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#so i have to improvise and use something so that the acrylic can stand
thesmallmeggles · 7 months
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And Now For Something Completely Different:
☎️ SPAMTON APPEARANCE HEADCANONS ☎️
"Megan, why are you talking about Spamton? *gasp* You abandoned Zanzo!"
1. This is my blog
2. No I haven't. He is still very present in my conscious.
Anyway...
Addison Spam
Made out of hard light. (One could walk through an Addison. Feels tingly and warm.)
Grey dot eyes, wears glasses
Smaller than all the other Addisons, 4'0"
Puppet Spam
Hair is synthetic (probably nylon), thick fibers both crunchy and sticky from whatever (improvised?) hair product he uses.
Plastic head and hands, plush body
When I've drawn Spamton, I tend to make his head more proportionate to his body. (But still kind of big.)
Has the sleep doll eyes. Irises are heterochromatic - pink and yellow. At the time Kris encounters him, the irises have silver streaks. Eyes tend to stick in odd positions.
Construction of his head limits his neck rotation. He can only turn roughly 90 degrees. If he needs to see directly to his side, he has to turn his body.
Body is stained and stitched up in places
Stomach is spongy foam, the rest is firm like a densely stuffed toy (specifically those vintage plushies. That stuffing retains scents like you wouldn't believe.)
There's a slit in his upper back revealing what appears to be a ventriloquist dummy control stick. Spamton tapes over the hole, but it never holds for long.
Articulated four fingered hands
His limb joints are similar to Woody and Jessie from Toy Story. Or a Raggedy Ann. Just the stitched bit.
Little nub feet, like a Raggedy Ann
I like the juxtaposition of Spam having a physical presence while becoming socially invisible.
Spamton Neo
Noodly bootleg action figure looking dude
Rough seams, haphazard paint, floppy limbs
Glasses are his eyes. Flashing light bulbs/leds behind them.
Head is more proportionate to body
About 10' tall
Wings are aesthetic only - he cannot fly.
Spamton Ex "Argus" (the nickname could change but idk)
Half animatronic, half mannequin, one hundred percent unsettling (My personal view is: "Is it really Spamton if he doesn't look at least a little uncanny?" EDIT: That being said, I hold no grudge against folks who draw/imagine the Spam Man as hot or cute or beastly or what have you)
His eyes are acrylic/glass with plastic lids. His nose is separate from his face mask. Seams at the eye line and across the cheeks under the mask.
Spam can emote, though it's limited. At least he isn't stuck with the "award losing smile".
Head is proportionate to body like Neo
Plastic and metal robotic skeleton with ball joints and wires. There's a heart cavity in his chest which opens to unleash his [Heart On A Chain].
Built-in Disk Drive so he can swap between bodies as needed.
The face and arms from hands to elbows are covered by silicone. Everything else is foam padded fabric, with special attention given to his pecs and posterior. ("FOR MY [Fellow Freaks].")
Hands still have four fingers. He has retractable wheels in his feet for when he needs to ZOOM.
About 7' tall, midway between Puppet and Neo.
Bonus: Two Different Human Spams
"Gary Sampson" and Sharron Ware
Mr. Sampson is a short (~4' 7"), stocky human with pale white, pink tinged skin (rosacea), hazel eyes, and thinning salt-and-pepper hair. He has high cheekbones, a long Nixonesque (former US President Richard Nixon, for clarity) nose, and wears prescription eyeglasses. His shoulders are broad and he has a notable paunch. Good old Gary from Advertising.
Sharron has heterochromatic green and violet eyes. He has navy blue/teal ombre hair and pale blue skin. (Dirty blond/auburn hair and pale white skin in the Light World.) He has softer cheekbones, ears, and a cleft chin. His nose is longer than a human's would naturally be. Stands 4' 9", a bit taller than Gary. Chubby with an average build. Assumed to be 35+ years old, exact age uncertain.
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desertdollranch · 4 years
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This week I’ve been working on some additions to Caroline’s parlor! 
Caroline, both the doll and the character, are a favorite of mine. I’m so happy I have her, but I feel bad sometimes for not showing her here much. Part of the reason is because she was given such a small collection in the short time that she was available, and so it’s challenging to figure out what accessories to make for her. Most of her collection was basically just dresses and big ticket items like her skiff, parlor, table and chairs, and bed. She never got the multiple small accessory sets that previous dolls have been given, besides her travel basket. And I’ve already reproduced that.
In Caroline’s Play Scenes and Paper Dolls kit, however, there are more illustrations of the things she never got in her collection. I found a few interesting pieces that I knew would be easy to reproduce.
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One of the illustrated accessories was this slate with an attached slate pencil. Caroline never went to school, but was taught at home by her parents when she wasn’t doing chores around the house or helping out at the shipyard. Caroline’s mother gave her word problems to help her with arithmetic. Adding numbers correctly would be very important for a ship’s captain to understand when calculating the total weight of the items loaded onto a ship!
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This slate was made from foam core that was covered with black paper. It’s easy to peel it off to paint, but I just left the paper on this piece. I trimmed down some flat craft sticks for the frame. The pencil is the trimmed end of a bamboo skewer. It’s held on with embroidery floss glued to the back of the slate.
A few more are under the cut!
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When Caroline can’t sleep, she can come down to the parlor and pick out a book to read by candlelight.
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A candle holder like this was included in the original parlor, but since I built my Caroline’s parlor myself, I had to improvise with something else to make a candlestick. This is a drawer pull that fell off one of my kitchen drawers. I trimmed down a birthday candle and hot glued it into the drawer pull. Then I cut a small piece of soft covered wire, painted it with a mix of brown and metallic silver, then glued it onto the pull. Caroline can hold it in her hand by slipping her fingers through the handle. It’s pictured here on the bookshelf and next to a mini hourglass charm.
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This tiny horse figurine stands on the top shelf of the built-in shelves in the parlor. It’s based on the original figurine included in Caroline’s parlor.
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On the right is the original, and on the left is the plastic horse from the thrift store that I used as a base. I looked at up close pictures of it on eBay to get an idea of how it should look. I painted it with acrylic, added the black saddle piece on the horse’s back with a bit of shaped clay, and made yellow reins by squirting some hot glue onto parchment paper in a w shape. After the glue cooled and dried, I painted the reins yellow and peeled it off the parchment. Then I attached it onto the horse with some more hot glue. The bottom base is made from foam core, and the whole thing is covered with a glaze of super glossy Mod Podge, giving it a porcelain look.
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Her keepsake box isn’t new, but I made it last year for her birthday and never mentioned how I made it. This is just some thin cardboard glued together and inlaid with a mix of straw and small craft sticks. Then I painted some of them on the top with Caroline’s name, making it look just like the straw box Papa made for Caroline’s tenth birthday and had smuggled to her from prison.
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Side view of the box. In the story, Caroline keeps her embroidery thread in there.
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Here’s how the shelf niche looks now! Nothing here is American Girl brand; everything was either made by me or picked up elsewhere. I may try to attempt to reproduce that model ship, (seen farther up in this post with the horse figurine) once I figure out the best way to do it. The sailor’s valentines (those framed photos of seashells) aren’t accurate to Caroline’s time period, so I gave her real seashells to display on the shelf instead.
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intruality-overlord · 4 years
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Why Are We (Best) Friends?
Warnings: Excessive swearing, alcoholism, mentions of drugs, drug use, suggestive humour, implied sexual content (no smut), some gore descriptions. Generally, Remus stuff.
Taglist: @blogging-time @veraisnotfine @littlestr @jessibbb @ibroken-butterflyi @hi-its-tutty @idkanameatall
Let me know do you want to be added or removed from the taglist! Updates every Wednesday/Thursday. Don’t worry I’m posting the second half of this chapter later today cause it’s too long all in one part and Tumblr doesn’t seem to like it when I post stuff too close together. So have the fun with the fluffy part!
Chapter Three 1/2: Duck
Loosen Up
May 26th, 2017.
Tiny little sips did Patton take, swishing the liquid around before swallowing each drop. Cautious. Procrastinating. Remus rolled his eyes.
“Why are you so embarrassed? I’ve seen you so drunk that if you weren’t a figment of imagination, the police could have been outlining your dead body in chalk the next morning. You don’t have anything to be shy about,” he said. Patton glared at him. “That’s exactly what’s so embarrassing!” He shrieked. “It’s bad enough knowing that happened! I don’t want a repeat!”
“That’s the whole point of this, Pat. I’m here so you don’t get completely pissed like that again. And if you do, I’ll stop you from being stupid.”
“I’m always stupid,” Patton mumbled into his next sip. Albeit, it was a slightly bigger sip. Remus would have argued with Patton, but he hadn’t planned a heart to heart and felt rather unprepared. At least he knew Patton had already drunk enough to not think too hard about what he was saying. Baby steps.
Turned out the snowball effect settled in soon after that. The more Patton drank the less he thought to regulate himself so he drank more. Remus discovered that night that Patton became efficiently, drunkenly relaxed at five cans of… whatever collection of concoctions Patton had mixed up.
“Wait Wait Wait Wait Wait! If I’m a figment of Thomas’s imagination, but you’re Thomas’s imagination, does that mean you could, like, make me,” Patton made a charade of what would have resembled an explosion if he still had his fine motor skills intact, “poof? If you wanted?”
Patton had had six cans and was on his seventh.
Remus blinked at him. There was some semblance of sense in that thinking, and Remus did love a good “what if?” question. “I don’t know...” he said. “Why don’t you try?!” Patton exclaimed, bouncing in his seat. Remus for a split second thought of how adorable Patton’s excitement was—
“Hell no!” He snapped. Patton whined. Sulking, he flopped back down in his chair like a voodoo doll that had just been angrily launched into a wall. “You’re s’posed to be fun!” Patton chugged the rest of his can and didn’t bother to put it down. Instead, it just toppled and rolled out of his lax grasp.
“If it worked then you wouldn’t exist anymore!”
“So?”
Remus also discovered that Patton’s attitude was just as bad as Virgil’s. At least Remus knew his limits now for future reference.
“Well if you stopped existing you wouldn’t know if it worked or not because you wouldn’t exist,” Remus reasoned, and he wanted to scrub his tongue with soapy sandpaper.
“...What if we tried it on Roman?”
“Damn you, that’s tempting.”
Multimedia
August 30th, 2017.
“Heya Remus—” Out of all the anarchy encapsulated in the room, Patton instantly fixated on the razor. The blade devilishly glinted. Patton glared at the offending mustache slayer.
“Don’t you dare.”
“Patton! I was just—“
“Leave the moustache alone!” Patton pounced, lunging for the shaver, and Remus shrieked a very manly shriek. Plumes of white flew free from Remus’s fringe in the kerfuffle. “Your mustache is special and perfect just the way it is!” Patton said. Wrestling the razor from Remus’s grip, which on further inspection was definitely for shaving your legs and not facial hair, and confiscated it.
“I know!”
What?
“That’s why I need it for my self portrait!”
What?
What looked like very grainy flour caught in Remus’s fringe made it appear silver, enhancing the pearly whites that split his lips into a beaming grin. Patton swore his teeth looked slightly pointier than usual. Each syllable rolled around Remus’s tongue exaggeratedly long before he spat it out. And the crazed look in his eyes looked especially crazed, circled in red like a big mistake.
Oh, he’s high.
Wait, what?
Hooking an arm around Patton’s, a stark gentlemanly contrast to Remus’s distinctly wild hair, bloodshot eyes and suddenly apparent absence of a three piece suit, and yanked Patton to stand before his work in progress.
“I’d ask what you think, but it’s not quite finished,” he said, giddy.
Paint was splattered all across the canvas.
And across the floor, and the walls, and the ceiling, and after spending five minutes in the room Patton somehow had some too. (Remus was always more of a catcher than a thrower. Terrible aim.) Focusing on an individual area, it looked like a nonsensical mess. There were handprints, globs of textured brush strokes, and scratch marks. Acrylic and watercolour paints with salt adding texture. Swatches of silk, sprinkles of glitter. The only orderly aspect of the piece was the fact it stuck strictly to a dominantly green colour pallet with accents of blue. Even so, there were hints of pinks, yellows, and purple. Tasteful hints, mind you. Oh, there’s some red, too—
“Is that blood?”
“A happy little accident involving a blunt pallet knife. That’s all.”
As a whole, though, when you stepped back it clearly was Remus’s self portrait. Amongst all the chaos, his outline was clear and confident. Insane smile and all. (Except for his moustache, which seemed to be the final missing piece.)
Patton looked closer. Woven in were more intricate details. Passages from Alice In Wonderland and Little Shop Of Horrors (“You love her madly, don’t you, shmuck” was one he picked out)— other books, musicals, and movies Patton couldn’t name— fit seamlessly into the collage. Everything was written in different, swirly fonts or magazine clippings.
Then he looked even closer. Patton squinted.
“Is that fucking dick glitter?”
“Green and blue duochrome dick glitter!”
It was the most accurate self portrait Patton had ever seen (or ever would). A massacre of common sense. It was his internal tumultuous frenzy in a visual medium. A celebration of self love in a uniquely Remus way.
“I’d frame that and put it on the fridge,” Patton said genuinely. Remus preened. “It’s… exceptional, really.”
But did Remus really have to sacrifice his adorable face caterpillar for it?
“I can’t wait to add the finishing touches!”
“Are you really going to put your own moustache on it?”
Remus burst into rambling only a select few could comprehend. Sentences clumsily overlapped each other as Remus spilled the direct translation of his thought process. And within that mess, the words were crushed like a Pepsi can (Yes, Remus could taste the difference between Coke and Pepsi. Yes, he purposefully drinks only Pepsi), squishing the vowels out of existence. In Patton’s case, though, he was able to translate the garbled soup of consonants roughly to, “One does not simply soil the sacred authenticity of multimedia!”
“Can’t you just...” Patton shrugged. “I don’t know— use some fake fur or something instead?” He argued.
