Yup, I'm still working on this

Work on the ugly apartments painting continues. I mostly worked on the willow tree on the right and I added the beginnings of the pink chairs. 

It is taking forever. I don't know if I will be working on a scale this large very much from now on, but here's where I'm at:

I am eating Insomnia Cookies!

I am eating Insomnia Cookies.

They are cookies that you order like a pizza and they deliver them hot and gooey, right to your door. This is the best idea ever. I have nothing else to say about Insomnia Cookies besides: yes.

Oh and here are some more drawings I did at Bread and Puppet for the cheap art bus:

Vermont Paintings

While I was apprenticing at Bread and Puppet, we spent one evening down the road at The Museum of Everyday Life checking out a great exhibit on matches, drinking Long Trail beer, and getting devoured by mosquitoes. Once it got dark, we settled on the lawn in front of a makeshift movie screen (read: sheet) and watched a film from the 1960's by Jack Smith. I had never heard of Jack Smith before, but learned that he was a contemporary of Andy Warhol. They did collaborations and things but Jack Smith was against using consumer culture as a vehicle for his art the way Warhol did, so he is not nearly as well known, but he should be! His work is a little bit elusive because he tried very hard to make it unable to be reproduced, but some recordings are available anyway.

The film we watched was called Normal Love and there may have been a plot, but I wasn't too concerned with that. I was too focussed on what a cool sensory experience I was having-- It seemed to me that it was almost like many paintings in motion. I loved the music as well. Here is a few minutes of Normal Love that I was able to find on youtube:

It was like watching beautiful image after beautiful image lit up on this square in the middle of a very dark, mountainy Vermont landscape with a ton of stars. I wanted to imprint that image on my brain so that I could paint it when I had access to my oil paints.

So that is what I have been doing. I started out using film stills and movie clips from Normal Love that I found online and then started transitioning to filling the movie screens with my own images. It is a series-in-progress, and so if any artists out there in internet land wanna throw some constructive criticism my way, I would be grateful.

I wish the image quality had been better on the owl one. Alas! I have a couple more in the works.

The following has nothing to do with Vermont or Bread and Puppet or Jack Smith, except that those experiences are getting me inspired to paint again, which has led me to finish up some projects that I let fall by the wayside. I wanted to post those as well.

This first one is a landscape from Ithaca.

And this next one is a nightscape I did waaaaaay back at Earlham and never finished. I still don't know if I would call it finished, but I am certainly done with it.

Three cheers for painting!

Sticking it to the Man

I have finally completed a project I have been working on for a couple of months now. It all started when a certain photo studio corporation for which I used to work promised me and the rest of my co-workers commission for our largest sales during the Christmas season on top of our hourly wages. Just an extra incentive to sell more stuff. We worked our butts off off only to be denied our commission thanks to a loophole that corporate conveniently set up for themselves. My co-workers and I were incredibly angry and disappointed.

To make myself feel better about the whole situation and get some risk free, completely legal revenge, I hatched a plan. You see, this photo studio chain offers online coupons all the time. One of these coupons is a free portrait collage (an 8x10 print with multiple photos in it, comes in a variety of formats. $30 value. No purchase necessary. Limit one per day per family). Can you tell I have sold these before?

It is essentially a bait and switch. You get people in the door who think they don't have to spend any money, take awesome photos of their kids, then they say, "Awwwe, well these pictures are so cute I'll just have to get a couple sheets!" Ta DA! We now have your money. BUT you actually can just get the free thing and walk away. In fact, you could theoretically go in every day and get one. Without spending anything. This is really, really annoying for the photographers whose job performance evaluations are based on how much they sell, but for the customers, this is pretty great.

I had calculated that I would have had at least $200 worth of commission coming my way had corporate not gone back on their agreement, so I decided to get about $200 worth of free collages. I would fill the collages with pictures of me doing ridiculous things in ridiculous costumes. When I talked about this with friends, they generally wanted in on the action, so some collages have other people doing ridiculous things in ridiculous costumes with me.

I have completed my goal. I feel pretty vindicated. Here is the end result:

Please note the bottom middle photo in which Becca is strangling me. Priceless.

The obligatory Harry Potter theme photoshoot. 

Yup I walked to the mall in a cape. I am a true Earlham kid.

Western theme, with a fence obviously.

50s house wives!

Pajama party!

...So I feel like I got my revenge and everything I did was completely legal! ...Except posting pictures of the collages online. Technically I can't reproduce these images because I don't own the copyrights. However, if this company tracks down this blog and calls me out on it, I will be really surprised. I imagine they have better things to do, like finding more ways to suck money out of both their customers and their employees.

