Itsy-Bitsy Spider: Artist book, Pop-Up

This was an artist book I made and turned in today as my final project for Artist books: Pop-Up.

The class was a great learning experience and difficult, but rewarding. It was taught by Instructor Susan Lowdermilk. She is an amazing artist who is a print-maker and artist's book maker.

Also, she will be my Instructor next term and will be teaching Intaglio printmaking.
Furthermore, she promised to teach me mezzotint printmaking which makes me so happy I am spinning in circles in my chair as I write this.

For now, here is my artist book, called Itsy-Bitsy Spider. I didn't write it, just illustrated it.

The itsy-bitsy spider climbed up the water spout.

Down came the rain and washed the spider out.

(The spider comes down the spout by pushing down on the tab in the previous panel.)

Out came the sun and dried up all the rain.

And the itsy-bitsy spider climbed up the drain again.

I didn't get photos of the title, ending, and front and back covers, but I can upload them later.

Bike Garden 1

Here is the finished maquette of my project. I was supposed to use wire to create an object at least 12 inches high and I was to express form and movement.

The object now sits--with the rest of the students finished work--in the display case in the LCC art building.

I love how an idea can form in one's head (imagination) and then it can be put down on paper (creativity) and manipulated, and finally it can be turned into a 3-dimensional object.
Thought becomes form.
I never get this same sense when I make 2 dimensional work such as a drawing or painting; it is exclusive to sculpture.

A Pelvic Bone or a Grotesque Face?

Although this acrylic painting on cardboard looks like some sort of grotesque face it is actually a painting of an animal's pelvic bone.

I did the painting in my Introduction  to Painting class. The warmer color is from the brown of the cardboard and I used black acrylic paint for the dark and white paint for the highlights.

My Instructor, Adam Grosowski, is an awesome painter and teacher and he is making us do a lot of value studies in graphite (slide sketches) and in acrylic paint. He says that most anything can be rendered in ones, fives, and tens on the value scale. One is black, five is gray, and 10 is white.

The two paintings on the right are an interesting comparison. The one on the left I did in 45 minutes and it is on the brown side of the cardboard. After I finished, Adam said that I needed to take a detail of  the painting and blow it up and do another painting-- only this time I needed to do it in a 15 minute time frame. (I did it on the white side of another piece of cardboard.)

The interesting part, to me, is that one painting took 45 minutes and one took 15 minutes and yet they are comparable and the 15 minute painting doesn't at all look crappy even though I was racing the clock.

This also was the experience of the rest of the class.

 

I am learning a lot and after every class I feel as though I am walking out a better artist. Next term I have Adam Grosowsky as my Instructor in Intermediate Drawing and I can't wait!

The Intruder Series and The Suicide Portraits

This drawing, "The Intruder" is one of a series of drawings that I did during a very dark period of my life.

My wife and I were living in Vancouver, Washington. We had moved in order to buy a house, but neither of us realized how much difference it would make, moving just across the river.

My wife needed the car for work and I felt stuck in that ugly, toothless city. You can't even get a good cup of coffee over there and it seems like the only dog allowed in Vancouver is the pit bull. I remember the flat blocks and run down houses surrounded by chain link fences and the Cash Connection on the corner. Everything had a cheap dollar store feel to it.

I saw less and less of my wife and she would often come home crying. I asked her what was going on and she said it was just some sort of mid-life crisis. She was in her early thirties, so I took her word for it--after all I had went through my own life-transitions.

She began to drift away from me and I could feel it, but I didn't know what to do. We had once been so close we called ourselves "soul-mates" and we were the envy of our friends and family.

I turned to drawing and painting. The drawing above, the one with the dark silhouette and fly, is one of the first of the Intruder Series. It felt as if I was an unwilling psychic--I saw a series of images in my mind's eye: my wife and I in bed while leering men looked in at us through the bedroom window; our house on fire and a gorilla breaking through the front door; strange men standing on the front lawn of our house with the impassive, thoughtless faces of zombies, and the blow-fly buzzing around and crawling over everything.

I didn't know what it all meant because the images were coming from the damp-deep-down in the well of my psyche and not from my conscious mind. The images were disturbing and I didn't always draw them. I didn't want to see.

I didn't see much of her in those days and so I often drew her back or drew her sleeping beside me. I was trying to hold on to her--I realize that now. The drawing to the right is one of my drawings of her as she rushed off to who knows where. I think the caption written on the drawing says it well--"Always on the go."

When the housing market crashed we lost the house in Vancouver and moved back to Portland. Not long after that I discovered the truth of what was going on, and finally, reluctantly I left her and our two cats and headed for Eugene, Oregon.

When I first got to Eugene I was living in the basement of a friends house and whenever the dark fingers of suicide reached out for my throat I turned to drawing. I did a series of nearly 50 self portraits that I call The Suicide Portraits. I was looking for myself in the dark and my pen was the flashlight.

Now I am going back to school to earn myself a Fine Arts Degree but I will never forget how the ugly truth surfaced in my artwork like a bloated corpse rising to the surface of a swamp and how I drew my way through the dark tunnel of suicide by finding my face in the dark.

To the right is one of the Suicide Portraits.