Don't Get Jittery On Me--Part 5, or "Open the Window Already"

It's claustrophobic in here, airless, despite the brisk, sail-snapping breeze from the convection current running through the open windows from the bottom of my house to the top. There's a lock-down in Boston, for heaven's sake, where the door-to-door search for the remaining alleged Marathon Bomber continues. In between non-news of that, there is coverage of the aftermath of the West, Texas fertilizer-factory devastation, where the lives of many were also horrifically impacted. But the focus here, at least on the East Coast, is more on psychology than the chemistry of ammonium nitrate. The young minds that rigged a few ordinary pressure cookers into shrapnel-filled bombs grab our primordial American heart. I find that hopeful. That we still, as a people, seem to have a primordial heart. We can still be horrified. It is a paltry hope for a nation awash in senseless violence, but it is hope nonetheless.

And that is why I share with you, today, some window work that I have done on my new altered book. Yesterday, and today, and for quite a few tomorrows to come, I suspect, we will be wanting all the fenestration we can find. If you are new to this project and are interested in the previous permutations of the book, just scroll through my blog archive and take your pick of the four previous installments. And if you don't see what you want to know there, just ask.

When last we spoke, I had filled a window space in the book with a transparency showing a house. The next thing I did was to add some text below it, for context, as indicated by the superimposed red arrow.

The cool thing with a transparency-in-a-window is that you get to choose what will show through it from behind. In this case, I wanted to continue the doll theme that I'd established previously. Repetition like this anchors me in the development of a project when butterfly-stroking through a sea of seemingly infinite choices. So this is the image I chose.

But then I had to decide about the cropping. This way, with the big head emphasized...or

this less obvious crop....



I wound up preferring the crop that emphasized the focus on the little doll. It sets up the scene for this to become, perhaps, a rite-of-passage story or some such. It's also a little more mysterious, a little less in-your-face. By looking at the little doll, I'm hoping the viewer will experience a frisson of anticipation about the rest of the story. This is a shot of the illustration as it looks behind the window.

 
And, as you'll undoubtedly notice, when the page with the transparent window is flipped, there is yet another opportunity to make a visual statement. Which I did. The elements I chose--a text snip and a picture of a snake-charming woman--were from my copy of a 1957 Look magazine. Because the paper is thin and fragile, I used double-stick archival tape to hold the elements in place; the moisture in even a glue stick would have caused wrinkling.

And here is how the transparent window page looks when it is turned. I love how the word "mystery" works here. It's adding to that frisson we were talking about and the relationship to the house in the transparency leaves lots of room for narrative imagination. Personally, I like the tension. First you see the text snip that says "I did not like the sound of the loud voice, but I liked still less the..." And then you flip the page and you get the word "mystery." Yeah, that's working for me.

And that's it for this time. Until we meet again, I'm wishing you lots of open windows and streams of bracing fresh air. And Boston people, and West, Texas people, and in my own backyard, Sandy Hook people...my heart was and is with you.

If you're steaming along with this series, you may find Part 6 here: http://lauratringaliholmes.blogspot.com/2013/05/dont-get-jittery-on-mepart-6-or.html

Under the Influence–Wistful Thinking with Fred Free

Tightly controlled randomness with a bouquet of wistfulness that tickles memories I didn't know I had—this is what draws me again and again to the work of Fred Free. But what is this wistfulness? It bombards me from many directions, like echoes in a canyon. Wistful is about more than old paper, which Fred Free uses in abundance. In this exercise, I set out to explore the whats and whys of Fred Free's brand of wistful.

I began with a somewhat reductive search for common denominators that might have something to do with the wistfulness in Fred Free's work. My list was brief, just enough to give me the courage to throw myself under his influence. In addition to using old papers, I would try to keep my backgrounds uncluttered, incorporate florals or other botanicals, use at least one technical reference, and avoid the space at the upper right hand corner of the piece as though it carried Ebola. I would scissor instead of rip. I would encourage just the right text snip to find my hand, and if I could stumble upon the word "free," an iconic device that is always used to good effect in Fred Free's work, all the better.

Here is a look at my worktable about two-thirds of the way through.

I made a little cheat-sheet of some of my favorite Fred Free pieces to help me along in my work. That's it on the right. My collage-in-progress is on the left.

Of course, fingering the practicalities of what might be called one's artistic DNA is the easy part. Still, I hoped that from this very basic collection of parts, in some alchemical triumph of transmutation, wisps of "wistful" would appear.

Well, they didn't. The base metals didn't go all gold on me. Instead I fell into a rather hellish vortex of anger, telling the story of a girl who tilted precariously backward while grasping her head between her hands because her self-absorbed smiling parents made her feel worthless and her heart was black and white just like her parents and just like her life but this girl found her way to technicolor eventually even though it was just in dreams as she soared off to meet that light in the (left-hand-corner-of-the) sky.

"Sweet Dreams," collage on cardboard

Wistful? Hardly.

