Artist Talk Part 8

 At first my pillow monsters were just heads.  I was still learning how to use a sewing machine and I really had no idea about fabrics and needles and anything, really.  But, I do best when just digging in and finding my way through trial and error rather than reading manuals.

I limited myself to just being able to use fabrics from the remnant bin at the store.  The remnant bin is where the final bits of fabric go when there is not enough on the bolt to make a yard.  It is literally a bin, and it was nice to have a narrow selection to choose from instead of all that was available in the giant box store.  The newness of making pillow monsters was thrilling, and I became obsessed.  I would sew into the late hours of the night, and then wake up extra early to sew some more.  After months of being depressed, I started to feel alive again.  When sewing pillows, or pillow monsters, or dolls, you sew them together inside out and then you leave a hole to pull them right-side out, and that moment in-between inside and right-side outs is pretty exhilarating (doll-maker's high?).

It wasn't long before my pillow monster heads started evolving and growing limbs.  Looking back at these photos, the monsters seem a bit rough and crass, but there is also an energy to them that I like, that comes from being a beginner. 

 

 My blog was somehow gaining a readership, and someone recommended I sell these monsters on Etsy, and so I opened a shop.  For those of you that don't know (are there still people that don't---I wonder), Etsy is an online host for artists and crafts people to sell their goods.  The whole blogging and online selling really sat well with me.  My husband can easily paint paintings and then store them in the basement and never tire of it, it's a trait I deeply envy.  With me, I require more of a give and take.  In art school, professors are interested in what you are doing, and your fellow students actively engage in your work during critiques, but outside of the school setting, you are on your own.  This is especially true if you move back home to the suburbs and away from the art community you established during school.   I found another community online, and it felt nice.  Selling work you make is also a very good feeling.

After some time I began writing little biographies for my guys, here is one of my favorites:

Jeremiah can hold his breath for a very long time.  He practices in the bath tub.  He doesn't have a stop-watch, so he counts.  He knows he counts accurately because he puts a "Mississippi" in between the numbers.  His rubber ducks cheer him on.  Because holding his breath is his special talent, he thinks he would make a fine pirate.  He made his eye patch all by himself.  It looks very authentic because he used a piece of pleather off of his mother's couch.  She forgave him because she loves him so much.  Jeremiah's brother, Ronnie plays a game called Dungeons and Dragons, and he is an expert on a lot of things.  He says that Jeremiah is not a real pirate unless he has a cutlass.  Jeremiah doesn't know what a cutlass is, but he is saving up for one.

Here is a pair of conjoined twins

A sailor-man with an embroidered tattoo of a snake on his arm, clearly inspired by Mimi Kirchner, who I am a huge, enormous fan of.

I never tire of these mustache men.  Their pattern is pretty much unchanged since the first one I made.  They always make me laugh.  They seem like chivalrous little gentlemen.  I think what I like about them is that I imagine them to think of themselves as quite serious, but really they are ridiculous. It's the same feeling I get when a child mispronounces a difficult word like "paleontologist"--- so endearing.

I began to get a feel for the different sorts of fabrics out there.  I had a brief infatuation with felt.  It is good to learn on because it's not fussy and it makes shapes nicely.  I like the challenge of using a variety of textures now.

This guy was my first tree people.  I make a lot of people wearing costumes:

Otis is very good at standing still.  He loves to people watch, but is painfully shy and fears someone may ask him a question or get bothered by his staring.  He has a tree suit that he wears to the park, and because he can stand so still and be so quiet, he goes unnoticed.  On a rare occasion a child will look up at him and be delighted that there is a tree with a smiling face looking back down at them.  When this happens, Otis reaches out his hand and gives him the dimes and nickels that he picks up on his walks to the park.  Then he whispers, "Money really does grow on trees!"  And the children skip off happily, dreaming of the super-bouncy ball they will get when they put their change into the machine at the grocery store.

All Dolled Up Postcard!

All Dolled Up Postcard!, a photo by nichol-b on Flickr.

Four days until the show!

Back, a photo by nichol-b on Flickr.

Here is the back of the postcard for some important info.

Artist Talk Part seven

It wasn't long after I returned from Prague that my mom's treatment stopped working and the tumor began to grow back.  Unfortunately, this time after another surgery, it progressed as the doctors expected.  Over the course of a year, it took away most of her abilities, except her humor, she always held on to that.  When a loved one is very sick and in and out of hospitals, there is a lot of waiting involved.  Waiting in rooms, waiting for doctors, waiting for her to wake up, or sleep peacefully.  Sketchbooks are good friends to have during times like these.  I drew my mom often. 

