Week 32 of 48

Remember waaaay back when I talked about some collages I had started? Time to share a few of them! I haven’t done them in several months, but picked them up again in recent weeks and showed them to one of the visiting artists for the first time. In case you forgot, I was cutting pieces out of Time and Vogue magazines back in April. Here are a few of the resulting collages.

the only rule is that each must contain at least one image from Vogue and one image from Time

so far they have evolved to come in these two forms

I am trying to fill a sketchbook with them

I'm nowhere close to being half way through the book, so I better get working!

Hopefully there will be many more of these to come

please pardon the bad lighting in these photos...

Oh, and the home studio I built where all of this collaging is happening

and hopefully more drawing too...

Week 13 of 52

I realized recently that I am not going to be here for 52 weeks! I looked at my contract and saw that I am only scheduled for 11 months, not 12!! I haven’t taken the time to actually count out the weeks, but I should be able to update the number to something a little more accurate soon. Anyways, on with the real entry… Given that a big part of what makes living here difficult for me is isolation from the rest of the world, it is changing my work. Aside from the problems I have making it to studio and getting work done, the place is changing the work itself and how I think about it. In fact, I’ve apparently started a whole new project based on this isolation. Other than the internet (which I don’t use for news), my only contact with media of any type is through magazines. I have a subscription to Time, which I never read—I only flip through headlines—and the slew of fashion magazines I purchased at the beginning of my stay in order to build the advertising porn wall in studio. These two sources are essentially the only way I have any idea what is going on outside Johnson, VT (weeks or months after the fact—did you know there was a volcano in Iceland? And that military inspired fashion is in?). And of course they are highly edited, specialized and tailored to specific audiences—demographics which I probably fit perfectly. Somehow these media staples, my only lifeline beyond the village of Johnson, came to represent the “real world“ and it was suddenly important to do something with them. So I’ve been working on “mash up“ collages, combining images and symbols from both. I work on them fairly brainlessly, which is great these days when I can’t push my own anxiety aside long enough to think through a whole project. I’m not ready to share any of the actual collages, but they have taken over our living room at home (since there is no space for them in studio) and occasionally get spread through the house with the help of Penny.

taking over the living room...

body parts...

heads and faces

the language of hands and arms

For a while I thought about just building a catalog of parts. I wanted to go through one entire issue of Vogue and cut out all the flesh… In the end I decided against it, because while I would find it to be a fascinating study, I’m not sure anyone else would care and what would I do with it after that? It may still happen anyways if I get sick of the collaging… I’m only sharing about half the pieces collected out of Vogue so far and nothing from Time, but once I’m ready to share some actual collages, you’ll get a better sense of how they end up working together.