paints and pens, stuff i've made

small ‘exercise’ paintings

small paintings 1-9
Had a bit of a play yesterday, using small (5 x 7 inches…approximately 13 x 18 cm) canvases. I started each one as a pool of two or three colors, allowing them to bleed into each other (or smooshing them together with a brush, if they were thicker) and dry. Then I’d wait until there was a detail that I wanted to paint in…hair, or coils, or round bubble shapes…and let the shape and colors lead the way to a finished image.

These were fun. Didn’t do any planning or trying to determine things in advance. I would just get this idea that I wanted to paint a fragment of knitting…so I’d pick up one of the canvases with a dry blob of paint on it, and start fitting rows of knitting over it, just as though I were making a sweater for a jelly monster. These felt more like studies for bigger paintings.

I do think an artist should actually work in different sizes like small, medium and large. I mean, your head can occupy the small, that size….And big is your body and medium is, I think medium is the hardest to operate because it occupies only part of your body. Like either just from your neck to your knees or from your head to the top of your genitals or, I mean, it’s a weird kind of scale and size.
—Squeak Carnwath, in conversation with John Yau

It seems strange to me, and yet completely right, that the size of the canvas determines my approach to it, and the feeling of the finished work. This particular size I associate with postcards and pocket books…ephemeral things that wink in and out of existence. I don’t feel the need to paint anything sweeping or exhaustive. Don’t need to work layer upon layer, waiting for something to slowly emerge out of all that paint. The need for a narrative, or to arrange several elements together so that they inhabit a small universe within the painting, is absent. I’m happy to paint one small blobby, hilly, lumpen object, without making any references to its past or future. For me these are really about the colors, and the small gestures of mark-making that texture the surface.

About these ads
Standard
aboard the M/V sonofagun, art + design, bookbinding, Inspirations, stuff i've made

Five beasts a week…

Tengu

“There is a kind of lazy pleasure in useless and out-of-the-way erudition.”

—Jorge Luis Borges, from The Book of Imaginary Beings

A-lan

Kris is posting photos on his blog of each and every one of the hand-illustrated mythical beasts in his unique and personal bestiary, Teratologus.

I’m glad he’s finally doing this…there are over 200 beasts in it, and he has painted or drawn them all, as well as compiled as much information as he could about them (and not just from the internet, which is full of incredibly misleading, misinformed, copy-and-paste-from-each-other style research!) Because of the impossibility of reproducing this book with its full-color pages, it can only ever be shared this way. At least a few more people get to see these illustrations…until now it’s been a kind of household treasure that only a handful of friends have ever had the chance to browse.

It was a labor of love for him for at least 15 years…something that he did out of passion, with no other motives or promise of any sort of reward beyond the old-fashioned joys of research and scholarship, and the pleasure of imagining and illustrating each character.

Standard
aboard the M/V sonofagun, Darwin, Australia, life

Surrounded by media whores…

monday interview merged

Monday, 25 February, 2013: Dude and Kris pose together on the back deck of our boat for a photograph taken by Daniel Hartley-Allen, to illustrate a full page interview that was conducted and written up by Alison Bevege, and which appeared in  the NT News’ last Monday Interview section. No promises, but I think this is the last of Kris’ capers in the media for a while, they seemed to be coming fast and furious for a while, there…but we’re lying low from hereon, nose to the grindstone, pulling our heads in, and everything interesting that can possibly be said has been said, now, anyway.

Really, the cat makes the picture…you can imagine what an insufferable princess Dude’s become since he appeared in the paper. It’s gone to his head. :)

Thanks to Alison, for a fast-paced, action-packed write up; and to Dan, for the awesome photo. XX Nat

P.S. Kris’ fourth and last book, Out of Census, was printed in Indonesia late last year; it’s about his escape from Czechoslovakia, and his vagabonding around Europe and India. We only have a few hundred copies of it. If it sounds like something you might enjoy, you can get hold of a copy via Kris’ website, monsoon dervish.

Standard
life

Should be given away at indie booksellers, coffee shops, and places that sell things with bird prints.

Meh, just my luck, this video has been taken off YouTube due to copyright issues…so you can’t even go to YouTube to watch it. So here’s something similar, and hopefully it stays a while.

Standard
journaling + mail art, stuff i've made

Object Enclosed: one (1) pc. “Ear”

fat ear

Paintings are not going too well. Reached a point yesterday when I thought I would explode…some unnameable despair filling me up, making everything I do hateful and wholly despicable.

Finally I squeezed noodles of paint over the problem canvas, and spread the quinacridone magenta around wildly with my hands, obliterating everything I’d done so far…I cried a little, but the rage subsided, and I felt heaps better for having done it. A feeling of calm filled me, but I also felt tired.

To take a break from all this pathetic, anguished (only happens in movies, surely?) painting, I set about making some mail art  for a friend who is also a painter (probably a less angry painter than I am, but who knows, really, what lurks in the hearts of women who paint?) and I started the epistle with this hilarious first page. I should have attached a small magnet to the stapled ear, so that it could be used as a fridge magnet…what a fun idea! Oh well, maybe next time (there’s always the other ear). ;)

I quite like how I’ve managed to bring the two options together harmoniously by “cutting the painting’s ear off”.

Standard
art + design, embroidery and textiles, Inspirations, made with paper, stuff i've made

Why can’t E-day be V-day?

embroidered pop-up valentine
There’s a wonderful chain reaction that happens when something beautiful that someone else has created and shared sets off a string of your own creative sparks. Mini-eco’s pixel heart pop-up sort of did that for me, yesterday. After making the wood-burned valentine card, I had the idea of using embroidery on the same design, so I made this card next.

