Three Charming Fellows

These three are my charming fellows for the All Dolled Up show.  The one in the middle is a ventriloquist.  The top one is a flower salesman and the one on the bottom is about to profess his love to someone special.

All Dolled Up Artist Talk... Part 4

This is a continuation of prep for my upcoming artist talk.
Part one is here
Part two here, and
Part three here!

Back at Memphis College of Art, I let myself explore some non-painting classes that I always wondered about.  It turned out to be a really useful meander (is that word right to use?  I am sure my ruthless editor (husband Joseph) will not think so [I kid, I am super grateful for him, especially since at this rate, my 1 hour talk will be turning into an all night lock-in ((wait, that sounds awesome))]).  I took a fiber arts class, which was amazing.  We learned how to dye fabric, silk screen, embroider and batik.  It was my first time ever being exposed to the world of fiber, and I loved every minute of it.  It was nice to be out of the painting studio and forced to think about what I wanted to communicate artistically with another medium.

More helpful still was my Book Arts class.  I had always assumed that the class was meant for illustration majors who wanted to illustrate books.  But Book Arts is really about art making realized in the form of a book, which can be interpreted very broadly.  Now that I am trying to define it, I feel the words getting all congested in my brain.  In the class, we learned different ways of binding books, which was refreshingly exact and methodical, and we also had assignments of creating more personal artist books.  I think all art majors should be required to take the class, it was so useful in clarifying what I wanted to communicate.  It is unlike painting because things needed to be planned out; there is no getting lost in the material and waiting for happy mistakes. 

My work during this time was still about my father, but it was changing.  I was trying to convey what it is like to have memories of someone that you cherish, but can't trust.  Whenever I think of my father, a collection of stories come to mind, and before my mom got sick, I never questioned their authenticity.  But, after she got sick, we of course talked about my father a lot, and family came around to visit, so I could ask questions.  I realized that these stories I had were more like legends.  They were an amalgam of things I remembered, things others told me, things I replaced with photographs, and things I just made up.  Here is the first book I made during the class, it is called the Day The Door Flew Open, and it is based on a memory of my father driving my family in the car, and then my mom's door flying open, her inching out, and him pulling her in and shutting the door.  To hear it stated plainly, it maybe doesn't sound like much, but in my memory it is very dramatic:

The writing was done with a letter press, which MCA has, and is very fun to use.

I used a photo transfer process to show how my memories of my father are aided strongly by family photo albums.

Each page reveals more and more of the memory, like it is something that needs to be "chipped away" at.

The last page reveals my complete memory which is made using a linolium printing process and then watercoloring over it and photo-transferring on top of that.  Those are my three brothers in the back seat.

Here is another book I made, which is more like a diorama.  It is about a memory I have of grocery shopping with my parents.  I would always beg and plead for quarters for the vending machines to get gumballs, or tiny toys.  My mom would never want to give them to me because she didn't want me to be spoiled, but my father was more of a softie, and he would let coins fall through the holes in his pockets so that I could find them and reap my reward!

It is hard to tell from the image but we are in the "cereal aisle" of the grocery store.  That is probably every child's favorite aisle.  It is basically like watching cartoons.  The cereal boxes I used for the diorama were color photos of japanese cereal boxes.  I thought it would help make things seem more surreal and uncertain, like my memories.

For this last book, I was researching toy theaters, to learn how to construct the box.  That research led to my final thesis work.

To be continued.  Thanks again for reading!  I am tired and have been fueling myself with Twizzlers, which is odd combined with red wine, but at least they pair up color-wise. 

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.