Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Realize, realize what you are.

The studio: Right now I am working on the watercolor portion of my piece. To be more specific a dress that a girl is wearing in my piece. It is made out of tiny watercolor drawings of cat heads (don't act surprised). I am using the same imagery that I wanted but pulled away from making the cat heads out of clay, I thought the material was wrong and would appear distasteful and awkward. I am pleased with the idea of using flat sewn on paper heads to create a more visually alluring and flowing dress. My plan from here is to adhere the heads to the fabric and start embroidering and dying. I am very excited about combining all of my loves; dying fabric, beads, buttons, sewing, clay, watercolor.. and so forth in one piece playing with depth, planes, harmony (now I'm just rambling). 
Dreams: Oddly enough I happen to keep a catolog of almost all the dreams I am able to vividly remember upon waking. Also I have night terrors from time to time so most of the dreams I remember are more like nightmares. 
My Dream: Over the summer I worked as a desk clerk at Best Western Galaxy Inn.  The dream starts out with me at 
work but the hotel isn't a hotel, it's a pharmacy. The manager and owner are training a new person to replace me and for some reason both he and I are working. Although I know what I am doing the trainee begins yelling at me and tells me that what I am doing is wrong and I realize that I really have begun to forget things. As I enter the back office (which is now where we keep all of the medicine) I keep running into spider webs, they are EVERYWHERE. In the back I run into my sister (who also worked at Best Western and apparently works at this hotel/pharmacy) and she ignores me and surprisingly isn't offering to help me, even though she has worked there longer. I become very overwhelmed and quit. Somehow I have a bike at work and begin riding it to Cathy's (the dayshift manager) house to apologize for leaving her short handed at work. On my journey I come across a pool and it is filled with obnoxious kids in there later teens. My boyfriend shows up and reminds me that I know the family and that they just recently lost their sister who I knew (well enough to have attended the funeral). The parents come out and I begin to remember and feel bad about finding the kids obnoxious. Then I wake up. 
Visual Memory: This
 is very embarassing but... when I was in 8th or 9th grade I was friends with a girl who lived around a lot of woods. She and I would always go hiking, camping, and basically just find any way to get in trouble. One day she, her brother, and I decided to build a fort.. so we went into the woods that ran along the side of her house and found a clearing, we found a long stick and put an old bike seat on the end. Then we took the old tarp that covered her pool and made a tent like structure using the stick as the center and strings tied to trees as a way of keeping it tight. We then used old chicken wire (her parents owned a concrete business) and made walls all the way around. About a hundred feet away was a field and the crop of choice that summer was corn, so we cut down a ton of corn stalks and wove them in and out of the chicken wire to create "walls'. The area that we pitched our tent over had two levels where tree roots had allowed for erosion so we made steps out of plywood and some nails. Las
tly we hung their old hammock from the porch from tree to tree within our structure. It took us all day, but when we were done we were proud and fully entertained. For a couple months the structure stayed up and for years I would drive by and be able to see the remains. That image is forever etched into my mind. Standing at the edge of the woods staring at our fort (Fort Fluff) as the sun was setting in disbelief that I had taken part in such an amazing undertaking.
These are photos of where I worked over the summer... so basically what I saw 5 days a week from 4-midnight!

The front!
The LOBBY! Check out the sweet mirror I got to use to see who was coming up the hallway (And yes there were some creepers)

Tuesday, September 8, 2009

It's All Left Up to Me

  


Over the summer I was working at a BestWestern for about 8 hours a day (night shift to be exact) longing to be back in school and creating. I missed working with my hands so much that I resorted to making bracelets and crocheting on slow nights. Although work put my art on a bit of a hold, it did allow me to meet some amazing people. A 67 year old man who was filled with great tales and advice. Young military guys who held stories of Iraq, Germany, and even a ScubaBear! If anything the few "guests" who I really got to know really gave me a lot to think about and showed me why I try to communicate and why I chose to concentrate on my art. This semester I am looking to finish up past work, make some amazing new pieces and finally put all of the pieces of the puzzle, that I envisioned about 2 years ago, together. My plan for our first piece is to create a "painting" with water color, ink, fabric, clay, and anything else I feel fit to sew together. A collage of sorts if onemay, my favorite. I love using my hands, as do many of us, and using multiple materials to create one piece. As far as what I have been looking at; I have really been into sewing for months now and have looked at some random less known artists/ peoples fabric art. The image to the left is of some Pittsburgh art and I just thought it was lovely. It is like life-sized cross-stitch. The image at the top is of an image I found surfing google at work over the summer. It was on a young girls blog and I really enjoyed the elements in it. Fabric, drawing, sewing, it reminded me of the way I like to work I may also just be into somewhat tacky art (no offense to above artists) an art that incorporates crafts within the home with a little something more. In conclusion I just feel like spending my last semester staying passionate. I started out trying to expressing my emotions from a bipolar standpoint.  Or looking for a way to show others who I am internally, a way to communicate. In a way I still want to do that yet the events of the summer and the last 4 years have shown me a different way of thinking.  I feel like I need to create a world that I understand, I need to do this for myself, and thats it.

Oh I almost forgot some artists that I have been looking at are Mike Kelley (He works with stuffed animals need I say more?) and Kristen Morgin. Google them or you can click on my link to Mike Kelley's website. He did a few VERY odd pieces with Paul McCarthy ( another interestingly lovable artist) I have yet to post a link for Paul because I can't find a site that offers links, images, and so forth. There are other sites that host articles about him such as Wikipedia and so forth. You can also youtube pieces of his videos last time I checked.