Altered Calendar: July

Now that it is the last day of July, I figure it is about time for me to post July's altered calendar piece. I basically filled this mountain with flamingo silhouettes. It's flamingo mountain! That's all I have for you today.

We're just going to cover everything in glitter.

As I wrote in my previous post, I have just completed a summer class in illustration through the SMFA. It is the seventh of eight classes I need to complete my Illustration Certificate! One more to go! I wanted to share the work I did for this course. When I took Introduction to Illustration we had a new assignment every week, each one based on an actual job that a working illustrator might get. The Intermediate Illustration course I took this summer was structured in a similar way but spending more time on fewer projects. We critiqued our work every class and were expected to make edits and present considered and finished work. It was challenging and also similar to how a real illustration job would go. 

We kicked off the class with a New Yorker cover-- a magazine with a long history of illustrated cover artwork. If you get your work on a New Yorker cover, you're kind of a big deal. Often the covers are clever comments on current events, but not always! Sometimes they are just nods to New York City as a place and a culture, or nods to something seasonal. I'm not particularly well versed in politics so I decided that my cover would be a love letter to Summer in Upstate, New York. I painted Enfield Falls near Ithaca. This is a real place where you should definitely go swimming if you are ever in the area. I had fun with the green and red color palette.

The following assignment was an illustration for a short story, such as you might find in Harper's Bazaar. When you illustrate stories for children's books, you usually want to show the characters in fully realized detail, but when you illustrate for adult audiences, they usually want something less detailed that allows the reader to imagine details for themselves. Generally characters' images are only suggested or fragmented in stories for adults. 

We read a story called "Old Mrs. J" by Yoko Ogawa, which is a rather eerie story about the landlady of an apartment building whose garden starts mysteriously to produce hand-shaped carrots. I don't want to spoil the ending, but there are other strange, unsettling things that go on and a very creepy twist. I did a couple sketches of hand carrots for class.

My class's feedback was basically that I needed to make it creepier. "So creepy that you scare yourself" was the exact advice. We explored ink as a medium and I decided it would be ideal for this assignment.

I felt that my piece could be creepier still, so I looked at images from that old book, "Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark" whose illustrations (by Stephen Gammell) are done in ink and absolutely terrifying. They are too scary for my blog, so you should google them. But do it during the day, when it's light out, maybe with a friend so you're not alone. 

Much creepier this time around!

Our next assignment was a celebrity portrait. Illustrations like this are often used for published interviews with anyone from politicians to pop stars. My instructor, when giving us this assignment, recommended that we use sparkles. I couldn't entirely tell to what degree he was kidding but he said something along the lines of, "It's not a mandate-- I'm not saying use glittler......... but use glitter." So I knew I needed to do a portrait of someone who would make sense covered in glitter. 

Ke$ha seemed to me to be the obvious choice.

So here she is in all her sparkly glory, in a gold bathtub, drinking a beer with a wolf in sparkly sunglasses. I feel like that is something she would do, right? Plus, wolves feature prominently in the video for her song "Die Young." 

As an in-class exercise we looked at hand lettered fonts and text and logos and album covers that include interesting hand lettering. Typography is something I used to find incredibly boring, but lately I've been really into it! We did some experimenting with text. I was drinking lemon iced tea so I wrote "lemon."

Then I wrote, "Lime" in Spanish to go with it. For being an in class exercise, I'm rather pleased with them.

We put all of our text practice to good use for our final assignment, which was product labels. I have a secret love of hot sauce labels-- they usually involve quite frankly really cool art with skulls and fire and death, devils, scantily clad cartoon chili peppers... I believe hot sauce is the grocery store product with the most interesting variety of labels. I may start a collection of interesting hot sauce labels. I will look like a weirdo taking photos in the grocery store but I don't even care!

I designed a blues dancing inspired hot sauce logo using stills from youtube videos. Some dancer friends and I agreed that a blues dancing hot sauce would have to be flavored with aged peppers, molasses, and a splash of Kentucky bourbon.

My class liked the concept but gave me some ideas for editing the background colors and the text. I agreed with what they had to say and did some alternate text sketches, this time using smoke as an inspiration for the lettering.

... And then put it all together with a new and improved background! I am very pleased with the results! Now if anyone ever follows that recipe and invents this hot sauce, I have your logo!

Altered Calendar Project: May

May is the fanciest desert house, 

complete with sky chandelier 

and horse skeleton embellishments. 

(This is part of my altered calendar project.) 

(I bought a boring calendar and I strive each month to make it less boring.)

(See also: April, March, February, and January.)

YAF Sketches

 I spent this weekend at a Young Adult Friends Quaker Retreat in Southern Mass. It was a really centering, refreshing experience and the setting was a little meeting house surrounded by trees and low stone walls so very iconic of New England. We were a short drive to the beach and I did some sketching there as well. I also shamelessly stole this picture of me at the beach from my friend Helen's instagram. Tell me if you want me to remove it Hel! And give me 12 slaps on the wrist with a wet noodle!

