FRIENDS OF SLOP

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Hi gang! Well, I haven’t made a lot of physical art lately. There’s a few pieces that are halfway done, as there always are, as there always has been, but in general I’ve really cooled down making art – I could go into some detail as to why, but none of it really matters except to maybe a home renovator who had free services to give or a therapist with a willing ear – matters little to me at the moment. Covid has had it’s ways with either making people reassess their what and whys and make them double down or walk out. There’s more pressing matters than art/ there’s nothing more important than art in this difficult time: both are true statements in my opinion. Still, I have neither art or fucks to give about making art at this current time. I’ve never given up on art, and I’m not now, I just haven’t been….inspired. And that’s been the case for a while, even before Covid. I just haven’t been telling you, website viewer, though by the frequency of posts, it doesn’t take a detective. So, when I’ve got more physical art, I’ll show you. –This isn’t unusual. In my early 20’s, I had a burst of artistic production — then it went (and again, you don’t really need to know why) –but in it’s place I had about 5 years of a different artistic freedom: singing in a band. Between expressing myself in lyric writing and physically singing (if thats what you wanna call it in a punk band), my artistic cravings were satiated. I’ve always always always loved music. And believe me, when that band went away, it crushed me, but i recovered, and in time, I went back, and went back better into physical art making.

So, here, as before, one could say I’ve traded in one “art” for another, for you see, I’ve picked up a new passion in the past few months, and it’s really brought me out of the doldrums. I am a volunteer DJ for an internet radio station based out of Portland, OR called

SHADYPINESRADIO.COM

I currently have a show that you can listen to there on Friday nights, 7 to 9pm pacific time, called FRIENDS OF SLOP. Just like my website’s name, the name has it’s own connection to me, and, surprisingly, to music as well. I’m playing a little bit of anything and everything, any genre that I want, sometimes all of them in a show, sometimes taking a dive into a single genre, time, or theme. Whatever I want, really. For me, it’s a whole new way to express myself, expose others to new things/ideas/sounds, and a whole new thing to learn (it’s a bit like podcasting, as I understand it, but that’s the thing, I don’t necessarily understand it, lol). So, if you’re here to see my art, or (more likely) to see my Screen-printing tutorial/plans, cool, I love you for being here —please, feel free to go a little farther and click on these links and have a listen to my show. Like most of my art, it’s collage art – figuratively piecing this obscure song alongside that well known band and vice-versa, coming up with something for your ears rather than your eyes. If you can’t tune into the show on friday nights, you can still listen to this weeks and all my previous shows on mixcloud, that is:

http://mixcloud.com/djlarraby

Thanks for any and all support, Much love.

VINYL KILLERS 2018

Super Happy about this folks!  I got the call to put records in the freshly revived VINYL KILLERS show, like, 5 days before the deadline!  OF COURSE i want to be part of it, BUT i don’t have anything!  Well, 3 days later I’ve got 5 records for show, just about the fastest I’ve ever produced anything like this!  YEEEEE!!!  OF COURSE i can point out every little flaw, but damn, I’m pretty happy with these!  I owe it all to my large stacks of material, kept like a hoarder, a free weekend (that was about as beautiful-fall-in-pdx as you can get), and PERSISTANCE (that sax player is the third iteration of him).

poster-vk-all-1

VINYL KILLERS AT THE GOODFOOT

trouble,troubadour, trial

troubles,troubadors,trials

Here’s something new.  Lately, to spark inspiration, I’ve been buying frames with the intent of trying to fill them immediately with new work.  90% of this was put together last weekend (it was supposed to be a 1-weekend work), but the remaining 10 didn’t come to me until this weekend.  Doing some different than usual things — it’s all “analog” cut n’ paste (no gel medium transfers), it’s all paper on paper (my usual is collage on wood panel), with the final step being lamination rather than an epoxy coating.  I think i’m going to get away from epoxy coating in general.  I love that it gives me a protective layer to safeguard/solidify my work, but more often than not over the years it is yellowing out far too much, and there is no remedy for that (at least that I know of).

