All Dolled Up Artist Talk Part 3

This is a continuation of my upcoming artist talk.....  The first part can be read here.  The second part is here.

It's worth it for me to do some sort of time frame for this.....  I already feel my prep spiraling out of control.  I certainly don't want to go on and on about myself, like I am reading from my personal journal, when the students really just want to know how I sew up some dollies.  I just feel like all these events are related to art and how I began sewing dolls, but surely I should be further along by now in my biography which is meant to take up only 10 minutes of talking time.  So just to have it printed out and professional, here is my time frame:

10 minutes---  Undergraduate experience
5 minutes---  Time in Prague taking Puppetry Class
5 minutes---  Mom's passing/  Moving/  Frustration/  Elsita (all closely related)
5 minutes---  My blog challenge
10 minutes---  Dolls, dolls, dolls
10 minutes---  Other Artists in show
10 minutes---  Q and A
Done----  Face un-reddens

So I guess the point of all that is that I need to put some pep in my step.  If you know me, you know I don't tend to jabber on, so I am surprising myself a bit in having so much to say.  I imagined the opposite problem occurring.  I am going to carry on now.

I took the commuter train from my home town to all my classes at the Art Institute.  Joliet is really the farthest official suburb from Chicago and the first stop on a very long train ride.  I am telling you all this because I think this is part of the reason why I hated my time at the Art Institute.  The commute was awful.  I took up two seats with all my art supplies, and an hour and a half into the journey, the train would be full of baggy-eyed business people who I always assumed despised me for being artsy and having too much stuff.  The school itself was big, cold and impersonal.  The teachers were all established artists, which is part of a good theory about good art education, but you really have to shout and make a scene to get their attention, which isn't fair, or my style.

In my painting elective class, I began painting large scale black and white versions of photographs of my father and my family before I was born.  My brothers are all much older than me, so my family had this substantial separate familial experience before I was around.  The photos from that time seem like a secret, magical window into a world without me, but at the same time still a part of me.  I loved looking at those photos and thinking of my father.  It was really comforting for me to spend so much time analyzing them and letting them transfer through me and onto the canvas.  I xeroxed the photos, and gridded both them and the canvas, so that I could get things right.  It's a cold process, but it felt comforting to me to paint them in that way, because it added some distance to emotions that were still a bit raw.  I enjoyed it immensely.  It was, however, not well received at the Art Institute.  It is not a cool thing to be painting your family photographs at The Art Institute.  I didn't care though, and my professor at the time didn't make me do something else, which I am grateful for.  My fellow students gave me a horrible time during critiques, but I needed to do those paintings, and all of their paintings were ugly.  Just kidding!  Wouldn't it be funny if I said that though?  


One good thing that did come from the Art Institute was the art I was being exposed to.  There is so much to look at in Chicago.  So much!  The museum is right next door to the school, and students got in for free, so I spent all of my "waiting for my train" time there.  To get to the paintings and sculptures I wanted to look at, I always had to walk through the medieval armor hall---past pretend knights.  It felt like I was on some sort of royal, urgent artistic observation mission!  Some of my favorite artists I discovered while I was there were:

Joseph Cornell

H.C. Westerman, a Chicago Imagist sculptor

Roger Brown, who donated his house and extensive and quirky art collection to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (we toured it during my painting class and it was incredible)

Karl Wirsum, my all time favorite

Outsider Artist, Henry Darger

After a year and a half at home, it really started to seem like my mom was cured.  I let myself believe it.  All her doctors were dumbfounded.  She was doing well.  I only had a semester's worth of credits left before I could get my degree, and I wanted to get it from Memphis College of Art, not the Art Institute.  I needed some time, space, and southern hospitality in a nurturing environment with professors that took your work into consideration and talked to you about it.  I missed it so much.  So, I spent one more year in Memphis.

All Dolled Up artist talk: Part Two

This is a continuation of my upcoming artist talk.....  The first part can be read here.
If anyone has any idea how to judge how long a talk will be by word count, please give me some idea.  I am sure there must be some kind of ball park figure, but Googling left me with nothing. 