Triple Project Update!

Hi all! I have three projects I want to update you on. FIRST PROJECT: Were you wondering what ever happened to Project Fox Bed? Well, I'm still working on it! Here is the progress on the headboard:

I am excited about how far it has come, but I clearly need to finish up those dandelions. I also am going to do the back of the headboard even though it will be up against the wall. I'll know it is there even if I don't see it!

SECOND PROJECT: Marker portrait practice is ongoing:

 

Look! Some of them are even not in profile and they have their eyes open! PROGRESS!

And finally, THE THIRD PROJECT. I am introducing a new project for 2014-- Every year I get a wall calendar and aside from helping me organize my busy life, I think the images set the tone for my year in a way. It is important to me to have a calendar that I like, that makes me smile, or inspires me. Then I save my calendars from past years-- I have calendars dating back to my high school days. I have had Penguins, Japanese Woodblock Prints, Black and White Photographs of Paris, Gundam Wing, Van Gogh, Ferrets Dressed in Silly Ferret Costumes, Bread and Puppet, Inuit Art, and Goats in Trees (who knew-- goats love to climb trees!) 

Anywho, this year I waited until about January 6th to start looking for a calendar and by then they were %50 off at least, but they were also the worst ones that no one else wanted. I could not find the calendar of my dreams to define 2014! I found a $2 calendar at Walgreens that has pictures of beautiful and generic landscape photography and I was like, "ok, fine, this one is not the worst" but then I decided that these landscapes would be perfect surfaces for collages or drawings. Each month I'm going to alter the photo in some way and create a new, interesting art piece! Here is January-- I turned the negative space of this glacier into a disgruntled hippo monster and its grand baby:

I'll keep you posted on the upcoming months!

One Sketch a Day-- Days 123 through 221

How did July sneak by me? I can't believe how many weeks passed since I posted, and I admit, I have not made as much work this month, but even when things get crazy and I can't find the time for paintings, I always have my daily sketches. Here are some recent highlights:

I drew the things I was saving up for. I am still waiting on those screen printed leggings, but I got that scooter and The Cat Empire Tickets!

I was sitting on the T thinking about how much I wanted waffles. Find your inspiration anywhere!

This one is my signature. Can you find it?

Not finished with this one, I have to revisit Tealuxe:

I went on a sheep drawing kick last week. They are great! They're like fluffy stick figures!

And finally, from my visit to Vermont with my family last week:

Oil paints-- makin' a comeback!

We had a brief and powerful rainstorm over here today and the view off of the back porch was totally magical! I have not cracked out my oil paints in a while, so today was the day. I painted my neighbor's clothesline, which got caught in the rain. Oops!

The painting isn't done yet, but it is close.

The Spanish Conquest of Mexico in 32 Square Feet

I usually focus on current artwork and projects in this blog, but sometimes I like to pull something out of the past and that is what I'm doing in this post. 

In the Fall of 2008 I participated in Earlham College's study abroad program in Mexico. A group of students and professors from Earlham spent about four months in Cuautla, Morelos, a two hour or so drive south of Mexico City. It was a really fantastic and challenging semester and I would go back in a heartbeat. We took courses in Spanish, 20th century Mexican History, Mexican Literature, The Economic and Environmental Issues that Mexico currently faces, and Social Movements from the last three decades. I stayed with a welcoming and lovely host family and I got the opportunity to travel to Oaxaca, Puebla, Guanajuato, San Miguel de Allende, Cuernavaca, and Guererro during my time there. I didn't see a single beach though, which seems silly since Mexico is known for its beautiful beaches, but I went back in the Fall of 2011 and did the beaches. 

Each of us also had an internship or field placement that allowed us to get involved with an aspect of the community such as schools, markets, stores, in one case a bicycle repair shop. My field placement was working with local artist Rolando Guillermoprieto on a 4' x 8' mural telling the story of the Conquest of Mexico by the Spanish in the early 1500's. It was an incredibly violent conflict, but our focus was really of the clash of ideas, cultures, and traditions, and the later fusion of Spanish and Mexican cultures. It was one of my absolute favorite aspects of the semester and probably one of the coolest things I've done in my life thus far. 

The picture below is the finished mural. I completed the semester by writing a 20 page paper in Spanish about the mural's iconography, the history it represents, and the process of painting it. I am just going to summarize it for you in English!

Long before we arrived at this finished piece, we created sketches of all the different aspects of the mural. Most details were planned out in advance but of course some evolved as we went.

These are my sketches of Quetzalcoatl, the plumed serpent god with his human form emerging from the mouth of the serpent.

