Return of the bead loom

This is the last of the Met store posts because I left that job three weeks ago. 

For a while the Empire State Building, masquerade masks and this Coke bottle shaped woman kept popping up in my work

One day I was working on it and a customer informed me that "her hips don't lie".

Sir Metropolitan

More of my art at the Met store. It's a dragon.

Fashion Design Kit

I made these at the Met store. It's a kit, and it's pretty good, despite the resemblance to Bratz Dolls.

Funny Valentine

The day before Valentines day Katherine was lamenting (whining about) the fact that she had not yet received anything from her boyfriend (he's in the UK, which is an ocean away and has frequent mail strikes). Anyway I made her this:

Teaset

We sell this tiny teaset. I spent an obscene amount of time designing an painting one.

It looks like a lot if you put it all together...

Self-explanatory.

Desert.

Ocean.

Forest.

Arctic.

Somebody broke the teacup. No names.

Tea for One and an Arm

It's another thrilling wall display.

This time we're selling a paint your own tea set kit.

An ill-lit longshot.

The Pot. Thanks Van Gogh.

The Cup.

And thanks again. The nice thing about Van Gogh is that if something doesn't look quite right you just add more paint. He kind of just had the one trick.

And a close up of the head.

Fashion Design Kit

So, the big negative comment in my performance review was "we think you spend too much of your time lurking behind the register with your scissors and whatnot" and the solution was to move my table into the middle of the floor and make me craft there, like a performing chimp.

The first thing I did was open this fashion design kit.

The fabrics are mostly acetate, and the dress form is so shapeless it's hard to tell the front from the back (hint: there's a seam down the baak), but it's actually kind of a decent kit in that it encourages creativity rather than achievement. Parents and grandparents do not always agree with that model and I hear a lot of "she can't do that" and "if it's not easy she'll just give up" and "where are the instructions?".

Anyway there's a giant column behind my table, a white monolith in the center of the store, so I've taken to making relevant cut paper displays and mounting them there. 'Cause what else am I going to do?

So without further ado (and there has been rather a lot of ado) the clothes line display:

I've nearly filled the sketchbook and at some point I'll "borrow" that and scan the drawings.

Sundries - Met Store edition

This is what I do all day: I stand on a Terrazzo floor, talk to ladies from the midwest about their grandchildren, and build displays.

Cut paper skyline.

This is a two foot high wood veneer block at the top of the stairs, I put children's books about New York City on it. Sometimes people buy them.

Squirrel.

This is a portable easel with drawers full of art supplies. This is what it looks like with art on it. Why a squirrel? Why not a squirrel?

Photoclip Mobile.

Yes, it's poorly photographed. And yes, it's been up for eight months and has not contributed to the sale either of the mobile or the jar full of pompoms, pipe cleaners and streamers from which the elements are constructed. But dammit it's the first thing I made when I got to the children's department and you're going to look at it. You can see the owl at the center (giant pompom, pipe cleaner, card stock). I'll take better pictures of everything else.

Glambrella.

This an under-lit corner between the t-shirt display and the handicapped elevator. It's where we display over-priced, poorly made color-it-in crafts for 8-11 year old girls. The crafts have slightly disturbing conspicuous-consumption overtones and anti-feminist undertones. I scaled up the patterns on those projects, drew them in Sharpie and colored them in with color-change markers. It brightens up the area nicely. I've code-named it "Operation: Lure Children into Dark Corners".

More coming. I've photographed my big (i.e good) displays too and I'll be posting them soon.

Labor Intensive and Devoid of Function

I call it Janus in my head (and now on my blog). I think it's a headband, or a necklace if you don't have a strangulation thing... or if you really do, I guess.

Maybe I'll get a new personality someday and wear it.

Tableaus

So these are all little unrelated tableaus (you have no idea what I went through to spell that word properly).

I'll probably be changing the captions or figuring out a way to make them into one thing but for now I thought it would be good to get them up.

Hubris... ouch.

Something to prove.

Girls can be so cruel.

Taking a stand against the logging industry.

Simple misunderstanding.

Punk Cameos

So this week I'm on a silhouette kick. There's a book on silhouettes for fun and profit at the store. It has very strange tone. Very strange. I didn't really follow it.

These are between 5 and 6 inches tall and about 4 inches wide. But I like them small like this.

I don't really know what to do with them. I think they might look good on t-shirts. Or maybe I'll mount them separately or mount the matched pairs between sheets of plexiglass and hang them above my dresser.

God, they're really sad... or somber... or Victorian. I guess they're just cameos.

Happy Holidays

At the request of my work friend Michelle (shiksa, and stalker of Hassidim) I made a Passover display for the Met store.

Some selections from the seder plate

(from memory, okay, I've only been doing this my entire life, do you really expect me to know whether the parsley or the horse radish is bitter herb... shut up)

Baby Moses.

Please ignore his man hands

An historic request.

So, they took down my display before passover started and this is the correspondence between me and Michelle on the subject.

Goddess of the Hunt Reforms!

More from the world of photo-collage... I wanted it to be more newspapery than this but that's not how it worked out.

Made it on a bead loom to be a display.

Now we're sold out of bead looms... I'm not trying to imply a causal connection.

There are four of them...

New Ad Campaign?