This past Wednesday, I had the honor to do a "speed-painting" during the duration of a concert performed by Trio in Stereo. (Visit MySpace or Facebook to learn more about this Chicago band!) I was invited to do a painting of some sort so I decided to role out the paper right on the floor in front of the stage. With paint markers, oil sticks and the Magnum 44 permanent marker, I created an image of the 5 band members in roughly 45 minutes. There were many comments on the strong odor this marker produces. Permanent marker is not a sense typically associated at the bar but, well, this was a multi-sensory experience for sure! Next time, I'm definitely bringing knee pads!
I'd like to think the wandering line in our formation of these dominos this past weekend is connected to the wandering line growing out of my "doodle." My "doodle" today is the start of a new 3-D piece. It is a continuation of a series I've been working on since I was in North Carolina this past spring.
After teaching and preaching the wonders of a sketchbook to teens this summer, I found myself practicing what I preach these past few days. Sketchbooks for holding ideas and images together is great and it's even greater when you get to make the book from scratch...sewing, gluing and filling. The whole thing. You may have guessed I have accumulated many Tuesday doodles over the past few months... and I've thought, what better place to keep them than in a personal book I bound by hand myself?!?! Why did this concept only occur to me now?
Consolidating my imagery into a single book is also timely because I have been trying to purge things in my home that I no longer use. The One-Year-Rule is the best and has served me well: If you haven't found a use for something in the past year, get rid of it and trust it will come back to you when you need it. The Artist/Hoarder instinct goes haywire when you do this. One particularly persistent pile of clutter I had to face was a bag of sticks. Wooden sticks, people! I don't need them! If I had a front yard, I'm afraid mine would be the one with the old toilet overgrown with weeds and the rusty lawnmower. But anyway, almost everything in my workspace is being glued into my book...
In an unexpected turn of events, I found myself not in Michigan this weekend as planned, but instead on the South side of Chicago. My friend recently moved to the neighborhood of Bridgeport and I thought I'd take advantage of a free day to explore the neighborhood streets with her. There are a lot of quirks to this traditionally blue-collar area. It is highly saturated with Italians, Chinese, Lithuanians, and cops. Lots of cops. One quirk I found particularly fascinating was the abundance of knick knacks and dolls decorating storefront windows . Yes, dolls. If you place dolls in your windows, I'd like to learn why. My friend explains: "I think they're kind of like the lawn ornaments of Bridgeport restaurants." They are everywhere. In another unexpected turn, I found out my suburbanite sister was going to be not just in the city that day, but in Bridgeport as well. She did indeed grow up on the North side but then married a Sox fan. She is forgiven. My friend and I walked over to her tailgaiting party outside U.S. Cellular Field-home of the White Sox. It was the annual Elvis Day at the ballpark and we watched a few Elvis impersonators parachute into the field. This is particularly strange since I was with my brother on the previous Sunday at Wrigley Field watching planes from the Air and Water Show fly over the field. The South side and the North side. So alike and so different. On the South side, they have way more dolls and way more Elvises. And then there were fireworks and well, things just get craaaazy! And that my friends, is just what happens when you visit the South side.
I haven't supplied a doodling Tuesday this week but here's a painting on a Thursday. This is a painting I started yesterday in the kitchen. With the palette resting on the counter and sink area, I started a painting of the stove, whistling tea kettle and all. Let this be a public service announcement: it's usually not a good idea to mix toxic oil colors in the place that you prepare food. Eek! There are whole organizations dedicated to these issues: like the ACMI (Art and Creative Materials Institute) http://www.acminet.org/
I wish I could have posted a sign on a lamp post in Chinatown last week. It would have read:
"Lost: Hard Contact Lens Slight bluish Tint Last seen in my eye at the corner of 23rd St. and Wentworth Ave. Age: 18 months"
I wear lenses that last up to 2 years. I sleep with them in and take them out only to clean every few weeks. They are awesome and give me nearly perfect vision. Life just isn't the same without those little curved lenses in my eyes.
BUT!, It turns out there are inmates in Dixon, Illinois who are busy carving away at eyewear, including the rigid gas permeable lens sitting atop my misshapen (but now delightfully corrected) cornea.
