Wednesday, February 17, 2016

Things Far Away

In Finland With Carina Granlund (Above)
In Germany With Susanna Lakner( Above)
I feel like I’ve made this post over and over again, but I’m still amazed that I can make something in my house in Winston and send it all around the world. That person will then open up their mailbox, take possession of the item, and send back a picture of the work in their home. It’s still amazing to me and I’ve been sending things in this fashion for five or six years.

Wednesday, February 3, 2016

Making Cam Newton 8 x 10 Collages

I’ve been on a crazy making run of late. I haven’t been doing much “music” or even writing, just a lot of trashy collages. A friend in Virginia enlisted me to create a couple of collages of iconic musicians. The three collages were painfully simple and focused almost solely on the power of the figure. I created a David Bowie one, a Joe Strummer one, and Woody Guthrie. There was little to them except for the image…just some paint and a lot of layer of mod-podge to make them shine. They look neat (I’m glad he liked them) but it wasn’t something that required a lot of thought on my part.
This is something that comes up over and over again. I have two different modes for my trashy collages, I have the ones that I like, the ones that are painfully “messed up” where the figure slides to the background, and I have ones where the figure is right up front. No one cares about the more abstract ones. I honestly can’t give them away. The really simple ones I reserve mostly for my friends kids. I dial back the strange and highlight their child in the foreground. Only once in a while do I make something completely asinine out of their child’s image and I only do those after I’ve sent a handful of other collages. Some parents are more inclined to enjoy a picture of their child with someone else’s body riding a tank down a European city more than others. It’s honestly easy to pick out these people.
On a whim last weekend, I decided to make some Carolina Panthers themed 8x10 collages. It was a mix of the worked and a mix of the obvious. The background has a little abstraction to it but the eye gravitates to the wonderful Cam Newton. At the very top of the image is a line reading, “Fuck All Y’all” that was inspired by all the idiotic shit the MVP quarterback has had to put up with this season. Why not a little grit?
The trick was to see if people were interested in the subject or the art behind it. When I posted the image I wrote that I’d give away as many of these as I could. Honestly, if 50 people wanted them I was going to make 50 of them. Each one costs me about two dollars in materials so it isn’t a big deal. The eight people who raised their hands and were interested are big Panthers fans. Mostly they’re people I watch the games with every weekend- people that I’ve watched with for the past six or seven years. In the end I made 12 of them, kept one for myself, and have three left over. I’m hoping that I only need to mail one of these to keep my costs low. I doubt I’ll see any donations from my meager effort. Each one took about an hour or so of creation time and they were a lot of fun to make. It would be nice to see where people end up putting these and how public that spot actually is. Foul language is a little bit of a deterrent for most people.