Optical Art, Op Art and Crossed Eyes

While sorting through a box of old art papers, bits and pages from magazines and other fodder that I have saved for art projects and collages that are yet to be created out of the chaos, I found a folder of black and white op-art that I have had for at least thirty-seven years. Most of the pieces are copies of student work from the early years of my career when I taught art at Union Junior High. They are the high contrast black and white, geometric designs which if looked at too closely or too long cause the eyes to cross and summon hallucinations, head aches and, in extreme cases, a dead faint. Best to be avoided, but if not, at least taken in small doses.

 

 

 

So small it is. I made some copies on cardstock and chopped the sheets into 2 1/2 by 3 1/2 inch cards. Then I broke out the gel pens and started to alter the cards. I have a black and white ATC trade coming up, so I used three of the cards as a background for a set of chat noir cards.

I used a few others as backgrounds with some cutouts from magazines, but most of the cards I have been coloring with the gel pens. Here are a few cards that have been colored, but are not in a final, finished form.

Poor, Pale Rusalka! Alas!

Last Saturday, I spent a big chunk of the day enjoying the Metropolitan Opera HD broadcast of Antonin Dvořák's Rusalka. The visually and vocally gorgeous Renee Fleming was superb as the tragic heroine, the water sprite Rusalka, who wants to be human so she can pursue her prince and experience human love. In this production, Rusalka sings her "Song to the Moon"  from a tree above the waters of the lake. How a water sprite ended up in a tree is an interesting question, but it's not important. The plot is similar to Hans C. Andersen's story "The Little Mermaid." But, alas, Rusalka does not have a hopeful ending as does the the little mermaid who is given a soul and the promise of ascending to Heaven; and this is certainly not a happy Disneyfied fairy tale. No happy ending here. Poor, pale Rusalka is cursed to wander for eternity between life and death as a ghostly figure, neither human nor water folk.
One of the wonderful parts of the Met HD experience for me is to see the sets being moved about and assembled during the intermissions. Speaking of the sets, the illusion of Rusalka walking on the water of the lake at the end of act three was beautiful. For the non opera crowed, Renee Fleming was the beautiful soprano who sang the National Anthem at this year's Super Bowl, which game I did not watch and apparently didn't miss much.
I am looking forward to the rest of the HD broadcast season; especially Massenet's Werther with Jonas Kaufmann in March and Rossini's La Cenerentola with Joyce DiDonato in May.

An Angel

My daughter-in-law sent me the picture above this morning. Baby Gabriel is an angel. He has been in our family since he was three months old. He is almost two now. His adoption was finalized on 31 December 2012. When he was placed in foster care with my son's family, their first foster child, my son was out of town working. The night he returned, he picked up the baby and was rocking him. My daughter-in-law told him to not get too attached, because it was a temporary, emergency placement. My son looked into the baby's eyes and said something like, "Nope, this baby is ours. He's supposed to be with us." Truly prophetic.

He certainly loves to pose for the camera.

Five Cent Stamps, ATCs and Handmade Envelopes

I just finished two separate ATC trades with the theme of postage stamps. The challenge for both trades was to make a collage of stamps for the background of the ATCs. That was not too difficult a task, but trying to decide what to do as an embellishment or for something in the foreground had me stumped for a few days. The stamps came from a box of stamps my grandmother sent me in the 1960s when I was an avid stamp collector. She had a friend who worked for a publisher, and the friend gave the stamps from the manuscript packages to my grandmother to send to me. I have dozens of the same stamps, mostly five  to eight cent commemoratives. I made both collages the same, but the second one has two different stamps. I could do a comparison puzzle with the two; "How many differences can you spot between these two cards?"
For the finish on both cards, I cut out the "golden five" from two little copies of Charles Demuth's painting, The Figure 5 in Gold, and glued them down over the stamps. I thought that tied the card together: five cent stamps and the number "5." I outlined the stamps and the fives with black gel-pen. My hand is not very steady any more, so there is a wobble on the outline of the fives of each card. That just proves it was handmade, right?