"We're more than license plates!" should be the motto of Illinois Correctional Industries. Browse their website and take note of the amazing array of products they make such as
Women's Cotton Panties
orHotdog Buns But anyway, back to my contacts... I am utterly amazed by contact lens technology all the time. I was looking at the website for the company that makes my lenses Menicon Z(and now apparently contracts with the IDOC.) They offer a product that my eye doctor never mentioned to me before and sounds fascinating. It's a lens that you only wear at night and it re-shapes your eye so that "you see perfectly all the day long without any visual correction." It's like braces for your eyes where you wear a retainer at night! HA! I imagine it being problematic if your cornea slowly loses its shape as the day wears on and things gut fuzzier and fuzzier. But still!
It also turns out it's hard to photograph contact lenses, especially when they're in your eye. Here are a few more of my attempts: I can see! It's a miracle!
On Monday, we took our sketchbooks outside to our front yard: Millenium Park. It was the lunch hour for many and they sat on blankets in the lawn listening to free live reggae music. Have I mentioned I love summer in Chicago? This woman sat chatting to a friend with her back to me, unaware of her excellent posing skills.
While I was supposed to be posting my Tuesday doodle last week, I was pushing the wonders of "jaffa cakes" onto my neighbor at Grant Park's Movie in the Parks. Everytime I go to Harvestime grocery store on Lawrence Avenue, I pick up a sugary unidentifiable something from another country. Harvestime stocks an amazing array of imported food products. What I thought were caramely insides from the picture on the "jaffa cakes" package, ended up being some orange flavor instead. Surprise! What have you bought from Poland lately? I'm sorry. I went to Movies in the Parks in Grant Park last Tuesday and did not do my Tuesday doodle. I was embracing the ever fleeting summer in Chicago. I love summer in Chicago. To make up for it, I'm going to post several doodles this week. Promise!
That's including this one from the Monroe Harbor today:
So this first picture isn't a doodle, but shows the nice contrast in weather and recreation from last weekend's art fair. Say yes to kites! Okay, on to the doodle...
I'd like to showcase a three dimensional "doodle" piece that is a still a work in progress. Inspired by a vivid dream I had last month and the form of mussel shells(resting in the lower left corner of the picture above), I have begun a paper sculpture. It is a natural progression from the series of "book sculptures" I was making in North Carolina this Spring. Refer to this post and this post about those previous works. My dream was trying to the solve the problem of making the accordian fold (a rather inorganic structure) move organically out of an enclosed space. Ya know, your standard, run of the mill dream. Take THAT dream interpretors! Side note: I will be returning to the theme of accordion folds in a future post soon. Okay, back to this crazy dream... so wouldn't you know it, nature's done it already. My coils of handwriting (torn out of my journals) are growing out of these "pods" that are shaped much like a mussel shell. It can morph out of the wall as well. I'm not sure where it is headed; it's doing things of its own accord. I just hear one word in my head as I'm working on it: MORE. Perhaps these pods will start flourishing in the cracks of my ledges like fungi. Thoughts?
The art was packed in the car in the rain. Jean's art and what seemed like half of Home Depot's inventory is driven to the suburbs. In between the storms, tent was assembled in Cantigny Park. In the middle of the night, the tent blows down and poles bend and well, Jean doesn't get to enjoy her morning coffee. Jean's art is wrapped in a tarp and is more or less saved. Jean does not cry. Jean realizes the show must go on... with the tremendous help of someone whose name starts with an M and rhymes with cycle. The tent is rigged back together with more Home Depot products. Jean sells some stuff, gossips about art fairs with her neighboring exhibitors, sweats some more in the humidity, does a doodle for Tuesday, wraps up her broken tent and goes to Jamba Juice on the drive back to the city. The End. Oh!, but here's the doodle:
This week's Doodling Tuesday arrives one day early because I'm running ahead of schedule on other things and have absolutely nothing else to do...said the artist, lying through her teeth. No, really, I'm getting all ready for the big fest this weekend and wanted to get my Tuesday doodle out to you before I forgot. This week, I thought I'd "draw" on the parallel of my violently scratched out to-do lists and their relationships to my paintings. Draw your own conclusions.
We sho' are special here at art fest prep headquarters with our new camera gadgets and such! Get ready for June 20-21! Details are a comin'! (What? You see paintings in the background that might be at the show? Shh!)
Art Fest prep is on the brain this week! I've been scheming ways to lay out my booth. This is a preliminary sketchy doodle from that. You can definitely see the potential, right?
Next time, I'm definitely bringing knee pads!