When I think about those days, my life seems like some sort of carefree dream.  But, after my first year at MCA, everything changed.  The week before finals, I got an email (I had no phone at the time) from my brother explaining that my mom was in the hospital and they found a stage 4 glioblastoma tumor in her brain.  For those of you that don't know---all of those words are terrifying.  I knew already, because that is the same type of cancer that my father died from 11 years earlier.  So, it was just this horribly awful coincidence, probably combined with some environmental factors.

This is not the picture I want to include in my talk, but it is the only one of my mom I have on my computer at the moment.  I just finished going through some albums, and found a much better one, but this will have to do for now.  She is the bride.

They operated on my mom's brain, and because this type of tumor is highly aggressive, she was given a prognosis of three months to live.  I quit art school and moved back home to be with her.  I have three brothers.  Two lived near home and one moved back home from California.   Her surgery happened right at the end of spring, and so we expected to have only the summer with her.  Because she was given a terminal diagnosis, she was able to cash in on her life insurance money, so we took her to France.  I come from a very Catholic family and one of my brothers and I took her on a sort of pilgrimage to a town called Lourdes, where Saint Bernadette had visions of Mary in a grotto, and supposedly if you drank the holy water there, it could heal your infirmities.  I don't know what we expected, really.  Those first few months were very surreal.  Time felt borrowed, and passed strangely.  There was pressure to make every moment special, which made things awkward in a way, until we all found a new normal.  During that time, I actually found myself thinking of my dad a lot.  When he passed, it wasn't so difficult for me.  I was a child, and I missed him horribly.  He was a very buoyant guy who filled up the room with his charisma; and he was a great, fun, engaging father.  I just believed what everyone said about heaven.  One day he was suffering, and then the next he was in heaven, and I would see him again some day.  I understood that easily, as a child does.  Our relationship was never confusing, like how parent-child relationships get when you go past the "my mom/dad is my hero" stage.  So, in a way I never properly grieved after he died, and watching my mom go through the same thing he went through, hit me double-fold, as I am sure it also hit her.  I began looking through family photo albums.  My mom kept really great ones.  I especially loved looking at the ones from when my parents were my age.

Meanwhile, as a result of either the holy water, or aggressive, experimental treatment, or a combination of both, my mom's tumor wasn't growing back, and she was healing pretty well.  She had a horrible short term memory and couldn't go back to work, but she was volunteering at a hospital and living a pretty normal life.  I decided to stay with her and commute to school at the Art Institute of Chicago.  I was determined to be a serious artist, and that was the school for serious artists.

Forest Orphan Numero Uno

I thought I'd share my first Forest Orphan with you.  She is supposed to be an owl, but she looks like she is dressed as some bird species that can only be found in the Amazon rain forest.  I took great care with her and even made her wings detachable.  I wanted the Forest Orphans to be less "hipster in the city" and more "lost boys from Peter Pan".  Joseph told me that when I try to sew more sophisticated things that I lose the charm and fun.  I like my forest orphans, but I see his point (said in a begrudging voice).  It will be a nice challenge to add sophistication and keep the charm and fun.

Two Friends in the Shop

These two guys are going to be in the We Make Dolls book coming out in May of this year.  They are famous, so they may have big egos, but they love you just the same.  I put them up for sale in my shop! 

Enjoy your weekend!

Forest Orphan Sneak Peek

In addition to the Super Heroes and Villains I a making for All Dolled Up, I also decided to put a few Forest Orphans in there.  I am going to make three:  an owl girl, a deer dear, and a bear boy.  I have been having a lot of fun sewing them up, it is nice to slow down and add special details.  I have also been enjoying this winter which hasn't even reached coat status yet.  Walter and Albert and I have been going out every day.  It's really a joy for me to take these two fellows out----Albert on his leash and Walter with his monkey "backpack" (leash).  Albert enjoys peeing on every blade of grass with a foreign scent and Walter prefers rock gathering and waving bye to all the inanimate objects in peoples yards.

All Dolled Up Artist Talk... Part 1

The kid's asleep, I have my big bowl of popcorn, a little vino and I am ready to begin my speech preparations.

Just a general introduction for blog readers----I am curating (and participating in [I cheated and curated myself in]) a doll show called All Dolled Up taking place at Vincennes University at the end of February.  I have to do an artist talk after the opening, and I am writing out what I am going to say here on the blog.  I feel comfortable sharing myself on this blog----it is a comfort zone format, so hopefully the words will flow forth.  Come on words!  Flow!  Forth.  Go!

