Artfest, day three: showing some "Skin"

By the time you get to the third day of class at Artfest, you're usually pretty wiped from staying up late for one reason or another. And you're aware this is your last full day before you head back to reality. People tend to be pretty subdued.

Even my pal Janine and I didn't do much cutting up in our only class together, "Under Your Skin" with Erin Faith Allen. We were to meditate on our personal stories, using photos of body parts and anatomical illustrations as symbols.

I like the old Vesalius-style drawings, where the body is posed "naturally" to show how the various systems work.

Courtesy National Institutes of Health

Combined with matte prints of photos and all my new paints (yay!)...

I attempted to do three pieces at once, mainly so I would focus more on story versus getting things "right." We each chose a word we associate with how we feel about our bodies, and tried to keep that word in mind as we worked.

Not surprisingly, things got fairly intense for each of us, so I'm going to respect my classmates' privacy and not give a lot of details.

I will say the word that came to me was "sanctuary."

I didn't finish any of my canvases, and I may have been getting a little ambitious with three; two would've been better, and I would've gotten the colors a bit more accurate. (See how hard it is not to critique, even when you're happy about the direction of your work?)

But the class was absorbing enough that I wasn't terribly bothered by my sloppy technique or by not finishing. I still took my work to the Show & Tell gallery later that evening. A good chunk of pieces there can't even be picked up because they're still drying and, like Janine's sticker said at the beginning of this post, fragile. Stick around for scenes from Show & Tell.

Artfest, Vendor Night: worth a million in prizes

Cards by Andrea Matus

Maybe the cards above aren't literally worth a million in prizes, but I'm certainly willing to pay for what Andrea Matus does with her art. And when you go to Vendor Night, every year... 

Vendor Night, 2008

people rush the tables as if there were gold and precious gems there. Hey, come to think of it, there were!

LK Ludwig was selling paintings and necklaces of Picasso jasper, which is supposed to encourage creativity. Each one is named for an ancient god or goddess. The one she had in mind for me was Neith, "Egyptian goddess of war & arts. She rewove the world each day on her loom." Whoa. 'Scuse me while I go kick some ass and rebuild a planet. Speaking of craft...

I found some "witch/Kraft" Stephanie Rubiano was happy to let me take home, in a print.

Which/ witch, craft/Kraft. Hee hee... [sighs]... Love the puns. Oh, but you have to see what else I brought home. Mercy.

I was charmed by this piece by Lorraine Reynolds, my instructor from "Books Unbound." I love how contemplative it is, even if I don't know specifics of its narrative. It has that quality in common with a piece I bought last year from Andrea Matus.

Turns out I was Andrea's very first Vendor Night collector. I'm just happy I could help her and the other artists get the sales ball rolling, because cash is the only compliment you can pay bills with, amirite?

Tomorrow: going within for "Under Your Skin."

Artfest, day two: A short history of gluin' and screwin'

Get your mind out of the gutter. I'm talking about altering books.

The instructor for my second class, Lorraine Reynolds, says she's happiest when she's working in the studio, "gluin' and screwin'."

Lorraine Reynolds' work

So we proceeded to glue and screw in "Books Unbound." And guess what? I didn't have my traditional Artfest Meltdown. This is monumental for me.

Waaaay back in 2007

First year: Meltdown in my very first class; I freaked out because I was falling behind and thought I wasn't 'getting it right.' Second year: freak-out on second day, and I actually left the building, I was so upset. Third year: mini-freakout in second class, full-blown attack in third class.

Fourth and final Artfest: Instructor says, "Does anyone know how to glue a block of pages together?" Why yes... yes I do. "Does anyone know how to cut a niche?" Why yes... yes I do.

So I'm actually prepared to pull the rest of the class techniques together into a semi-cohesive narrative! Whoo-hoo! "A short history" right there.

Putting together my ephemera and photos, I realized I could tell a "short history" of racial stereotyping from the European colonial era into the modern era. (What, your mind doesn't automatically go there?)

The "apology" text is from a postcard advertising a documentary about the Tuskegee experiment. The background image is a postcard reproduction of an old French ad for Negrita liquor. A mammy figure serves up the bottle with her own image as a "negrita," essentially posing herself as an object of consumption.

The transparency is from one of my mother's baby pictures. My mother grew up in a time when blatant stereotypes in advertising (and elsewhere) were common and unremarkable. I placed her so the curve of her arm echoed the curve of the woman's arm in the ad.

That combination led me to create another vignette: a white woman examining a black woman (a cousin of my mother's) as if she were looking at an exotic specimen.

On the cover, I framed another French ad, this one for chocolate, and overlaid it with a framed image on glass of soldiers firing a cannon. Colonial wars for territory... anyone? England vs. Spain vs. France vs...

Yeah, it's a wee bit heavy: the subject matter as well as the book itself. But the week before Artfest, I'd spent a lot of time thinking of the stereotype at work in the Trayvon Martin murder: black teenage boy = threat. And it's come out in my work.

But I feel a bit lighter having dealt with a heavy issue. And the complete lack of freak-out in class feels pretty good too.

Tomorrow: enough seriousness. There's shopping to be done at Vendor Night.