Thinking Out Loud

• August 25th, 2005 • 2 Comments • meandering, supplies, texas •

It’s too hot out! The temperatures the last few weeks have been unbearable in the studio. Last week was so humid, I could turn on the faucet and water would just hang there in the saturated air. This week there have been triple digits all week long. Sadly this means no working in the studio. I’ve brought items to work on up in my apartment but there are too many distractions; television and my computer being the main culprits. In addition, my computer desk is no place to do art! I am one of those people that needs for all items I am using to be spread out so I can see them; there is absolutely no room for this kind of nonsense in our office. The evening brings no relief from the heat or the humidity for that matter.

Lousy heat, why can’t you be cooler? The poor studio is such a mess. My parents recently moved and I acquired several new items, including a table saw and an air compressor. But with this heat I cannot re-arrange the studio to accommodate, or use for that matter, my new toys. How frustrating!

It always seems that the “To-Do” list piles up when one is unable to “Do.” Thus far the agenda includes:

1. organizing sketches from 2004 into some sort of cohesive notebook.
2. case several naked book blocks!
3. paint large painting on new canvas, er, first build frame
4. build structure to house: paper, boards, completed artwork, prints
5. re-arrange studio for actual use

I’d like to spend some time on item #4. Storage is fast becoming a big problem. It’s probably one of the bigger ones I’m facing. What is the best way for me to store accumulated paper, mat boards, illustration boards, finished prints, et cetera? My best plan so far involves constructing a 4′x4′x4′ rolling cube with shelves. If I built it to my ideal specifications, it has the potential to skyrocket to roughly $200. Outch. That’s similar to the price that keeps me from buying pre-made shelves. After some more calculatin’, I discovered that I could shave it down to $130 if I didn’t put my box on wheels. My father suggested creating a sort of “skeleton” of the box, using 1″x2″ boards. This bodes well for the money, but I fear it’s impractical for actual storage. (There’s no protection from flying paint or dust.)

This opens the option for vertical storage, which I loathe: it leaves my boards all bent and warped. I want the cube, as it not only will provide nice flat storage, but also a super-duper-rolling work surface. The only major disadvantage to the cube is it’s weight. I don’t plan on being in the apartment garage forever; lifting that mother into a U-Haul would probably kill me. The cube’s weight quickly increases with the thickness of the board I want to use, another drawback. What’s a girl to do? I have NO idea.

The DeGolyer Library

• February 7th, 2005 • 0 Comments • reading, texas •

Today was quite productive! As mentioned previously, I’ve been doing docent work for the DeGolyer House at the Dallas Arboretum. Valentine’s Day this year, the docents are having a meeting and it was requested of me to find some love letters between Everette and Nell DeGolyer. Peter Maxson directed me to the The DeGolyer Library at SMU in Dallas, Texas. Whotta day!

First off, I started rummaging through boxes of correspondence between Everette and Nell DeGolyer. The letters begin when both were nineteen years old, and continue until Everette’s untimely death. Of particular interest were the letters written between the young couple before marriage. Only once was my eyebrow raised; the majority of the correspondence was “passionately polite.” The sheer volume of correspondence, business agreements, diaries and other materials was un-BELIEVABLE! Fortunate for me, I was able to see the restricted rooms in the library. Most impressive was a room which I estimate to be approximately 15×15 with ten-foot ceilings. It was entirely filled with shelves containing sorted file boxes filled with papers; many of them belonging to Mr. and Mrs. DeGolyer. Don’t think I am exaggerating: when I say filled, I mean filled. Boxes, from ceiling to floor, wall to wall, with only space for a person to walk between the stacks. IN-credible. I can most accurately equate it to that scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark at the end where they pack the Ark away in a box in a warehouse. The space was smaller, but the voluminous amount of material is most comparable. That room only scraped the surface, by the way. I was most inspired by a card-catalogue created by Everett DeGolyer Jr., which was used in documenting his vast collection of railroad photographs. I will address THAT topic in a later post as my artistic inklings have been revved up again.

Lunch was with Russell Martin, the library’s director, and Ann Peterson, curator of photographs. Both were most gracious (they bought me lunch!) and highly informative. My time in the library was from ten in the morning to three in the afternoon - time I feel was well spent. Honestly I can’t wait to return to continue burrowing through boxes.

* * *

Plunging through so many documents today made me realize how ethereal electronic mediums truly are. I realize that yes, the amount of time spent archiving electronic documents consumes a deal of time and money; not to mention the longer “shelf-life” for electronic documents.