“Ugh,” Remus grunted, “That sounds like something Roman would do. His art is so flat and boring! Always so play it safe, never experiments,” He ranted passionately, throwing his arms in all directions. “And there’s never enough glitter!” He scoffed. Pent up energy drove him in stomping circles. “Too much glitter makes it look childish,” he said, tone swinging into a mock impression. “There’s no such thing as too much glitter! I don’t care if it gets everywhere. I’d happily leave glitter stuck in my teeth rather than some stupid, diet of the week salad! And Roman wants to claim he’s the gayer one?! Huh, bullshit.”
Patton checked if his ears hadn’t conked out. They screeched like microphone feedback. (His ears and Remus.)
“Roman’s such a bitch— I fucking hate him so goddamn fucking much, the cunt.” Remus thrust his hand into the nearest paint can, and readied the colourful grenade.
Patton grabbed his wrist, hastily. Globs of acrylic paint slipped from his fist, reuniting with a green puddle soaked into the carpet.
“Uh-um,” Patton cut in, improvising a distraction, “Why don’t we have a drink and watch, uh... ah, um— Ratatouille?” Fizzing with nerves, Patton cracked a hopeful smile. One Remus couldn’t help mimicking. “A drink of water!” Patton quickly corrected, “and Ratatouille.”
(“Giggle water?”
“Emu, no.”)
“I love that movie!” Remus said, clapping his hands. More green sprayed them in Remus’s brazen excitement.
It worked. Patton breathed a quick sigh of relief.
Beaming, he cupped Patton’s face in his cold, sticky, stained hands. “You always have such good ideas!” Remus gushed. That was a rare, rare compliment. Patton's face blazed. For a second he was sure the paint would evaporate from his skin.
No, his wine red complexion was hidden.
Green handprints drying on his cheeks, Patton watched the movie with Remus just like that. After, Remus finished the painting properly. Instant grief followed shaving his moustache. But when he grew it back, he was ultimately happy with the results.
Next Chapter:
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jcmorrigan · 4 years
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Sun-Kissed
The F/O? Giovanni Potage from Epithet Erased. The S/I? Rachel Scribere - mundie, writer of much fanfiction, independent contractor supervillainous minion who has also given up on adulting. (Most of those things apply to me IRL!) I really hope this intro hasn’t become repetitive, because it’s the best way I have to kick these things off. Anyway, this was inspired by me realizing we hadn’t kissed in the confession oneshot and then realizing it was an opportunity rather than a misstep. Also, if you saw the necklace prompt I sent to @selfshipimagines...yes, this is why I thought of it, which is why it’s here.
***
It began with Giovanni refusing to use a Dungeons & Dragons board and its associated miniatures for their intended purpose. He had scribbled the names of locales in our next planned heist over it, drawing out the floor plan, and I’m not exactly sure where he got miniatures customized to look like me and the rest of the official Blasters in his squad, but there we were, positioned across the D&D board on the table in the abandoned library that served as our “evil lair.”
           I came upon him there, in the Casual Friday wear of his worn gray sweater and a pair of beaten-up jeans, maneuvering the mini-minions around the board with intense concentration. “Composer,” he greeted without looking up. “What do you think is a more badass way of entering a building? Blowing up the ceiling and dropping in from above on parachutes, or tunneling in from underneath with a massive drill?”
           “Do we have a massive drill?” I asked, taking my place across from him at the table.
           “Not YET,” he said in the tone that indicated we could very possibly be in possession of one within a few weeks.
           “If you can get one,” I told him slyly, “then use it. WAY cooler than dropping in. Probably safer, actually.”
           “Good call, Composer! You get to take an extra percentage of the loot for your cut when we pull this off!”
           I never liked taking more than my share. Really, being an independent-contractor Banzai affiliate (who the upper echelons of the organization didn’t exactly…know about) was the only way to survive financially in this climate. All the same, if Giovanni didn’t bring back quota, he was more screwed than usual. I aimed for a balance. And tried not to let on just how much more I was making than him by hawking jewelry.
           Speaking of which, the reason I’d entered the room was concerning a rather special piece I’d lifted recently. Nothing that would go for any sum whatsoever. Something valuable in a different way.
           Now, how to bring that up?
           “Soooo,” I began, “you know how we’re…dating now?”
           “Why wouldn’t I?”
           Right. That wasn’t my smoothest opener. In my defense, we were still pretty new as an item. It wasn’t so long ago that he’d spilled his guts to me on a display bed in a mall department store with a broken leg –
           Okay, that’s kind of a “You had to be there” incident.
           The point is, we were only recently official, and I wanted to do a little something to commemorate that. Especially since we hadn’t hit a few rather…important landmarks. Like the first kiss. That hadn’t even happened on confession night, and it was rather tearing me apart, were I to be perfectly honest. I might have had a selfish agenda in taking the piece that currently rested in my jeans pocket – yes, I wanted him to have something nice, but also, maybe this would lead to the big moment.
           “Well,” I babbled, “I was just thinking that…we’re on the grid now, and…and that means we…that I should probably start…doing things a little differently, since you’re…special…and I’m…also special…and…”
           On the job, I can improvise. When writing fiction or accounts, I’m a wordsmith. When trying to talk to someone who made my heart flutter, I just couldn’t get to the fucking point.
           Or look directly at him, for that matter. It was kind of like looking into the sun.
           “…and I mean, I know we’re still starting out, and still figuring out boundaries like if kissing’s gonna be a thing, and I’ll admit I’m kinda new to this in general, but – “
           “WHAAAAAT?”
           I couldn’t help but look at him then – with the usual results, feeling like my circulation speed had suddenly spiked. He looked absolutely flummoxed. Angry, even. Like I’d told him he’d shown up five minutes late to the doorbuster craft sale where satin was on a massive discount (an incident I reference because I had seen this exact scenario take place and had to drive an incredibly peeved Giovanni home from while reminding him that we could just obtain it through less-than-legal means).
           “What do you MEAN we’re still figuring out kissing?” he ranted. “I’ve kissed you, right? It was great! I wouldn’t be so NEGLIGENT as to forget that!”
           Oh. So he knew. As of this moment, it had occurred to him. I could see right through him. I just shook my head wordlessly.
           “We HAVEN’T?” he said in awe. “Okay, I am FIXING that!” He pounded his fist on the table; the tiny Spike fell over, and he glanced at the miniature sheepishly before righting it with a whispered “Sorry. Won’t happen again.” Then he looked back to me. “But we SERIOUSLY haven’t kissed yet?”
           “…No,” I admitted. Which wasn’t exactly what I’d come there to say, but I would have been lying to say I hadn’t wanted to get to that discussion point sooner rather than later.
           “Well, we’re fixing that!” he declared. “Right here! Right now!”
           I very nearly exploded. I tried my best to keep calm. “You…sure? I mean, I kind of wondered if maybe you were putting it off because you didn’t actually wanna – “
           “No! We are DOING this! And it’s gonna be GREAT!” He’d risen, advancing to me. “I’m gonna be the best guy you’ve ever kissed!”
           Without even thinking, I teasingly replied, “That’s not a high bar.”
           Giovanni stopped in his tracks as I rose to try and meet his height. “What, you’re saying you’ve only dated bad kissers or something?”
           “Well, no,” I admitted, wondering just how far down this hole I should go. Honesty is the best policy, right? “I’ve just…never kissed ANYONE before. Which isn’t a big deal! It’s just – “
           He looked like I’d just slapped him across the face: eyes wide, jaw dropped. “You’ve NEVER – “ He closed his eyes and shook his head. “No. Not here. Not like this.”
           “What?”
           “This is your FIRST FREAKING KISS!” He waved both hands in the air to emphasize his point. “I’m not just gonna plant one on you in the middle of the lair! No, you’re getting the best first kiss of your life – “
           “I’m pretty sure I can only get one first kiss in my life – “
           “And it’s gonna be somewhere SPECIAL, God DAMN it!”
           I closed my hand around the jewelry waiting in my pocket. He was going to make me wait to hand it over, wasn’t he? “What…did you have in mind?”
           Within moments, he’d (gently yet firmly) seized my free hand, beginning to lead me out of the library. “We’re gonna hit up all your favorite places in Sweet Jazz City until we find the one with the right atmosphere!”
           “Don’t you have a heist to – “
           “IT CAN WAIT!”
           Well, I wasn’t about to say no to that.
           The first place we tried was the actual public library that was still open, as that was one of my regular haunts. (Books you didn’t have to steal! What an innovation!) I found myself being led into the midst of the YA fantasy section, meaning that Giovanni really did know me far too well.
           “And here we are in your natural habitat!” he said proudly. “So…does this feel…you know, romantic?”
           “It’s good,” I said with a smile.
           Which was a mistake. “Good?” he repeated, one lower lid twitching. “GOOOOOD? This can’t happen unless it’s GREAT!”
           “No, no, it’s – “ Wait, why was I protesting? He and I were basically on the same page. I was just trying to be polite. “Okay. Really, it’ll be great no matter where it happens, but this feels a little…weird. Not exactly romance central.”
           “Good!” Giovanni insisted. “This is gonna be your first freaking kiss, remember? You gotta stand up for this kind of thing!”
           “Yeah, but it’ll seriously be – “
           “AND LET ME LIVE WITH THE BURDEN OF UNDERWHELMING YOU ON YOUR FIRST KISS?”
           “…Okay, I cave.”
           He seized my hand again; “Let’s head out! I know EXACTLY where we’re going this time!”
           We ended up in the middle of the craft store, of course. “Will you look at this?” he said, arms outstretched. “We’ve had so many good memories here.”
           “We have,” I agreed.
           “This is our place!” he said gleefully. “Our stomping grounds! Where you and I belong! So…yarn aisle or acrylic paint aisle?”
           I bit my lip.
           “…This isn’t it either, is it? C’moooooon, Composer, I said you gotta stand up about this and make it perfect, and I mean it!”
           “I’m just – I’m trying to be polite, okay?” I argued.
           “Well, we’re the bad guys! We might be secretly NICE, but we’re sure as hell not POLITE!”
           I wasn’t sure how to argue that point, as much as I knew it didn’t really make sense at all. “Can we pick somewhere that’s not…aisles?” I asked. “You know…rows of shelving. The library was the same problem. It’s just not the right aesthetic.”
           “Got it! No shelves! Onward!”
           The next place he picked out was the fountain in the square, and I had to admit that was a pretty impressive locale, aesthetic-wise. “Now, THIS is Romance Central!” he proclaimed proudly as he led me toward the structure. “Can you see anyone not kissing here? No. You can’t. Because it’s perfect.”
           It seemed good on paper, but the closer we got to the fountain itself, the more I began to get nervous. The square was full of heavy foot traffic at this time of day. There were hundreds of people who would potentially be…watching. And I was beginning to almost feel stage fright. Like I had to get this right, or the whole city would mock me.
           “Yeah,” I said nervously. “Definitely a fan favorite kissing spot.”
           How was I going to bring up –
           “Wait a minute. No. No!” He rounded on me, glaring. “We can’t just pick EVERYONE ELSE’S kissing spot! It’s gotta be our own! …Unless you really want here – “
           “No,” I said hurriedly. “Look, it’s hard to explain, but this isn’t it either.”
           “All right! Fourth time’s the charm!”
           We ended up in the zoo, and when I saw which exhibit Giovanni had led me toward, I couldn’t suppress a chuckle. “Ta-daaaa!” he said as he gestured to the wide, open pen of lazy mammals. “Your favorite place in town, am I right?”
           Oh, how could I tell him this one?
           He read it on my face. With a sigh, he asked, “How did I mess up now?”
           “You’re not messing up!” I told him immediately. “It’s just…the bear exhibit isn’t my favorite place in town. It’s Molly’s.”
           Giovanni froze, blinking, wide-eyed.
           “You got me mixed up with your kid,” I teased, nudging his shoulder.
           “…Right,” he muttered. “Which animal was yours again?”
           “Giraffes and/or sharks.”
           “So you wanna – “
           “Not really.”
           “Okay. Next!”
           When I figured out he was leading me to the opera hall next, I practically collapsed laughing. “Gio…oh my God…”
           “Don’t tell me.”
           “This isn’t my favorite spot in town either. You know whose it is?”
           “Don’t say it – “
           “This is Sylvie’s,” I snorted. “You wanna tell me again how he’s NOT one of our kids?”
           “Shut up,” Giovanni muttered as he did an about-face to lead me away from the opera house.
           As we entered the park close to sundown, I admitted, “Gio, part of the reason this hasn’t been working is that I’m kinda freaked out by all the people. I just don’t want everyone to…watch this. It makes it feel like I gotta do this right, and I don’t even know if I’m any good at kissing.”
           “Sure you are!” Giovanni replied. “How could you NOT be? Trust me, I know these things. But if you want privacy, then dammit, I’m gonna get you privacy! Follow me to the love destination!”
           I had to admit this location had promise. It was further into the park, a wooded area next to a small brook framed with granite boulders. As we settled to sit in a gap between the rocks, the evening sun glittered off the surface of the water like a disco ball.
           “Much better,” I told Giovanni, shifting my legs to the optimal position for comfort.
           “So?” he asked. “Feelin’ it? Is this the place?”
           “I think this is the place.” And I meant it. The impending twilight filtering through the leaves felt rather ethereal. The brook’s soft yet constant babble provided some pleasant white noise.
           “Okay.” His voice cracked, and for the first time, I finally realized he was probably nervous, just like me. “So…we’re here. And it’s perfect. So…we can do this.”
           “We can,” I agreed.
           Neither of us wanted to be the one to move first. We just wanted it to happen on its own. But that wouldn’t happen unless somebody took initiative.
           Fuck it.
           “If you’re ready,” I told him, “I’m gonna just…I’m gonna do it.”
           “Do your worst, Composer.”
           At which point, he made the stupidest face I’ve ever seen him make in my life, bar none. Eyes shut, lips comically protruded forward – and I wondered how many people he’d actually kissed, though I wasn’t about to ask that.