Hooray!

The Weirder the Better

One of the best things that came out of Bread and Puppet for me was inspiration. It was excellent to get away from home and meet so many other creative people. I noticed that a lot of other artists among the apprentices worked in a particular way, which is planning out their end result a whole lot less than I do. When I'm drawing (with pen) I usually make a sketch first and then ink it. So many people who worked with pen at Bread and Puppet just went for it. I really, really liked that idea so I gave it a shot and it completely rocks. It is a lot more spontaneous and whatever comes out of your brain just comes out. I've noticed that when I work with pen, a lot of what I do is cute. And I am tired of cute. Drawing in ink without sketching first is pushing my drawings to a much more interesting place, I believe.

Something else I noticed about a lot of the work that other apprentices were making is that the imagery was often totally creepy. That's a good thing. There was a lot of distorted bodies, oozy shapes, people eating things, penises, darkness, dismemberment, jars full of eyeballs, hair, things that blurred the line between beautiful and grotesque... It was AWESOME. I love weird. I want more of that in my world. It's gonna happen. Especially since I began collaborating with Leda, who is a really amazing artist and Bread and Puppet apprentice from New Zealand and who comes up with a lot of ideas I would never have thought of, but that's what collaborating is all about, eh?

Leda and I wrote stories and swapped them, then illustrated each other's stories. We fully intend to continue this exchange through international post. I wrote her a really long story about a woman named Elsa who has no legs (Leda's edit) and doesn't wear clothes. She goes on many adventures and then meets Bart, a flautist with a hat. They fall in love and live happily for several years until he pressures her into wearing a shirt so she leaves him. The story Leda wrote is about an old woman who shows up on the narrator's front porch in a very mysterious and surreal way. These are the illustrations I did for it. Guess at which point I stopped doing pencil sketches beforehand:

I sadly do not have photos of the artwork Leda did for the story I wrote, but I do have a picture of some earrings she made me that I now wear constantly:

Sometime in the final two weeks of the apprenticeship, she told me to draw a man eating a man eating a man eating a man and this is what came out:

This was really fun to draw. Really, really fun to draw.

Yup, I dig drawings that are creepy and weird and spontaneous. 

Weird is good for you.

Bread and Puppet Apprenticeship

I am back in Ithaca after the 5-week apprenticeship at Bread and Puppet Theater in Glover, Vermont. My brain is still transitioning. I spent the end of June and all of July living on a farm with no cell phones or internet access. I loved it. Loved, loved, loved it. It feels very strange to be blogging about an experience that introduced me to a lifestyle that was so alternative to the excess of technology in our culture.

To sum up my time there I will say that I was surrounded by a vibrant, creative, and diverse group of artists, puppeteers, musicians, and performers. We had a busy and, for me, exhausting schedule of parades, circuses, pageants, rehearsals, experimental dance and music, cooking, cleaning, and artistic projects. Also some really, really, really good parties. Sleep? Sometimes.

Peter Schumann started Bread and Puppet back in the 60’s in New York City. He and his wife, Elka and their family moved the theater around over the years and eventually settled into the farm, which is their current location. A barn that was built in the 1800’s is now a home for their museum of historic puppets. The puppets are mostly made of paper mache and range in size from masks or painted cardboard shapes to the giant Mother Earth puppet that takes more than twenty people to operate. Everything at Bread and Puppet is a surface for art: walls, fields, forests, bodies. Everyone helps with everything. The shows are very political and it was wonderful to learn about theater and puppetry as activism-- there are so many ways that art can be used for social change and it was pretty eye opening to see it in action.

As a side note, Peter is almost 80 and still gets up on twenty-foot tall stilts at every circus and wakes up at the crack of dawn to make fresh loaves of bread every morning. What a BAMF.

Here are some photos I took of Bread and Puppet:

I didn’t actually take many photos because I was always involved in things that were happening. To take photos, you have to not be the one doing the thing you’re taking the photo of. If you want to see more pictures of performances, I highly recommend checking out Mark Dannenhauer’s photography. His photos are spectacular!

In the spare moments we had for our own projects, I did quite a few small art pieces, mostly watercolors and drawings. Aside from landscapes, which are pretty normal for me, I started doing quick watercolor portraits of other apprentices. I am getting really interested in faces, so I was exploring that interest. I only brought watercolors with me to Vermont, but I am hoping to turn some of these into inspiration for oil paintings, so here you go:

Coming soon:

Artistic collaborations with Leda.