I also sent off a card in a "Heart" ATC trade. That one started as a copy of a scherenschnitte Valentine that I made a few years ago. I scanned it and reduced the size to the dimensions of an Artist Trading Card, 2 1/2 in.  x 3 1/2 in. Using pen and ink, I added dots and some squiggles to change it a bit. I have used copies of this paper cutting for ATCs in the past.

Using the envelope maker that my daughter gave me for Christmas, I made the envelopes to send off the cards. The papers I used were wallpaper, and pages from magazines. I worry about the magazine pages going through the postal sorting machines because it is thinner than envelope paper, but I have sent some magazine-page envelopes through the mail successfully in the past. Here are some before and after shots of two of the envelopes, front and back:

Two Artist Trading Card Swaps to Start a New Year

I joined two swaps for the beginning of January: one, a black and white; two, a mega swap of ten cards. For the black and white , I did a couple of Kokopelli drawings. My trade partner listed on her profile that she liked Native American design, especially kachinas. They are simple, but I like them.

My daughter gave me an envelope maker for Christmas, and I used it to make an envelope for this swap. I used a page from an old Southwest Art magazine, and I like how it turned out.

The mega swap was for ten ATCs. I made a few new cards and combined them with some that were from series that I made in the past years. I don't think I could have created ten brand new cards in the last two weeks. Here are six of the cards I sent.

A Room with a View

Pulled myself out of bed at 5:00 a.m. this morning to get ready for the return to school after two weeks and three weekends off. No mater how I hurry around getting ready, making breakfast, grabbing a frozen lunch and scraping thick frost off the windshield, I am late getting on the road. There are also two damnably long stop lights between my house and that of my son at both of which I have to wait and which make me even later. I picked up the grandsons at twenty to seven in the predawn gloom, and we set off across the valley. It was a blue twilight when we arrived in the parking lot. While crossing the student drop off and bus lane in front of the school, I was almost run over by a speeding parent. I could have shaken my cane and hurled epithets at them, but I didn't. I was just grateful that I saw them before they hit me. Once I arrived at my library and settled in to work, I noticed the "dawn's early light" outside my library windows glimmering along the tops of the Oquirrh Mountains.

I took this picture of the view with my Iphone. The phone always makes everything look smaller than the real life view, but of course I forgot to adjust the image, so it doesn't look a spectacular as the view from my windows. I took another photo in the afternoon, and it shows the scale better; but without the beautiful pink flush of the sunrise on the snow.

I have a lovely view from the library windows all the day long.

New Year Swapping in January 2014

I am sending out two swaps today. Both of them have double partners. The first is a location swap where traders pick a state or sometimes a country to represent on the ATC. I always choose Utah, where I have lived for43 years, if it hasn't been snapped up by another. New Mexico, where I lived from 1949 to 1960, would be my second choice; then California where I lived from 1960 to 1970. When I do a Utah location trade, I pick Delicate Arch as the theme. If I were to do New Mexico, I would build the card around the Saint Francis of Assisi Church in Rancho de Taos. I have done several art pieces on that subject. I don't know what I would choose for a theme if I did California; probably something around Huntington Beach, maybe the auditorium and tower at old Huntington Beach High School. Now there's a thought!
The second swap is a simple silhouette on a background. I used a silhouette of Delicate Arch on two backgrounds made from extra ATCs I made a few years ago.
Location ATC card:

I made three of these, so I could keep one for my collection. I haven't hiked up to the arch in many years. My knees won't let me walk that far up hill (coming down is even worse). I am glad I took a lot of pictures.

Silhouette card with the two backgrounds:

Here is what I usually glue on the backs of the ATCs. If I run out of the contact papers with this design, I will put an address sticker on the back with the title, number, and date.

The design is from the title page of an old biographical encyclopedia published in 1888. I bought the book almost 50 years ago at Acers of Books in Long Beach, CA, one of my favorite places to browse when I was a student at Long beach State. I bought many books there that are now over 150 years old.

I also decorated the envelopes for sending the swaps. Here are three of the front sides and two of the backs. The paper was stained with inks in my "secret" process. I like to outline things with black. It must be my expressionistic side.