I took a break in November, following a class called “Every Picture Tells a Story” taught by sculptor and collage artist Melissa Stern. I’ll write more about that class later; it was excellent.
For now, I’m posting a few pictures (from that class) because they point me in a new direction. I’ve turned from paper cutting to collage: some torn paper and Tyvek along with hard-edged cuts, and some found imagery (Dover bugs, lizards, snakes) combined with some free-hand cut imagery (“drawn” with scissors).
Here’s a figure from “Slovenly Peter” (a 19th German book of manners for children, reissued many times) that I integrated into a class exercise based on “a memory about eating cake.” Perhaps Augustus Gloop, the little guy seated at the table (a cut out from an illustration in S-P), ate more cake than was good for his digestion.
Most stories in “Slovenly Peter” (as in the original “Grimms Fairytales”) do not end well. Today’s parents might call them “politically incorrect.” But they are catchy, and the illustrations are charming. The dissonance is rather fascinating. Working with this material could be my next literary-art challenge.
The dark recesses of childhood might also be responsible for this next sequence.
Run Away
Running for fun, running without aim, running to escape–maybe this work’s best understood as an exercise in interactive storytelling. The less predetermined the visual story, the more invested the viewer will be in telling her own version. The key is to provide clues and spark a viewer’s storytelling process, without completely predetermining the tale.
These are “exercises” rather than finished art, and somewhat unlovely, but after scratching my head for a month while I looked at them, I have an idea what to do next.
It comes as something of a surprise.
But after a month, I’ve decided to try my hand at designing a board game, something dark and swampy, with many potential paths to fruition and a few disastrous dead ends.