           Okay. This shouldn’t be hard. Just put my mouth on his mouth. Easy. We didn’t even have to involve tongues yet. Like a sputtering car engine, I moved ever closer, bringing myself to the connection point –
           And he slapped his hand over his mouth before I could get there.
           “Is this too fast?” I asked. “Because we don’t have to do this – I mean, I know, some people just don’t do the kissing thing, and I think I’m one of those people who does, but – “
           “It’s not that!” he said, muffled and miffed. “You know I’ve seen every slasher movie in the book, right?”            “Uh…what does that have to do with – “
           “You think I haven’t seen this EXACT SCENARIO before?” he snapped from behind his hand. “Guy takes girl to the park, down by the river, for a romantic kiss. Guy whips out knife. Guy murders girl. Girl’s body gets dumped in the river. Guy goes on to commit series of increasingly more disturbing mutilations. And I am NOT going down that road!”
           I did a double take. “Gio…you know you could just…not kill me. You’re not a serial killer, you know.”
           “I know, but it still feels WRONG! We aren’t doing this here!”
           His hand was off his mouth and back over mine, leading me up and out of the park.
           “Where are we going now?” I asked as we headed back through the twilight.
           “I’m still working that out – “ He then froze in his tracks. “Of COURSE! It’s PERFECT! Okay, I have it this time, and I really mean that! Come on!”
           He picked up the pace, nearly pulling me over into a fall. He slowed a bit after remembering that my top running speed could be outdone by certain tortoises in the world.
           I wasn’t sure where this was going at all, at first. We headed into the outer edge of town, almost to the city limits, but not yet where the buildings’ height truly diminished into suburbia. Giovanni scoped out the apartment buildings here, trying to pick out one of sufficient height. I wondered if he was going where I thought he was going with this.
           “You know,” he remarked, “it’s kind of a good thing this didn’t happen until after the sun went down. …WHICH WAS MY PLAN, OF COURSE! All those other locations were just fakeouts to get your guard down until I showed you the REAL main attraction!”
           As much as I knew that wasn’t the case, I had a good feeling about this one. “You really are an evil genius.”
           “Now come on!” He tugged my hand sharply to hurry me toward the building he’d targeted.
           By then, the sky was completely dark, giving me an extremely auspicious feeling about this. We hustled around back of the building, where Giovanni sought out the fire escape ladder. Of course, pulled up one story so that there would have to be an actual escape from the top down for anyone to reach it. Creep prevention and all.
           Well, this building was about to meet a couple of creeps.
           “Now, this is just standard procedure,” Giovanni bragged. “Any villain worth his salt can scale one of these without even trying. You’re still new to the biz, so I don’t blame you if you still need practice at it, but I’m an old pro by this point. Watch and learn!”
           Oh, I already knew where this was going. Still, I couldn’t stop him and I knew this.
           He bent, surveyed, sprang. He managed to catch the edge of the lowest balcony with his hands, then, completely lacking the necessary upper body strength to climb the rest of the way, just sort of dangled there, struggling and grunting to pull himself onto the metal surface.
           “Not that you need help with that or anything,” I told him, “but if I was offering – “
           “I mean, it’ll probably boost your ego if I pretend I need you to help me out here, and your ego is terribly malnourished, so go ahead. Even though I completely have this under control. Wait, what are you going to – “
           Trying not to blush at the proximity, I bent just enough that I could hook one hand under each sole of his shoes. Then, I posed, “Ready?”
           “Uh…yeah…”
           I rose, bringing his feet up, and that gave him the necessary leverage to scramble up onto the balcony. Even though it had just been hand-to-foot contact with a layer of rubber between, I still felt that had been incredibly intimate, somehow.
           Then remembered I was going to have the same problem. “So, um, I’m NOT going to be able to get up there on my own – “
           He’d already turned around, lying on his stomach so he could look down to me. “Don’t worry about it. Just jump.”
           “I’m not even sure I can actually jump.”
           “Just go for it!”
           Feeling rather foolish in advance, I bent my knees, ready to completely underwhelm. I jumped as high as I could (which is nowhere near as high as you want it to be), flinging up both arms on instinct.
           He caught one forearm in each hand, his own arms extended down to me, and after a rather painful dangle, he managed to reel me up to the point where he could wrap both arms around my upper body, bracing against the balcony to rather gracelessly drag me up to the same level.
           Which felt even more intimate.
           “Thanks,” I said once we were both on terra firma. Or metal firma, I guess.
           He clapped me on the back – which is not something I let most people do. “Don’t sweat it. Now let’s go!”
           It was smoother sailing from there – just trying to climb the rest of the ladders as quietly as possible, the night punctuated by the clinking of our shoes on the rungs. Giovanni was ahead, and so he got to the summit first, yelling down an enthusiastic “Come on, come on!” as I hustled to finish the course.
           It was exactly as I’d suspected. As I emerged atop the apartments’ roof, I gasped at the sight of the Sweet Jazz City skyline lit up like a treasure trove against the dark of the night.
           A sudden shift caught my attention; Giovanni had put his hand behind his back. I realized he’d been extending it to help me the rest of the way, but when I’d gotten there myself and gotten distracted by the shiny stuff, he tried to make it look like he hadn’t been doing that.
           “It’s perfect,” I told him. “…You’re…perfect.”
           “I know,” he said proudly. “That’s why we work, after all, since you’re only slightly less perfect.”
           Which was really his way of saying we were even keel, if you knew how to read the subtext, even if I did still think he was far too good for me to deserve.
           “Let’s get closer,” I suggested, approaching the edge where we could really see the lights.
           There we were, side by side, taking in the glittering panorama. And suddenly realizing that we still had to actually do something about it. Well, it wasn’t obligated, but it was the entire reason for this, and we did both want it – it was just still so difficult to initiate somehow.
           Giovanni cleared his throat; “So…I’m going to assume you’re ready for the big moment.”
           “Yeah,” I said, feeling my hands begin to tremble. “As I’ll ever be. So if you wanna…start it this time…”
           I turned toward him, looking up into his eyes. The low light played with the shadows that blanketed him, and I could pick out every feature on him from memory. God, he was adorable. If we were fully illuminated, his rose-pink eyes with their gold flecks would probably be sparkling as brightly as the skyline.
           I wondered if he really, truly looked at me the same way I looked at him. His expression seemed to be flustered enough to indicate it, but…why would he?
           I guess I really did need to listen to him and work on my own self-worth.
           He placed both hands on the sides of my face, sliding both thumb-pads over the cheekbones. And then started leaning in.
           This time, it was me who slapped my hand over my own mouth.
           He looked as though he’d been wounded. “Was…this not it either? Is this not what you wanted? Just tell me what needs to change, and I’ll – “
           “It’s me,” I muttered. “I’m just stupid nervous. This is literally the first time I’ve done this, and…it’s gonna be bad.”
           “No, it’s not! Even if you were bad, I’d totally be good enough to make up for it!”
           “I have no bar to even measure this,” I said softly. “Do I have to…do anything? What if I smack you in the face? I’m going to smack you in the face.”
           “Do you really think that’s gonna matter?”
           I wasn’t sure how to answer that.
           “Composer, you might totally suck at kissing. That’s fine. It’ll still be…it’s you, okay? So it’s not really gonna matter! You know I’m gonna love it, even if it’s awful!”
           “But you made a whole big deal out of everything being perfect – “
           “That was for you, Composer! And…I…wanted to have a safety net in case I’m the one who sucks. Maybe. Not that I would. But – “
           That was when it really hit home, what he was trying to say. “You won’t suck at it, Gio. You can’t. Because you’re you. Which is exactly what you’ve been trying to tell me.”
           He was silent a moment before saying, “Reverse psychology. I don’t REALLY think – “
           “I know what you think, you dork.” I slid my hand away. “Now kiss me already.”
           “But about that smacking faces thing,” he brought up. “Let’s just coordinate that before we get into it. You tilt left, I tilt right?”
           “Good c – “ I blinked. “No, because if you mirror it, we’d be going the same way. So we either need to both go left or both go right.”
           “…Right’s good?”
           “Right’s good.”
           I resolved to hold still, to not move outside my assigned head-tilt, but I broke that resolution – I advanced slightly to meet him, raising my heels just slightly to bridge the height gap. My eyes shut –
           And we hit foreheads before our lips could ever touch, which I suppose was to be expected.
           “Did you go left or right?” I asked, just about laughing.
           “I thought I was going right…”
           That turned out to be the perfect icebreaker. What relationship needs to be too serious, after all? I felt more spontaneous now, laying my arms over his shoulders, clasping my hands behind his head, as we gave it one more shot.
           It struck this strange balance between unexpectedly mundane and unexpectedly divine. Had I really been so worked up about this? Just pressing one set of lips to another? Who decided to give this such cultural weight, anyway? This hadn’t been anything to worry about.
           Except for the sensation that someone had slammed one paddle of an AED to my heart to get it to beat double-time with a sudden jolt.
           And then it was over. Too soon.
           “So?” Giovanni asked excitedly. “Was that perfect or was it perfect?”
           I eased my eyes open. “It was,” I told him. “I kinda expected it would be longer, honestly, but for a first, it was – “
           “You know, there’s no rule saying we can’t do it again.”
           “…You bring up a VERY good point.”
           We re-adjusted, replacing arms to put each other in more of an embrace. Then we went for seconds, pressing together just that much longer. I realized we hadn’t really talked about the concept of tongues, but we seemed to be on the same page regarding them – keep them were they were, for now. Still, we repositioned, trying to leech a little more affection off each other, almost biting –
           “OW!”
           I pulled back suddenly; Giovanni let me out of his arms, watching me press a finger to my lower lip.
           “Heheh…” He knew what had happened, as had I, and he nervously buried a hand in the hair at the back of his head. “Sorry ‘bout that. Got kinda caught up in the moment there…”
           His upper row of teeth had bitten down onto my lip. Gently enough not to draw blood, but he did have those rather pointed fangs, and they certainly were sharp.
           Normally, I didn’t have a very high pain tolerance. That was why I was surprised, myself, when I said, “Actually…I kinda liked it.”
           He reached peak flustering, muttering something about that also being part of his plan.
           “By the way,” I said, emboldened by our current promotion in affection, “I got you something. Funny story! I had actually wanted to give this to you all the way back in the lair, but then we started out on the whole sidequest. Anyway, remember how when we became official, you gave me a very important hoodie?”
           “Yeah,” Giovanni recalled. “The one you’re wearing. Lookin’ good, by the way.” He snapped me finger-guns at it.
           Did I forget to mention that I had been wearing a pink-and-plaid hoodie? Did you get this whole way not picturing me in one? Well, now you know I was wearing one the whole time, so you can brush that mental image up.
           “Well, it’s not fair that you steal me something and I don’t steal you something back, is it?” I reached into my pocket, feeling that both necklaces were still there. “Are you ready?”
           “What did you do, Composer?”            I retrieved the pendants, quickly detangling their silver chains. “This might actually be really silly. But I got us matching necklaces. Technically, they’re friendship necklaces, but I thought that we ARE best friends, just best friends who also date, and…” I held up one in each hand. The charms reflected the shapes of the sun and moon. “So this one’s mine,” I said, drawing the moon back to myself. “Because I’m the dark and depressing one. But you always make me smile and fill my life with sunshine, so…”
           I offered the sun pendant toward Giovanni. At first, he stared blankly at it, and I worried I hadn’t picked the proper gift. After all, I’d never seen him really accessorize or talk about doing so aside from his self-described edgy and gangster black nail polish.
           “But if you don’t want it,” I said hastily, “that’s cool too – ���
           The pendant had disappeared from my hand. He had it now. “This is why you’re my fucking favorite minion,” he said, voice trembling. “But you know you’re not the moon because you’re the depressing one, right? It’s because you’re the poetic one who’s always thinking about stuff. Also, I am gonna wear this forever.” He quickly fastened it around his neck. “Put yours on!”
           I attempted to do so, fumbling with the clasp for a while before hearing, “No, no, no, let me get that!” right before a hushed “Teleports behind you,” at which point I realized Giovanni was behind me rather than in front of me, his hands taking the clasp away from me and fastening it expertly.
           And you know what? I couldn’t even complain about him making me feel incapable, like I usually would if someone fastened my necklace for me.
           His hands settled on my shoulders from behind, resting there for an odd length of time. “What’s up?” I asked.
           “So we have lip-kissing down,” he stated. “Are you cool with…other places? Not naughty places. I’m just looking at prime real estate – “
           “Please,” I said without thinking, feeling that defibrillator shot again.
           He lifted my hair out of the way, and I could feel his lips brush the back of my neck.
           “Oh, I am DEFINITELY going to get used to this,” I told him once he let my hair fall.
           “So…um…what happens now?”
           “I mean, I did kinda interrupt the whole plan you were making,” I reminded him. “We should probably go back to that.”
           “Yeah, but it’s nice out here. I don’t wanna go back yet. Dammit, the spot I picked was TOO good and now I don’t wanna leave!”
           “Okay,” I resolved. “So how about we just stay up here and talk about whatever?”
           “Sure. I like whatever.”
           We stood side-by-side, looking out toward the city.
           “So,” I asked, “I know you have some kind of plan for getting us that giant drill. And now I need to know how you intend to do it.”
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lady-divine-writes · 6 years
Text
Kurtbastian one-shot - “Crafting Chaos” (Rated PG)
With Kurt sick, Sebastian steps up to help Thomas with an arts and crafts project for school, which puts them both in a sticky situation. (1198 words)
Notes: I needed some domesticky floof, so here it is. This actually happened to me once upon a time. xD
Part 45 of Daddies
Read on AO3.
“Hey guys,” Kurt says softly, attempting to smile even though every inch of his face hurts, his nose so clogged he can barely breathe. He was hit from all sides with every sinus based infection known to man after his last business trip. All he wanted to do was climb in bed, never to be seen until his cold cleared up and he looked vaguely human again. But now that he’s home, all he wants is to be with his two best boys … who have been keeping a respectful distance in order to let him rest. And Kurt appreciates that. But the silence in the house has left him uneasy. It’s always said that the scariest sound in the world when you have children is silence.