 

After awhile, I needed to rid myself of some nervous energy, so I took up hand sewing.  I appliqued strange, comical faces, and then turned them into pillow people.  It was really satisfying and soothing to do.  The first ones I ever made looked like this:

 My husband liked them too.  One night, while waiting in the ER we both took turns sketching plans for more:

 

After my mom passed, my husband got accepted to grad-school and we moved to Bloomington, IN, a happy town.  It was winter when I finished moving and everything was gray, and cold.  I had a small inheritance from my mom, so I didn't need to find a job right away, and I slowly fell into a deep depression.  Taking care of my mom when she was very sick was difficult in all the ways you can imagine, but I loved it, and it made my life meaningful.  Without her, I wasn't sure who I was or what I was supposed to be doing.  It was a dark time.  I watched bad tv and mindlessly clicked around on the internet.  If it weren't for my dog needing walked, I probably would have never left the house. 

One day, though, I stumbled across these images on the internet:

This may sound bizarre, but for some reason, they were very healing to me.  They are so strange and delightful.  They were like nothing I had ever seen before and they made me want to start making things with my hands again.  Then, I read up on the woman behind these creatures.  She is a Cuban woman, her name is Elsita, and she is now living in LA with her two children and husband.  She made these weird little guys after her son was diagnosed with autism.

Here is what she writes about them:
I have a rule: When things get too serious do something silly.
So I made them. I was so extremely sad when I found out about my son's disease
last week. Things got as serious as I have never ever experienced before in my life.
But honestly, that's all gone, gone with the wind. I am back now from all those dark places and I am here to celebrate life and love. My son is healthy, he is strong and energetic and he is different too which makes him unique. I love you Diego, I love you all little Dudes, and I love everything and everybody!!! Viva la vida!!!!

Elsita has a blog, and I probably read the whole thing in one day, and continued to read every post after that.  She gave me the kick in the pants that I needed.  I have never met her, but I do feel like I owe her so much for getting me out of my depression and motivating me to embrace life and making things again.  Shortly after discovering these guys, I gave myself a mission. I was going to sew a "Pillow Monster" a day for 30 days.  I was going to treat it like my job and see where it would take me.  I really was just looking for a creative jump-start.   To keep myself accountable, I was going to also keep a blog about what I made.  I had no idea that 5 years later I would still be sewing dolls.

Artist Talk Part 6 Prague!

If I ever come into big money, I am going to set up a scholarship program for art students to go to Prague after graduation.  I can't imagine a better place to decompress.  Art school can be like a creativity butter churn (the student is the cream in this analogy), and after graduation, making art can seem so daunting.  Maybe because my Memphis College of Art is a school that tends to be more conceptual, but it made art feel a little heavy and serious.  I felt pressure to be making art about "issues".  But, being in Prague helped lighten things up a bit.

First off, Prague is beautiful. 

The roads are stone and go in circles, and you can't throw a rock without hitting some sort of ornamental sculpture.  There are no functional gutters, they all seem to be gargoyles, or spitting cherubs.

It feels like you are in a living, breathing fairy tale.  But, the fairy tale is more of the gothic variety instead of the Disney variety. Prague's beauty is breath-taking, but in a dark and twisty way.  I loved walking the streets and observing.  I don't know Czech, so I felt really isolated, in a way that was enjoyable.  I felt like my sense of observation was heightened because I couldn't understand what anyone was saying. 

I had cappuccinos and honey cake almost daily.  Look!  Even the cappuccinos are full of fun and whimsy.

This picture sums up Prague pretty nicely for me.  This is the Television Tower, which was built in the 80's and 90's when czechoslovakia was under communist rule.  The TV tower was resented by the people of Prague, who couldn't openly complain about such things.  

You can see how the tower is hideous compared to the rest of Prague's skyline.

But after the Velvet Revolution and in the year 2000, the city had this Czech artist do an installation involving the tower, so he added a bunch of solid black, shiny babies to it.  They are crawling all over it to this day.  Why?  Because.

Here is another sculpture by the same artist, David Černý, this is a sculpture of one of Prague's former presidents holding onto a pole above the street.

My main objective while in Prague was to take this intensive marionette building workshop taught by a Czech puppet master.  It was magical.  There were about 10 people in the class, all from different countries.  We spent 8 hours in the little workshop carving away at our designs and then in the evenings we would go see various puppet shows or puppetry museums.

In addition to making puppets, we also put on a performance so we could practice using the puppets.  This girl is playing the accordion while we practice singing. 

My puppet design was a three-headed evil business man demon.  My home-town at this point was one of the fastest growing cities in America.  All our farmland was being plowed over and turned into one giant beige strip-mall and this is who I imagined to be behind all the construction decisions. 

Here is my finished puppet.  I designed him to have a bunch of floppy legs, but Mirek, the puppet master helped me give him a unicycle instead.  It works, and the wheel is really squeaky in a way that makes him seem even more evil.

