Neglection and Affection

I knew this would happen. I have neglected the blog. Good news though, I did not fall off the face of the earth. My show with Ranna went swimmingly and it is over before I realized it was happening. I finished up my last assignment for seminar, photos will be up soon for that. Here are 2 images of the gallery space. Thank you to all who came!

Time Is Running Out!

My experiment with the shopping bags was a little lackluster. There was something I just loved so much about the bag itself and I was trying to integrate it too atistically to marry with the rest of my work and lost the general aura the original text presented. We'll see if they end up in the show or not.


Here's an older piece that may be in the show. I wanted to bring another soft, black and white piece to break up the color of all the painting that will be in the show. It's a straightforward irony, but it's on such a small piece of paper that really calls back to the calendar, pinup image.


Above is a portrait of Ed Gein's house, completing the 3-piece series for my seminar class.

Black and White flyer for our show

something about the future

Above is the second finished house which is where Dahmer stayed when he lived with his grandmother.

This is my Gacy painting showing the underlying layer of rainbow I use throughout the whole piece. To the right, was the final product, but I still have some tweaking to do. Images are now functioning on Ranna and I's ETIOLOGY website. Also, I forgot to shoot progress for this piece when I started it early on in the semester. Below is my portrait of Albert Fish:

Thesis Exhibition: ETIOLOGY

Ranna Chaudry and I have a show coming up soon! November 17-27. Opening reception is November 18! Visit the ETIOLOGY website at: http://www.tcnj.edu/~baier2 (It's still in beta so please disregard the missing information)

Gone Fishing

Been neglecting my weekly blog, shame on me. Lots to discuss! Our seminar collaborative exhibition opened a few hours ago featuring a series of found objects from which we source our inspiration. The blanket above is my submitted object. I chose it because I'm a twitchy person and tend to pick every fuzzball off the featured blanket and roll it through my fingers while I'm thinking about all the things I need to do. I've been working with the theme of perfection and imperfection, which I find right down to the very thing I sleep in.

On another note. The pinup girl I've been working on has been finished! There still needs to be touch-ups, but I'm moving on to other projects for now. I'm doing another 6ft painting of Pogo (Gacy) the clown killer on retail poster. This one will be done in watered down acrylics, focusing more on paint experimentation rather than technical precision. See my finished pinup and Gacy in progress above.

I began working on a short series for Seminar using external sourcing and postmodernism ideas. As far as postmodernism goes, I feel like anything can go. I approached it with a revisitation to architecture concept art. Rather, than focusing on precise line work, I used my tool (compressed charcoal) to mark make texture. The houses are sketched from crime scene photos of serial killer houses. I was already working with serial killer portraits for thesis and found the houses they lived and killed in to be quite interesting. There is something so eerily normal about them and decided to investigate them in my work. Here's a sketch and another house in progress below:

Too tired for clever titles.

My first show (group show) of the year just opened tonight. The install went smoothly and pictures will be up soon. Here is the progress of my current pieces. Finished the slaughterhouse and almost there with the painting!

Halfway there, living on a prayer?

I don't really listen to Bon Jovi, so don't judge me by my title choice. Some days I feel like I should be more religious so I can pray to be able to get all these tasks done by their deadlines. Anyways, I got half of my large pinup girl painting done and and half of my slaughterhouse piece chalked out. The painting has proven to be a tedious, time consuming project and the slaughterhouse one allows me to unwind and release a little. I'm happy to be working with two different extremes that compliment each other so well. Here's the updates:


I worked on the slaughterhouse a bit more, this photo was taking prior to the introduction of water and charcoal everywhere approach. I also have some mockups of my website in the works, so hopefully that shall be taken care of soon as well.

Website Examples

AH! So I need to throw together a website...fast for a general mockup. Trying to pull together some things I like about other artist's websites. Two I were looking at were James Jean (http://www.jamesjean.com/) and Henrik Tamm (http://www.henriktamm.com/home.htm). I like the splash pages each provide, Jean has a random work that pops up each time while Henrik has a multi-image spliced into one. The menu bars are both clean and have a 'back' access while you are viewing work or a next/previous option as you scan through the galleries.

Another website I found is merely for lightbox purposes. Feerik (http://www.feerik-art.com/) uses the lightbox program to show his work and I love the separate screen that appears over the site and dims the surrounding.

Processing and Assessing

Group A from my seminar class launched their first show of the semester with incredible success, especially given to the tight time constraints. Great job pulling it together before 5:30 hit, Katie McFarland! I hope our show goes equally well. I need to apply some finishing touches to the presentations of my work as well as a hanging solution for my canvas.