The same can be said for his own son and husband.
But Kurt finds them in the living room, sitting on the sofa, both concentrating hard on something Kurt can’t see with his burning, watery eyes. “I’ve been looking all over for you. I thought you might have gone out somewhere.”
“Not a chance,” Sebastian says, lifting his gaze to look at his husband wobbling towards them. “We weren’t going to leave you home alone in your hour of need.”
“That’s very chivalrous of you.”
“What are you doing out of bed, Papa?” Thomas asks, but with his eyes glued to a piece of material in his lap that he’s carefully applying buttons to. “Daddy said we needed to let you sleep for as long as possible.”
“I was asleep. But I suddenly remembered that you have a big art project for school due tomorrow that you wanted me to help you with …” Kurt’s eyes sweep over the mess on the floor, a cornucopia of Popsicle sticks, fabric scraps, tubes of acrylic paint, buttons and googly eyes “… but it looks like your Daddy may have that covered.”
“I knew you might not be up to making puppets, so I decided to help Tom-Tom here,” Sebastian explains, beaming up at Kurt with a smile of pure paternal pride.
But as Sebastian isn’t exactly the arts and crafts type, Kurt can’t help being a little bit wary.
“A-ha. And where did you get the material?”
Sebastian rolls his eyes. He knew this question was coming. “Don’t worry. I didn’t go rummaging through your craft supplies. I know better than that.” In his pained state, Kurt hmphs, but quietly. Sebastian only knows better because he accidentally used a remnant of $300-a-yard silk – a discontinued print that Kurt had squirrelled away from his last fashion show in Milan in the hopes of having it recreated specifically for items in his line - for one of Thomas’s previous art projects.
Kurt’s dream of recreating that print never came to fruition. But to this day, Hepburn has the snazziest neckerchief ever seen at their local dog park.
“So, what are you using?”
“Some old t-shirts of mine,” Sebastian answers.
“And some old socks,” Thomas adds. “We found the buttons under my bed. And I got the eyes at school.”
“Brilliant.” Kurt squints harder at the puppets both his husband and son are constructing on their laps, joining seams with a liquid that should look white, but is instead clear, and leaving an oily spot behind. “Ok, but how are you keeping them together? I can’t really see two inches in front of my face, but that doesn’t look like Elmer’s glue you’re using.”
“I didn’t have enough Elmer’s glue for all the puppets,” Thomas explains, sitting up so his Papa can get a better look at the six puppets lying on his lap, three on each leg, waiting to be completed.
“We were going to make a run to Michaels,” Sebastian says, “but we didn’t want to leave you alone. So I improvised.”
“With what?”
Sebastian holds up the small blue tube he’s been working with and shows it to Kurt. “Super glue.”
“Super glue!? You’re using Super Glue!?” Kurt looks from Thomas’s lap to Sebastian’s, layered with almost as many puppets as his son has. “And you’re working on your lap!?”
“Yeah …?” Sebastian says, unconcerned.
“Did you put some wax paper underneath? Or maybe a board?” Kurt leans down to get a better look, but stops halfway when the room begins spinning.
“Nah. This was all kind of spur of the moment.”
“Sebastian!”
“What?”
“Haven’t you ever used Super Glue before?”
“Nope. Why would I? When do I glue anything? I leave that stuff to you. You don’t let me fix anything anyway … not after the bicycle incident. Besides, it’s just a few puppets. What could possibly go wrong?”
Kurt closes his eyes, the headache he woke up with swiftly turning into a migraine during the course of this conversation. No good thing in the world ever happens after someone utters that particular question. Glue experience or not, his husband should know better. At the very least, he should learn to read directions.
“Uh, Thomas? Honey?”
“Yeah, Papa?”
“Could you stand up for me, please?”
“Sure. Okay,” Thomas says, putting down his tube of glue and beginning to move his puppets to the floor.
“Don’t move the puppets,” Kurt instructs, putting a hand to Thomas’s shoulder the best he can while only bending over the tiniest bit. “Just … stand up.”
“Oh. Alright.” A confused Thomas rises to his feet, but starts giggling once he gets there. Standing upright, he has six puppets adhered to his legs, not budging a hair, even when he begins to jump up and down.
“I have puppet pants!” he cheers, lifting his left leg and giving it a good shake.
“Yes, you do.” Kurt sighs. “Come with me, Tom-Tom. We’ll scrape the puppets off your pants.”
“Are … are we going to hurt them? I put a lot of work into them.”
“Not a one,” Kurt promises. “And with any luck, we won’t put too many holes in your pants, either.”
“So, Super Glue puts holes in fabric?” Sebastian asks as Kurt leads their son away to his bedroom.
“No, but peeling the Super Glue off Thomas’s pants might. It shouldn’t be that big a problem, though. It’s not like those are his favorite pants.”
“Uh, well, I might have a problem.”
“Yeah? And what’s that? Are you wearing three-thousand dollar Gucci jeans or something?”
Kurt turns back to his husband, staring up at Kurt with inexplicable anxiety etched into every line of his face. Kurt blinks blurry eyes, trying hard to bring Sebastian’s current predicament into focus, and notices that Sebastian has been gluing his puppets down with his legs outstretched.
His bare legs outstretched.
“I’m wearing shorts,” Sebastian admits. Kurt watches his husband give one of his puppets a test tug, wincing when he discovers the puppet has adhered completely to his skin.
“Oh boy. Well, I hope you weren’t too attached to your leg hair.” Kurt waves for his husband to join them, trying his hardest not to laugh at Sebastian’s sticky situation. But the sight of his husband standing dejectedly with six Popsicle puppets stuck to his legs almost does Kurt in. “Because you’re not going to be in a few minutes.”
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mrsbeef · 6 years
Text
Heart-shaped herb flower display build
When I’m in an emotional rut, I often find the best way to distract myself is to throw my entire soul into some kind of project, ideally one with a bit of external motivation. And fortunately for me, just such a project suddenly fell into my lap. Some friends of mine were having a party that was part birthday, part LGBT community celebration. It was also Black Panther-themed, and the event name was “Queerkanda”. My task: design and build a punch bowl display based on the glowing purple flower of the Wakandan heart-shaped herb, so that party guests might imbibe and obtain De Strenkt of De Bleck Pentha™. I was only too happy to take up the challenge.
This whole project took 7 days, though only about half this time was spent actually building anything. The rest of the time was spent conceptualising, sketching, finding references, and toting feels.
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 Step 1: Site visit
I had a little walk around the area where my installation was going to be placed on the night. The spot was a hedge approximately 2.5 – 3 feet high. The bowl itself was going to be placed in the mouth of a large acrylic cylinder, which would then sit in the middle of the hedge, giving the impression of the flower rising out of the foliage. Sounded simple enough.
Step 2: PINspiration
A bit of research showed that the heart-shaped herb flower from the Black Panther movie is not bowl- or cup-shaped like a lotus or a poppy, but actually more trumpet-shaped, like a datura. In fact to me it looks like nothing so much as ruellia tuberosa, a blue-purple flower that grows wild all over the place here in Trinidad and goes by the amusing local name of ‘monkey gun’.
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(JM Garg under Creative Commons licence)
Then I started to have a think about glowing flowers. Immediately I thought of those lamps made of silk (or occasionally wool) with solid black edges that look almost like stained glass once lit up. You know, these things:
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So I assembled a Pinterest board with pictures of purple trumpet-shaped flowers like monkey gun and morning glory, and pictures of lamps like these from Etsy. I’d refer to these images for inspiration throughout the project.
Step 3: Preliminary sketching
Having seen the site and the acrylic base I’d be using, and having acquired some reference images, I was now able to start imagining how I might actually build this thing. And what better way to do that than to get a pencil and start drawing stuff?
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The basic idea was to make five separate flower segments to then be combined into the full trumpet shape around the cylindrical base. They’d be made of purple fabric with black fabric borders, over a skeleton of large-gauge wire. Each of these wire-and-fabric segments would then be illuminated from the bottom by a carefully-angled blue LED bulb, with another LED to be placed right below the bowl. My initial idea was also to add some different tints and tones to the purple by using bleach solution and blue fabric dye, if I could get my hands on it. This was because
a) using paint would affect how the fabric would look under the LED light, and I didn’t want it becoming opaque; and
b) bleaching and dyeing the fabric would allow me to add colour variation without the risk of colours running.
Now I had a much more concrete idea of how to proceed, which meant it was time to go…
Step 4: SHOPPING!
This was going to be an outdoor installation, and currently in Trinidad it’s the rainy season. And if you don’t know what tropical rain is like… well, it can be pretty merciless. So the key phrase in my design philosophy here was “all seasons”. This is why I elected to make the flower out of fabric instead of paper; I needed something that could stand up to the elements if— heaven forbid— it had to, without falling apart.
Luckily, Trinidad is the land of Carnival, so I was able to get pretty much everything I needed in the same store. However, Trinidad is also the land of public holidays, so I had to wait out the long weekend before I could buy stuff. By the time I got everything it was already Wednesday.
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For the base fabric I chose a purple candy floss, which is a translucent material that’s quite shiny on its own. While in the store I used my phone flashlight to test how the candy floss would react to light; I found it had a soft glowing, almost frosted look to it, which I liked.
For the borders I picked out a length of black suedette, which just devours light like nobody’s business, so I figured it would make a very nice contrast with the more luminous candy floss.
Finally, for the wire bones I got a coil of heavy 12-gauge aluminium wire, the kind that’s usually used in the construction of Carnival costumes or large puppets or any other kind of sculptural armature of a certain size. It was a good weight, sturdy, pliable but not excessively pliable. All good qualities, but boy, did this wire cause me some pain. More on that in a moment…
Step 5: Construction begins
Aluminium wire of a certain thickness, when repeatedly bent at the same point, becomes hot to the touch.
Just a cool bit of science I happened to notice.
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How did I come to notice this, you ask? Well, you see, as the picture shows, the only wire cutters in my house strong enough to take on the task of cutting through semi-hard 12-gauge aluminium wire were old and rusty and dull and horrible. So I ended up using them as a vice, clamping down one end of the wire while repeatedly bending it back and forth until it just broke. That is how I had to cut every. Length. Of wire.
Raw ends of wire like that are also sharp, and will cut skin when they swing around. I managed to slice open my cuticles twice just trying to get the wire cut. Somehow I was able to keep my eyes intact, though I found myself really missing my safety glasses, which are still in Toronto.
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I would shape a single length of wire with the rusty pliers and my hands, leaving the two open ends at the bottom corner. I then bound those ends together with masking tape to give myself a closed fan-like shape. This process I repeated five times. Then I cut the suedette into long strips about an inch wide, and starting at the tape-covered join for a bit of extra stability, I glued the fabric strip in place with a hot glue gun before proceeding to wrap the suedette around the wire, which gave me a heavy black outline.
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Finally, I cut the purple candy floss into squares and used hot glue to glue three squares of candy floss to the back of each covered wire outline, before trimming away the excess with scissors. It was an arduous bloody process, and I kept having to take long breaks to be an emotional wreck of a human being, so it did take quite a while.
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But one square of fabric would have been way too diaphanous, and in the end it actually turned out to be a pretty good decision to use three sheets, for reasons I will explain later.
Step 6: Lighting tests
LED lights are great because they don’t tend to give off a lot of heat. This is good for my purposes, because any light that gets too hot would melt everything I’d made. That’s why black light bulbs were not an option. Those things get DAMN hot. I know because I burned my fingers on one. Between that, the hot glue gun and the wires, I’m essentially impervious to pain at this point.
Now here’s the fun part.
I could not find blue LED lights no matter where I went. Originally I wanted battery-powered bulbs, but then I relaxed my standards to mains-powered rope lights. Nothing doing. Couldn’t even find them in white.
So I had a poke around at home. I found a large bag full of close to 100 tiny battery-powered LED mini-bulbs in bright white, left over from previous birthday parties here. They weren’t very powerful, but I used them to test out how light would look on the flower segments.
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How many bulbs will give enough light? One bulb? Three? ELEVEN?
The number of bulbs needed to satisfactorily light one segment was just prohibitively high (not all the bulbs in the bag worked), so I needed to try something else. I eventually settled on a spool of bright white LED Christmas lights. Using the coil of leftover aluminium wire and two large books, I set up an improvised frame that I could use to arrange the flower segments around the light string.
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Hmm, looking pretty damn good if I do say so myself. But there’s something missing.
Step 8: Last-minute detailing
It became apparent to me fairly early on that the candy floss seemed to be completely immune to bleach. I don’t know what I was doing wrong, but I decided to jettison that idea. I also couldn’t get my hands on any fabric dye. But I still wanted to add a bit more black fabric to the flower segments, so that the finished flower would more closely resemble the silk lamps that were my original inspiration. So I got out the sketchbook again and drew out a few ideas.
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Eventually I settled on the pattern of thin points of graduating lengths in the lower right corner; I cut them out of suedette and arranged them on top of a segment with straight pins. However, there was a problem: the black suedette absorbed way too much light, and pretty seriously affected the way the light hit the candy floss.
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Solution: apply the detailing to the *back* of the segment instead, allowing the dark strips to be visible on the other side while still being covered by a layer of light-diffusing candy floss. I applied the strips of suedette very, very gingerly, using only small dots of hot glue. This is where it became apparent that it had been smart to use three layers of candy floss: the glue adhered only to the first layer of candy floss, so I avoided having spots of dried glue showing up on the surface of the flower and getting thrown into horrible relief by the light. Unintentional win! Now time to go to sleep and await--
Step 9: Installation
I arrived at the location with about an hour and a half of sunlight remaining. Borrowing two extra pairs of hands, I bound the five segments tightly together around the cylindrical base using a length of 14-gauge soft wire, which felt like freaking silk in my hands after everything I’d been through. Then I used some good old-fashioned elbow-grease to shape each segment convincingly and help create the trumpet shape I’d been after. Finally I stuffed the remaining purple candy-floss into the cylinder and arranged the lights before sticking a bowl on top.
