October 6, 2015

October 6, 2015

I decided that I should have an instrumental record in my collection.  I loved a lot of instrumentals during the 60s.  Remember Telstar, Classical Gas, Grazing in the Grass, Pipeline, Walk, Don’t Run, Green Onions, The Stripper, Taste of Honey, Yellow Bird, Hawaii Five-O and so many others.  I decided to do Green Onions.  I had a vision of a row of green onions in a chorus line doing a can-can.  I could not find fake green onions locally, but I saw a set of five on eBay and bought them.  When they came I was very disappointed.  They were papier-mâché—even the green stems which were bent and cracked.  They also had unattractive little strings hanging down like a strange beard.  So there will be no green onion chorus line—at least not for this show.  Then Sirius 60s played Baby Elephant Walk—a song that I had forgotten, by Henry Mancini.  So I made a 12” x 12” baby elephant scene.  I bet you have to play this recording when you come to the gallery, it is not one that we remember.

October 5, 2015

October 5, 2015

My work has to be in at the end of the week.  I am in crunch mode!  It is not just the art, but figuring out how to make the tags from records with the recorders attached with the button in place for activation.  I finished two pieces this weekend and am still working on 3.  The art can be turned in on Friday or Saturday.  I am sure that I will be a Saturday person. 

One piece that I wanted to do from the beginning was ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs.  I pictured a couple of teens from late 50s/early 60s era.  The boy is in a black leather jacket; the girl is wearing a short red headscarf (remember those?) and has a red sweater tied over her shoulders.  The boy is in a gang called “The Black Sheep” with the logo on the back of his jacket.  (“I’m going to keep my sheep suit on until I’m sure that you’ve been shown that I can be trusted walking with you alone. Owoooooooo!).  It was a fun song, not as big as their hit ‘Wooly Booly’ but easier to illustrate. 

Anyhow I actually saw Sam the Sham in a dance club in Quincy.  It was a small venue and they played and everyone danced.  Years later when my husband and I were talking we discovered that we were both at that concert.  I was there with my friend, Cindy, and he was there with her brother, Marty.  We didn’t meet until a couple of years later when he transferred to SIU-Carbondale.  It was also a dance—a mixer held at Woody Hall where I was an R.A.  If nothing else, this show will bring back memories for those of us who remember the 60s. 

Octover 4, 2015

October 4, 2015

I always liked the song ‘Do You Love Me (Now that I can Dance)’ by the Contours.  It was a bonus that it is a Motown song since I wanted to cover all genres.  However when I heard it, I got a picture of hippy rabbits frolicking and dancing.  (Do not ask why, I don’t know.)  This was also fortuitous because hippies were a big part of the 60s culture and I wanted to include that as well.  Why rabbits?  I am not sure but they seemed like a good choice for a hippy (peace, love, vegetarian, etc.).  So I have two male and two female rabbits dressed in hippie clothing (flowers in their hare--sorry) dancing along the road.  This is a just for fun, silly piece.  But it is something that you look at and have to smile or even laugh.  Come to the show which runs from October 17 through December 3 at the Prairie Art Alliance Gallery at the Hoogland Center for the Arts.

October 3, 2015

October 3, 2015
I told you that I would come back to tell you about hand-painted papers.  I have a gelli plate which is like a thick sheet of gelatin but is permanent.  I dab some paint on, spread it with a brayer, add lines or texture if I want, and lay down a sheet of paper to get a print.  Deli paper is my preferred type of paper—it is the thin paper that they wrap sandwiches in at a Deli.  You do not have to clean the plate between uses, the left-over paint adds wonderful depth and shadow.(But the plate cleans easily with water or a baby-wipe when you are finished.)  Printing with the gelli plate is addictive.  I can easily paint 20-30 sheets in no time.  Luckily I have a drying rack in my studio, but I hate taking the time to put the wet papers on it.  I had great fun painting lots of colorful sheets for my ‘Octopus’s Garden’ piece.  The piece is entirely collage (except for the sand and water).  The only paper that was not painted using the gelli plate is the rock that the Octopus is sitting on.  The rest of the papers are just the way that they came off the plate.  I added a little shadow and minimal embellishments.  This piece is 12” x 12”.  I told you that it was going to be my raffle piece, but turned out too well.  (But I do LOVE ‘I am the Walrus’ which is my raffle piece and may have to buy a chance myself!)   If anyone wants to come to my studio and do some gelli plate printing, I would love to have you--but wait until next week after the show pieces are all turned in.  Thanks.

