way that it rots the tree from the inside out. I’d get chainsaws and cut the tree down and it would be hallowed out in the center and I’d also cut jack-o-lantern faces in them and then build a big fire and put the tree on top of the fire. The tree would burn from the inside out with flames shooting out the jack-o-lantern face. That was called Burning Head and I did that project on various scales for years.
Jean: How do you put on these events? How do you draw a crowd? Who is your audience? Is there a live audience?
Jim: There always seems to be an audience somehow. My favorite thing is to come to a festival campsite and ahead of time create this thing and around midnight fire it up. It’s what I call prehistoric VCR. This tree catches on fire and incinerates from the inside out. Because the tree is hallow, it has a chimney effect. It sucks hot gases in the bottom and blows smoke out the top. People cannot help but be drawn to it and watch it.
Jean: Do you document it?
Jim: I have not. I have been scolded multiple times for not documenting these events. Other people document it for me. I’ll do pencil and paper sketches afterwards or sketches of the thing burning.
Jean: And do you show the pencil and paper sketches anywhere? Do you share them in anyway?
Jim: Not really. My feeling on this is that this particular type of art is the art of the moment, the art of the experience. And unknown to the people I’m burning this with, I coat the inside of a log with various heavy metals like arsenic which burns red, and copper which burns blue or green depending on the temperature. I’ll take fireworks apart and fill little wormholes and defects with different types of gunpowder and as the thing burns, little things happen inside that only last for a second and people will say: Did you see that? A lot of it is "sight gaggery.”
Jean: Sight gaggery. I like that. Are there other aspects of your art making that your want to share?
Jim: I like pen and paper. I love to make sketches. Usually it’s on a cocktail napkin at a bar. I’ll take the napkins and I'll Xerox them because the napkin doesn’t last very long.
The Blue Beaver started with a cocktail napkin sketch and I still have that. I’ll keep those things.
Jean: So what’s next? What are you going to make now?
Jim: I’ve had people ask me that. I have one more art car that I’m going to do. There are other people in my city [Atlanta] that are doing this. People will see these cars and insist that I help them with their vision. One person wants to make a huge mobile clamshell with a lounge in it. There’s a lot of mechanical stuff that goes into it. So a lot of what I’m doing is somewhat boring. I’m making the transmission and a lot of the gutsy stuff that goes into it and allowing the person that’s doing the clamshell do the clamshell part. It’s going to be called the Clam Comet. It’ll be a fairly fast moving vehicle. It’s going to be an open clamshell that goes about 45 m.p.h.
Jean: Do you have any web/internet presence?
Jim: I’m asked that all the time and the answer is always no. My thought is that…
Jean: Until now, when I blog about this…
Jim: Right, but you have to actually be there to experience it. The art is there to be enjoyed and until recently I burned it all on the site. So I would spend days, weeks making something and then enjoy it and burn it. This is very hard for people. They didn’t really want to see these things burning. I’ve actually had people try to put one of my art pieces out, in other words, save it from me.
Jean: Is that going to be the destiny of the Blue Beaver as well?
Jim: No, the Blue Beaver, I think, will live on for a long time and ultimately be auctioned off for charity.
Jean: Why is this one different?
Jim: It’s hard to burn one of these things without it just releasing unbelievable toxic substances and creating an environmental disaster. Not the least of which the tanks exploding and people running and screaming.
On the other hand, it might be kind of fun to have the Blue Beaver running across the desert and then the whole thing catch on fire and explode. That’d be fun to document, especially if it happened at night.
Jean: Is there anything else you’d like to share?
Jim: It gives me tremendous pleasure to have people come up to me and talk to me about this. It’s the highest compliment when people come up to me and ask me questions about what I’m doing. Even if it’s in jest or even if it’s in seriousness. My favorite question so far is: “Is this real or did you make it up?”
Jean: I don’t know how I’d answer that.
Jim: Usually I just say yes.
Jean: Do you have something in particular that you want people to take away from your pieces?
Jim: Yeah, I want them to laugh and to think about things differently. I would really like for them to stop driving boring cars. For love of God, do something with these cars. Put fins on them, put faces on them, cover them in fur. Please do something. Cars are so boring. Why would you want boring cars? Turn it into a monster or a fire hydrant. Just do something with it!

