So I got a job…

• June 5th, 2008 • 0 Comments • fun stuff, jobs, pottery •

What? A job? After months of struggling doing freelance? Actually I love my new job. Without naming names, I work in a paint-your-own ceramics shop. While I’ve never worked with ceramics before (Save that awesome plate I made in middle school art class…) I must say this job is awesome. One, it puts me back in a shop atmosphere. Two, I have the opportunity to teach people something new about art. Three, somehow, I got a boss that actually listens to my opinion rather than nod like a bobble-head doll. Four, did I mention the DISCOUNT? Hello, customized new dishes for my kitchen. Five, I get paid to paint. It dawned on me the other day while I was painting shop samples that someone is paying me to paint. I sat there for three hours intermittently helping customers and painting. For money. Realizations like this require the use of both bold and italics.

While I have been working on various drawings and paintings at home, I present without further ado my first finished ceramic piece, a faux Talavera bowl with a wiener dog on it I painted for what else? Mother’s Day. (My mother absoulutly adores Talavera.)

Oil

• August 20th, 2006 • 3 Comments • experiments, jobs, screen printing •

*whew!*

Freelancing wasn’t paying enough of the bills, so I took on a regular 9-5 job. My time is now being squeezed like a lemon, resulting in super-concentrated evenings and weekends of doing. As one of my new coworkers put it, “What do you…NOT do?” I honestly didn’t have an answer for her.

Last night, however DID bring on a pleasant surprise. You may recall (or view for the first time) my experiments in removing old photo emulsion from a screen. Again, I had trouble getting a few spots and haze out. Anger mounting, I gave up on the acetone. While it immediately eats out the emulsion, the unpredictability of the liquid makes it hard to control. If one could have a wash-out hose filled with acetone, it would be perfect. (Well, except for the horrible smell and ghastly amounts of acetone.)

Out of sheer frustration, I thought, Aw hell. You can use acetone for toner transfers, why not wintergreen oil? They seem to weaken the same things… Thus, a speedy application of wintergreen oil made its way onto the screen. Amounts of green photo emulsion came off of areas I thought were clean! To break up the oil, I poured some Dawn liquid soap and scrub scrubbed with a toothbrush. After a quick wash-out and dry, it was perfect. Perfectly clean! Nothing! Absolutely AMAZING.

Now my only problem is actually FINDING some more wintergreen oil. I have a small bottle (with precious few drops left) purchased from a now defunct drugstore chain. Going to national chains yielded NO results; I even asked the pharmacists if they had any on hand, only to be given a blank look and a “Winter-what oil?” Looking online is even more difficult as results are crowded with aromatherapy and foodstuff results. Point of fact, the aromatherapy and “natural” joints will try to sell you PURE wintergreen oil, not the synthetic stuff. Obviously, 100% natural/homegrown oil is going to be more expensive than the man-made junk. The bottle I have was 2oz of synthetic purchased for $2.75 back in 2001 (as opposed to the fifty-five dollar half-ounce bottle of pure!!). An acquaintance of mine who does all kinds of sciencey stuff at Berkley gave me a link to a site that will sell me five gallons at once for the low low price of $165!! Yeesh! I should buy the damn stuff and sell it on my own online shop; I’ll be rich, rich I tells ya!

Ah well. This may bring on the need for finding a “wintergreen” substitute.

Arrrrgh

• April 27th, 2005 • 0 Comments • computers, jobs, supplies •

Ah, I was cheerily coming up from the studio after a productive evening, only to have Neptune’s Finder malfunction. Insert sad sad noises here. I can’t for the life of me figure out what is wrong with it. Fortunately, my generous family bought Pisces for my 25th, so I can do a firewire connection and backup everything. Bah. Just when my evening was going so well, too!

* * *

I finished a lesson plan earlier this week involving CMYK printing process for my pedagogy class. Unfortunately, I could not procure any oil colors in process cyan, magenta or yellow. Acrylic was the only thing available: I purchased some retardant and decided to try and print using acrylics.

Materials:

ez-cut block
acrylic CMYK colors
acrylic paint retarder
various papers and posterboards

I actually started out using the acrylics without the retarder. The cyan rolled up well, but I quickly forgot exactly how fast thin layers of acrylic dry! Luckily I tossed my roller in the sink before it was ruined. After adding the retardant, the paints didn’t roll up as nicely, but didn’t dry out quite so fast. Interestingly enough, the recommended amount of retarder to add was no more than 15%…I mixed up about a 3:2 combo. While the package warned of tackiness for hours to come, the thin amount rolled onto the block dried QUITE fast. Not as good as oils, but they worked in a pinch! The only real problem I had was acrylic acting as a glue between the block and paper. Initially I thought it was a problem with the acrylics’ fast drying time. However I accidentally laid the block down on a dried print and it peeeeeeled the acrylic right off of the paper! There is now a thin layer of acrylic affixed to my block. Great.

After working out a lesson with examples I was somewhat inspired by using and working with the very “layerable” CMYK paints. Normally I’m a little reluctant to act on working with some new materials but I thought, “What the hell.” And painted something somewhat nice, complete with some modeling paste and a screen I used to make some t-shirts with. It’s not bad; it may not be good, either. It has a wiener dog in it. CMYK Wiener or something like that. Humph. So, it may not fit in with my usual portfolio…eh. Everyone needs a little ’bout of self-indulgent art therapy every once in a while! On that note, I’m thinking of starting a portfolio of pictures and items that are not typical of the usual suspects I create. When I returned from Europe with a painting for my parents of a campsite in Venice, I think they were surprised that I could do a watercolor landscape at all. (Heck, their favorite print I did was of an old Mexican man sitting in a chair admiring the landscape.) Parental admirations aside, I’ve been meaning to have a secondary gallery for a while now. Perhaps this is something I can attend to when I finish with these teacher certification classes!