I also did a drawing of Tenochtitlán, the Aztec floating city. The lake has long been filled in and is now Mexico City. When the Spanish first arrived, Tenochtitlán was estimated to have a population of about 300,000 people-- larger than any city in Europe at the time. The Conquistadors would never have seen anything like this before.

Rolando and I collaborated on the representation of Tenochtitlán in the finished piece:

There are multiple ways you can read this mural-- the first is the seascape at the bottom of the composition. On the left, we have the so called "New World" (a problematic term, but that was how the Europeans saw it) and on the right are the Spanish ships making their way West. This is also a reference to maps, where West is usually to the left with East is to the right. In the sky we have masks from different cultures in Mexican history. From left to right: Olmec, Maya, early Tenochtitlán, Toltec, and two Aztec masks. I totally painted all those masks. I was super proud of them. I also painted the clear blue sky. Rolando painted the dark sky on the right representing the approaching conflicts with the Spanish. In the sky above the ships are horses, which the Spanish brought to the Americas. They also reference the double meaning of "nightmares," again speaking to the impending conflict.

The circle on the far right also represents the clash of the powerful Aztec and Spanish cultures in the form of the meeting of Quetzalcoatl with Hernan Cortes. Cortes was the leader of the Conquistadors and in fact Moctezuma II, the Aztec ruler at the time welcomed him and his men, believing that they were incarnations of Gods or characters from an Aztec legend. Did you see the cartoon film The Road to El Dorado? I mean, we could deconstruct a whole lot of mis-representations and stuff in that movie, but the idea for the plot line didn't come from nowhere.   

The center circle is a face off between Moctezuma II and Cortes who appear as larger-than-life apparitions in the sky above the "Venice of the New World" Tenochtitlán and the surrounding mountains decorated with subtle Aztec designs-- executed by yours truly along with the clouds! I did most of the clouds in this mural because I LOVE CLOUDS. I also painted Moctezuma II. Cortes was painted by Rolando.

"Who is that lady between these two very powerful men?" you may be asking. She is Marina, also known as "La Malinche." She was a slave in the Aztec Empire who learned Spanish served as Cortes' translator. Supposedly she was also his lover and legend has it that they had a child-- Mexico's first half Spanish half Indigenous person, but that has not been proven or disproven. Without La Malinche as a translator, Rolando believes the Conquest would not have been a success for the Spanish. She was Cortes' voice and therefore is arguably one of the most important women in Mexican History during one of its most pivotal moments. 

The Aztecs did quite a bit of human sacrifice and their ideal sacrifice victims were fifteen year old boys with perfect skin. Good luck finding that! Am I right? Um, anyway, it was not fun to be their neighbors because they would roll into your village and find all your acne-free teenage boys and ritually kill them. They killed a lot of other people as sacrifices too. There was a lot of death. So when the Spanish showed up with their horses and their guns, a lot of people were all for them taking the Aztecs out of power. La Malinche, being enslaved by the Aztecs, I imagine would have had plenty of reason to want them out of power as well. Because of her role in the Conquest and her profound impact on history, she appears as a Goddess, and of the three faces, hers is the most prominent. 

Finally, the panel at the far left shows two Goddesses representing different religious traditions in Mexico: The form of the Aztec Tierra Madre (Mother Earth), Tonantzin is visible in the mountains. She is lying down with two legs bent, her knees forming the tops of the mountains. 

In the sky is La Virgen Guadalupe, who appeared in 1531, ten years after the conquest and performed miracles such as healing and making roses grow on a barren hilltop. Some theorize that perhaps she was fabricated by the Spanish to encourage the people of Mexico to convert to Catholicism, as she was a Virgin like the Virgin Mary, but was a Mexican woman. Either way, she has a very devout following in Mexico to this day. Her image is everywhere. There is even a water mark in the subway of Mexico city that is shaped like her. It has a little shrine around it. I visited the water mark Virgen de Guadalupe when I was in Mexico City! She shows up on toast sometimes too, and trees, and stuff like that.

In our Mural, La Virgen is surrounded by cherubs at her feet whose faces are Rolando's grandchildren. He added them in as a hidden personal touch. These two goddesses together represent the meeting and co-existing of these different traditions in Modern Mexico. The Conquest was in so many ways a period of conflict and cultural upheaval in Mexico, but the fusion of Spanish and Mexican cultures really made the country what it is today-- diverse and colorful. I remember Rolando telling me that the "New World" need not refer to the Mexico that the Spanish "found" but the one was created when the civilizations combined.

Creating this mural was incredibly eye opening and fascinating to me. I consider myself very lucky to have gotten to work with him. He is an amazingly talented artist and a living encyclopedia of Mexican History and Art History. He also had many fascinating stories about his life-- I remember just sitting in his studio listening to everything from Flamenco guitar to Justin Timberlake while we painted and he talked about life and art and history. Basically, it totally rocked and I am so very thankful for the experience.