Every Woman Enjoys a Little Nakedness ...

Holy F’ing Batman … this is collage number 24, coming from me, the person who said on October 17th, that they were going to *try* and do a collaged and/or altered something every day of every freaking week to get back to her art.

I did not think I could do it.

As usual, I proved my own damn [distorted sense of] self wrong!

That case in point, I was going to ramble on about what that means for me creatively speaking, but I think I’ll wait till day 30 for that … in keeping with the old adage “30 days it’s a habit.”

Once this is habit again, believe me, I’m going to spout off about it. Once it is habit, it just is … it just is, me, something I will continue to do every day, or die trying. (tiny “woot” here)

Today’s collage is full of art, in and of itself. Off to the right-hand corner you will find something lovely, torn mag article section which features Jasper Johns. It was very Rorschach-ian, and I saw a naked woman in his piece, which became then the mood and the madness for my entire piece.

I HEART Jasper Johns! I loofa his back in a bubble bath, any day. All he has to do is ask, or just look at me, or just keep doing his art!

Ali and I were lucky to see a HUGE, and I mean H-U-G-E Jasper Johns exhibit at the Chicago Institute of Art two years ago. We both fell in love with him on the same day. I know, sounds weird, but totally is not! That was one of the times that Ali said her famous line, “I’m such a Lolita!” and I was jumping all up and down because I was all like, “Yeah, Ali, I guess it would be bad if you lusted after him at 15, so I will just have to keep him for myself.” The fact that I’d share him, because we both love him so … well, that’s a whole other scandalous ballpark, but the point is WE LOVE HIS WORK … TO. DEATH!

So, Ali is in this collage too, lower left-hand corner, though the image may be tweaked beyond recognizing her, but I like to tweak and gel and whatever the collages. She is standing behind one of her favorite pieces from our trip, a see-through piece, and I can see her through my camera. (Fabulous!)

While am all about fostering self-esteem and love of the body no matter its image, maybe Ali is tweaked to the point of being the essence of future womanhood in this picture, and then if you look you will see my big fat left eye bucking up right against John’s torn section in the piece, because while I “tweaked” Ali to protect her innocence, I then tore and put myself right next to JJ, so there! (all of this is utter bullshit, because I never really know how these pieces will turn out!)

Anyways, and ironically, after scanning and finishing this piece, I clicked over to the Chicago of Institute Art page just to be curious about what might be there now, special exibit-wise and this is what I read:

October 10-January 2, 2010 – Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Collage.

Yes, I pissed myself.

And I know what I want for Christmas now, and it’s not one or two new front teeth!

I just want to be sure that I get to this exhibit. I want to take all my daughters (surrogate and otherwise), the little girls and 17,000 of my closest friends. I want to make a day of it! I want to run naked through the halls of the art institute and … okay, um, maybe that’s taking it too far. I just want to go there, with the above-mentioned people and have a really good time all over the place!
Here is the exhibit description, the exibit I TOTALLY KNOW I’M going to if I have to crawl there! The write-up:

Collage is commonly thought of as a modern art form, but the act of “playing with pictures” has a long, rich, and surprising history. Sixty years ahead of the avant-garde—and more than a century before Photoshop—aristocratic Victorian women were already experimenting with photocollage. This world-premiere exhibition is the first to comprehensively examine this little-known phenomenon, presenting many eye-opening works that have rarely—and in many cases never—before been displayed or reproduced. See Playing with Pictures at the Art Institute before it travels to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. It might change the way you look at the Victorian age.

Love it, love it love it!


I’ve long known it’s not a modern form, and there’s a painter they used to say “painted with torn paper” but his name escapes me right now, but that guy (when I read about him in my college art course) I wanted him to be brought back to life so I could make babies with him! So I will get you his name later, because I know he’s in a big fat hard-cover art text and his name is totally highlighted in purple! He totally on my “People I would like to dig up and have babies with” list!

Collage art has been around forever, and is here to stay.

I never knew till I started it myself years ago, that I had been doing it for a lot of years in journals and stuff. And while I did start to do it pretty specifically 5+ years ago, I never completed 24 projects in 24 days, I will tell you that!!! I had a handful of project per year, and a headful that I never started. I knew I loved doing it, but I wasn’t doing it enough! Until now.

Which brings us back to the beginning of this note, and why as I completed collage number 24 today, I was all “Woot?!?!?! What. WOOOOOOOOOOOOOT! 24 days already! What do you think about that, Self?

And my “self” well she didn’t say a word. She was just beaming and dreaming and scheming about what she might be able to rip up and/or alter next in the name of finding clarity!

Peace and art out!

~a

p.s. I kind of want to dig up Rorschach too, because this one time at band camp when I had a psych test, there was this inkblot that really did look like a buffalo eating an ice-cream cone, and I want to ask him about that one because I don’t think my interpretation merited my getting kicked out of band camp!