Road Home

Pictured above: World Atlas, Altered Book made at Penland School of Crafts, 2009

I was eager to get home this past week...eager to see friends, eager for my own apartment, the ability to walk Chicago neighborhood streets in the Spring, put my dishes in a dishwasher, boil my own water, imagine!

We made it from Penland, North Carolina, to Chicago in 14 hours...but not without a few roadblocks in the Cherokee National Forest.



View Larger Map
The chainsaws were already going and it was at least an hour to turn back to other roads so we waited it out in the woods.
Ciao for now, North Carolina. Helloooooooo summer in Chicago!

Doodling O's and 1's in the mountains

It rained, it snowed, flowers bloomed, then it snowed again, then those flowers wilted, and then, one morning, everything seemed to be green all at once. Now in my last week on the mountain, I'm trying to soak up all of the North Carolina spring that I can!

My daily walks have had this view above and I tend to carry whatever book I am working on around with me like a pet.

This "computer book" is a work in progress. 0's and 1's, 0's and 1's, 0's and 1's.

Doodling walks...

I am in the final days here at Penland School of Crafts out here in North Carolina. The doodling is still happening (although I missed a Tuesday post yesterday...my apologies.) There have been great walks and hikes and drives through the mountains of late to distract me from the studio.

Sometimes the trails lead to neat old abandoned houses near the train tracks.


The trains snake through the area often making a loud harmonic hiss from those tight turns it has to make through the mountains.

Doodles Morph into Space

This week's doodle is once again within a "book" form but it also resembles a vegetable steamer! ooooor an artichoke! ooooor a flower!

Doodling Tuesdays

Strange weather we're having here in North Carolina! But the art books keep on! And yes, the doodles are in the form of a book again.

How to Go Crazy, I mean, Make a Clamshell Box

This weekend was full of boxmaking, hikes up a mountain,
boxmaking, a bonfire, dishwashing, oh! and more boxmaking.

A Clamshell box is a special cover used to encase and protect books. I decided to just make one really huge box for no particular book in mind. Go big or go home!

Clamshell boxes are already difficult, labor-intensive objects to create, but I decided to make life harder by making it oversized and using old crumbly paper. Faaaaantastic. Making a box like this requires measurements as close as 1/32nd of an inch. At many points I wanted to just go play in the mud but it paid off at the end of the 9th hour!





The sound of a good clamshell opening is very satisfying... I'd also like to think a chorus is singing somewhere everytime I open the box...

Green Friday: Artists and their Environment

Today's blog is a part of a Green Friday Synchronized blogging event. Check out the other bloggers linked at the bottom of this post who are also exploring the topic of Art and Environmental issues.
Many of you may already know I am in the middle of an 8 week bookmaking course at Penland School of Crafts in Western North Carolina. The studio coordinator for this books class, Emily Barrows, was willing to sit down with me today and tell me a bit about an art project she has been working on where she lived with all of her trash for 6 months.

Here is the interview:
Jean: So could you start off by telling me what your project is about?
Emily: It originated from my need to purchase a computer. I struggle a lot with buying and consuming things in general but for some reason things that you plug in have become even more disturbing to me. Alarm clocks, coffeemakers, anything you plug in has such a short lifespan. Computers are especially scary because they have semi-precious metals in them. The things that go into making a computer are so epic but it's this really slim laptop and looks really sleek and beautiful but the amount of chaos and disorder that arose to just give me this little pile of order is overwhelming. So I guess that almost as punishment I decided I will live with my trash for six months. Anything that I would otherwise throw away, anything that can't be composted or recycled or that I would normally flush, I had to actually keep in my bedroom with me. I decided that this would be an interesting project because I would journal about how this was affecting me and my relationship with trash. I still plan to combine this into a personal narrative and critical essays which will be bound into books made out of the trash from that time period.
Jean: What did you do with your trash?

Emily: Originally I thought, okay, I'm just going to keep my trash but then I started to compartmentalize the trash in my room . I would have takeout boxes in one pile, cellophane in another pile, and dental floss in another. The actual act of sorting was keeping it from being trash anymore. Taking what is trash and trying to project another identity on it, even simply by compartmentalizing it, keeps it from actually being trash. I was going out to a lot of junk yards at that time just to look at stuff. I lived in Atlanta at the time and there are acres and acres of junkyards like a moat around the city. It's then that I realized they do the same thing: there will be miles and miles of one kind of thing like just tires. I realized it doesn't become trash until it becomes that icky stuff that you don't want to touch and you can't distinguish one item from the next...dumpster juicy trash, that's trash.

