Lessons in Eccentricity

June 29, 2006

Being at the International Sculpture Conference in Cincinnati last week gave me the opportunity to meet and learn about some artists I hadn’t known about before. Chakaia Booker, who makes sculpture out of tires, was the keynote speaker. This piece was in the Carl Solway Gallery, but I actually like her larger installation pieces better, and you can see them on her website.

Everywhere Chakaia goes, she wears these crazy wrapped outfits that she sculpts on her body every morning, so anytime she’s at an event you cannot miss her. She also wrapped string and yarn around her ankles and wears bracelets made out of tire material. That’s Robert next to her, although he’s not an artist but a collector, he also shows up at events wearing fantastic pink suits and matching glasses. Talk about making me feel like a plain jane. Just when I was getting started on building my black wardrobe….now I’m thinking I should get more eccentric.

Robert also wore hand-painted artist-signed shoes that day. He took one off so I could get a better photo. I have a black pair of Dansk like this, so when I get some free time, I think I’ll turn them into cartoon shoes. Wouldn’t it be funny to paint cartoon toes on them, like you were seeing inside the shoes? Maybe a couple of toe rings…nah, feet are too hard to draw. I’d rather do faces.

Before the conference I was reading an article about Nick Cave’s “Sound Suits,” so was happy to see an especially good one at the Solway gallery. I’m always telling people I don’t do wearable art, but this might be enough to change my mind.

The surface of the suit is covered with all sorts of textures and techniques — weaving, needlepoint, beads, sequins, who would think sequins could be so great?! — Somehow he makes them all work together.

Here’s as eccentric as I get. I wear goofy watches and honey-bee earrings. I bought these a couple of years ago at Thomas Mann’s studio/gallery in New Orleans. It was nice to catch up with him at the conference — his studio on Magazine Street survived, and he’s put together an exhibition of art in response to the Hurricane Katrina that will be traveling to 10 museums.

Speaking of bees, a big Bee showed up at a party at Pat Renick’s studio on Friday night. Pat is a teacher, mentor, and cheerleader for the sculpture community in Cincinnati. Something like 200 people showed up for the party, and Pat hired Cincinnati police officers to escort people to and from their cars.

Pat always wears black, and almost always wears a black hat, so when she’s not wearing the hat, she has hat hair. She’s done inspired things like make big dinosaur sculptures out of VW bugs and helicopters. Here’s an interview and photos of her work from Sculpture magazine.

Even though Pat threw the party, she didn’t know that Mr. Bumblebee would appear to present a special gift from the Studio B artists. Everyone loves Pat, so it was a touching moment.

Some other artists at the conference that raised my eyebrows — James Croak wasn’t eccentric looking, but he gave an articulate and witty presentation of his work. He makes figurative sculptures out of dirt. And he had entertaining stories about Enron guys buying his sculptures about sin and corruption.

Saya Woolfalk put on an interesting presentation. She does paintings and performance art influenced by Japanese cartoons, how can I not be interested in someone who sews their art? We also met Nikki Blair, who did some scooters for a North Carolina Museum exhibit we admired last year.

Since I was dragging one of my quilts around all weekend, I had a chance to show it to lots of people. Nikki said my quilt was “groovy” which I consider a high compliment, and one that I can’t say I’ve gotten before. That’s one thing that’s good about making art quilts — have quilt, will travel. Most the sculptors I met last week couldn’t say that!

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Studio B Opening

June 23, 2006

The opening at the Studio B Sculpture Invitational was a great success and the buzz of the International Sculpture Conference. Probably between 400-500 people showed up throughout the night. I’ve posted some more great photos of the opening on RuBert Studios blog, but will post more about the conference later. Between the conference, all the parties and shows, I need a nap!

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Urban Camping Deluxe

June 22, 2006

Just so you know, urban camping in an old warehouse isn’t bad, in fact it can be a lot of fun. I found an IGA near here with a little sushi stand inside. The sushi man makes it fresh everyday, so I pick some up for lunch. I actually cleaned off my “desk” so we could eat dining room style.

