Rarely do I experience visions. But I can’t recall what was probably a long and tortuous path to this one. It feels like it just occurred to me, fully formed. I am sure that’s not what happened here.
Ants on a log—isn’t that what they call celery with peanut butter and raisins?
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| Close up |
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| Even closer close up |
What does it all mean that I had the urge to make this? First off, lots of people have lots of artistic urges. Almost none get made, thank god! The teacher in me knows that’s true. In 30 years of teaching, I have witnessed over and over again students imagining they had an idea only to find out that they were metaphorically (or literally!) drunk at the time and in the cold light of day, the so-called-idea evaporates into nothing. Zero times zero always =0. Such a bummer! But such is the creative process. If this happens to you, it’s not a malfunction, it’s not a sign you aren’t talented or whatever, it’s par for the course. It really should be happening. Those who mistake every idea for an idea are, well, either very lucky or just terrible and maybe they don’t know it.
Why is it so important to have this sense of complete and total urgency? Because it’s damn hard to escape the force of gravity here on earth that demands you spend your time doing just about anything else.
For me, only the most urgent of urges get acted upon in the studio. What that means is that some idea seems incredibly important to make. So terribly important I can’t ignore it or explain it or find anything else more compelling. At the time (which must be sustained for a month or two) it must be the most compelling idea ever. I can’t have competing ideas.
I can really never state a pat reason why anything should gain this level of urgency, it’s very intuitive. Sometimes upon reflection, often after the piece is finished or well underway do I gain any insight on why it seemed so important. Maybe it relates to some event in my life I am processing—whatever. The point here is that it doesn’t just seem important, but really, really important! Important enough that I can pierce the atmosphere of the earth and go into orbit for the duration of the mission.
That happened with the bugs on a log.
If someone was torturing me and I had to come up with a nice package of conceptual scaffolding to get the waterboarding to stop, I might say something about the cycle of life and the bugs are eating the rotting log. And the fact that I wanted to make this design into an endlessly repeating tile is not just about my strong preference for the decorative arts, but also because I am hoping the cycle of life is infinite.
I could also say something about how much insects give me the creeps.
Beetles, fwiw, are also a motif I can endlessly recombine into endless variations—which is something I like to do and have done with flowers and birds and butterflies. They are the same but different and from a design perspective that makes for a lot of fun playtime for me. Without which, ain't nothing gonna happen.
As for what’s the final product here, well, that’s a good question. I’m not entirely sure. I intended this as a sketch for a stained glass piece—but for that I need not get all fancy and color it and make the drawings pretty. So, at some point I decided to make a really worked up digital version to play with. This was done taking ball point pen doodles:
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Ballpoint doodles and making pencil sketches of each one to eliminate all the crap and to nicely shade them: |
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Fancy shmansky pencil stuff
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Pencil
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Colored in PShop
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I input this pencil stuff into Photoshop and colored everything. Then I collaged them together.
I don’t know why I want to make repeating tiles so badly, but I do. This has been going on for about eight or so years and lots of my designs tile even if you can’t immediately tell. And even if I don’t output them as wallpapers or fabrics or whatnot. I just want them to tile! Maybe it’s because I want to potentially make yardage. Maybe it’s because I have always admired MC Escher.
About the “potential yardage” thing. I have been asked many times if I would please open a merch store. This may or may not happen. Personally, I am happy knowing these designs exist as potential yardage. I kind of fancy the idea of becoming a designer of hankies and having people blow their nose into my artwork. Sometimes I have Spoonflower.com print me out a yard, sometimes I don’t. I have made wallpaper in the past that was available for sale though my gallery (claireoliver.com) and it didn’t sell. Yeah—the price was prohibitive for many people which is an issue when print-on-demand meets my gallery agreement. And that’s the choke point here.
As for the “final product”:
I have three digital versions. One is two
endless repeating vertical “logs” (as seen in the video above):
and the third is a single (not repeating) image of bugs on a log:
The third one may someday inspire a stained glass piece. But it will end up very different than the digital version—especially in terms of color. And there there’s the ever perplexing drama (for stained glass artists anyway) of where to put the lead lines?
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| How the pros do it |
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