These two pieces are 5x5 feet wheat pasted ephemera and photographs on drop clothes. Family photos and pages from a vintage book I found,
published in the year 1872, I probably shouldn't have torn it up....
but it was so spot on with content. Titled Mother, Home and Heaven,
it housed advice in a literary and poetic form on, how to live a good honest life,
raising a family. the ethics and morals from the 1870's hold some weight today in
poignancy and sarcasm. Not unlike what we strive for today, but can that really be real?
The photo is blurry because my eyes are bad and it is taken with my phone.
The piece below is the same vintage ephemera and photographs wheat pasted and then smeared with tar.
this is a detail, the pages are torn from the bottoms of the pages so no words are visible,
except what I have scratched in. Some images of family members peak out between the vertically pasted strips
running horizontally across the surface with a rhythm mimicking a heartbeat.
A closer look at what is happening. I sat this in the hot sun after burnishing the surface with graphite. The sun heated the surface to the point where the wax
below became soft and even liquidy. I thought it would crack and move the more rigid material
on the surface, much like the seismic shifts in the plates of the earth or like liquid lava
flowing under rigid rock until the rock itself becomes liquid. However, this piece is large and
the shifts I had hoped for did not occur. So I decided to flip the painting inside out with a spatula,
like flipping flap jacks. The result was a pile of gridded wax flap jacks..
Then I went to lowe's to learn about TAR
Ok back to blogging! This is a piece that I have been working on since first semester. It has evolved considerably! It has been constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed many
times. the materials are a multitude of layers of paint, wax, resin, graphite, plaster and tar.