And then it hit me. The power that speaks to me in Fred Free's' work is very much intertwined with Fred Free's capacity to view things in their true relationships. This probably influences his choice of elements, which, at least in some of my favorite pieces, use scale ranges gingerly and for maximum suggestive impact. What I discovered upon close examination of Fred Free's work is that it embraces the overview, like the scene from an airplane cruising at 30,000 feet. Within that perspective, there is room not only for “wistful” but for a wide array of emotions. As for me, in the piece I constructed while under Fred Free's influence, I was hovering so low emotionally that I might as well have been riding in a crop duster. No wonder there was no room for wistful in my vista. I wish this particular lightbulb had gone off earlier in the exercise.

And so I leave this experiment enriched, inspired, and with plenty of food for thought.Thanks, Fred Free, for letting me get my hands on your style while under the influence.

Please enjoy Fred Free's work here http://fredfree.com and here http://fredfree.tumblr.com and here http://flickr.com/photos/fredfree

And here are a few pieces to whet your appetite.

 

modifications noted, Fred Free 2013

free procedure, Fred Free 2013

bridge and crown, Fred Free and Random Cowboy collaboration 2013

 

nova lux, Fred Free 2013

who alone was, Fred Free 2013



Don't Get Jittery on Me--Part 4, or "The Big, The Small, The Garish"

Today's session started out innocently enough, but then I stumbled upon a garish foil greeting card in my box of "antique treasures." It wound up changing the direction of this altered book. But more about that momentarily.

I started confidently. Big! Having roughed out the structure of the book in the last three sessions, I was ready to fill in some blanks, starting with the first window, shown in Part II of this saga here: http://lauratringaliholmes.blogspot.com/2013/03/dont-get-jittery-on-me-part-ii-or.html. (If you're new to this series, the window is on the right page, under the side porch of the house.) I started by test-driving a large acetate that I had printed out a year ago and buried in a file of big things. Big! I was feeling the scale.

But I also fished around for other alternatives to fill in the window, and that is how I stumbled upon the garish greeting card, which was part of a two-shoebox load of old stuff bought for dollars at a going-out-of-business consignment-shop sale. "Why the heck not?" I mumbled to myself, and slapped it in the window for the purposes of self-argument.

Not quite what I had in mind for the very beginning of my book, but I would come back to the card, oh yes I would. So I went with the big transparency to fill the window, cutting it down to fit, and this is what it looked like from the front.

The cool thing about using a transparency in a window is that when you flip the page over, the transparency frames whatever is behind it, creating another opportunity to make an artistic statement. This is the page flipped over, so you can see what I mean. Whatever I glue there will look innocent at first, but when the reader flips the page, presto...a focal point.

Ordinarily I would have taken some time to trim out the edges of the window on both sides, but there was a current running between me and the garish card so I picked that up next and started to play around with incorporating it. Even though it was shiny. Even though its accents were luridly, royally blue.

As it happened, I liked how the card fit in the porthole that I had cut in Stage II. I especially liked how the fortune-teller's globe echoed the shape of the porthole. I liked the idea of concealing the card beneath the catbird flap to tone down--at least a little--all that shine. I liked how the edge of the card would stick out and become a sort of tab, or handle. I liked how the handle part said "cheer." That seemed like kind of a nice vibe, and different for me. I usually don't go for cheer in my work.

And best of all? I loved that the card has a little interactive door, which reveals the greeting when opened. How perfect for my altered book!

But how to incorporate the card? For the placement of the card to work within the porthole, it had to be attached in the middle of nowhere. Of course I could have simply glued the card in place, but I wanted both the front and the back of the card to show. I turned to a method I've used before, another type of tip-in. Here, for your edification, is a picture of a page in a book I made ages ago that uses this construction. That book was called "The Princess Diary." No cheer there, oh no. But see how the image is sandwiched between trimmed book pages?

That is the engineering I used to get the garish greeting card to stay put in my new altered book.

And this is how the book looks with the catbird card flipped down over the porthole. That brown washi tape peeking out from behind? It trims out the Jittery Girls assemblage that I created in Step III. It's horrid and has to go. The lurid royal blue on the garish card said so.

While I was tweaking the tape, I also redid the tie closure, substituting ribbon for the red baker's twine. The trick was to find ribbon that fit through the eyelets I had installed in the last round, but after digging a little I found some. The blue on the greeting card really changed my sense of color in this book.

Because I had a few more minutes, and wanted to clear my table, I incorporated additional scraps from the original bombed Barcelona book. Since I wanted to create a pocket, I used glue dots (sometimes called pop-up dots) from the craft store for attachment. I was playing off the line of text that's there at the bottom, which says "I floated in the quiet waters of a rock pool." Floating doll, floating text. Just the sort of detail that I like to be in control of.

Scissors for demonstration purposes only. I'm not sure what will wind up in the pocket, but something will show up on the table eventually.

To conclude today's work, I snapped a photo of the binding. Despite all my additions, there's still plenty of room and the binding remains in good shape, the pages begging to be turned.

'Til next time. Thanks for following along.
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Still hanging in with the story? You can find Part 5 here: http://lauratringaliholmes.blogspot.com/2013/04/dont-get-jittery-on-me-part-5-or-open_19.html