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Then it began to positively piss down rain. Luckily the outlet where the lights were plugged in had been wrapped up with a piece of a black bin bag, and the whole flower being soaked now meant it wouldn’t catch on fire! Can’t burn this one, Killmonger.
The rain turned out to just be a passing rain (though a heavy, almost hurricane-like one), so once the spot of bad weather was over, all we had to do was wait for sundown.
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And there it is!
Queerkanda forever <3
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junjunfinale · 4 years
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Form structure
For look of the installation, I put in consideration what else can I play with the circular form. 
At first, I think much more functionality part. Like how does it connects ad holds? Then I realised that it is too heavy to hang as there are many components: wood layers, acrylic and power supply. The school ceiling is not allowed to drill, so is impossible for me to hang. So it need to be stand from the ground. I was suggested that maybe can have something seemingly invisible as support, or hide with designed elements.
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I don’t want to go too far from polaroid itself. Therefore, I try to think some more direct approach. First I thought down the memory lane, so the form becomes a pathway, as mentioned in previous post. But then it doesn’t seemed as interesting. 
Then I try to brainstorm what can I do with the circular shape. Like a flat disc adding ornamentation? The intention of the design is reflected to time. Then I thought of Alice in Wonderland and gears. However, I realised that it would end up bring my context too far off again as it makes the look so rustic and traditional, whereas polaroid comes in in 70s -80s. Then I tried to think things like time travel and many other objects or subject matter as my concept. But ended up not working. So I search on what relevant to polaroid or the timing when it is at peak. 70s-80s art movements (feminist art, pop art etc.)
Links referred:
https://www.widewalls.ch/70s-art/
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2008/dec/19/corporatefraud1
https://www.fashiongonerogue.com/how-wear-1970s-fashion-trend/how-wear-1970s-fashion-trend
https://dp.la/exhibitions/evolution-personal-camera/polaroid-era
https://galeriemichael.com/2018/01/analyzing-periods-of-contemporary-art-the-1980s/
Then, I realised I shouldn’t use time as my concept; instead it should be timeless. Polaroid is something significant that no matter how time transcends, it is irreplaceable. So I tried on seeing timeless design.
Links referred:
https://www.thespruce.com/rules-of-timeless-design-4002021
https://blog.alexdevero.com/timeless-design-10-principles-of-a-good-design/
https://designshack.net/articles/graphics/create-a-timeless-design/
https://www.businessleader.co.uk/how-to-create-a-timeless-design-for-your-new-product/56188/
https://speckyboy.com/designer-might-create-timeless-designs/
https://www.designindaba.com/articles/point-view/timeless-design
I went on and meet Sweii to break my thinking. Then she taught me by asking me to find something relevant, like kinetic sculpture in disc form as reference, and improvise on my approach. One of the most memorable is taking Salvador Dali’s melting clock as concept and turn the installation into melting disc!
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Brainstorm together:
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brynnaverse · 7 years
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Last Night’s Dream
Foreward:
No one likes hearing about other people’s dreams, I know that.  I remember hearing Noel Fielding once say something like, “listening to other people’s dreams is dreadfully dull.”  But I can’t find the source for that quote, so I may be wrong.  Therefore, I don’t expect you to read this.  It’s written badly anyway.
Preface:
I have apocalyptic dreams all of the time.  They’re usually extremely vivid.  Pieces of these dreams sometimes sneak into my consciousness and it will take me half the day to realize they’re fake dream-memories and not memories of actual events.  Typically, in these apocalyptic dreams I either (a) accept my fate relatively quickly in a wave of calmness or (b) find the group of people I trust, who I can hold up with and survive the impending doom[*].  You would think that my brain would register these biological hallucinations as nightmares, but 90% of the time, it doesn’t.  Ninety-percent of the time dream-self is either completely at peace with the situation or is excited to bring my important people together to solve the puzzles/ problems at hand until my eyes decide to wake up.  When my brain has decided to survive Armageddon, I wake up inspired.  I can solve anything, even if I don’t become the leader of the team, I know that I’m important to survival (not the survival of mankind, to say, but the survival of my team...they’re the important ones anyway).
So here we go.  From this point forward I will be writing in first person: I, Me, Mine, blah blah blah, are all going to be in reference to the dream-self.   All footnotes are in reference to my real life, or day-self.
The Dream:
I was living in California[**].  I ran a small business managing performing artists[***] while spending the other half of my time learning about marketing and performing contortion.  I was making a decent living, I wasn’t worried about bills and taking courses to help further my career came across as affordable.  My life was entirely ran from my laptop, my external hard-drive, & my phone.  The world was in a relatively troubled state.  There were horrific events happening around the globe, but none of them directly effected me or my happy little life on the fringe.  Ignorance is bliss.  My dad was in the Air Force[****], if I needed to worry about anything, he would tell me.  My dad is also the sort of person who believes in independence, problem solving, adventure, and working things out on your own: therefore, he’s likely to withhold information if HIS interpretation of said information will irrationally scare you and hold you back from your own freedom.
I was reading about a cruise.  It was a small networking cruise that was intended to be packed with people in the variety-show industry.  There would be performances, seminars, socials, and other general conference things.  The focus was to get professional performers to present themselves better, on the back-end, to improve their footing in their desired market.  I wanted to go.  I felt like I needed to go!  I had never been on a cruise, and this was the ideal opportunity to brush up on my skills as a manager.
With the world in its current state, I called my dad and asked him if it was the appropriate time to go on a cruise.  He had mentioned a few countries that weren’t ideal to visit & that things on the American front were a little rocky, but that it should be okay.  So I enrolled.
When I called to schedule my booking the lady on the phone told me that the ‘Performers & Networking Retreat’ was on a larger ship than the flyers proclaimed and it was due to the fact that we would be sharing the boat with an ‘Adult Christian Retreat’.  She assured me that both conferences were on opposite sides of the ship and it was unlikely that the two groups would mingle.  I didn’t care.  I wasn’t even sure why she thought it was so important to go on about.  I took a mental note of it and registered for the conference.
The weather was beautiful the day the ship left.  I was a little intimidated going on this networking retreat by myself.  Usually at conferences I have one of the performers that I manage with me and simply speak on their behalf, and I’ve never presented my performer-self in such an established environment.  I packed lightly, we would only be on the water for 48-hours and the dress code said casual.  Thus, my packing consisted of 2 clean black tank tops, a pair of clean jeans, structured sandals, my laptop, my external hard drive, a notebook, a pen, a water-proof disposable camera, & a crappy little Nokia phone that I would be able to keep signal and be used while at sea.  I left my real phone on land.  I kept my clothes and major electronics in my backpack in my room and carried the other things with me in a hip-satchel as I wandered throughout the ship taking in the full retreat experience.
For a long time, everything was running smoothly.  The social events were ran a lot like raging college parties with a speakeasy vibe.  You needed passwords and handshakes to get into certain areas and the only way to get those was to meet the right people and ask the right questions.  You were forced to make friends, otherwise you were basically excluded from the conference.  Each of the event spaces was set up like a performer's wonderland.  There were a few traditional stages with lush velvet curtains.  Some were small lit platforms where people could gather around and watch the showcase.  Others were improvised stages set up on the backs of broken down trucks in warehouse caverns in the heart of the ship.  There was beautiful graffiti, sparkling lights, small private bars in hidden rooms, and mazes of color, each area was its own rabbit-hole where you had to gather information from various people and collect your own unique-clique of industry-individuals.  It was getting dark, the weather was turning gloomy and the waters a little choppy.
I ended up in a section furnished with classic cars that had been gutted and modified to create seating areas, bathroom stalls, bars; even flipped over and covered in a layer of acrylic to become a stage of gears, engines, and tubing.  The group I had bonded with was made up of magicians mostly, a few people who owned venues, and a sprinkling of actors with a small awkward array of skills.  There were one or two agents that I wanted to talk to and a manager who was an ancient juggler who really made it big back in the day, but wasn’t interested in being on stage anymore.  There was a magician on stage.  He kept complaining that the waters were too rough and that it was ruining all of his tricks.  I assumed that he was just too drunk to perform them well.  Every once in awhile a new person would wander in, look appalled, and storm off.  The magicians rotated.  I was happy to have finally found some sort of routine.  As much as I loved the rabbit holes, it was nice to be somewhere comfortable for a little while.
I wandered off through a maze, a beautiful magician was leading me by the hand swearing that he needed to show me something.  We ended up on the deck of the ship.  The water was black, the sky thick with clouds, and a thin cold mist filled the air.  I liked the way it felt when I breathed it in, but the way the boat was rocking hurt my ankles.  I caught glimpses of stars through breaks in the clouds.  The planes flew low into the city.  You could tell the airlines by the colors of the wings.  We were close enough to port that you could still see a line of lights and buildings, but it was too far away to make out definite shapes.  I noticed a few other boats in the water.  Big freight ships slowly bobbing along next to giant military vessels.  They made our cruise ship seem insignificant.  I guess it was romantic.  We didn’t talk much, just listened to the thunder rolling in and kissed hard like we were really in love even though we barely knew each other [*****].
---I don’t have much memory of the next part of this dream, knowing the way that I dream it was probably sexy stuff but it’s not integral to the story---
Struggling to remember puzzles and passwords, I was determined to find my way back to the stage of deconstructed cars.  The events were dying down as the night went on and less and less people were out and about.  Everyone I saw seemed to have sour looks on their faces like they didn’t want to be there.  It wasn’t the vibrant retreat that I’d left... but it was.  I stumbled through a curtain onto the acrylic stage floor, the tides turning for the worst.  Standing there was a woman in a black pant suit swaying back and forth holding a book.  The audience, though a mere 20 or 30 people, was mostly made up of people in white tank-tops and grungy jeans, a few of them wearing blazers nodding along to the string of hate flowing from the woman’s mouth.  I noticed the clique I had created sitting high on top of the roof of a car in the back of the room looking-on with confusion.
The woman was going on about how, “magic is all lies and deceit given to man by the Devil” preaching how, “God would be ashamed if he knew what we were congregating over.” and that “we would be cleansed by fire and brimstone if we did not beg for forgiveness.”  This went on continuously as more and more nodders trickled into the space.  After a while of sitting at the back of the stage I stood up and asked her, “If you’re so offended by all of this, why are you here?”  She looked back at me with hatred in her eyes as if to say, “it’s the only thing I’ve ever known.” but her voice shrieked with profanities as she had her minions drag me off stage.
My emotion at this point, confused.  I didn’t have much time to question the situation.  A loud crash that echoed through the ship.  The colorful lights that once lit the rabbit holes became a violent, fluorescent white blinking between red.  I squirmed out of the clammy hands of the security guards and ran through the maze that my temporary love had shown me.  The space was small, filled with quick turns and dead ends so I didn’t worry about anyone following me, not many other people would fit.  Especially not the nodders.
I returned to the deck of the ship.  There was a scattering of people emerging from their rooms, obviously performers awakened from a deep sleep, still coated in their glitter and hairspray.  There were also a few people in white tank-tops and grungy jeans adorned in their thrift-store blazers. Everyone looked out into the ocean.  A hundred yards away, if you looked really hard, you could see the black curved top and periscope of a U-boat.  It was facing the wrong way, the tides had turned it around, it had rammed into the side of one of the giant barges that seemed so peaceful before.  The percussive waves from the collision began to reach the cruise ship and we rocked at mercy to the sea.  I thought to myself, “Maybe the freight ship is okay, maybe everyone is okay.  It wasn’t a head on collision and the barge is so much bigger than the U-boat that it wasn’t enough force to have any real effect.  Maybe! the water absorbed most of the shock and everything is fine!”  I wound my disposable camera and took a picture placing the strap around my wrist.
It was raining pretty heavily at this point and lightening was littering the sky.  I asked a few people if they had seen more of the situation and if they could explain it to me.  They said there was a loud rumble and everything shook before the U-boat ever reached the surface, other people mentioned that there was a smaller military boat behind the barge & that they collided as a result of the U-boat’s interference.  I had noticed that there were more ships in the water now than there were earlier.  Everyone was talking at this point.  Every story was different.  The planes were getting lower.
I ran to a stairwell and called my dad.
Out of breath and covered in rain I opened with, “Hey! so, I know it’s late but I have a few questions.”
Concerned he responded, “Is everything Okay?”
I was becoming worried, “I don’t know....but you may know more about the situation than I do.  I don’t know if it’s made it to the news yet, but a U-boat has just crashed into a barge off the coast...”
“It hasn’t made the news yet, but I knew about it, I just got called into duty”
“What?! You’re never called into duty?”
“We don’t really have time to talk about this.”
My father quickly explained to me that war was on the horizon and that tensions were so high that almost any catalyst would be seen as a direct threat and initiate an international war.  Though the military knew that it was a large earthquake that caused the U-boat to veer off course they would announce it to the public as aggression from international powers leaving them with no choice but to use nuclear action.  He said that he had been “On Hold” from the Air Force for deployment.  That he knew he would probably be leaving soon, but that no one knew when.
“How could you not tell me this?!” I screamed into the Nokia brick.  People on the cruise ship and transitioned from gossipy-confusion to actual panic.
“I didn’t think it would happen so soon!  I’ve been on hold before and nothing has happened, it wasn’t worth worrying about.  You going on a cruise wasn’t going to change any of that.”
Ocean water was sloshing onto the lower decks, people were running around scrambling and screaming.  I’d never been on a cruise, but I’d been on a lot of ships.  For the most part, they were pretty self correcting.  At this point our best option was to ride the waves until we made it through the storm.
Dad asked, “Are you okay?  I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, please say something.”
I hadn’t noticed my silence, eventually I responded, “Yeah, I’m okay, I understand.”
Someone grabbed my hand and pulled me up-stairs to the captain’s deck [******].
Dad yelled, “Bryn! are you okay?!”
“I think so, I don’t really know what’s going on anymore.”
