MixedMedia

A friend recently asked if I could make a “cat sarcophagus” for her daughter’s upcoming eighth birthday party. Along with the proposal she included a snapshot of a “cat mummy” from London. Coincidentally, a few months prior, National Geographic had a cover issue dedicated to pet mummies of ancient Egypt, which my family had loved. So plenty of fodder. I took up the task and wanted to document the process and result to share.

Step One
Create the form. Since the sarcophagus was going to be used to store candy, I knew it needed two halves. I drew and cut one out of a large cardboard box, and essentially copied it for the second half. In the center, cut out a square somewhat larger than a shoebox size, leaving enough room on the edges to retain structural integrity.

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Around the holidays last year I’d made a promise to knock out a washboard table with a collage top for a family member. I’d gotten the basic idea from the remarkable Victoria Romanoff in Ithaca, New York at a meet up we’d had years ago.This go around, I’d found a couple of pricier washboards with glass rubbing plates. Cleaning them was quick enough, and the greatest challenge was compensating for their irregular sizes, which was accomplished by simply adding a 1-inch riser to the top of the right board, allowing equal heights and the lining up of the joist piece.The collage top itself was a lot of fun to create. Given that the intended recipient is a family member, I had lots of raw materials to cull from: maps from trips we’d taken together, cutouts from visits we’d made to Nova Scotia and elsewhere, scraps of my daughter’s artwork, etc. The piece came together well – unexpectedly “white” but to good effect.For the joist piece I simply cleaned up a piece of antique board found in the barn, painted it white, and sanded it down to enhance the texture and integrate it with the top piece.The most pleasant discovery in this piece of work is that one can place a light within the recess of the table between to the two legs and achieve a very nice glow to the piece. Something to think about for future, more sculptural works might be having the table closed on all four sides and illuminated. 

Andres Myers is a mixed media artist who’s work stands out from the usual. Its almost otherworldly. Familiar too. Layers of color like lacquer, applied carefully and used sculpturally – paper, cloth, plaster, tape, paint, wire – you name it, its there. Its also deliciously abstract – a lollipop that fell onto a sprinkles-covered ice cream cone melting in the summer sun in a little black box – vulnerable. Some of it, like the fissure works and those with clay, seem to have bubbled up from bizarre other worlds of color beneath tectonic plates – perhaps, “the space between the two- dimensional and three- dimensional, hybridizing painting, printmaking and sculpture” to nick her own words. Check out Andrea’s elegant site: Andrea Myers

I sure would like to be in New Orleans Saturday when Prospect.1 New Orleans opens in the Lower Ninth Ward and throughout the city. Its going to be, “the largest exhibition of contemporary art” in the U.S. – ever. Well, that’s according to the New York Times, with a bit of hedging with a “billed as” bit.  Nevertheless, 81 artists, 50,000 out of town visitors and installations scattered across the city – some of which are overtly Katrina related – cited are Wangechi Mutu and her “Ghost House” and “Mithra,” a massive ark-like creation by the LA painter Mark Bradford. Both look like they’re using lots of reclaimed materials. Brilliant.Read the full article about Prospect.1 at NYTimes.com 

While I was in Ithaca last week, I had the pleasure of meeting Victoria Romanoff, restorationist and artist. One of the pieces of ‘functional salvage art’ she introduced me to was her “washboard table.” The idea is elegantly simple: for an open-faced (front and back) table, join two antique washboards together with a top surface and an interior-mounted lower shelf. For a closed-back table, join three washboards together.

I had fun over the weekend creating some collage-texture work and joining them together as a side table. To give the top a nice clean edge, I trimmed the lip all the way around at 45 degrees. A coat of waterbased finish later, voila! A bright, colorful and very stable but lightweight table.

Next time, I’ll have to make sure I find matching washboards to match: I was so excited to get started on this effort that I’ve used a bronze, horizontally oriented board on one side, and a plated silver, vertically oriented board on the other. Both made by National Corporation of Chicago and bought locally for about $4.00.