October 2, 2015

October 2, 2015

Car songs were big in the early 60s.  Remember ‘Hey, Little Cobra’, ‘GTO’, ‘Drag City’, ‘Little Deuce Coup’, Mustang Sally’, ‘409’, or ‘Route 66’ to name a few.  Well I decided to do ‘Little Old Lady from Pasadena.’  I wanted to put her brand new, shiny red, super-stock Dodge at the corner of Colorado Boulevard.  So I looked up images of the street and of a super-stock Dodge.  I worked on the piece for a couple of weeks and put it aside.  I had put myself into a tough spot by using a 1 foot by 3 foot canvas to get the length of the street.  The lines of perspective were difficult to maintain with the buildings and road.  But after a 3 month hiatus, I knew that I had to get back to work and figure out how to complete the piece.  So I ignored the street and buildings and worked on the cars first.  The car bodies are collaged from road maps painted with Twinkling H2O paints.  Of course the little old lady’s Dodge is done on maps of southern California—you can see Pasadena on the side of the car.  After doing the cars, I decided that my mistake was in painting the buildings.  All of those long straight lines were difficult (for me) to paint, so I went back to collage.  The buildings are now a mixture of paint and collage.  I used vellum for the glass on the cars as well as the building windows.  The little old lady is waiting at the light and two young men in the next car are ready to race.  I hope this piece brings back memories for those of us who grew up in this era.  (Go granny, go granny, go granny, go.)

October 1, 2015

October 1, 2015

In 9 days all of the work has to be taken to the gallery for installation.  I still have to create the labels for the records which will be the tags for the work.  I have recorded the songs onto the small recorders.  Now I have to figure out how to attach them to the back of the records and to put the button to push in a good spot where it will not be pulled off.  The recording sound is not great, but it is OK.  I keep telling myself that it is just there to jog memories.  If you remember the song, you won’t have to use the recorder.  The entire record with recorder on back has to be attached to the carpeted walls.  I expect that I will use Velcro.  I just hope that they stay up. 

In order to complete the labels I need to have prices for the art.  I think that pricing is one of the most difficult things for most artists to do.  Art is more than the cost of the canvas, paints, brushes and all the other things that I stick in.  There is a tremendous amount of time involved.  That includes thinking time as well as creating time.  We all say that we don’t get anything for our time and that is close to the truth.  We pay membership fees and the gallery takes a percentage of the sale price.  If I have a piece for $100, by the time that I pay the gallery costs, the materials costs, and miscellaneous costs (ie. framing, transporting, etc.), I may net about $30.  How many hours did it take me to make the piece?  At $100 it was probably a small piece which takes 2 or 3 days.  So I am getting $10 or $15 a day.  They may or may not be 8 hour days.  But you get the idea.

Some of my work takes several weeks, most of the pieces that I have in the show are in the range of 2-3 weeks, a couple of the items took over a month.  How do I price that?  In the end, it is just a best guess.  I make up a price.  I don’t have a formula to keep track of my time and charge so much per hour.  I would price myself out of any sales; especially in Springfield where art sales are lukewarm. 

Why do I do this?  Obviously I am not in it for the money.  Yes, it is therapy of a sort.  I enjoy creating.  I enjoy making people laugh and think and look beyond their daily lives.  I feel that it is my calling at this stage of my life.  It makes me happy and I have fun doing it.  (But sales are always good; they validate what I am doing.)

September 30, 2015

September 30, 2015

After finding a piece to do for the Rolling Stones, I was still without a Beatles song.  I considered lots of Beatles songs.  Several do not lend themselves to a visual, several are extremely depressing (and I am currently working on one of those—more on that later).  I settled on’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ but something happened on the way to the club, and I ended up doing ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ instead.  Now Lucy is a crazy song with strange images.  I looked at 5-year old Julian Lennon’s original drawing which inspired the song (or rather the title he gave it inspired the song.)  I looked at some surrealistic versions of the image that other people created.  I decided to be true to the words in the song, but to also be true to the child’s viewpoint of the world. 

My Lucy is in the sky, in fact, she is on a separate canvas slightly right and above the main canvas.  She is wearing a dress made from holographic paper which flashes diamond shapes and she also has diamond straps for the dress and diamond earrings.  A close-up of her kaleidoscope eyes is on a smaller separate canvas which is off the left side of the main canvas.  And the third separate canvas is of the newspaper taxi.  So you are getting 4 canvases in all, 3 are smaller and are firmly attached to the large scene. 

The large canvas shows the front of a boat on a river moving toward a small English village.  There is a “marmalade sky”, tangerine trees, and giant green and yellow flowers of cellophane leading up to the bridge and the fountain.  I thought long and hard about the rocking horse people and rejected several options.  (By now you have realized that I do not have the full scenes of my pieces completely worked out before starting.)  Should the people be sitting on rocking horses?  Should their bodies be like centaurs?  Well, I like my solution and wish that I had planned it from the beginning.  I put a pub in the village called ‘The Rocking Horse’, so of course, the people who go to the pub are the “rocking horse people”.  They are probably in there eating marshmallow pies right now.

This is a difficult piece to photograph since it is not rectangular.  However I am going to show you the small canvas of the kaleidoscope eyes.  I think that the holographic paper makes them look very much like a kaleidoscope image.  Come and see the entire piece—from a 5-year old’s viewpoint--at the Prairie Art Alliance starting on October 17^th.  [ I am not sure if I meant Julian Lennon or me with that one!]