In the meantime, I did mention tackling my 6ft painting for thesis! Below is an update of how much I have now. I've been experimenting with acrylic paint effects in some of my works recently, which you can see in my group show next week. However, I wanted to reminisce the wonders of traditional oil painting. This pinup girl is aimed to emulate a more 1960s painting style of Gil Elvgren, with loose ties to Norman Rockwell, so I tried the keep the skin tones warm and inviting with rosy red cheeks. I haven't painted in oil in over 4 years, so I think I'm doing okay for myself so far. Stay tuned next week to see if I mess up!

For seminar, I decided on my slaughterhouse scene. It's not brutally violent and bloody, don't worry. Below is the line drawing over a retail poster that's been thinnly gessoed over. I forgot to post progress, but will do soon, I promise. The subject matter is anchored to the top and cuts off on the sides. I really liked the awkward space it creates on the bottom and hope it works to my advantage when I tackle it with plenty of charcoal and water to create a sweet texture.

Where To Begin

With news about my thesis show coming sooner than expected, I took the very little free time I had in jumping into my 6ft painting! I built the canvas with some basic wood from home depot and stretched it with a canvas dropcloth rather than a professional grade canvas. What I liked about the dropcloth was the imperfect texture and the obvious seam from where two layers were sewed together.



I'm painting a pinup girl inspired from Gil Elvgren's work. I enjoyed the absurdity of the situations his girls would get into in the images and wanted to play off that content in favor of discussing consequences of the American dream. I'm also freaking out because I need to stay in track in order to accomplish all the work I need to do by my show in November!


(Gil Elvgren's work)

In news pertaining to my Seminar class, I think I have a concept for my internal modernism assignment. I saw a documentary a while ago, depicting French slaughterhouses in the 1940s. I enjoy working with charcoal and would like to explore the context slaughterhouses play in a capitalist society and how we feed into a commercialized system. Progress is due Thursday, so I'll see what I come up with!


(Le Sang des betes)

The Undergraduate Final Chapter

It's been a while since I've blogged, but my grade is now depending on my responsibility to keep this thing alive and breathing. Hopefully I'll be so used to updating nonstop for the next 4 months, that I shall maintain the good habit.

I wanted my first entry of the last semester to feature a current day artist that is extremely inspiring to my aesthetic for my upcoming thesis show. My painting teacher introduced me to Richard Prince, who became notable for his joke paintings and nurse paintings (shown below). What drew me to his work was his use of figures and text, two things I have enjoyed incorporating in my work. His work is very involved with layering and transforming materials while still maintaining traditional practices. A majority of his works also comment on his surrounding society.

With the joke paintings, he pulls one-liners multiple comedians have been caught using, to the point where no one knows the creator of the original joke. He turns the common statement into an immortal tale on his canvas, lavishly adding on layers upon layers of acrylic paint.

His nurse paintings really inspired me to pursue an idea in my head about working with 1960's pinup girl paintings. I like how he uses the actual nurse from old book covers and blows the image up larger and you can see the original cover behind it, but only just so.

I also loved the idea of painting over something already in existence. It has completely changed the way I approach using base materials for work. I now have shopping bags, retail promotional posters, and magazine covers littered all over. The base materials not only provide a cheap solution to creating art, but it fuels the ideas and concepts I have in my head as well.

Hangen Sie In Dort: An Artist's Book

Artist Book Structure

I wanted to continue working with handheld handbooks, like with my recipe booklet. This booklet will be a bit bigger, however: 5 x 5 inches. I plan on printing it double-sided like a standard book and sew it together in the middle. I haven't decided on a paper yet, but I'm looking into matte finishes. possibly. The covers with be a dark red with cats on the front and back. The text faces I am using is a Russian Advertisement type titled Kremlin for all the titles and headers. I am also using Traveling Typewriter for the text inside the book.

Throughout the book will be images used in my series, isolate on their own on the pages to accompany the text. The series will be held in the pages with an illusion of photo corners constructed in photoshop. The type will be broken into parts like in the recipe booklet for feasible reading. I plan to place the book in a cardboard folder case I will cut and construct by my hand. I'm thinking about spray painting a stencil stamp the reads the German 'Hang in There' title to mirror the title cover page of the book inside.

Print Series- Artist's Statement

World War II has always been an interest of mine. It was a very gruesome and large event that impacted many countries around the world. Using the confinements of the initial words, I fabricated a fairytale of the war to sugarcoat parts that are still hard to consider in present day. My initial approach was to desensitize history through the use of cats, censoring scenes of WWII to make them appear more whimsical, as if a story of war as being explained to a child. To further emphasize the child-like nature of the pieces, I applied my own drawings into the piece crudely held in place my masking tape. It is not a way of laughing at the events of WWII, but looking through a surreal perspective of censorship to separate the viewer from the images.