I looked out over the edge and saw smaller ships get swallowed by larger waves.  It had seemed that the port had deployed every boat it had, like everyone was fleeing the city.
Dad barked, “Stay on the line as long as you can, I need to know you’re okay!”
“I’m trying!” I quickly responded out of breath, as the few people on this deck began adorning life jackets.  I snapped pictures of the city burning in the distance.  I looked up, most of the rain had stopped but lightning was booming all around us.  It struck one of the wings of a plane which came barreling into the ocean slicing into the sea like a steaming butter knife made of screams.
I tried to stay calm, but I was scared, I was legitimately was scared.  This was real!  The world  was going to end with a huge storm opening for nuclear holocaust and there I was on the top floor of a ship with a bunch of strangers wearing life preservers like they were playing dress-up.  Our ship jerked as Captain Alex [*******] tried to stay on top of the waves.  People shouted information at me to relay to my Dad, he was our only contact to the outside world at this point, he was our best bet at being saved.
We had been turned around so many times that the end of the barge was swinging toward the bow of our ship.  The sea was saturated with vessels and chunks of metal.
A metallic boom echoed through the ship, water violently drowned the lower decks.
---At this point, I was terrified, I wanted to hope that I would survive this, but I thought about how useless survival would have been.  My notes, laptop hard-drive, my professional life was in my room.  My room was filled with water.  Even if I survived I would have nothing, the life I had spent so long building was over.  It was hard to accept that.  All I had was a crappy Nokia phone, my ID, and a waterproof disposable camera.  Livid at myself I thought, “What the fuck is wrong with you? This isn’t how the world functions anymore! All of these things you feel like you need to carry with you are archaic and useless in modern society?! Why can’t you just function like a real person?!”---
Dad was still on the line, “What was that?! Where are you?!”
You could taste the salt of the sea in the air.  The ocean was creeping closer to our peaked oasis, Captain Alex knew that our time was up.  More planes crashed into the ocean in the distance angering the sea.  The group panted  and panicked as we inflated the life raft.  Everything was slippery and nothing was working.  
I cried back onto the phone, “I have to go!  I know you and Mom don’t talk but if you don’t hear back from me you need to call her and tell her that I love her-”
A huge wave toppled over the inflating dingy, swallowing my plastic brick and pulling my arm down into the cold void of the angry ocean.  I was stuck to something.  I gripped the side of the dingy with my right arm and felt the water rush up my nose.  After a good deal of struggling, I was pulled up onto the raft by the other people who were on the captain’s deck.  That was it, the ocean was destroying everything in sight.  I snapped pictures of everything.  Debris in the water, planes smashing into the water, explosions off of ships in the distance.   I took a picture of the cold, scared group with my camera and began crying.  The angry preacher lady was there, the fight completely wiped out of her, the fear I read in her face before radiated throughout her entire body.  I didn’t recognize the others.  My anxious brain ran through the situation, “Could it have happened differently?  What did I do wrong? Was this the end?”  A Southwest plane nose-dived into the water less than 50 yards away sending an aftershock that the little raft would never survive... I was scared... legitimately and genuinely scared.
I woke up.
  [*]:  We all know that the latter is ridiculous, everyone thinks that they’re special enough to collect the perfect team of miraculous misfits who can survive Armageddon.  Let’s be real, the likelihood of that is EXTREMELY improbable; no one is a superhero.  If the ground fell off the Earth everyone would die unless they were in a plane & then they would die when they ran out of gas; the longest lasting survivors would be the handful of individuals in space, but they too would (most likely) run out of resources and too, meet their demise.
[**] My mother is extremely superstitious, I was raised being taught that California is going to fall off.  My mother, though primarily atheist and extremely skeptical, genuinely believes that if SHE goes to California it will fall off due to her presence.  She is scared that I have inherited this curse and that if I move there, it will fall off... because of me.
[***] This is what I currently do for a living, though I plan on moving to California, I don’t believe that I will be able to support myself on my current business structure and will require another part-time job to supplement my income.
[****] My dad is actually in the Air Force.
[*****] I love these moments.  I’m really into short term, hyper-condensed relationships where both people can really experience that ideal of ‘love’.  Everyone involved is 100% a part of the moment and truly wants to be with the other forever.  When everyone knows that there are definite factors that will terminate the actual possibility of this never-ending love, but disregard that knowledge because of the moment. “It’s only forever.  Not long at all.”  My friend once called them “Weekend Marriages”.  I’ve adopted this term, even though they rarely happen on weekends for me.
[******] I’d like to say it was the hot magician from earlier in the dream, but I don’t remember. #dreamlogic
[*******] I don’t know why I knew the name of the captain
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dawnajaynes32 · 6 years
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FRESH Narratives
FRESH Narratives
By Tom Wachunas
   “…In my juror’s statement from last year’s FRESH, I spoke about the presence of our nation’s political and social crisis that I saw in the works submitted. We are reeling in shock; now we begin to join together to heal, stand for the causes we hold true, and find ways to move ahead as one. FRESH 2017 explores new definitions of space and this new place that we must all learn to navigate and inhabit together.… If FRESH 2017 was a reeling in the face of a shocking new narrative, FRESH 2018 is about artists constructing a better narrative.”  - Artist Charles Beneke, Juror for FRESH 2018
    EXHIBIT:  14th annual FRESH, through March 31 / Summit ArtSpace, 140 E. Market St., Akron / Hours: Noon to 7 p.m. Thursdays-Fridays, noon to 5 p.m. Saturdays / Information: 330-376-8480/ www.summitartspace.org
     ARTIST PANEL DISCUSSION Thursday, March 22, 7 pm / Free and open to the public / Reserve your seat at  http://bit.ly/2BBUzlq
   I’m very pleased to report that my mixed-media relief painting, “After the Sermon,” was selected to be in this exhibit, and grateful to be in the company of so many truly engaging works from 34 artists, chosen from 150   submissions. I wrote here about my piece back in October, 2017, so if you missed that post and you’re interested, here’s a link: 
http://artwach.blogspot.com/2017/10/surrendered.html
     A particularly ‘fresh’ aspect of this exhibit is the adjudication procedure. Artist Charles Beneke was the sole juror for last year’s FRESH exhibit, and he was asked to return this year in the same capacity. In his juror’s statement (excerpted above), Beneke explains, “The organizers were curious to see how time and cultural movement in this volatile era could have affected the artists of our region and how any potential changes may have become manifest in the artworks they produced and chose to submit as evidence of who they are one year later.”  I highly recommend reading his full statement, so once again, here’s a link: 
 https://www.summitartspace.org/fresh-2018-jurors-statement/
   I didn’t see FRESH 2017, but evidently there were threaded through it manifestations of the sociopolitical Sturm und Drang of our time – our “volatile era.”  If I’m reading Beneke’s assessment of the current show correctly, this year’s installment is distinguished by a comparatively different kind of probity, a lens-shifting of sorts.
   Eminently noticeable in this exhibit is its pervasive inwardness - a palpable arc of personal introspection, discovery, and yes, mystery. The pieces I find most compelling aren’t only visually beguiling but also conceptually and psychologically insistent. Some of them keep singing in my memory like a song I can’t stop humming even if I’ve forgotten the words. 
   A substantial portion of the paint in Catherine Spencer’s abstract oil on gessoed woodboard, Separation Anxiety, looks like it was applied with a putty knife, erasing some shapes and color passages while simultaneously creating others. And then there’s that odd vertical divide right down the middle. It’s a stream of self-conscious mark-making that maybe wants to harmonize with its surrounds, yet ultimately disrupts the composition’s equilibrium. Purposeful, or accidental?  Anxiety indeed. 
   Robert Carpenter’s fascinating three-sided Sketch is a sculptural work made from wood, plaster, gauze, and paint. It’s an unusual spatial configuration that hangs perpendicular to the wall and has the look of an improvisation with scrappy found materials. The formal complexity of this 3D drawing conjures a wrecked building being salvaged and re-assembled, a ravaged space being repaired.
   Holy Games is a sprawling abstract work on paper by Jack St. John. His layered strata of acrylic, ink, pastel, and spray paint make for an active surface, seething with idiosyncratic scribbles, frenetic splotches, and broad scrapes. The whitish cruciform emerging from the middle of the picture plane (or is it being engulfed?) is vaguely suggestive of a figure, arms outstretched and dripping pink, as if attempting to embrace and unify all the volatile energy surrounding it.
   On a more charming note, there’s the shimmering Random Star Variations by Roger Benedetti. These brightly colored, very shiny (some painted with nail polish) whittled sticks pop off the wall and seem to dance with their own shadows. I wanted to see a much wider expanse of them, to be more fully mesmerized by this cosmetic cosmos. As it is, the piece is nonetheless a titillating evocation of childlike wonder.
     Amidst all of the remarkably diverse iconographic and material content clamoring for attention in this exhibit, it could be easy to miss the foam, paper, and metal piece by Carol Klingel, parts of me I know nothing about. From a distance you might think it’s an electrical wall fixture. Plug into it anyway. This close encounter of the tiny kind (approx. 5” x 3”) resonates in a large way, if only in its uncompromisingly enigmatic nature.
   There’s something almost primordial about the image of what might be smoke plumes, or a vaporous sky, set at the bottom of a molded foam box, itself looking like packing material. What originally filled those negative spaces?  In solidarity with the artist, there are parts here we know nothing about. At once inviting and elusive, it’s that proverbial song in the head again. 
   The words are gone, but the tune won’t let go. Art can be like that.
   PHOTOS, from top: 1. Separation Anxiety, by Catherine Spencer / 2. Sketch, by Robert Carpenter / 3. Holy Games, by Jack St. John / 4. Random Star Variations, by Roger Benedetti / 5. parts of me I know nothing about, by Carol Klingel   
FRESH Narratives syndicated post
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nofomoartworld · 7 years
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Hyperallergic: Slippery Geometry and Beguiling Color
Sanford Wurmfeld, “II – 18 + B/2 (YGY-VBV/Ys + Vt)” (2016), acrylic on canvas, 59 x 90 inches (all images courtesy MINUS Space)
The Washington Color School, which was centered in the nation’s capital, included such artists as Morris Louis, Gene Davis, Kenneth Noland, Hilda Thorpe, and Paul Reed. In 1965, Gerald Nordland organized the exhibition, “Washington Color Painters” at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art (June 25 to September 5, 1965), which traveled to other venues, including the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, helping the group gain national exposure.
As the recent re-hanging at the renovated East Building of the National Gallery of Art makes amply evident, there were a lot of artists interested in the expressive possibilities of color who lived and worked in Washington DC between the late 1950s and the late ‘70s but were not included in Nordland’s landmark exhibition: Anne Truitt, Sam Gilliam, Kenneth Young, and Alma Thomas, for example.
While the Washington Color School is by now a well-known chapter of postwar American art history, there is another, lesser known though no less accomplished group of abstract artists who developed a meticulous approach to the phenomenology of color. Working in New York since at least the mid-1970s, these artists, who are centered at Hunter College, where they taught and, in some cases, continue to teach, have never been fully recognized.
Someday — hopefully sooner than later — an enterprising young curator will organize an exhibition in New York under the rubric, “Hunter Color School,” which will include Doug Ohson (1936–2010), Robert Swain, Vincent Longo, Joanna Pousette-Dart, and others who have taught there.
Two of the artists who are longtime members of the “Hunter Color School” are currently paired in the exhibition, Gabrielle Evertz/Sanford Wurmfeld: Polychromy, at MINUS SPACE (July 8 – August 12, 2017). While the exhibition closes today, the gallery is open by appointment until September 4th.
Wurmfeld, who retired from Hunter College some years ago, and Evertz are longtime colleagues and friends. More importantly, their work is very different from each other, demonstrating that the ontology of color is a wide-open field — a space where research, color theory, and painting can arrive at very different conclusions. Georges Seurat opened the door to this fusion, and generations of artists have taken up the cause.
Evertz’s two recent paintings are done in her signature vertical lines and bands of color interwoven with vertical clusters of gradated gray bands, which taper in a calculated way from the painting’s bottom edge to its top, and vice versa. While Evertz’s work might evoke comparisons with the chromatic abstractions of Gene Davis, the differences between them are sharp and profound.
Gabriele Evertz, “With Your Brightness” (2016), acrylic on canvas, 60 x 60 inches
Davis’s insistently flat paintings tend to accumulate in rhythmic repetitions. They are walls of color that do not invite close scrutiny and, in that sense, exemplify the Minimalist credo neatly summed up by Frank Stella’s famous assertion, “What you see is what you see.” This is not the case with either Evertz or Wurmfeld, which means they have pushed our experience of color further down the road and should be recognized for doing so. Despite claims that there was a point of culmination in painting in the late ‘60s, beyond which no further discoveries were possible, the present state demonstrates otherwise.
In counterpoint to the rhythmic repetition of Davis, Evertz threads the tonal (or harmonic) progressions of gray (the  tapering bands) through the bands of varying widths and unvarying color, from muted hues to saturated tints. As a musical analogy, think of Bach’s fugues interspersed with Morton Feldman’s chromatic clusters. The effect is fascinating.
One effect of Evert’s groupings of progressively darker or lighter grays, which are bounded on each side by a blue or orange band, is that they seem to recede or advance spatially, interrupting the painting’s flatness. And yet, we know this to be an effect of the color, not of overt illusionism. Another effect is the tapering of a gray band into an overlapping darker or lighter gray, starting at the top or bottom edge and moving at a predetermined angle until it reaches the opposite edge, which introduces a visual tremor into the painting. This is enhanced by the fact that once you focus in on the tapering, you cannot not quite put together what happens when you step back and take in the painting as a whole. The tapered bands, whose angles become less pronounced, add a disruptive twist to the experience. There is a visual buzz, whose source is not instantly identifiable.
