Meet the Beetles

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?

 

Bon Appetit! 

Close up

Even closer close up

 

 

ANYWAY….

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:

 

Ballpoint doodles

and making pencil sketches of each one to eliminate all the crap and to nicely shade them: 

Fancy shmansky pencil stuff

 

 I did a separate pencil drawing of the tree trunk. 

Pencil

 

Colored in PShop

 

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):

One is a repeating pattern of bugs on splash marks:

 

 

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?

How the pros do it

 

Two drawings

"De-Luxe" click to enlarge

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sometimes a drawing does a mitosis.  (Mitosisizes?)  Well, the thing split itself into two pieces somewhere along the line.

I had this notion to do an old woman barfing.  Yeah, I know, not really a new idea for me...I am deathly phobic of barf, so it always seems a fresh, relevant take on life...especially in these political times.  So I had my usual Photoshop mock up and stuck in a folder for later.  

Old woman barfing rough sketch

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Later turned out to be about a week ago.

Second generation of sketch

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Let's see: along the way a lot of changes happened, things morphed, things stretched, other things contracted...and in the end this was the drawing I made.  In my mind, I was making something about ageing...  I struggled with the barf--mainly I was thinking..."what does this even mean?" and "how will I render barf this time"?  And those two questions killed it for me.  

I guess I had always thought about contrasting an abject action with the signifiers of wealth and power--a rich cloak, embroidered robes, lace and pearls-- you know, when I was a kid going to the Boston MFA, I used to love those Rococo portraits of noblewomen.  Maybe someday, like at my PROM, I can wear a dress like that!  And oooooooooh lookie how well the artist renders silk!  Can I please drown in lace collars, pearls and jewels for one minute of my acne-ed pathetic puberty?

 (I never went to my prom).

And I grew up to understand that art had changed: it had gone from absolute spiritual necessity to flattering those who could afford odious status symbols redolent with signifiers of power.  Ew.  Thanks separation of church and state!  (Just kidding--I love separation of church and state.  But it does do a number on the meaning of art.)

Anyway: I wanted to reference that lacy stuff...I have a long history of drawing princesses and queens.  When I was a child I drew frowning queens all the time--read into that what you will. 

Frowning queen, circa 1966

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 I have done a few frowning queens as an adult too!  So I added a crown and sceptre. I also added a giant sneeze cloud in the first sketch (which is not in the final drawing but if I do decide to make this a window, I will probably include).  Well, everyone these days will see that as a giant cloud of covid spreading itself around and of course, covid is mostly affecting those who are unable to avoid others--and wealthy folks can mostly avoid it, but they are every bit as vulnerable to it as a disease.  Especially if they are older.

 So whole I definitely was thinking here about privilege, about class taking a pratfall--but I was still also thinking about ageing.  I didn't want this to be a piece wherein its easy or simple to hate the powerful and laugh at their downfall just because. I want to depose certain structures more than anything, but dehumanizing your enemy is always going to end up dehumanizing yourself.  So I wanted some sympathy for this character.

I also thought she had the wrong face.  The original face was graceful and beatific--too accepting.  So I changed the face and that's when the mitosis thingie happened.

VERY quickly, I took the old face and stuck it on a body and it was magically just right.  How often does that  happen in the creative process?  JUST. ABOUT. NEVER!!!!  So that was exceedingly pleasant!

And here she is:

Garden for Maria Sibylla Merian

This li’l patch o’ heaven is a repeating design.  I started with a hideous Photoshop template cobbled together from rough sketches.  This I used to generate was I was calling “clumps”—clumps of flowers, basically, but in the arrangement that would eventually tile endlessly according to the template.

There were three flowers clumps and a separate bird drawing and also a separate drawing of rocky soil.

Then I colored them in Photoshop.  My favorite way is to scan them in full color—and my scanner thinks pencils draw in green for some reason, so there’s plenty of weird color information even though the drawings appear more or less black and white to the eyeball.

I use the “selective color” option a lot of the time.  Mostly altering the neutrals and whites.  Just playing around until I sigh with deep and profound happiness.  I love color.  My eyeballs CRAVE color.  Bright, bright, warm color! Lots and lots of it.  But I prefer color relationships to sad lonely isolated colors.