All the words fit fluidly in my first piece as I began exploring my collage approach to the series in Concept 1. Trying to keep the outer space setting a secondary part to the image, I crowded the moon with burning buildings pulled from WWII scenes. I used an iconic Hitler to specify this particular war. The hand-drawn rafflesia and cats were drawn and scanned on tracing paper to replace a tank and grenades. I placed the fictional LOST character subtly into the soldier’s helmet. His expression accompanied by the cats along with the rafflesia tank creates the whimsical atmosphere I was aiming for.

When I began my second piece, I decided to continue with working on scenes from WWII. I decided I wanted my images to be more cohesive with each other with less random images pasted on top of each other. I stuck with one picture of the London Blitz and inserted three Nazi planes, repeating and resizing them in a pattern that moved across the sky. Instead of bombs, falling cats dropped from the sky. I used the same tracing paper drawing technique and also added some drawn cupcakes to the bottom so the cats did not appear to be falling to a fiery death, but a delicious break to their fall.

The final piece was tough. I really wanted to depict Auschwitz, but the concentration camp seemed to be a very conversial subject to desensitize. I decided not the place in the mass graves but stick to the more subtle approach I’ve been using. The smoke in the background suggests the crematories in progress, but it is not the focus. I found a walkway scene from Auschwitz and decided to cover it with many cats roaming about the aisle. I inserted the iconic Auschwitz gate over the walkway to tell the viewer where we are, but hung a drawn ‘Cats 4 Sale’ sign underneath to shift the idea of a terrible camp into a curious place filled with cats.

Love is a Four-Letter Word

Love is a Four-Letter Word
By Andrea Mastrovito
The Foley Gallery, New York, NY
11-11-09



Andrea Mastrovito's exhibit appealed to me because she was working in a method similar to my series project; using collage. I was immediately drawn in by the diptych Firing Squad by the use of space and color. The backgrounds are strictly kept to cool blues while the foreground is exploding in warm reds and yellows and white. The cut-out shapes worked well in her pieces. They act as voids the viewer is encouraged to fill in using their imagination or own personal life. Letters of L, O, V, and E are scrambled in each scene, depending on the image, it either fills up a body or acts as the ground or both.

The series works because it is about visually depicting the concept of Love. Love may be a four-letter word, but it is not a simple definition. Mastrovito utilizes a concept of a series to explore different kinds of loves and how love is really in the ey of the beholder. Take Doggy Style for example, there is one dog filled with the letters of love mounting this blank dog who is looking away. By not seeing the animal's face and by observing it's absence of those letters, we begin to question the story behind the work. One may say the white dog's feelings are not consensual with the other or perhaps the white dog is overcame with a sense of shame or guilt that forces it to shy away from the viewer. This technique really engages the viewer to formulate their own conclusions within each piece.

Her exploration of love expands beyond just sex and intimate relationships. In the series, we can observe the love for war, the love of sacrifice, the love in salvation, the love of the hunt, the love of running away, and so much more. Others viewing the show may read each image as a different kind of love compared to my interpretations depending on their own personal connections with the work.

Print Series

I was able to use all 7 words in my first print of the series. I focused on the time period of World War II and utilized my words to fabricate a surreal environment that displaces the viewer from the scene at hand. I constructed a collage element to create an image of WWII. I decided to use hand-drawn objects as a censor tool to cover up gruesome parts of war. The concept behind my series was to desensitize history through the use of cats; a quirky sugarcoated fantasy as if the war was envisioned by a child.

I continued with the theme of WWII in my next two prints. Instead of the photoshop aesthetic collage, I tried to focus more on using a specific photo from the scene and adding only a few elements cut-out and drawn. I felt the images were less cluttered and more conceptually engaging to the viewer. The hand-drawn cats on tracing paper became the bombs or the imprisoned jewish rather than simply and object to cover it up.

The series is posted below in the order of development to see the progress evolved as one print moves to the next.

Lists for Project 2

Places: Ocean, Outer Space, Russia
Eviornmental Conditions: Tornadoes, Snow, Meteor Shower
People: Daniel Faraday, Jeffrey Dahmer, The Doctor
Mood/ Feelings: Phenomenal, Furious, Whimsical
Object: Phone Booths, Daleks, Cats
Flora/ Fauna: Venus Fly Trap, Rafflesia, Roses
Period of Time: Jurassic, World War II, AD79 (Vesuvius)

Final Listings: Outer Space, Meteor Shower, Daniel Faraday, Whimsical, Cats, Rafflesia, and World War II

Recipe Booklet

Recipe Booklet Idea

My idea for the how-to assignment was to take a humorous spin on a stereotypical tension between and cubicle worker and his or her boss. It's titled "I Accidentally Murdered My Boss: Covering Up the Crime Scene on the Clock" This little booklet is intended to be 7 pages and wallet sized (3.75 x 2.5) for convenience purposes.

I want it to be just simple typed up steps on various paper backgrounds; each accompanied with a spot illustration on each.