Today's Job

    My students are doing value lessons right now, and one of my guilty secrets is that this large composite drawing (Mrs.Swift Learns to Speak Boy) is on my mind, because I think  this piece falls short in that regard. 

    In the process of adding values to the panels and increasing contrast, I'm finding that a couple of the panels don't quite fit together properly. The original finished work was translated into etchings and there was a compositional mechanism that covered up all of the joining edges. I was busy being a full time teacher, grad student and mom at the time, so I welcomed the shortcut. But now that I want the drawings themselves to shine, I have to make sure all of the pieces fit. This is the first re-do of the project. It is turning out to be a bit of an engineering project to get it right.

    This is a link to the printed version: Mrs. Swift Learns to Speak Boy

 

Resurrecting Mrs. Swift

   Every year, there is a show in Chicago about motherhood that I'd like to enter, but some of the pieces I have with that theme aren't in a presentable shape, or I don't have possession of them. The Scaffold painting I've been working on is one of them, and this is another. I just ordered a big mat board from Dick Blick, so that I can adhere these small panels onto a larger substrate. Then, my plan is to adjust the values so that it has higher contrast. The two panels that are missing have an error in size (I could explain why, but chalk it up to grad school and having to make-do on a schedule) and have to be re-drawn. Part of today's work involved cutting the new paper for those drawings. 

    This image started out as a very small drawing and then bloomed into an image for one of the paper quilts I made for my thesis show, titled, Mrs. Swift Learns to Speak Boy. The problem with the quilt and it's sister, Dreamer in Training, is that they are too fragile to enter in any competition where they would have to endure any amount of handling. I recently found the drawings that I used to make the prints for the quilts, and thought I should try to get them into a more presentable form. I hope I can do it.

Mrs. Swift Learns to Speak Boy

For IF's challenge this week: strings

It might be kind of hard to see, but those are little Lego men tying down Mrs. Swift.

This is the third state of this drawing, done on coquille paper with graphite, 8.5" x 12". I have to start working larger!

Mrs. Swift

I removed this drawing because I want everyone to look at the finished version, called Mrs. Swift Learns to Speak Boy. Please look at the post on April 3, 2008.

Finished!

For IF: This quilt has roots in the story Gulliver's Travels, by Jonathan Swift. Perhaps it can cause a little Deja Vu about the story.

Here it is: Mrs. Swift Learns to Speak Boy. What a marathon this was! On to the next one!

Toy

When I got my son everything changed, as everyone said it would. I was ready to love him and watch him grow, but I didn't exactly expect that I would be voluntarily captured by him. That's what happened, though, in body and spirit.

I've posted this before as a part of a much larger work called Mrs. Swift Learns to Speak Boy. People have commented on the "robots" in the piece, but they aren't really robots, they are Lego men. Along with my son (a few years down the road) came a considerable and still growing army of Lego men. I've been wanting to post a detail from the larger work, which ended up as the image I used for my first printed paper quilt, so that you could see that the robots are really Lego men. I hope the Lego people don't mind that I played with their toys, today's IF challenge. You can see what became of this drawing here: http://lynettesartblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/finished.html

Close up

For IF: Birds are Prehistoric, right?

This is a close-up of the tessellation I used for my printed paper quilt, Mrs.Swift Learns to Speak Boy. It is a hand-colored photogravure print, and was used as the border for the quilt. If you'd like to see the whole thing, it is posted here: http://lynettesartblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/finished.html