When the coloring was done, I re-tiled the image according to the template.  It did have the teeniest seam…grrr…..which I painstakingly deleted.

What’s it all about Alfie?

The florid profusion of life…the persistent insistence of life on growing despite our best attempts to plasticize the world into a pseudo synthetic ersatzerama of fakedy fakeness.

Have I mentioned before that I barely interact with nature?  Yep: this is what I imagine plant life to be like.  In this way, I have nothing in common with Maria Sibylla Merian 

If you don’t know who she is, for goodness sake, look her up.Details: I was gonna color those birdies but I figured they would totally disappear if I did. So now they get to be ghost birds. Also, they cast a slight shadow on the ground below which helps distinguish them.  Note: I never use the drop shadow feature in the layer menu as every drop shadow looks terrible and very 2-D.As for size, the image is virtual and repeatable. the tile could be as large as, oh, two feet and could be endlessly repeated to infinity. Or smaller...its digital and the files size is ample

 So will this become wallpaper or fabric?  That’s a question I have been getting a LOT.  OK: I have some sort of crazy mental block about actually producing this.  Its not that I don’t want to—its that once the piece is done (and done means the design itself) then I havemoved on to other projects and the very last thing on earth I want to get involved in is figuring out marketing.

YES: I know Spoonflower will set up a shop for you.  My gallery wants to produce wallpaper, but not fabric so perhaps both will happen.

 Details below!:

Axe Murderers

Ok, if you need to get this out of your system first, here's a link to the Monty Python Lumberjack Song
This is a post about a digital image--not a window.  It may become a window someday in some form, but for now, it is an idea for wallpaper.

I had this idea a while back  (do I begin a lot of posts with that line? There's a reason for that...) The idea was to do a chopped down tree--possibly with the person chopping it down.  They could look concerned...a look, perhaps that could say, "why yes, I did read Jared Diamond's book Collapse regarding how civilizations and societies which collapse often do so as the result of ecological pressure, you know, like climate change?? And I did take note of the part which stressed that deforestation is, well, a huge effing problem!"

I did some rudimentary sketches.  Crappy stuff.  Now (endless Covid summer) is a time when I am gathering and consolidating threads to see what going to be a project and what isn't.  So I have this ephemeral "idea-thing", more like an urge, and I have a crappy sketch!  Now what? Urges and crappy sketches do not a project make.
 I commenced to try to figure out how to draw a fallen tree.  Not so easy. I mean, what does a fallen tree even look like?  A pile of chaos! I feel a lot more must happen before I touch glass, if that's what's going to happen.
It took a while, but knowing I wanted to be influenced by my own fine self, I worked with an old drawing and customized it into a facsimile of an oak tree.  That took a long time--like maybe a few days working all day, trying to force/coax tree-ness out of an old sketch and magic fairy dust.  I find that getting negative reinforcement on a project can feel dire and devastating.  And at the same time, its kind of a tempest in a teapot, by which I mean, my own skull.  I mean, why on earth do I expect to get a decent image the first few times around? When all my so-called best ideas are not clicking, I hear the siren's call.  Time to rearrange the basement! Or clean the cat box. Or some such. Most of all, I want to change mymind and abandon ship.  Sometimes this feeling is has an incredible gravitational pull.  I know from teaching that this is a real moment for less experienced artists.  It can be really awful.
This is when art making really becomes an act of faith.  Not faith that I will succeed, whatever that means. That's a little too goal oriented. But faith that something interesting will happen if I persist enough.  In fact, one thing that does happen a lot is that I find I create a lot of material I can't use in this project but can be tabled for anther day. And I also find that there are amazing things to be discovered if one persists and resists the urge to change their idea.

meh

what?  I can't even see what it is I would have to render here.

This is the tree for me.

Maybe something like this?  Or maybe NOT!

As for the lumberjack character, I have a whole file of lumberjack images. I am into the romance of lumberjacks with what I would describe a  de riguer superficiality.  I mean, what do I know of lumberjacks?  I've lived in cities my whole life! I guess I mean I like old woodcuts of Aesop's "The Trees and the Axe". 
But yeah, I read Collapse too.