I cut and scored the card like before, but before popping it up I used a pencil to draw the design (including a small grid of lines in the center for the cross-stitched part…the squares aren’t very regular or precise, but who cares? Not me. :) ) Then I used a bookbinding awl to punch the needle holes, and stitched the design up with 3 strands of DMC stranded embroidery cotton. The whole thing took an hour.
embroidered pop-up valentineSo then I was hooked, right? Because when the gratification is so quick in coming, I can grow an obsession in moments. I got started on a third version of this valentine card (Hey! How about a card where the pop-up has pop-ups?) but didn’t finish because Kris reminded me that I was going to work early the following morning, and I reluctantly put the tools away. But I want to pick up where I left off, this Saturday, and make as many of these versions of Kate’s card as I can think of.

For a mad moment last night, sitting in the dark with my last cigarette before bed, I even wondered “Why can’t Every Day be Valentine’s Day?” and started to think I could make one valentine a day (not just mini-eco’s already much-too-abused pixel heart pop-up design, but all sorts of valentines) for a year, just to see what that might feel like; just to see what focusing on love and friendship everyday for a year—and then sending those 365 love messages out to people—would do.

Life might explode like some amazing hundred-year-rains desert flower. The world might turn over in their dreams, and sigh with love in their sleep. I might get nothing but lazy Facebook messages back: “Hey, Nat, thanks for the heart, soooooo super cute! OMG!” Or nothing at all might happen. Silence. No reaction. Hmm…either way, it’d be an interesting project, no? Maybe the day I get put into a retirement home, that’s what I’ll do for the rest of my time on earth. That and scare children.

Valentine 2005 by Marian Bantjes,

Valentine 2005 by Marian Bantjes,

All of this reminds me of something that the amazing designer, typographer, writer and illustrator Marian Bantjes does on a fairly regular basis. If you aren’t familiar with Bantjes’ work, I highly recommend a visit to her website…this woman is amazing! Her ideas are original and playful…her projects are sometimes wacky, sometimes elegant, but they are always poetic and, in the case of her personal Valentines projects, downright romantic.

I love that she still does a lot of hand-drawn design, lettering, and illustration. I love that there is nothing on the planet that she will not explore in a playful way to create something beautiful and striking (her pixel patterns made with sugar cubes for Stefan Sagmeister, for example.) I love that she only does work that she loves, now…

“She started working as a book typesetter in 1984 and opened her own design firm in 1994 employing up to 12 people. In 2003, she left all of that behind to begin an experiment in following love instead of money, by doing work that was highly personal, obsessive and sometimes just plain weird…”

This is a sample of the 150 hand-drawn Valentines she made in 2007; since then Bantjes has transformed Valentine’s Day into her very own ritualistic way of using her design skills to connect with the people in her life. Her Valentines 2008, Valentines 2009, Valentines 2010, Valentines 2011, and Valentines 2012 are each worth a look. My personal favorite is 2009′s 4 fragments of love letters, in beautiful handwritten calligraphy, that start and end in the middle of a really romantic, loving message…the sort of passionate writing that anyone would want to receive, really…and Bantjes’ recipients will probably spend the rest of their lives sighing over the missing beginning and end parts of the ‘love letter’.

“150 Valentines” by Marian Bantjes, 2007. Pen and ink hand-drawn designs.

Standard
blogs and sites, craftiness, Inspirations, made with paper

Mini-eco’s pixel pop-up Valentine’s cards

'woodburned' valentine card

By far the cutest idea I have come across for a paper-engineered Valentine’s Day card has come from the blog minieco.co.uk by a clever lady named Kate. This 8-bit pixel heart pop-up reminds me of more than just old computer graphics…I can see counted-thread cross-stitch charts, lego, and kids’ wooden building blocks being used to decorate the basic heart shape.

mini-eco's popup pixel valentine's card

Mini-eco is choc-full of gorgeous paper projects like these pop-up Valentine’s Day cards. Each and every one is a must-do for someone who loves playing with paper and sharp objects! ;)
Photo: Kate from mini-eco.co.uk

I made a couple of plain versions, first, using the same sort of brightly colored card used in the original post, just to get the hang of all the cutting and scoring. The first one wouldn’t pop-up properly and, upon closer inspection of how the pop-up thing ‘works’, I found that there was a small error in the cutting and scoring template provided with the tutorial. If you just keep in mind that each vertical cut in the top-half of the heart has to extend down to meet the horizontal scoring line of the previous ‘step’, you will solve the pop-up problem. Another way to think of it is that each vertical line in the top-half of the heart should be three pixels long, not just two (as it’s shown in Kate’s cutting/scoring guide) and that you will have to extend the two-pixel-long cut downward by the length one more pixel…till it meets a horizontal cutting line.

Starting out with Kate’s basic tutorial for the pixel heart, I used a really fabulous Japanese paper that mimics pale wood…it’s so realistic that at first I thought it was just very thinly shaved wood veneer! It even has the fine, hairline streaks of silvery film, like you find in the grain of real wood.

I cut the heart, but didn’t do any folding until after I’d decorated it. I used a dark brown felt-tip marker to do a design that sort of reminded me of wood burning and folk art. I tried to use dots and hatching to give the design some contrast. Then I gently went over some parts with a colored pencil to mimic the slight smoldering that forms around the dark design areas when you use an actual burning tool.

Cut a slightly larger piece of dark burgundy card for the backing, and glued the pop-up card in place. And that was it…easy, and such a pretty card to look at…I have been staring at mine for hours, enjoying its chunky dimensionality and the illusion, from certain angles, of a burned Valentine made from a solid piece of wood. :)
'woodburned' valentine

Standard