(Incidentally, wish me luck…I have applications in at 6 districts in my area. Here’s hopin’!)

Art-Related Activities

• January 19th, 2005 • 0 Comments • jobs, texas •

For five or six years now, I have been writing papers for academics. It’s been all very comfortable for me and I am quite good at it. I can whip up a good art essay and scrawl down several pages of pure genius in a few hours. Dear me though, this has taken a turn for the worse now that I am faced with the formidable; a cover letter. [Cue dramatic music here.] Mentioning that I am in training to become an art teacher in the State of Texas seems to have escaped the scope of this journal. For those who don’t know, if one has a Bachelor Degree in Texas one is qualified to go through an alternative certification program to become a teacher. I made the decision to go through an “alt-cert” program a few months ago; orientation for the whole shebang was last night. My resume has been re-polished for someone looking for an art teacher (as opposed to someone looking for a printmaker) which came out swimmingly, but I’ll be damned if I could figure out how to write a decent cover letter.

I know what not to write; a friend of mine who has experience wading through hundreds of letters at a time brought one up; “Hi! My name is Candi!!” it began. Oh dear. I think poor Candi was thrown into file thirteen. Everyone with half a brain cell knows not to be a “Candi” but how does one avoid being “Joe Average?” The purpose of the cover letter is to lure the reader into reading your resume. It’s as if I am making a bowl of porridge: can’t make the reader feel stupid, can’t make the reader feel I’m stupid, it must be just write. (Oh, who could resist that pun?)

My philosophy on art I attempted to sum up in one sentence: “Art is about becoming aware of the visual world at large and making connections between visual problems and solutions in that world.” Now I’m faced with a problem about making a connection; how do I make this statement relate to myself personally? Connection. Critical thinking. Problem-Solving. Too easily I am flooded with words I feel I must use. Unfortunately, the little boogers won’t form a cohesive paragraph for me. Humph.

* * *

No wonder I can’t get down to the studio. Recently, I started volunteering as a docent at the DeGolyer House at the Dallas Arboretum. If you’re ever in Dallas visit the house! It was home to an absolutely fascinating individual, Mr. Everette Lee DeGolyer. Sadly, the Arboretum’s website is mum on the topic of the house museum, which is on the National Register of Historical Places. Smack in the middle of Dallas, the DeGolyer mansion is a house museum of un-comparable quality, not to mention the fact that it still retains about 80-90% of it’s original furnishings. 17th century tapestries and 18th century furnishings abound inside; it’s a rare jewel that deserves more respect than it gets.

Regardless, I insist on being thorough in my tour notes. In addition to sifting through the pages and pages of history (most of it provided by DeGolyer grandson Peter Maxson) I started reading Mr. De by Lon Tinkle. At the risk of being cliche, one word: fascinating. The link I provided above to a short biography only skims the surface of how influential and amazing Mr. De was. True aficianados of Texas and/or oil history will marvel at how one man helped to shape so much of the industry. It’s the little niches of history that end up really interesting!

Finished!

• November 6th, 2004 • 0 Comments • jobs, painting •

Oh, I am so happy! I finished my first full painting in Studio 4A. It’s still slightly wet, but it’s up on the wall and ready to be photographed when the daylight hours appear again. Entitled “Planet,” the five-paneled piece I feel is quite successful. Though it’s not apparent to the casual observer it makes me quite glad to have used neglected canvases that were once doomed to never again see the light of day.

Painting is good, but I do miss printing. My last print pulled was when I was in Glasgow, Scotland for a week in the Summer. I desparately wanted to edition it upon returning home, but alas, life keeps getting in the way. Though there is a ray of hope: I visited PRINT Press in Denton, where I used to work part-time while I was in school. Currently, they are involved in a very alternative reproductive project that does not in any way involve the press as it is three-dimensional. My scheme involves visiting with the box of goodies I produced in Scotland and beg for some press time, since they love me ever so much. Please please please. . .! Life has a way of keeping me from printing; I could not for the LIFE of me get hired after I returned from Europe. It was the old “you have too much/too little” experience deal. I knew that the brand new BFA graduate would experience some trouble getting hired, but c’mon! Barns and Noble wouldn’t even take me!

Thus, I have been thrown into a crash course of what every art student needs to know, but was never taught in school. Networking. No, it’s not one of those crazy corprate buzzwords, it’s a simple way of saying you must talk yourself up to people you want a job from. Networking won’t work at retail stores because they don’t give a horses behind how much you bother them. Really, most retail managers want someone who is obedient and will do as told. You have to learn who to talk to, where to go, and what to do. Me, I’m shy to a certain degree, though I have no doubts about my abilities. It’s simply scary to go and ask someone “gimmie a job” while at the same time trying to impress them. It’s all who you know, right? Well, you have to go meet people so you’ll know them.

In the meantime, I plan to: be patient, make art, stay away from retail jobs that will gunk up my resume. I worked retail over summer semesters in school: retail is poison to independent thinkers. I would rather ask for financial help from family members and struggle with freelancing than work retail. I know, it sounds completely snobbish. But honestly, if I put the time and energy into working hard, I am going to work hard at finding a job that won’t cause my brain to whither into a raisin, rather than moving low-rise jeans from one side of Old Navy to the other.