a collage game

So the game here is this: One fashion magazine, cutting out a pile of pieces relying on mostly color/pattern — I gave myself some liberty with a few things like the lips, but then other pieces range from big swatches of color/pattern to smaller pieces–most of the pieces cut were cut out of the paper Once (no trimming after, shapes and cuts made when cut out are what you’re dealt with). Then I used a random way to picking the pieces to place (i went with using my phone number, i.e., “5” in my ph# =’s the fifth random piece out of the pile and so on) –and trying not to move the pieces too much once they’re down, i.e., I can’t move a piece completely to another area, but i can nudge/budge things, and i can change how the parts lay over/under each other. I stop putting pieces down either by chance or choice, but I don’t take pieces out.

It’s all laid down on a marked paper (I made a 10.25″ square), Don’t Glue it -Just take a pic of it, cropping out all the parts of paper beyond that border.  The biggest drawback I have is that I’m a terrible photographer with terrible cameras and lights, besides that since it’s not glued, you have to fashion a way to take pics without disturbing the work.  I’ll work on a better way with this, but that’s not really part of the game -having the pieces unglued is, because when you’re done you tear it apart and do it again.  For practice.  Hopefully, it’s sharpening my compositional skills, get me thinking and on my feet quickly, and showing me the benefits of making “studies” when possible.  These are my results, with minimal photoshop tweaking after their analog creation.

Kaput/Caput: Walking in a daze- it’s over she’s gone (too many piano problems, sounds like you got).

shes-gone-kaput-piano-probl

an 8 x 8 out of season (started around November and took this long to mature).  Yes, part of the title has to do with part of the image.  Art has been pretty good to me as of late.  Keeping the lack of sunlight from gettin me, distracting me, sharpening me up, even if it means blunting down first.  Lately been doing Collage Game Challenges.  I’ll post one up.

I have to write, on a sad note, that Zoey the cat has passed away.  The neighborhood cat who I’ve known and loved, as she was, for 13 of her 19 years, has gone to a better place, where they’ll all love her, and she’ll have no reason not to love them.  She can be seen in hovering above in my piece I made called “Zoey’s Journey”.  Rest in God’s Love.plate

Analog Postcards

Image

postcard 1 shows what it protectspostcard 2 i want to smoke potpostcard 3 a message from the mediumpostcard 4 we hear a song to forget

 

These are “analog”, i.e. all cut’n paste, no photoshop (save for putting them into the computer and the tag).  Also, no other media, all made with the actual source media (no copies of original or modification of media, save for the cutting and gluing down.)  made over 3 days.

Big 500 of 2017

 

it’s the 10th year of the BIG 500, (also known as the BIG 100, 200, 300, and 400, til it got to be good enough to just say 500).

500+ artists of all types,genres,medium,skillset/level,amateur to pro and all those dreamers inbetween get to make art on wood panels (generally) and show them all at once in a large public place, (randomly mixed, no tags, so the art itself shows) with the business being that if you were to have $40, you could take it off the wall and buy it then and there.  Artists get $30, and the house splits the rest to them and the Oregon Food Bank (which is also treated as a food drive, bring a can/donation for the show).

It’s a beautiful thing.

Every year, for me, it’s a stretch –getting the ideas, working the substrate (an 8″x8″ panel) applying the idea in an interesting way, usually experimenting with the medium, taking risks and being OK with process if not the product.  Or, in TL;DR, there’s winners and losers every year, but it’s all good.  Besides, I’m told we’re our own worst critic.

So, anyways, rough math is 500 (more like 600) artists making somewhere’s around 10 pieces each equals probably about 6000 works of art.  complete and total eyeball saturation!  Something for everyone, if not to buy, then to witness at least once in your life, the veritable brain salad of raw, art.

It’s a beautiful thing.

https://www.facebook.com/events/147065505912706/

The BIG 500 of 2016

 

 

well gang, here we are again, at yet another BIG 500.  Now that isn’t a bad thing.  Most people I know would be surprised to find out that I make stuff –art, if you want to call it that–and that’s  my fault.  Part of that is that is I’ve got no game, no business savvy, no promotion, zip, nada, zilch –I don’t even really talk about it.    The other big part is that I just don’t make a lot of art in a year’s time, so when you put that together, my website is just one “88 STRONG” after another “BIG 500” for the most part.  I get it.  There’s many reasons why this is — none that are great, and none really your business (unless you feel like being my patron, then we can go into details, because someone’s support would be crazy great.  Do patrons even exist?)

