Plague Makings

I hate when people start talking about the plague around me. I hate having to listen to people speculate widely about things no one seems to know. I’ve heard the crackpot theories from students, right-wing nutjobs, and overly paranoid friends who have trouble controlling the basic facts of reality. I’ve heard the milder versions, the somewhat grounded versions, but they’re still just people a stab in the dark. If you’re not one of those people, your someone who thinks they’ve already had it and are convinced because they coughed once in February. Because it’s the thing on everyone’s mind, they feel the need to talk about it. I never want to talk about it, I never want to hear about it, I never want to read about it. The information I got right at the start of all this craziness is pretty much all I know, and all I’m going to know. I know to stay away from people, wash hands, and buy toilet paper. Anything momentous will be relayed to me in due time. Oh, there’s one more, try and keep Misty’s anxiety at bay by always being super calm.

Right in the middle of the spring semester, my work transitioned to all online classes. This wasn’t much of a big deal to me since I had taught all my current classes online, before. Two of them were already online. Basically, I slid some things over from past semesters, added a couple of activities, and viola, I was teaching from my dining room table. I did this for two months. For four hours I sat grading papers and answering emails. After lunch, I’d continue grading if there was something pressing, if not, I’d randomly check my email until dinner.

The early afternoon was for making things upstairs. Upstairs is where I do all my tape collages. In just a few weeks of this schedule, my collages started to back up. I had stacks and stacks of envelopes that I needed to send out. They didn’t go out because my stamp order didn’t come in for three weeks (one made to “save” the USPS) and I ended up not leaving my house for two weeks straight, like not once. During this time, I was consistently sending to mail-artists and a lot to my friends and family. I sent to friends and family two or three times a week, mostly in jokes and cards making fun of myself. I have almost 60 people on my “friend list” so…a lot of mail. The friend list is different from the mail-art list because I rarely get anything in return…separate book and everything. Every morning, I’d set out a pile of small envelopes (no post office = no big packages) out front, and slowly but surely, the piles started to dwindle. I alternated piles, one day I’d send to mail-artists and the next I’d send a card with my face on it to friends. 

9x12 Tape Collages 

A side note, now that I’m away from access to a fast printer and can’t made add and pass sheets and broadsides, I can’t send them. All my reserves of these items are completely depleted. Now that I’m not sending out add and passes, I’m not getting a lot of them. This could be a way out for many people. As a side-side note, the mail is trickling in. I can see some change in the amount I’m getting, and that’s a lot less. Not much from out of the country, a few from Germany in the past two months, but that’s pretty much it. Many postal systems in Europe are completely closed at this moment. I notice this when I’m getting the mail out of the box, but not when I’m sending. I might be mailing a lot of envelopes into the oblivion, left in postal purgatory for months on end. Hopefully, this is what happens to me, one day I open the mailbox and see dozens of envelopes. Chances are they’ll be returns.

When the smaller envelopes started to pile on my desk, envelopes filled with paper collages, tape collages, and random sticker paper pictures I took in my backyard, I decided to switch gears. No more smaller tape transfers! I switched the upstairs production to larger tape collages on 9x12 watercolor paper. The paper I splashed some paint on outside (more about this later) and then collected them in even more piles, upstairs. I’d rip the images, make the transfers, and then fill up my table with the sticky images. From there I’d tape down a couple pieces of painted watercolor paper, and then put something together. As the weeks went by, my collection of the larger 9x12 collages, along with others I’d been collecting over the past couple of years, grew. I have 30-40 of these in a portfolio book upstairs. In the back of my head I started to think about a show…display these somewhere. Then I thought about where to make that happen, the amount of work it would take, and the relative disappointment that would inevitably come from it. I don’t even know where you’d send that email that no one would read? I’m convinced, I’m going to do it. 

9x12 Tape Collage on Watercolor Paper 

Now I’m just listing…this is a thematic mail-art (ish) post. For a month straight, I made a video every day that I texted and posted online. Some of them were just a few seconds long and took no time to put together, while some of them I filmed myself doing various things and wrote and sang a little song to go with them. The first of these songs seemed the most interesting to my friends, it was about cutting my neighbors’ bushes. I made them for a couple weeks after that, to dwindling interest. This dwindling interest coincided with my own lack of interest in making them. There’s a couple more I need to make, but I think I’m pretty much done with those. One of my activities in the coming weeks is to try and get the best of these videos on YouTube.

Outside is for painting, mostly spray-painting. Most of my outside making endeavors involve one of two things, backings for collages and children’s board books. For the backings, I like to keep things somewhat simple, at least for the smaller bingo cards. I like to only use one or two colors, so I don’t overpower the layer of tape on top. The backings for the bigger collages, the 9x12’s have a lot more colors on them. I also go for randomness with these. Sometimes I press the paper on drying paint and see what comes up. When I put tape to these collages, I usually work with the random colors to make something visually cohesive, more of a composition than a barrage of color, text, and image like on the smaller bingo cards. 

I always spray on these folding tables. 

The board books are a lot of fun to make. I paint two pages each time, and they take a few weeks to complete because of the mass of paint that ends up on them. I’ve made these for a couple years now, and probably have created 40-50 of them that are floating out there. I always write that they’re for add and passes but I doubt they get passed, which is fine by me. I’ve gotten four back, something like that, but if they come back, most of those are done by just one person. I don’t think I’ve gotten one back where a whole bunch of people have added to them. The lighter books made of old envelopes seem to come back at a much higher rate probably because they’re cheaper to mail. For both types of books, I them out and if they don’t come back in a month or two, I’ll never see them again. The process of making them is more fun than me collecting them. Visually I think the board books look neat even if there’s not a lot of variety to them. I embrace chaos with board books, enjoy it even, which allows me to take chances with technique and application. During the plague, I’ve scaled back on making the books, simply because I have 20 of them packaged and ready to mail upstairs.

I’ve also made some stencil items and some pictures with my face on them. The ones of my face I can move around whenever I drop of things to friends houses, the stencil thing…not so much. I think it’s funny, makes me laugh, but I don’t think anyone would want it. I don’t want it. 

These were dropped off on friends' porches.

This line made me laugh.

And lastly, it brings me to these two 8x10 “paintings?” I guess I should call them paintings. The process is simple, a lot of paint, and a lot of different paints, (acrylic, spray-paint, bingo markers, watered down acrylic) stencils, and then repeat whole process. These two came together nicely; better than any other “painting” I’ve made before. My “paintings” all look like a good start but nothing that’s finished. These, with the letters mixed in, appear to at least have a voice even though I know idea what it’s saying. I work within a similar process all the time, tweaking slightly, adding, and taking away. One day, maybe I’ll get something I’m happy with. I’ll probably give them away to anyone who says they want it; the pile of stuff upstairs is starting to get unwieldy. 

They look good enough, I guess? 

The goal for the rest of the plague (the rest of the summer) is to keep making larger tape collages upstairs and attempt to spend more time making paper collages. What some folks can do with just paper and glue is amazing to me, I’m not one of these people. I often end up with crass paper collages, one’s that look like the first memes from the 1980’s on the first photocopier ever made. I like these, but they’re not visually striking. The only outside, in the backyard goal, I have is to finish up two sketchbooks I started on last year. I’m almost done with both, maybe 10-20 pages left. They’re one of those projects that just loom around everything else you’re making. They sit there judging you.