Russ got romantic and built us what he calls a little “urban campfire” using a scrap piece of neon. Maybe he’s getting ready for our anniversary which is this Sunday. Can you see the clock in the upper left corner? It says 2 o’clock. Is it a.m. or p.m.? Who knows, we’ve actually been working until 2 a.m. for the last two nights and so maybe that’s why our eyes are all squinty. Luckily I brought about 100 music cd’s to play for driving and working!

Cindra asked how I can work and travel at the same time. Actually, I have a dirty little secret that I have a “day job,” but I don’t like to talk about it here, because this is my “art adventure” blog. I also manage some office and industrial property, but with the blessings of cell phone technology and some pre-planning, I can work on the road. Besides being a master-neon-glass-holder and art-studio-caterer, I am also working on getting two air-conditioning units repaired, roof replacements bid, and contract janitorial calls! No wonder my eyes are all squinty! Actually I think bouncing around between art and business make me more creative, as much as I hate to admit it. I hope it does for Lisa too.

The sculptures were done late last night, and the conference started today. The opening at Carl Solway Gallery and the Studio B Sculpture Invitational opens tonight in about an hour. Hope there’s a good turn out, and we get lots of good photos…

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Urban Camping

June 20, 2006

If you’re wondering where I am (and I’m sorry, won’t be able to answer questions from my last post until I get home next week) — I’m in Studio B which is an old warehouse that houses artist studios Over-The-Rhine in Cincinnati. As you can see here, I’ve already built a little office using a metal box and some old paneling that I found on the first floor of the building and brought upstairs using the freight elevator.

I always wanted to live in a loft and have one of these elevators, very chic I thought. It was a lot of fun running the elevator, until I clobbered my knee because I forgot that the outside door comes together in the middle from the top AND the bottom — you gotta be careful around industrial stuff like that.

There’s an active group of sculptors who organized the Studio B Invitational Show that will open in conjuction with International Sculpture Conference on Thursday. Just before we left town, Russ printed out some big banners that lists the 50 sculptors in the show. The graphics were done by Joell Angel-Chumbley and Celene Hawkins, both show organizers and participating artists.

We’ve been here for three days, installing another series of Russ RuBert Positronic Neon sculptures. It’s been fun working in this pretty raw environment that the Studio B artists have prepared for the show. There’s a lot of creative energy, with sculptures showing up every day.

Some sculptures are just sited, others require lots of work to install. Here’s Celene Hawkins creating and installing her work based on tweasel plants and urban environments being reclaimed by nature.

Nathan Hamilton has also spent more than three days installing the work “Observations of Human Creativity.” It’s made of 460 clear film canisters lined with photographs that he’s googled on the internet using the term “ART” with qualifiers such as bad, good, and tacky. The canisters are lit from the inside with little LEDs that make the photos glow, so there are oodles of wires to string and organize. It’s really beautiful and interesting — I’d love to have a Christmas tree covered with his work.

This is a detail of an installation by Robert McConaughy who owns Mac’s Farm and Sculpture Center which was just featured in Sculpture magazine. It’s made from twine and smells great. The floor isn’t part of the sculpture, it’s left over from the inventory system of a sporting goods factory that once operated in this building.

Here’s the outside of the building. Looks a little rough because it is. The light gray building is the Carl Solway Gallery which sells contemporary sculpture to international collectors, so appearances can be deceiving. I like driving around Cincinnati because they have tons of beautiful old buildings (better looking than these, but many are also sadly neglected).

I call it urban camping, because although we are staying in a friend’s beautiful house near the University of Cincinnati, we spend most our time in the Studio B gallery. I brought our own toilet paper (although that wasn’t necessary since the facilities are more than adequate) and we’ve had to be creative, spreading cream cheese on bagels using scissors because someone forgot to bring a knife.

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Fabric Portfolios Finished!

June 17, 2006

Well, here it is after weeks of labor in the PaMdora sweatshop (I sweating have I been, over a hot iron without aircon in the studio). And golly, that stack must be at least 3.5 inches high! Actually it would have been more like 4.5, but I’ve already mailed two off. The rest I’m going to take to Cincinnati with me, because next week the International Sculpture Conference will be there and you just never know who you might see!

