The Three Pillows of Wisdom

You may well remember my "Small Golden Pillow of the Resistance". It languished at Open Studios, despite my pricing it attractively. Several months after Open Studios, an astute collector (and friend- Hello Antony!) inquired as to whether it was still available. He was smart enough to snatch it up.
Then he approached me with the tantalizing question as to whether I ever do commissions. Of course I do! So he requested that I do two more pillows... one that reads "Bite Me".

And one that reads "Eat Me". As you see in the photos, "Bite Me" is complete and really a lovely thing to behold. "Eat Me" is still in process... I worked really carefully and consciously to make all the colors harmonize and to make the "fonts" that the words are written in different, yet complimentary. I think I was successful.

I actually wanted to photograph this and post it here to see if "Eat Me" read as clearly, or whether it requires tweaking and clarification. It looks pretty good although it's harder to see that the back ground fabric (under the gold) is really a very pale pink and it will be cut jaggedly to echo the star burst pattern. And then it's being mounted on a medium brown (kind of (milk) chocolate-y) pillow. But Bob just looked at it- unprovoked- and exclaimed that it was perfectly easy to read. That made me feel more confident, although I am still debating a narrow border of dark brown (bitter-sweet chocolate) beads around the interior of "Eat Me". Maybe not; maybe it's just gilding the lily!
I am very happy with how they're turning out. Sometimes someone else's idea is a good jumping off point. I have just completed 12 large scale pieces for my show in NYC and these pillows are a cosy way to sidle back into new studio preoccupations.

My Gift to You: More Free Art Ideas

Latest piece to erupt on that famous studio wall. I guess I'm (not so subtly) addressing the commodification of, well... everything! And certainly art and artists. I generally riffed on the Coca-Cola* style of font with a bit of personal tweaking (gotta make it my own). I especially enjoy playing with typefaces and fonts because my own handwriting is atrocious. (And if you're going to make big long words labor-intensively sewn onto fabric and embellished I think you'd better be able to read what's being written). This piece is about 70 inches long and about 38 inches tall. The edges are decorated with a half a million of those little white plastic tabs that come on the top of milk cartons. (We've been saving them for years so it's nice to finally have a use for them). I don't know if you can see it in a small picture like this, but the background fabric is pictures of International Harvester and John Deere tractors with cozy farmstead buildings and farm urchins thrown in for good measure. Obviously, Big Agra Inc has seen to the commodification of our food industry (thank YOU Monsanto!) and generally in this, the season of Xmas, everything is truly a commodity. Go ahead and commodify me!
And in the midst of all that commodifying, it occurred to me that this is often a great source of inspiration: a single word or phrase that gets caught in my cerebral cortex. I hear a word and maybe hear it again (or sometimes they just spring suddenly onto that TV screen inside my head) and then it sticks and I need to do something with it. The "do something with it"is to make it into an art project and I recommend this to you, if you're in need of prodding or encouragement. Find a word that resonates and illustrate it or illuminate it or just use it as a point of departure. For me, words that catch my fancy are most often political or economic in flavor. I did a whole series of collages that presented Economic Collapse vocabulary: things like Sub-prime Mortgage and Credit Default Swaps. Not only was it a good mental exercise in that I needed to research what the devil these things were but it was a way of making sense out of a pretty depressing scenario. (And then I sold a bunch of them which was good for my personal economy). A large fabric piece from two years back featured the lugubrious "Sequestration". (Anyone remember that?) You can even make a word up, which of course borders on poetry which is (obviously) creative in it's own right.
So for the holidays, contemplate words that reflect the edge of cliff feelings that we're all experiencing right now. "Unpresidented" is a good place to start...

*Probably the single most recognized font in world. I read a really interesting essay on line about how carefully that font was designed. And how it "shouldn't" work, as it has internal inconsistencies and odd spacing etc.