Sad, romantic, and totally remorseful lumberjack

As it happens, I am descended from people, man-people, who chopped down pretty much all of mid-Pennsylvania in the mid-1800's.  Then they moved west, presumably to find more trees to chop, and they chopped all them down too, then, lucky for them, they struck oil in Titusville PA and they all converted to oil men.  My grandfather was a geologist for Phillips 66 which is how my mom came to be from Bartlesville OK.  You see the thread here?  Trees used to be an energy source.  Then they found oil. It was no biggie to just tear down a forest and move along to the next one and tear it down too. But there was no sense that this was leading to wanton self destruction, at the time. No sense whatsoever that the energy industry might be "fueling" an unsustainable mess. Deep sigh....

Kinzua PA, my ancestral homeland, now under water.  Thanks Allegheny River!

As for the drawing, I took a bunch of my axe man sources and put them in Photoshop. I never work from life. First of all, I hate life.  Just kidding. I love life!  Life drawing, not so much. When it comes to models, I like action poses, which no model could ever maintain for more than a second.  Interesting art fact: The reason some art is so boring is because when you draw from life, the model has to stay put so all paintings are of people sitting or lying or stuff sitting or lying there...oh my gawd wake me up when its over!  Who draws action poses?  Cartoonists and illustrators.  So the content of Fine Art vs illustration is very much influenced by that fact.  How weird is that? Think about it and submit your 500 word essays in the discussion module.

So, I have developed what I call the "Henry Darger Drawing Method". Which was developed actually by Henry Darger.  This link has a paragraph about it. I, too, use source images. Sadly, despite the vast infinity of the world wide web, most images of human bodies can be put into three lame categories; selfies, porn and icky stock photos.  NONE of that is useful to me. Again, its cartoons and illustrations to the rescue.

So, with the lumberjacks, I found about 7 good sources--good poses--and I gave all the source images heads drawn by me. Then!  I switched their legs!  Then I draw them over in pencil   No one will ever find my source images. Except I am kinda showing you here.  But they are now entirely original. And I never once had to get someone to pose in historic costume with an axe.  Yay!

BUT I HAD TOO MANY LUMBERJACKS! What to do?  It became obvious that apropos of obviousness that to put a lumberjack with a fallen tree was too obvious!  And I had seven nice pencil drawings of lumberjacks looking pretty good together, so why not make them their own piece?

Seven lumberjacks

Can I just say? I really enjoyed drawing lumberjacks.

And then I thought, because I often do, how about making it a repeat tile?  Because its one thing to have seven lumberjacks in  a row or whatever, and its quite another to have seven million, which could happen with a repeat tile. Yes, sometimes utilitarian design concerns inform concept.  Chew on that, friends.
Beyond that, my, isn't this looking a lot like a statement about deforestation and about the sociopolitical systems we have that depend on such unsustainable practices? (Please forgive me, ancestors!) And doesn't it also seem to be making a statement about (toxic) masculinity at the same time? 

Oh yes, apropos masculinity,  I also drew a stump.  But....I had to chop off the roots in order to make the design work.  Who's destroying the metaphorical environment NOW??  Oh the irony.

emo tree stump

This is not the final--but a reasonable approximation.  Gonna go for the ketchup color background to symbolize, ya know, blood and french fries.

Raft/Ship of the Medusa/Fools

 

If  I decide to output this as a digital print, it could possibly resemble this jpeg.

 




 I had this idea last August to make a pile of people like I had made a pile of snakes. So I generated a quickie "collage" in photoshop using old figure drawings and let it sit there until about two weeks ago.

This is the quickie collage.

Two weeks ago I finished my large piece and thought I would take a look at some of my ideas which sit in waiting on my hard drive in a mislabeled file called "Current".  I had an urgent need to work on this idea--even though lately I have been less figurative. You know what I think?  I think that when an artist has an "urgent need" to make something, they should listen to that voice.

The original painting "Raft of the Medusa" by Theodore Gericault, depicts the survivors of the wreck of the ship Meduse.  Read about it here!  It's a painting I have adored for a long time and I do not wish for anyone to compare my piece to that one as I am not capable (nor all that interested, to be honest) of that type of painting.  BUT, I did think I could contribute to the genre somehow.  (Of which genre do I speak?  Why the "shipwrecked on a life raft as a metaphor for life" genre.  That one.)