So as I continued to compartmentalize my trash, I became really compulsive about not producing any trash because I didn't want it in the room and certain types of trash are stinky so I really tried to manage the stuff I was producing. When the 6 months was over, the stuff that I would use to bind into my book I saved and the rest of it ....I ceremoniously put into the trash...so it is gone.
Jean: Do you have any samples of that trash here with you now?
Emily: I did start to make two book covers. One book cover is made out of q-tips and dentalfloss and the other is made out of hair trimmings. I hope to literally print the narrative and critical essays directly onto the trash that I have collected and combine the trash with the paper. A lot of paper isn't recyclable.
Jean: So what have you learned so far?
Emily: It definitely has affected the way that I think and the way that I look at trash. I would go out to restaurants and would have to put the napkin and straw in my pocket. If there was a lemon wedge in my water, I'd have to take it home and compost it. If I didn't finish my meal, I'd have to take it home, which meant that I had to get a to-go box. Whenever I walked into an establishment, I had to walk out with just the product in my hand and that is so difficult, you know? I would watch the amount of trash generated by just dining out. It really made me neurotic and strange! I won't lie about it. [laughing]
Jean: Do you make different kinds of artwork now?
Emily: I do. It has profoundly impacted the way that I make art. My art has become a lot more visceral and a lot more trash-y. I like to to deal with dirty gross things now. I'm infatuated with it and I'm not ashamed of it. Not much of my art is pretty anymore. Even if it isn't a found object or doesn't incorporate found objects, it appears as though it does. I have a much more intimate relationship with things that have been handled and touched or abused or whatever. I feel like that has a lot more power as an object to me now than the clean and the smooth and "finished."
Jean: How has your view of the environment changed? Or has it changed?
Emily: I don't think it has. I think when I approached the project I was already overwhelmed by how epic the state of our consumerism is. I wasn't even approaching it from an environmental standpoint but more about my relationship to other people. That's particularly what I'm ashamed of. My little study of the amount of trash that I generated confirmed what I already suspected which is that there's a lot [of trash]. The fervor with which we produce...I mean the entire contents of a CVS store are made to be thrown away, including the store itself. It's such a large scale that I don't think my project put a kind of perspective on it because you can't. It's just too huge. It didn't change the way that I see the environment. Ultimately, it didn't even change my consuming habits. I've found since then, in the name of convenience and surviving like a normal person in our society, if I'm really hungry, I will go buy a bagel even if it means it comes in a bag. Whereas before I wouldn't have done that just out of fear of having to sleep with it that night!
Jean: So what will you be doing with this project now?
Emily: I plan to make an edition of probably only about 10 books [made out of the collected trash.]

Here are the beginning of the book covers made out of some of her saved trash.



Because one cover has hair sculpted into the shape of shrimp, you can e-mail Emily at hairshrimp@gmail.com to inquire further about her work.
Thanks for sharing, Emily!
Here are what other people are saying on Green Friday:

The Art Teacher's Guide to the Internet w/Craig Rolandhttp://www.artjunction.org/

Blissful Thoughts w/Chan Blisshttp://blissthink.blogspot.comchan.bliss@sdhc.k12.fl.us

The Carrot Revolution w/David Granhttp://carrotrevolution.blogspot.com/
Learning IT w/Frank Curkovichttp://frankcurkovic.edublogs.org/
The Teaching Palette w/Theresa McGee + Hillary Andrlikhttp://theteachingpalette.com/

Doodling Tuesdays in a book again!

Seeing how I am taking this bookworks class, it should be no surprise that my doodles are being presented in book form.

Biltmore Built More!

Due to a serious case of cabin fever in the secluded mountains of Western North Carolina, I decided to make a day trip this weekend to the famous Vanderbilt monstrosity called the Biltmore Estate. Before reaching my destination though, I found the polka dot car making more noise than it should. As I wound down steep mountains in the fog and rain, I thankfully sputtered to a random roadside mechanic.

Before I knew it, I was back on the road and on my way to the largest private residence in the country with over 250 rooms full of fancy art stuff and decadence unheard of in the 1890s. Biltmore built more! Get it?

Seasonal Developments from NC!

Each day is a little different here on the mountain.
Here are some developments of a bookwork in progress. I'm using handwritten words from my own journals and notes in addition to letters from others to create this piece.