Gabriele Evertz, “I Dream of Spring” (2017), acrylic on canvas, 60 x 60 inches
With Evertz’s paintings, I kept moving in closer and then standing back, focusing on a section and then taking the whole work in. In the square painting “I Dream of Spring” (2017), done in acrylic, there is a particularly pleasurable weaving together of three progressively lighter gray bands, which start at the painting’s left edge, separated by a maroon, magenta, and pink stripe. And then, everything changes as your attention moves across the painting, registering the artist’s different intervals of grays and colors without repeating herself. You suspect there is an overall structure, but you cannot determine what it is. Instead, the painting offers you different paths into and out of its groupings, which are joined together in no predictable manner. Evertz has found a way to be simultaneously improvisational and strict; it is quite a feat.
Sanford Wurmfeld, according to the art historian William C. Agee, “may well be the best little-known painter in New York today.” Interested in color relationships at least since the mid-1960s, Wurmfeld’s work underwent an important shift in 1985, when the artist mistakenly added one more square than he needed while drawing over a grid on a very large painting. As Agee has pointed out in a catalogue for an earlier exhibition, this enabled Wurmfeld to achieve “a new pattern with a continual change in the size and format of the grid.”
By incorporating the mistake into his work, and misaligning the grids, while incrementally thickening the line into a band as he moves across the surface, Wurmfeld makes it possible for the viewer to have a bifurcated experience, each mind boggling in a different way.
Sanford Wurmfeld, “II – 18 + B/2 (YOY-VRV/Ys + Vt)” (2016), acrylic on canvas, 59 x 90 inches
There is the experience of standing close to the paintings and studying the meticulous ingenuity of a structural grid whose overlaid, off-register vertical and horizontal bands increase incrementally, with the colors occupying the gridded spaces increasing or decreasing  in tandem with the grid. And yet, even as one becomes aware of Wurmfield’s technique, what happens optically is spellbinding.
While Wurmfeld’s calibrations adhere to a system, we are entranced by our experience of the colors, the way our eyes mix them — something his work shares with Anoka Faruqee’s carefully misaligned patterns. This optical state is heightened as we step back from the painting. The constantly changing spectral light seems to exist separately from the surface, like an independent aura or mirage that varies subtly with the movement of our eyes. The changes may be the result of the way we mix distinct hues at the back of our eyes, but that scientific fact is not something we are overly conscious of in our daily lives. Wurmfeld’s paintings provoke us into that state of awareness. The effect is dazzling.
Gabrielle Evertz/Sanford Wurmfeld: Polychromy continues at MINUS SPACE (16 Main Street, DUMBO, Brooklyn) through August 12.
The post Slippery Geometry and Beguiling Color appeared first on Hyperallergic.
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mizannethrope · 7 years
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Mother’s Day - it’s complicated
Today is Mother’s Day. I’m trying not to be sad.
I have been very open about discussing my mother’s fight with cancer and her death. I write about it a lot. I find catharsis in it so I continue. By writing about it and examining the feelings I have, I keep her alive with me a little bit longer. I keep up the exploration because I continue to learn so much from it. To counter the sense of loss I feel around the Hallmark holiday of Mother’s Day, I have sought to focus on all the other women in my life who have been like mothers to me. My mother loved me to an infinite degree but she also was acutely aware of her own limitations. I think she overestimated them but they were very real to her. My mother pushed me toward others that she felt would “improve” me. During my early life my mother sought out other women who could teach me the things she felt she could not. She was always striving on my behalf. In this pursuit my mother found or encouraged me to seek out surrogate mothers to learn from. She actively encouraged my friendships with these other women.
Let me tell you about some of these women and what lessons I learned from each.
When I was in early elementary school, Bonnie lived down the street from us in our townhouse complex. I’m guessing she was early 30s then. She had no children of her own, though I believed she wanted very much to be a mother. It wasn’t in the cards for her. Bonnie’s husband was a career Army officer and Bonnie was, at that time, a stay at home wife. My brother and I got to know her because we loved playing with her black lab, Machen, German for “girl.” Just as kids would go knock on a friend’s door and ask, “Wanna ride bikes?” I would knock on Bonnie’s door and ask, “Can Machen come out and play?”.
Bonnie had a challenging relationship with her own mother and father. Her mother favored her older brothers. Her father was remote and often cold. My mother, facing disappointment and problems in her marriage, confided in Bonnie and the two became close. Hours in Bonnie’s kitchen would reveal stories of her youth that stay with me today.
Bonnie had studied home economics in college. I’m sure this would be a questionable choice at best today, if such a choice were even an option. People often ask me about my love of food. I got it from Bonnie. My mom was not a very good cook. She never learned to cook in Korea. She improvised once she got to America but her repertoire was largely traditional American fare she learned from my great-aunts. Meatloaf. “Broiled” steak (more like boiled steak). Stew. Mashed potatoes. Frozen green beans and succotash. Because my mother worked, she stocked the house with Hostess cupcakes and Hungryman frozen dinners.
Bonnie was not a gourmet by today’s Food Network standards but she could work a cookbook. What I loved more than anything was watching Bonnie make and decorate cakes. She would make buttercream frosting and turn it into roses and flowers and leaves and grass and basketweave along the edges of a sheet cake. It was like watching something come to life out of a Wilton how-to pamphlet. Every cup of flour was carefully leveled. Every bowl of powdered sugar was meticulously sifted for lumps. Bonnie could also sew and crochet. At her side, I hooked endless potholders. One Halloween I recall we made sugar molds of black cats to put alongside a cake she baked for a friend. We tried over and over to get the sugar to turn pitch black (no gel food coloring back then). When I got the mix just right, we pressed the sugar into the molds and voila! Angry black sugar cats emerged, ready to stand along the orange frosted cake.
Bonnie was my main adult supervision and spirit guide for all my Girl Scout badges. We would pour over the Girl Scout Handbook and dog ear the pages with the badge requirements for the ones I hoped to earn that year. I hosted my first complete dinner party at her house (of course I got a badge for that one). I made whipped sweet potatoes with marshmallows and Swedish meatballs. I invited my parents over and served the whole thing. Bonnie gifted me cookbooks and let me watch her make sewing patterns and sew baby dresses for her nieces. She had a silver collection and a closet full of Kewpie dolls that she collected from childhood. Bonnie also had a weight problem and as a fat kid myself, we bonded over it.
Bonnie had lost 30 pounds at Weight Watchers but she had gained a good portion of it back when I met her. I was just a chubby kid. My mother fed me and fed me and then complained about how fat I got. I remember going to my first Weight Watchers meeting with Bonnie at the age of 12 at my mother’s urging. Having Bonnie to talk to about this was such a help. My mother had been too thin growing up and had never been fat. Her push-pull with me about food gave me whiplash. Bonnie could understand the torment I felt of loving food but hating it at the same time. It was good to have someone to confide in who got it.
Bonnie also had some coping mechanisms that were unusual. When in pain, Bonnie would laugh hysterically. One day she burned her hand in the kitchen. Rather than yelp or cry out, she began to... laugh. I looked at her like she was deranged. Once we wrapped her hand, she confided that her older brothers had often picked fights with her when they were children. When they would hit her, she learned to hide her tears so as not to give them the satisfaction of seeing her hurt. Instead, she began to laugh. Her reflexive pain reaction was laughter. Never let them know you are hurt is something animals know as a survival skill. I had never met a person who had adopted this strategy in such a way. It made an deep impression on me.
Then Bonnie moved away.
Pat was our immediate next-door neighbor. She moved in when I was in 4th grade. She seemed to me to be a successful career woman. She was recently divorced with custody of her 3 kids who were all around my age. Pat subscribed to Cosmopolitan magazine and drank White Russians and pink wine. She was a potty mouth but very pretty. You could tell that she had been sought after in her younger years. Even in her mid-30s, life had not yet worn her down. In my 11 year old brain, Pat was very sophisticated. It was obvious she had had many boyfriends after her divorce. I had never met anyone like her before.
In our neighborhood everyone’s door was always unlocked. We all came and went without knocking, especially in the summer when everyone was home from school. No one went to summer camps back then. Some kids visited their grandparents. Most of our neighbors had family in Tennessee and when summer came, off they went to the Smoky Mountains. My best friend’s family was Cuban so her summers were spent in Miami with her abuelo and abuela. I was bereft without her company. The summers were long. One year Pat’s kids went to spend the summer with their father. I spent almost all summer at Pat’s house while they were gone. 
Pat had a stash of Cosmo magazines from the late ‘70s. Every issue was about sex, make-up, and dieting. It was the summer between 5th and 6th grade and I would go over to Pat’s house and spend hours going through issue after issue. I learned about the Grapefruit diet. I read articles about the mythical G-spot. Does it exist? Is it real? How would you know? The Atkins Diet was a thing. Lose 10 pounds in 2 weeks! Then the Beverly Hills Diet was a thing. Eat this, don’t eat that. Eat ONLY this. For 2 weeks. Then eat that. How much should you tweeze your eyebrows? Here is how to get the ultimate St. Tropez tan. I read every word and memorized every image. This was what being a liberated woman was all about. Right there in those pages.
Pat had, in a prior life, gotten her cosmetology degree and license. I would sit in her kitchen and she would cut my hair and put it on rollers. She also sold Mary Kay Cosmetics and had drawers and drawers of samples. Make up nirvana! All in pretty pink bottles. I would try on the different colors but because we had read Color Me Beautiful together, I knew that I was an “autumn” and should stick to the warmer shades. Pat also always had perfectly done nails. Long, polished talons, she would rap them on the counters and on the dashboard while she was driving. Click, click, click, click. When one broke, she would slap on an acrylic tip and lickety-split, they would be perfect again. Perfect looking but not real.
For all that she was worldly and intriguing to my 11 year old mind, she was also clearly struggling to stay afloat. Her job situation was often erratic. She moved from one thing to the next, finally falling back on her cosmetology degree and working in a beauty salon. Her kids seemed to be in perpetual trouble and were not doing so well in school. Her oldest son went to go live with his father. She found herself pregnant by her married boyfriend, had the baby and then found herself pregnant again. Her liberated woman veneer didn’t hold up so well once you scratched the surface. Sometimes the most important lesson you learn is what not to do. Pat was like that older sister you are intrigued by but who winds up being a cautionary tale. I caught onto that pretty quick.
Then my family moved to a new neighborhood.
I met Jenna in high school. She was my boyfriend Garrick’s mom. I think I was probably a sophomore when we first met. In senior year, Garrick and I dated. He was my prom date and we were together until the end of our first semester of college. While in high school, and even after we started college, all of our friends hung out together and we often landed at one house or another near our high school campus. Garrick’s house was one of those houses where we often found ourselves. We were a small posse of nerdy kids who got together on Saturday night to play charades and board games and did student government and band in school. (I was not in band, for the record but I was a big into Model UN and student government.) If we weren’t at Garrick’s house we were at Torunn’s house. Torunn remains to this day, the only truly natural blonde I’ve ever known. Garrick and Torunn lived in the same neighborhood and both had split level houses. The lower level of each home became our regular gaming and movie haunts.
Jenna and her husband were from Oklahoma. They were 25 years out of the University of Oklahoma but she still had a clearly distinct southern twang. Her husband Jim had a deep voice with no discernible trace of southern inflection to my ear. He was a perpetually calm presence. As even-keel and reserved as Jim was, Jenna was vivacious, warm, and very, very chatty. You can pluck a girl out of the south but you can’t pluck the southern out of the girl. I immediately took to her. We were fast friends, me at 17 and her at 46. Which is, funny enough, how old I find myself as I write this.
Garrick had an older brother so Jenna was mom of 2 sons and no daughters. I have even more in common with Jenna now than I did then. As the mom of 3 boys, I understand how impenetrable their lives can seem. More than just a friend to her, looking back, I’m convinced I was her conduit to her younger son and his social circle. Like Jenna, I live for conversation. Through our long talks I think she got to know her son just a bit better. Because I was a girl and I would spill. Boys share so little. I got to be a surrogate daughter and in exchange, I got another surrogate mother out of the deal.
Jenna would invite me to join their family dinners often. She had little choice. I would overstay my welcome at every chance because I so enjoyed the company of this family. At their dinner table I found a more adventurous menu than I had ever seen in my own home. Jenna made an arugula salad with strawberries. What is this insanity? Arugula? What is that? Fruit? In a regular salad? Salad in my house was iceberg lettuce and Wishbone Italian dressing. Jenna was a meticulous chef. Also a Weight Watchers veteran, she weighed and measured every meal like it was a science experiment. Everything was portioned and plated meticulously. It seemed so… fancy. I learned a lot from watching her prepare each meal. Salad, entree, dessert. Each carefully and lovingly prepared with more thought than any meal I’d ever seen in any person’s home. More than the food, there was the spirited verbal sparring that took place like nothing I’d ever seen. Words were not blunt force instruments lobbed across the table intended to inflict fatal injury like they were at my house. Here they were carefully sharpened little barbs meant only to agitate the opposing party enough to up the state of verbal play.
Garrick’s dad was an economist for the International Monetary Fund. Their dinner conversation covered world affairs and national politics. I soaked it up and tried my best to keep up with the conversation. Once in awhile, I managed to hold my ground and even best my companions. I recall one dinner where Garrick, in an effort to show his clear superiority in all things world affairs, threw down and challenged me to identify what the acronym SWAPO stood for. Having just dealt with a Model UN resolution regarding recognition of the South West African People’s Organization as the official government in exile of Namibia, I felt pretty confident on that one. I did not, however, correctly identify the role of the Shining Path in Peru in the follow-on questioning. This was the kind of thing we talked about. It wasn’t the kind of thing we did in my home. I didn’t go back to dinner there without reading the day’s Washington Post headlines.
This was also a family that had lived abroad and had traveled extensively. I was perhaps the only 17 year old girl in all of Northern Virginia, perhaps the entire eastern United States, who enjoyed watching multi hours-long travelogue slideshows with live commentary. But I *really* did. Garrick’s family had trekked all over the world, whereas I had never left the DC metro region. Sitting in his basement, I traveled the world with this family through their carefully curated slideshows. It made me curious. I loved their stories and I loved being part of their family rituals. I felt included and I felt like I became a little bit smarter just by being around them all.