First: I did an actual pencil drawing with PENCILS.  I am sure you remember them. At this point, I have, like ten ways of drawing.  I doodle in ballpoint.  I mess around in Photoshop.  And I do the occasional meticulous pencil drawing. Please note: meticulous pencil drawings are NOT a necessary step in the stained glass design process.  You can make windows out of scrawlings on napkins if you so desire.
The pencil drawing looked like this:

Real pencil drawing!

Then I input that drawing into Photoshop by scanning it which was a P.I.T.A. because my scanner is 12" x 14" or something.  So I had to seam the thing together, but no matter--its not that hard.
And yes, Virginia, this will be a stained glass window someday, or that's the plan. I am thinking a black and white grissaile, assembled with lead, my favorite metal.  However, I tweaked it an that might end up looking something more like this:

(do me a big favor and picture a raft below them)

Apropos of burning urges, I wanted to do it in color too.  That entails separating each figure into a single Pshop document and "painting" it--in Pshop.
Which looked like this (once they were compiled):

Yes, I did love paper dolls as a child!

But that's not all! I should mention that when I first drew it, lightning struck and I had the sudden desire (and yes, this too felt urgent) to make it an endlessly repeating block.  This is not something that one can have a digital platform just do for you with the click of a button (or if there is an app for this, I don't know about it!) So, first I needed to make more figures:

The new figures were drawn on a separate page and put together in Pshop.

A note on the figures.  Yes indeed, if you are some sort of compulsive follower of my work you will recognize almost all of these characters from older stained glass pieces.  It amuses me to pretend they are real people who left my pieces, continued with their lives and perhaps at some point planned a reunion on a cruise ship where they could reminisce and relive the trauma of my having exploited their non-existent lives in one of my "Perils of Pauline"-style artworks.  Only to all get shipwrecked together and to re-appear in another window.  Cue evil laughter on my part: MUUHAHAHA!.  There's "Child Bride", "Persephone", "Sin Eater", "Andromeda" (who is now a POC) and some of the characters from "The Battle of Carnival and Lent".

As for the subject matter and why it might resonate for me at this moment?  I will let you decide if it does and how and why it does that.  Suffice it to say, I was pretty concerned with any attempt by ME to represent "HUMANITY"....but, I decided to try anyway. Its one of the more presumptuous parts of the artist's job description.  Plus, there's this irony about figurative art that ensures that it will always upset, offend, outrage people (which I think explains a lot about iconoclasm, a topic I would like to take a deep dive into at some point). Why is this?  Because figurative artists only have two choices and they both kind of suck.  Represent one's own self or represent The Other (any and everyone else who is not them).  I have always tried to dodge this catch-22 with what is a semi-viable third option: imaginary people!  But this piece is supposed to be human-kind.  So I had to depict people other than my own proxies.  I will sum this topic up by pointing out that humanity seems currently to be a writhing mass of fear, despair, confusion, rage and discontent.  As an artist, I hope, actually to present a venue for contemplation which is safe, "nice" to look at (or perhaps better stated that I deliberately provide aesthetic incentives for looking) and maybe a little humorous.  Not that there's ANYTHING funny about what we are contending with right now--because there  really isn't.  But art hides behind its fourth wall and the artifice is one of its best strategies to sneak into your consciousness and give people a platform to make actual change.  And aesthetics, including beauty and humor encourage active and sustained engagement with a subject that can be otherwise unbearable.

So, back to the technical hoohah: making it repeat sounds simple but its not--it took days on end actually.  So finally,  here it is: the perfect wall paper for your powder room or home abattoir.

Color version repeated four times

Black and white version repeated four times

Some details of my favorite sections

The Stockholm Syndrome section of the piece.

Character in this section include "Persephone", "Icarus" and the wresting guys from the lower left panel of "Battle of Carnival and Lent"

Five drawings

Here are five drawings for new pieces.  Actually, they are officially cartoons, meaning they show how I am planning on cutting the glass.

I often start with a gawdawful collage of images of body parts, some drawn by me and some culled from the interwebs. 

Example:

Her head and bust are existing glass I have already made.
That sketch is enough to get going in glass, but I am procrastinating.  So I decided to draw them nicely.  I thouhgt it might be a good idea to be influence by the drawing style of John Flaxman--an engraver with a particularly clear and coherent way of drawing.

This one is based on an emblem I particularly love.  "Semper Idem" means "always the same", fyi.