In case you haven’t been following the entire process through my blog, I’ve been making little fabric-covered printed portfolios of my work. If the sculpture truck doesn’t leave any minute, I’ll try to post photos of the contents.

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Fabric Portfolios 3

June 12, 2006

Here’s the front of my new book. I’m glad so many of you told me to leave off the bindings, because that’s the direction I was already working. Actually, I’m not opposed to bindings, you’ll notice that I put funky stripey bindings on most of my big quilts. But you’re right, for such a small project the bindings were taking too much space and time. It’s a lot easier to leave them off, and leaves as much space as possible for the design.

Here’s the back. I thought about doing some kind of fancy embroidery technique for the thread, and then thought naw… Maybe you can already tell that there’s a little less angst and a little more humor in this design. Oh, and look….

Here’s me on a diet, ha ha!

Actually, when I made my first hands covers, I forgot to flip the arm for the backside. I redid that, then laid them out on the table and realized that the arms weren’t symmetrical. So I remade them again because I thought it was funnier. What I won’t do for a joke? Now I have three arms too many. Everyone should have this problem.

Now I hesitate to show you this, because there was such a good response to the extreme cropping in my last design. But I’m also working on trying to make PaMdora smaller for another project, and this seemed like a good way to experiment.

Now if I can only figure out how to make her arm wrap logically (in a cartoon sense of the word) around the book. What do you think? It could be fun, and maybe I could have the best of both ideas.

Here’s a photo of this ghostly image inside the front cover. What a surprise! Of course I could have just stopped with an earlier design for the portfolios and laid out a little assembly line to mass produce something, but I’m having too much fun experimenting right now. And I wouldn’t have found out interesting things like this. Omega sent me this link for Alice Kettle who she says works backwards. Hmmm, me thinks this bears some more investigation.

I like that these are small projects that take only a few hours as opposed to a hundred, and I still end up with something that I can use rather than throw on the scrap pile.

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Fabric Portfolios 2

June 11, 2006

You guys are great! I knew when I got stuck, that I would get lots of suggestions if I posted my work-in-progress. And you all really came through. Thanks for all the great ideas. This weekend I changed my approach completely - dropping the binding and doing a pillow-case finish on the covers.

It helped speed things up, because I’m really not that great at bindings. Actually I don’t consider myself very good at precision sewing, so I have to design around that. For these two books, I played around with some extreme cropping to keep PaMdora’s face the size I normally make it.

Designing these books is a completely different way of thinking - it’s not just how it looks from the front, but the whole experience as you turn the pages, right to the very end. I love the way the backside of the cover looks after quilting her face. Sometimes I think the backsides of my quilts are more interesting than the front, and here’s a chance to take advantage of that.

On each side, I’m using different fabrics and threads, for a little surprise and to make the viewer want to turn it over and examine every surface. Without the bindings, the books (which by the way, are 7″ x 9″) have a very nice feel to them. The covers are simple and soft. I’m using scrylic felt as the middle layer, because it has the same appearance as batting, but it’s a little bit stiffer.

The funny thing was, after I finished these two books, I showed all of them to Russ and he said, well I still like the one with the bird on the cover (photo in the previous post). He said, it reminds me of one of those things you set pans on. I told being called a potholder is not considered a compliment in the art quilt world. He said he thought that didn’t matter, that they were appealing that way.

So what do you think? Go back to putting bindings around all the edges? Today I started three more books with different designs, but none of them have bindings either - except for the spine. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll get them done.

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Fabric Portfolios

June 8, 2006

I’ve been making little books for two weeks. The covers are fabric but the insides are paper. I got started doing this because I was asked by a curator to send information about my quilts, and I’m worried about sending photographs to someone who’s never seen the real thing. I don’t think the photos tell the whole story.

So I’m trying to design a printed portfolio that has a quilted cover. Just to give someone a real clue what the work is all about — what the fabrics are like, what the construction is like, what the colors are really like.

