Year Of The Spawn

zig-zag

I'm hosting a series of swaps on swap-bot where you're supposed to work with mostly neutrals (which, for this series, includes brown) and just "A Bit of..." color. This first swap was titled "Nifty Neutrals," with no "color" at all, just to get people in the swing of using neutrals.

Background polygons from magazine & catalog clippings. Central zig-zap from real (not facsimile) mid-19th-century ledger paper. Thanks to the influence of composer John Cage, I let chance determine the position of the black painted lines: their positions were pairs of integers in sequence from a random number generator.

it's rough to be a male

For this swap we were supposed to create a collage that is mostly "neutrals" (including brown) with just "A Bit of Red." I decided to work only with the clippings from my collection of writing, maps, & diagrams. As I put together the neutrals, I noticed that a lot of my elements (the ones that are legible) had something to do with men: men's hats, helmets, & swords; men fighting dragons; men carving tablets, designing ancient temples, building cities; men getting in fights; a man who faked his C.V. and wore blue eyeshadow; even men choosing restaurants. So, inspired in part by Hallowe'en, I decided that the "bit of red" should be a ghost of an unhappy man. As it happened, the only red I had in that box had to do with male-male competition in different species—fish, mammals, birds, etc. (!) When I cut out the little red ghost, I didn't expect words like "vigorous thrusting" & "sperm" & males dealing with rivals to show up so prominently, but it seemed fitting—and humorous to boot. The last piece I added was the big "El"—Spanish for the masculine "the."

dark forces are arrayed against us

With white colored pencil, white acrylic paint, and dark grey marker. This is the one I created for the "Bit of Pink" swap, but I ended up deciding it was too personal—too much about something in my real life—and that I wanted to keep it.

oblique-lined dottyback

This one was created for the "Bit of Pink" swap--the one I actually put in the mail. The fish is an oblique-lined dottyback. (I liked its name so much I used it for the title.) The grey cone in the background is a photo of a sculpture by Ai Weiwei. The handwritten piece below the fish is from a painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Indefinitely

It´s one from the archive - but nevertheless it´s pretty new - from 2014.

New Year's Resolution #33

More physical fitness!!!