I will start off by thanking Vincennes University for hosting the show.  It is not a conventional show to have in an art gallery, but I think the humble medium of doll-making deserves a clean white space with some lime-light every now and then.  A lot of softie makers that I follow have studied art and somehow landed on doll-making and now they are stretching the boundaries of what a doll is and making beautiful little soft objects that can range from dark and mysterious to joyful and whimsical.  It is a thing now.  Thank you Vincennes University for being so open-minded!

The words are coming out, but a bit in a clunky way.  I will edit later, though.

I am going to get personal in this talk:

A.  Because art is personal, and
B.  It really all does lead to doll-making


Like many of (the students at Vincennes University) I also began college at a 2 year school.  This was after I took a semester off to pursue dreams of moving to Vermont and leading a hippie sort-of-life while working at Ben and Jerry's ice cream factory, which I know doesn't make any sense.  Lucky for me I never raised enough money back then to even visit Vermont for a weekend. I was just exhausted with school and wanted to do something romantic, but I quickly became jealous of all my friends who went away to school and had tales of all the interesting things they were learning and people they were meeting.  So, I began taking drawing classes at my community college.  I loved it.  Some students started complaining mid-semester that they were tired of drawing still-lifes of junk from professor so and so's garage, but I couldn't get enough of it.  My high school art program wasn't very good, so I had never really been exposed to drawing with charcoal or even drawing from direct observation.  I began drawing all the time, and eventually I transferred to Memphis College of Art in Memphis, TN.  MCA is a tiny school, only 300 students, which was very good for me because even though I tend to be a loner, I like to feel like I am part of a community.  I chose MCA for a variety of reasons:  I wanted to go some place other than the midwest, it is the most affordable private art school, and it's Elvis' hometown--and I love Elvis---I love his music, I love his jumpsuits, and I love how he is simultaneously soulful and kitschy; not many people can pull that off. 

I fell in love with the city right away, and I still miss it so much that my stomach hurts sometimes.  Memphis is equal parts gritty and shiny.   It is the south, so maybe because of southern hospitality it feels like a small-town in that everyone talks to everyone else, and people sit on their porch swings and don't ignore you when you walk past.  But it is also a big city, with lots of music and noise and it always smells like barbeque.  The school shares a big park with Brooke's art museum and the Memphis zoo, and if the windows to the painting studios are open you can hear the howler monkeys (an actual thing).  Students can access the studios 24 hours a day.  I loved being completely immersed in art.  I initially started MCA as an illustration major because I thought it would be practical, and because I wasn't confident that I could make art without some sort of direction from someone else.  I thought I would always work best in the confines of assignments.  But I was swept away by my first painting class.  I was much more at home getting messy in the painting studio than in the computer lab.  After I changed my major to painting, I didn't really think in terms of "practical" any longer.  I just told myself that if I worked very hard in school and did my very best that "practical" things would work out.  That is a mistake by the way.

That's it for today.  Thanks for reading!

Super Hero and Villain Progress

I have been working on my super heroes and villains for the All Dolled Up exhibit that I am both curating and participating in.  The show is less than 2 months away.  I am very much looking forward to seeing my co-softie makers work up close, and touching it with my hands after admiring it on the internet for years.  I agreed to do an hour long lecture after the opening.  I am very surprised by that last sentence.  It would be more reasonable for me to have written, "I agreed to do an hour long lecture after the opening, after drinking 2 bottles of wine."  But, I was completely sober and now I need to make it happen.  I am very nervous that I will be boring, and I also have a lesser, more irrational fear that students are going to tweet to one another about my butt being big.  Then, everyone will laugh simultaneously and walk out.  I'm not really concerned about that, I just needed to insert some comic relief to make myself feel better.  So, to prepare for the lecture, I decided to write out what I was going to say on this blog, that way I can get all of my images together for the Power Point (sophisticated!) presentation and also (hopefully), you can help me by telling me what parts are terribly boring, what parts need elaborating on and what parts would benefit from the addition of pyrotechnics.  I am just going to keep it very down to earth and talk about my journey through art school (this is a lecture for art students (mainly) at Vincennes University), post-school shenanigans, how I began sewing dolls, and also the bios and backgrounds of the other artists in the show.  My face is red now after  writing this, not the best of signs!