It took quite a while to design the fourteen interior pages with photos of my quilts, details of quilts, a brief resume, artist’s statement, and bio, and some photos of people reacting to the work at exhibitions. In my experiments, I only tried sewing 12 pages, but the final version got to be fourteen (didn’t want to stop at 13). I was a little worried about sewing 14 pages, two covers, and binding, but it seemed to work okay.

I’m having trouble with the cover design though. The covers are stitched with varigated King Tut thread, so maybe I should just leave them plain. But I keep trying to put add things on the cover. I thought about doing my name, but that seemed too obvious and boring to cut out. Then I thought about being more cryptic and just having objects on the cover. I think the problem here is I used the same fabric for the blue bird as the border — boring! And maybe there’s too many musical notes.

Then I thought of using my initials, PR, ha ha. Probably only I would think it’s funny that a monogramed portfolio would have the intials PR. So then I thought of just P. P for Pam, P for PaMdora. But here it looks like something a cheerleader would wear.

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I feel like a Genius today

June 7, 2006

Monday the Uncommon Threads museum show came down, and I got this quilt back. I didn’t have time to take a proper photo of it before the show. Since my work has been getting bigger, it’s getting harder to photograph, and when Lisa Call posted photos of her portable photo wall, I started thinking about building a photo wall in my studio.

Before today, I had one of my design boards on a painting easel. It was sort of rickety, but worked for the smaller pieces. A quilt this big would have hung way over the edges, and probably knocked the whole system over.

Here’s my brain storm. I have these design boards made out of 4′ x 8′ insulation boards, framed with wood, and wrapped in flannel. I move them around and lean them against walls as needed. Actually they are 4′ x 7′ because I had to cut off one foot so they would fit underneath the lights in my studio. It just so happens that 4′ x 7′ is the same size as some metal shelves that I got at Sam’s.

Here’s the good part — we moved the shelves out to the middle of the room, and screwed the design boards to the back of the shelves (this was easy because the shelves have slots for adjustable shelves all up and down the supporting legs). Then I covered the boards with another layer of flannel to hide the split between the two boards. And look, moving the shelves freed up the wall in my paint/dye area for something else!

Don’t you just love it when something works so well? Maybe it’s because I’ve been getting up early for 6 a.m. yoga, and riding my bike to class instead of driving. It really makes me feel energetic, especially when there is left-over steak and potatoes in the frig for breakfast when I get home.

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Illustration Friday: Portrait — Pounds for Sculpture

June 3, 2006

I know know why I had artist’s block last week. The idea for this self-portrait was blocking everything else out, so I finally bowed to my compulsion to illustrate Russ’s installation at Grounds for Sculpture last month. As he worked his gizmo magic on his neon-aluminum sculptures, my job was to remain on stand-by as my great talent for holding things in mid-air while he decides what to do is only rarely called upon. (Although I did actually install some screws.)

So in the meantime, I ate. Hence I have dubbed the place Pounds for Sculpture. The first day we were there, the curators fed us donut holes for breakfast. What is it about New Jersey? People there seem to love their Dunkin’ Donuts. That same afternoon, the assistant for Lin Emery came to install a beautiful sculpture — the stainless steel modules twisted and turned in the slightest breeze. It was mesmerizing to watch, like watching waves on the ocean. Except I still can’t help making some silly joke about contemporary sculpture and donuts.

There was a cafe downstairs… wonderful roasted eggplant sandwiches, pastries, cappuccino, meringues, and quiche made with brie — can you get any richer than that? There was also my daily run to Starbucks for Green Tea Frappuccinos, my latest craving. And of course, Blow Pops, but I’ll save that story for another day. Looking through the window of the gallery is a peacock– there were several on the grounds — curious, pompous and watching with all their eyes.

So the drawing is of me, sitting on a little wooden box pulled up to a big green bench. When I wasn’t eating, I was working on my laptop. We were there five long days, and the GFS curators laughingly began to call it my “office.” But you can see it was really my dining room table!

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