Gift Wrapping (never buy it)

Late Father's Day/slightly less late birthday present for my dad.

I decorated this 9" x 12" envelope (the quarter is for scale) in reference to A Letter to Amy by Ezra Jack Keats which my dad read to me about a thousand times when I was little.

** I DID NOT MAKE THIS IT IS A REFERENCE PICTURE **

You can see the letter and the dog who I put on the stamp in the hopes that my dad will get the reference (he won't but he'll love it when I explain it to him)

Shape Collages

Dana subscribes to Shape Magazine and sometimes I hack it up and make terrifying chimeras. 

These are they. (The previous sentence is a Venture Brothers Reference)

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:

The Art of Self Promotion

After a long absence from the blog I'm posting. I'm putting up images you've already seen: the images from my TWO February theater projects (when it rains I over commit).

This is the flyer for my full-length play.

It went so well I was so proud.

The flyer for my writer's group [subject to change]'s group reading.

Commissioned Artwork!

This post feature a notebook and diorama I made for Leslie for her sister's birthday.

This is the story of the notebook in the breifest possible terms. (I'm keeping it brief because it's such a sad, beautiful story about such a beautiful object, but it's somebody else's family history and the fact that I was entrusted with it for a little while doesn't really make it mine to put on the internet).

This was Leslie's grandfather's notebook. He was Preacher to an Arminian Congregation at the time of the Arminian Genocide. He lost his homeland and had to be the leader of this group of reeling, mourning refugees whose suffering was not acknowledged by the international community. This was a note book he kept of clippings and quotes cut out of newspapers or typed on English and Armenian typewriters. the cover bears this legend:

Flowers picked

From here and there

While casually roaming

In byways of thought

For my inspiration

I loved having it around. It really is such an amazing collection of quotes and thoughts, and the object itself is simple and remarkable. Anyway, my assignment was so do some light restoration, basically just reinforcing the holes in the paper where they were starting to tear (I was so afraid of this part of the job that I may have done less of it than I should have), And to make a blank replica in happier colors for Leslie's sister.

I didn't realize this photographed so poorly, you'll have to trust me. The cover was made with red cotton fabric over heavy illustration board with metal eyelets. Text was hand-drawn in Extra Fine Sharpie.

I put in the front-plate upside down but it isn't so bad. Scanned and altered from the original with the name changed. Printed on cream-colored label paper

These are interior pages. I scanned some pages from the original and scattered them between the blank pages of the copy.

This part three of the project: a diorama of Leslie's sister's church (she's also a preacher, in Florence MA) made with the paper from the new book plus construction paper. the inside of the box is papered copies of the old book.

This is the original church. This project was made possible by Google Street View.

The following are five nearly identical glamour shots of the box, which is a 6x6x6 cube.

And that's it. Commissioned artwork.

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.

Jumper

So here's what happened: I was going to a housewarming and thought "I'll make them something, that'll be nice. A diorama or a collage or something." And then I thought about it for a few days and then the day of the party I sat down before work and started cutting up a magazine and I ended up with this. And I like it, I do, but it's not nice...

Fashionably Self-Destructive

But this is the happy ending: "The Misunderstanding" (the one with the hunchback and the little girl) has a new home With Annie and Olga in Crown Heights.

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.

Sundries

These are the ones that didn't really fit into the other categories.

It'll be the last of the construction paper posts for a while.

Creepy baby.

Skeptical sweater dog.

Sweater dog with an agenda.