Puppet practice.

Here is our poster for out play, which was so strange that I have no memory of the plot.  I think we sang Witchy Woman, though.

This is a stage from a puppet performance we saw.  In Prague, people go to puppet shows like Americans go to movies.  It is not something strange, it is very common.  In America I mainly notice puppetry during protests and political rallies, which is fun, but I like that in Prague puppets can just be everywhere without reason.  This play was a Rocky-esque play.  Rocky was really huge in Prague while I was there.  One of the puppets was actually a slab of meat.

Here is a shot from a puppet animation studio.

Tiny furniture.

There were quite a few of these boxes outside of storefronts.  The crank on the bottom animated a scene inside.  This one showed a saint being martyred,

Weird window displays.

It snowed once while I was there.  Here is what they do with snow in Prague.

My absolute favorite place in Prague was the Divadlo Minor, Prague's children's puppet theater.  This was in their waiting area,  That room is full of pillows meant for pillow fighting.

Here is their logo.  So cute.

This picture is upside down, but here is another image of the waiting area.

My lesson from Prague was that art doesn't have to be heavy, you can and should make things just because you can.  Joy and whimsy are important.

All Dolled Up Artist Talk.... Part Five

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

For my very last semester at MCA all I took was my painting seminar class. With my previous semester away from the painting studio, I was anxious to start on my thesis work and I knew exactly what I wanted to be making. While doing research on how to construct my dioramas, I found a toy theater book at the library. It is called Toy Theaters of the World and in it, it had images like these:

I was instantly drawn to the pictures in the book, and I loved it so much I actually purchased it, which is huge for a cheap-o like me.  Especially since it is out of print.

I love the facade, the orchestra and all the layers.  I love that there is a pretend audience already there to watch your pretend play.  Also, it's so grandiose, with all the gold and important looking red curtains, but it is a silly object, made out of cardboard and meant to played with on kitchen counter tops.

The toy theater was the perfect medium for what I wanted to communicate about my dad.  Looking at them made me nostalgic for childhood in a similar way that thinking about my father does.  They are also self directed, literally in that the person who plays with the theater is acting as director, actor and audience all in one, which I thought made sense with my memories as well.  Plus they are just simply joyful, fun little things.

This is the picture that gave me the general idea for how I wanted to construct my theaters for my thesis show.

Here is the first one I did.  Again, this is based off of the story of my father "rescuing" my mother from flying out of the car door.  I liked that there was both actual space, with the spacing of the different layers of wood, and implied space with the effects of the paint.

This next one is based on a story my family told me about how I jumped into the public pool without my swimmies on and my dad had to jump in after me with his work clothes on.  The cherubs playing trumpets on the facade are my three brothers.  They have instruments to represent their role in telling me the stories that make up my memory of my dad.  They are also in the back of the pool standing on an inflatable alligator.  Our faces are all photocopies of photographs, and my dad's hands are actually xeroxes of my hands taken directly from the photocopier and then shrunk down.  I did that to show my role in creating my memory of my father.

This final theater is not about a story but rather about how everyone always told me that I had my father's cheeks (big, chubby, rosy).  I remember that being confusing as a child.  I didn't understand how I could have my dad's cheeks when they were on his face and I had my own.  On the facade of this theater, my mom is the statue on either side of the stage.  She has a harp and a scroll to represent how I hear about my father.

I loved making these theaters.  If there are such things as muses, then during my final semester mine was right there beside me, shouting in my ear instead of being coy.   I feel like my whole art school education is summed up nicely in them.  For my final critique, my painting professor brought in a guest from a nearby college, and the only advice he had for me was "eh...  funk it up".  I was so angry at the time, but after some reflection, I think the advice is pretty spot on.  I am still really proud of this work, but I think there was a certain level of control that I wasn't willing to sacrifice when I made them.  Maybe it is because I was too close to the subject matter.  I don't enjoy giving advice, but I will say this, when you are studying art in school, if you are comfortable with what you are doing, then you should throw a wrench in whatever it is.  It's hard and scary, but that is when you are really growing as an artist.  When I look at these theaters now, I want to travel back in time and have more fun with the paint and the composition.  There should be octopus tentacles in the water to give it a sense of danger and a quickly sketched cape around my fathers shoulders.

At graduation I was very fortunate to receive a traveling fellowship, so 6 months after I was done with school I went to Prague to take an intensive puppetry workshop taught by a Czech puppet master.

To be continued...

Billy Bob Boopkins

Here is little Billy walking his dog in the big city.  He is my last little dude for the All Dolled Up show taking place at Vincennes University's gallery.  The opening is February 22nd.  I'm really very excited about it, and I will share the process of setting up and take plenty of pictures for everyone to see.