There was an episode of Sex and the City where Carrie reluctantly breaks up with her boyfriend. Reluctant only because she really, really liked his mom. I can relate. I think I spent almost as much time on the phone with Jenna as I did with Garrick. When Garrick and I finally broke up, I might have been sadder to lose my girlfriend than to lose my boyfriend.
Of course we kept in touch but over the years that too, has waned. I hope that I can be a friend to my sons’ girlfriends and, someday, wives in the way that Jenna was to me. I recall that she was the first person who ever told me that I was a good writer and who encouraged me.
No one is shaped by only one person. These women I write about were not the only ones who influenced me or taught me things. It’s a complex calculus, making a whole person. I think my mom understood this. Only much later in my life did I come to realize how difficult it was for my mother to see me connect with these other women. How much it made her feel inadequate and how jealous she was of the time I spent with them. She never said this to me. One day I just understood it to be true. In knowing this and upon looking back, I value her and those relationships even more.
Happy Mother’s Day to all the women who shape our lives.
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nofomoartworld · 7 years
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Hyperallergic: Painting Isn’t Dead! It’s Just Slow
Installation view of “Quicktime” (2017), Rosendwald-Wolf Gallery, Philadelphia (all images courtesy Studio LHOOQ)
PHILADELPHIA — When I read that Quicktime would be the name of the latest exhibition at Rosendwald-Wolf Gallery, Apple’s video editing software of the same name crossed my mind. Video actually has nothing to do with the show. The exhibition includes abstract paintings, most of them large, all finished quickly, by five different painters.
Quicktime takes its cue from Raphael Rubinstein’s “Provisional Painting,” published in the May 2009 issue of Art in America. In the essay, Rubinstein discusses a handful of artists — Albert Oehlen and Mary Heilmann among them— who seem to “turn away from ‘strong’ painting” in favor of works “that look casual, dashed-off, tentative, unfinished or self-cancelling.” Joan Miró, who rejected the idea of the “finished, durable work,” represents an early practitioner of “provisional painting” for Rubinstein.
Patricia Treib, who has two works in oil on canvas in the show, finishes a painting the day she starts it, and strives to work with what’s in front of her, in the spirit of improvisation. As she said in an interview with Joe Fyfe:
I want the work to appear as if it’s about to change or is in the process of shifting. I want there to be moments of ambiguity as to where one form ends and another form begins. A shifting quality as to the points of contact between things, clear assertions of one thing meeting another, but contradiction in terms of them existing all at the same time. There’s an absurdity to it.
In “Le Smoking” (2012) and “Camera (I)” (2013), the pronounced brushstrokes visualize the physicality of the paintings and emphasize “the process of shifting” that interests Treib. Her surfaces are generally flat and the thin oil paint occasionally contains tiny clumps of debris or brush hairs. The sides of “Le Smoking” seem smudged with soot, as if handled by a chimney sweep.
Like Treib’s brush strokes, Melissa Meyer’s paintings, reminiscent of 1980s subway graffiti, reflect the body’s movement during the creation of the painting. Meyer paints on the floor and works in oil thinned to the consistency of watercolor. There are no clumps of paint that could slow the eye down as it moves across the work. The title and contrast between the purple, black, and white in “Draw the Line” (2015) emphasize the clusters of movement on the canvas.
“Walk the Line” (2011), rewards the viewer with extended looking. Underneath the more dominant blues, pinks, and oranges, there are subtle cream squares in the lower corners and the middle. The painter wants us to stand there a while. This is a good challenge — how many viewers actually have the patience or stamina to stand and look at something that isn’t giving them a scattershot feed of information? Everything belongs on that canvas, not because an algorithm determined it, but because the artist put it there.
Installation view of “Quicktime” (2017), Rosendwald-Wolf Gallery, Philadelphia
The biomorphic shapes in “Mars Arms” and “Sooty Sweat” (both 2016) by Amy Feldman felt like alien beings that drew me in. In both, Feldman’s brushstrokes are short and quick. “Sooty Sweat” might just have the thickest paint in the entire show, while the lines in “Mars Arms,” though imperfect, convey austerity.
The anagrammatic title of “Mars Arms” is wonderfully suggestive. Saying it aloud, I think of the arms of Mars, which could either embrace or push away. However, there is no possessive apostrophe in the title. These aren’t Mars’s arms, after all. It seems more likely that these shapes are the arms (weapons) for the Roman god of war. Feldman’s rendering of the straight and curved lines, along with the small openings in the biomorphic shape, remind me of the mazes that I used to love doing as a child. Is that part of Mars’s plan? Perhaps Feldman’s work is half as dark as I’m suggesting. If the title were more bland, “Untitled,” say, or “Gray and Gray,” then I would read less into the shape Feldman presents.
All of this Mars business gets more intriguing with Marina Adams’s “What Venus Said to Mars” (2016) hanging catty-corner from Feldman’s work. Adams’s painting, in acrylic on linen, creates a vulvic center with contrasting orange and blue diamond shapes. The title, once again, plays a determining role in the reading of the painting. According to ancient Roman mythology, Venus and Mars engaged in an adulterous affair. Interestingly, Renaissance depictions of their love show Mars unarmed. Does their love bring an end to violence, or is it simply a small respite from what’s to come?
Caroline Wells Chandler, “Strange Attractor for Agnes Martin” (2017), hand crocheted assorted woo, 70 x 73 inches (178 x 185 cm)
Adams’s painting resonates with Caroline Wells Chandler’s “Strange Attractor for Agnes Martin” (2017), which hangs in the gallery’s display window on Broad Street. (Chandler’s work is not part of Quicktime.) Chandler, who trained as a painter, but has recently been working on large crochet figures that explore various dimensions of gender, depicts a female figure in crochet, seemingly bent in half at the waist, exposing her vulva. The difference, of course, is that Adams’s work involves a female saying something to a male, while Chandler references lesbianism by way of Agnes Martin. Rosenwald-Wolf’s decision to display Chandler’s work in their Broad Street window, in affiliation with Lord Ludd, is a smart, visible challenge to gender norms in the era of Trump.
In a show that’s predominately focused on abstract paintings, Ann Craven’s work offers a contrasting perspective. All three of her works are high gloss and involve trees. “Tree (Purple Beech, Cushing, 8-22-13, 10PM)” (2013) seems to fit the dialogue created by the other paintings in the show. The tree in this picture is like a large, dark mass coming out of the surface of the painting. In the upper right portion of the circular mass of limbs and leaves, a bit of blue breaks through, adding some variation to the coloring. Craven inserts some surreal humor with a trunk that’s disconnected from the ground. Perhaps it’s the inclusion of the moon in the other two paintings, but they would make more sense as part of another conversation.
Quicktime’s focus on abstract painting by women is refreshing. Certainly, there are a number of artists — Bruce Nauman comes to mind — that have explored time and duration in their work, but Nauman usually works with video. The passage of time is less visible in painting — the canvas does not move.
Installation view of “Quicktime” (2017), Rosendwald-Wolf Gallery, Philadelphia
If Adams’s works seem more labor intensive than some of the others, the look of the paintings, as she has said, is the result of years of work as a painter. Just as Adams took a long time to arrive at the work she’s doing now, we have to be patient and look for a while, say, longer than seventeen seconds, before we can see what it might mean to move quickly. Painting, right now, seems to me one of the more radical gestures by an artist. It’s equally so for the spectator; sometimes quicktime is actually the result of a longtime. Is it not radical to say, I’m going to stand here and look? I’m going to stand here and think.
Quicktime continues at Rosendwald-Wolf Gallery (333 South Broad Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) through April 22.
The post Painting Isn’t Dead! It’s Just Slow appeared first on Hyperallergic.
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Hyperallergic: Progress Report: Marina Adams’s Recent Paintings and Gouaches
Marina Adams, “3” (2015), gouache on Arches Paper, 12 x 9 inches (all images courtesy Salon 94 Bowery)
When I was looking at Marina Adams’s five large paintings in her terrific debut exhibition, Marina Adams: Soft Power, at Salon 94 Bowery (January 13–February 22, 2017), I felt that she shared something with the superb colorist, the Russian-born Serge Poliakoff (1908–1969), who, while he remains little known in America, gained a number of ardent fans who saw his work in Paris, where he lived and worked for many years,   Shirley Jaffe, Brice Marden, and Jonathan Lasker, among them. The eye-opening survey exhibition, Serge Poliakoff, at Cheim & Read (March 31–April 30, 2016), thoughtfully curated by the artist and critic Joe Fyfe, was his first large show in America in thirty years. That exhibition introduced us to a postwar artist working in Europe in the 1950s and ‘60s who had fallen from grace and was not looked at seriously for many years, either in Europe or America.
After leaving Adams’s show, I went home and looked up the review of the Poliakoff exhibition that Rob Colvin wrote for Hyperallergic (April 27, 2016) — I remember thinking it was very smart — and came across this line:
         The works sustain a restless equilibrium.
Colvin’s description seems a useful way to begin thinking about the paintings and works on paper in, Marina Adams: Soft Power. There are a lot of differences between Adams and Poliakoff, too many to enumerate. I would say the most important one is the speed with which Adams seems to make her paintings. They are a combination of structure and improvisation, the latter a particularly American practice that comes from Abstract Expressionism and jazz. Adams’s amalgamation of structure, line, and color places her in the strain of abstract painting that seems to have originated in New York in the mid-1980s, when Mary Heilmann began showing again after a long hiatus, and dates back earlier to Lee Krasner’s paintings with floral forms. They seem effortless, though that is not the case.
The rounded edges of Adams’s biomorphic forms suggest that they are —  as the exhibition’s title suggests — soft. While some of forms are interlocking or held in place by other forms, their grip on each other does not seem permanent; their shapes feel slippery and even liquid. They nestle inside each other, occupying a zone between floppy and flat, rounded and pointed. It is as if the hard-edged geometric abstraction of Ellsworth Kelly has loosened its grip. In three of Adams’s paintings, the forms extend part way in from the painting’s left and right edges, like phalluses, big thumbs, breasts, or flower petals, creating an implied S-shape (sometimes made of two adjoining shapes) spanning from the painting’s top to bottom edge. By making forms that push in from the right and left edges, the central shape feels squeezed, as in “Bigger” and “Alice When She’s 10 Feet Tall.” The dynamic tension of the pressing and pressed forms is erotic.
Marina Adams, “Alice When She’s 10 Feet Tall” (2016), acrylic on linen, 88 x 78 inches
Adams paints in acrylic on linen. The five large, vertical paintings, measuring 88 by 78 inches, are largest ones she has ever shown. She almost never uses primaries, preferring secondary colors, which are mixed and muted. The paint is matte and, in some areas of the work, you can see where she has added another layer of color over a shape to readjust its edge or to change the hue. This is true of “Second Sun” and “Standing On My Head.”
Marina Adams, “Bigger” (2016), acrylic on linen, 88 x 78 inches
There is at least one shape in each painting that is blue, magenta, or violet. There is only one other contemporary abstract painter I can think of, Judy Ledgerwood, who uses these colors regularly. Is it because they bring to mind Matisse or because they are too decorative? In the end, Adams makes these colors her own, largely because she never uses them in the same combination with other colors. In fact, each painting has a different and distinct palette in which one of the colors comes from the blue-violet end of the spectrum.
This is Adams’s breakthrough show. There is nothing formulaic about her use of color, line or shape. The paintings are eccentric, but do not feel willfully so. There is a constant tension along the borders where the forms meet — a push-and-pull surge. When Adams makes a pattern of irregular, diamond-like shapes across the entire painting, as she does in the title work, “Soft Power,” she alternates repeating and non-repeating colors and shapes. “To speak of joy and to sing of it,” Wallace Stevens wrote in his poem, “It Must Give Pleasure.” In Adams’s paintings and gouaches, the high-spirited pleasure of making comes across in the specificity of every shape, line, and color. It is the oddness and the likelihood of something unexpected happening in the painting — both in the shapes and colors — that makes them distinct. In “Bigger,” the forms pushing from the left and right are white, while the shape between them is deep purple topped by dark green. So we go from high contrast to tonal shift in the blink of an eye. We see the white shapes as both abstract and figural. The logic of the painting is internal. We accept it or we do not.
Marina Adams, “Second Sun” (2016), acrylic on Linen, 88 x 78 inches
The palette of “Second Sun” — which is my favorite painting in the show — includes magenta, green, cerulean blue, and white. The rest of the colors are quieter, forming rounded, sexual shapes pressing in from both sides against the magenta shape running down the middle. A dusty cerulean blue bar bisects the magenta shape. The structure enables color and value to push against each other, attaining a “restless equilibrium.” This is what holds our attention; the colors don’t sit still, but flutter like pinned butterflies.
Marina Adams, “12” (2015), gouache on Arches Paper, 12 x 9 inches
At the same time, Adams’s planes of color — from solid to dusty to layered — feel illuminated from with; they give off a soft glow (there is that word again, soft). In no other painting does Adams repeat these colors. This alone should be reason for the viewer to slow down, to contemplate how shape, line, and color interact, to discover the various moods it might stir up.
It is in the gouaches — most of which are 12 by 9 inches, many of them done in 2015 — that Adams investigates broadly diverse combinations of color and tonality. Proportionally, they echo the dimensions of her paintings. In some of the gouaches, she works with closely related hues, while in others she pushes one color hard against another. The matte surfaces, transparency, interior light, and solid color of the shapes in the gouaches laid the groundwork for the paintings. It is not always the case that an artist can enlarge her scale and make the paintings more commanding, but this is certainly true of Adams’s recent work. Having come this far — her fans (of which I am one) — wish her well on her continuing journey.
Marina Adams: Soft Power continues at Salon 94 Bowery (243 Bowery, Bowery, Manhattan) through February 22.
The post Progress Report: Marina Adams’s Recent Paintings and Gouaches appeared first on Hyperallergic.
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