Backstory
After working on Dissecting Double Portrait: Self and Petra Nimm I was not sure of my next step. I could have continued on with that piece; the method of copying and revising to create a new, related work allows for endless repetition of the process. However I knew I'd reached a point where I should put that particular work aside. I could have undertaken the same process with the other two double portraits, but there was something about Petra that was keeping me tied to working with her, or at least thinking about her while I worked. I spent the time in the studio playing around with the small oil paintings I am working on, thinking about what I had learned about Petra and myself to that point, what grabbed my attention from that experience and waiting for a beacon to guide me down the next path. And I was thinking about my personal art history.
What have I done before? Any of thing worth revisiting?
Two mornings in a row I woke up to the memory of work I did over ten years ago. I guess you could call them ‘digital collages’ of sorts as the compositions were created by printing, cutting out, laying out on the flatbed and re-scanning. Of these I printed up four at 18” x 24” on glossy paper for a show. A fifth ‘misprint’ hangs in my bathroom, while the other four were buried deep in the flat file. I think I remembered these pieces because they are related to the recent work in terms of the sources, tools and methods I used to create them.
That year, 2005, I had gotten my first flatbed scanner...a separate piece of equipment unlike the all-in-one printer/fax/scanner I have now. I remember working on the pieces during my older son’s nap time. It was a quick, low-mess process that allowed me to achieve results in a very limited period of time. I had also recently installed the open source program Paint.Net onto my Windows PC, so I was having fun playing with it too. During the same period of time I also had one of those cheap subscriptions to Vogue.
The previous winter I created a series of small paintings: acrylic, paint markers and gel pen inks on full page size portraits torn from Vogue. These paintings I neatly mounted with matte acrylic medium to 6” x 9” pieces of ½ inch thick MDF panels. I drilled a small hole in the back to hang them flush to the wall with a small nail.
Later that year the December 2005 issue of Vogue arrived in my mailbox. This issue had a great spread from Annie Leibovitz...The Wizard of Oz… with Keira Knightly as Dorothy in her ruby slippers and the rest of the characters were played by slightly mythical creatures of the art world….check it out!
At the time I had begun turning figures in the pages into silhouettes. Coloring them with dark colored Sharpie markers and then cutting the figures from the page. I had a collection of these in a small box, not sure what to do with them but having fun playing with them. They were like paper dolls waiting to be dressed up and placed in a new paper house.
One of the figures I turned into a silhouette was Kara Walker as Glinda the Good Witch… in 2005 it was just too tempting to turn Kara Walker into a silhouette.
I don’t recall what made me begin laying the small portraits on the flatbed scanner. But one day I did. And I printed a few of the scans onto glossy 8 ½” x 11” photo paper. Maybe the box with the figures was out on the kitchen table at the same moment, but somehow a figure landed on top of one of the prints. And the discrepancy of scale hit me. My little paintings were huge next to the small, fashionable silhouettes!
So I laid them both onto the scanner and created the pics. I had the opportunity to put a few pieces in a holiday pop-up show in Providence that season, so I put the files onto a CD and headed out to have them printed up bigger than any of the components were in real life.
End of story...until this past month.
After waking up to my memory of these pieces two mornings in a row I decided to dig them out of the flat file and see what new life they might take on, with thoughts of Petra in my head.
The first pic I chose to work with was this.
It is the one featuring the silhouette of Kara Walker/Glinda the Good Witch. What’s more, if I recall correctly the small painting she stands in front of was over a portrait from a feature article on the painter Elizabeth Peyton in Vogue. Unfortunately the work pre-dates my obsessive documentation with my iPhone camera and a Google image search does not yield the source image. I do recall placing the two women artists together in the image. Because I had Petra on my mind it seemed the right one to start with.
The rest of this post is a photo documentation of the process to date. I am not finished working with this.
I coated the surface of the digital print with 2-3 coats of acrylic medium. This sealed the ink to prevent the solvents in the oil paint from causing them to run. It also added texture to the glossy surface, allowing the paint to adhere and providing a barrier for pigment to grab hold off and to sand down.
After cutting the painting into fragments I laid each piece on my scanner and covered them with a sheet of white paper. Eventually I'll print these up.