However, take a family starting out in the 21st century. A young couple courting e-mails and instant messages each other. It is incredibly easy to lost/delete all items documenting the beginnings of a relationship. The couple starts a family. Baby photos and videos are done digitally and are never printed out; correspondence between family members and new parents are just as easily lost. Business transactions, personal journals, music collections and so forth are purely digital. In effect, there is no “real” documentation of the family’s existence.

I pondered this upon finding numerous receipts and correspondence between businesses and the like in the DeGolyer files. A physical object helps to solidify a person’s existence in another’s mind. It is the difference between thinking “I love you” about another person and actually saying the words to their face. I wonder, how much more concrete was a relationship like Nell and Everette’s due to their massive amount of letter writing? I noted that in each telegram, note and letter that they always signed out with “Love”.

It has been my experience in email correspondence that there is a severe lack of formalities. Never once has anyone addressed me as “Dear Olivia”; much less thought of using capital letters. It really becomes more of an amorphous conversation in delayed time than a solid collection of thoughts and ideas. The biggest complaint of cyberspace communication I’ve heard is about the lack of communicating emotion. This irks me; people have been communicating emotions to each other for thousands of years through writing; what about writing in cyberspace has changed this? I suggest that it would be an effort to “keep up”. The sense of time when writing an email is rushed. Hurry hurry! Must get this to Bob in marketing ASAP! Cyberspace commands one to do it NOW.

Hmm. . .sounds like a paper in the works here. . .

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!

Texas Finally Got Cold

• December 1st, 2004 • 0 Comments • photography, texas •

Brrr! The cold weather has finally hit Texas, so now my little garage studio is officially cold. Michael helped me to do one screen print. I noticed that when doing mulitples on fabric, I need more than ONE setup for the fabric to dry on! Oh well; after the cold, I wasn’t so interested in doing more than one print anyway. Rinsing my screen out was literally a chilling experience. Before I may have mentioned that there is a designated “car wash hose” near my garage that the complex provides. Handy, considering my kitchen sink lacks the power to properly rinse out screens. Unfortunately the nozzle was broken (it seems to be cheap) and the hose had somehow lost its gasket. So the screen had to be rinsed out in the kitchen sink -grr- and my pants were subsequently soaked by the leaky hose full of fridgid water -double grr-.

I am definitely going to purchase my own nozzle for the hose, but I am considering what to do about increasing pressure for the kitchen sink. Getting soaked with cold water when it’s 35 degrees out is not my idea of a good art experience.

The archival project is going well, despite a few initial problems. Some of the photos have a bizarre sheen which causes them to be scanned incorrectly by the scanner. Their images can only be viewed at an angle, thus the head-on light from the scanner distorts them. Strange! I am considering photographing them with light that can accomodate their needs.

The first item I am working with is different from all of the other photographs as it is an old album with the photos glued in. Delicate notations of what year it is and how much baby weighs are next to some of the pictures. However, I am faced with the age-old problem of conservation. The paper is old and acidic, not to mention the spine is falling apart. Should I attempt to remove the photos to save them? Should they remain in their album-state while I attempt to repair the actual book spine? I have already scanned the book as a whole: there is a digital account of the book recording it’s original state, including the front cover. A decision must be made, and I’m frankly leaning toward repairing the book, and adding an insert for a mini-cd on the back cover. That way when discovered: the original album may be viewed in its changing/transient state; the physicality of the cd leaves record of a new family member preserving documentation of visual material; and the cd itself may be viewed and enjoyed when the album “dies.”

Day One

• September 28th, 2004 • 0 Comments • studio 4A, texas •

I think it’s safe to say that everything is up and operational!

I’ve got the space split up into “clean” and “dirty” work areas. The back has a section of spare carpet, which helps to section off the clean area. (Makes for nice naptime as well. . .) The front is taped down with a cheap plastic drop cloth to keep paint from hitting the garage floor. I would venture to say I’m the only one at this apartment complex who is squatting an art studio inside my garage rather than parking my car.

There is no climate control. I’m not really concerned with the Texas humidity, or the heat. During my summer trip when I visited Glasgow, I noted that Glasgow is very very humid. Very cold and damp. Texas humidity ain’t got nuthin’ on Glasgow. Most of my prints are stored upstairs in the apartment, so I am not worried about them getting ruined. Things stored in the garage are mostly my large wood paintings and cardboard boxes. No worries.