I’m going to chat for a minute about this years set for the BIG 500.  This all started out over the summer when a friend of mine was making panels that correspond to the Chakra colors.  I don’t subscribe to the Chakra thing, but seeing panels of bright primary colors rekindled an interest in making colorful abstract pieces.  I dig color theory and abstraction, yet most of my work usually centers around a found image that would be collaged, a story would be created, and while color would play a role, it was the supporting cast.

Color and Pattern can be the story.

Pattern makes me think of quilts, which makes me miss my gramma.  My family isn’t that artsy, so I take note when I hear how my retired dad tinkers in his basement-woodshop making birdhouses, and I encourage mom to sell those Afghans she crochets, and “Like” on FB everything beautiful my distant relative Jan Christensen creates (an amazing photographer), but when I was a kid, the only artsy thing I saw from my family was my gramma’s quilts.  The whole dining room would be taken up with the table-stretcher contraption, so you couldn’t hide it.   Quilting sure as hell didn’t look like it could just be a hobby or something to do when you were bored and cold (my mom’s reply to why she crochets for free), although I bet gramma didn’t make a dime off it either .  Serious craftsmanship and time is put into making good quilts. Taking fragments of colored patterned cloth, cutting them to shape, making whole new patterns.  It’s a beautiful art.  I’ve thought it would be great to learn, but i don’t have the slightest where to start, and I’m sure I don’t have the time or dedication needed.

Around the same time as all the color thoughts were bubbling, I ran across a basic quilting pattern book at the bins.  Now, as of late, I’ve been all about the Gel Medium Transfer technique,  with my newer works building in layers, where one transferred layer sat on/over/through another.  I was inspired –I used one of the patterns, a basic “Columbia Star” pattern, as my drop-in point.  Color, pattern, and a shape, the basic cube, that’s the beginning.  The next part was about slinging paint.

I’d throw paint down,  frisket the panel, cut out my pattern, maybe throw more paint down, maybe gel medium a layer of texture down, and then pull that frisket off, put more down and kept continuing the process.  Then there are a few pieces here which have  no paint-slinging involved, they are strictly just transferred images on top of other transferred images.

What I found fun was the de-evolution of the pattern.  Some I kept tight, didn’t let those shapes float around, others i tried dealing with creating some kind of depth, some I broke apart, and there are two (one is pictured) where I got away from the pattern altogether, though I feel the physically-tiled piece still identifies with the other.

I named these pieces “PROBLEM AREAS”, as I took this as a challenge to create with color/pattern/shape, along with the usual challenges I encounter in art-creation, but also as a nod to a musician I had been listening to practically throughout the entire time I made these.  ONEOHTRIX POINT NEVER

Side note:  here’s what gets me–after about 3/4 through this series, I’m down at the bins (again) and find a book on some quilting artists and I am thoroughly humbled.   I am in complete awe of Jan Myers-Newbury.  It’s as if she had a similar kind of idea process with color, pattern, and evolving/de-evolving in her quilting, (i believe she does say something about starting out with the basic square) and has become some zen-master of it.

If I were to keep going down my path with what I have in these few pieces, I could only dream to have them looking anywhere near as beautiful as hers.  Click and you’ll see.

I am in complete awe of Jan Myers-Newbury .

 

 

the 88 STRONG of ’16

Another year, another go at the 88 STRONG show.  As usual, artists receive up to eight 8″x8″ wood panels to create art on, working off of 88 possible themes.  This year I started off with throwing lots of color down, without any idea where it’d take me.  Some of it worked, some of it didn’t, but luckily I have plenty of this size panel to work with –finished 8, probably have about 12 that I was working with.  Bought a big ol’ roll of pallet tape which works great as frisket paper.  Recent work involves use of color, shapes, and layering of gel medium transfers.