Spring Tide: Petra returns

After the full moon of March 31 Petra returned.

Franzi and I still don't know where she was and we can only surmise that the return of activity in the studio, between easel and wall, and the prospect of meeting Linna, our new acquaintance, drew her back.

I am not going to write much here about what Petra did in the first few days after her return to the watercolor table. Instead I thought I would just post a few pics of these warm ups before my next post on the large work that followed in April and early May. Basically, she looked around the studio at what had been going on in her absence and jumped back into the process.

Inkjet prints on 300 gram hot press watercolor paper, approx. 7 inches x 10 inches, of a photo of the cradled side of an Elegy panel; here Petra has begun applying watercolor paint. — Inkjet prints on 300 gram hot press watercolor paper, approx. 7 inches x 10 inches, of a photo of the cradled side of an *Elegy* panel; here Petra has begun applying watercolor paint.

On the table the inkjet prints have received additional blue watercolor paint. Behind are more prints waiting to be worked with, the Deciphering Elegy sketchbook, and to the far right one of the Twelve Poems and a watercolor sketchbook. — On the table the inkjet prints have received additional blue watercolor paint. Behind are more prints waiting to be worked with, the *Deciphering Elegy* sketchbook, and to the far right one of the *Twelve Poems* and a watercolor sketchbook.

A blurry shot of what was on the table to the right; one of the Twelve Poems which Petra had begun sketching in watercolor in her sketchbook. — A blurry shot of what was on the table to the right; one of the *Twelve Poems* which Petra had begun sketching in watercolor in her sketchbook.

The inkjet prints from the cradled side of Elegy laid out in a grid on the watercolor table. — The inkjet prints from the cradled side of *Elegy* laid out in a grid on the watercolor table.

The last two pics of the highly saturated watercolors are important as they are the basis for what came next.

Franzi blue, Part Two

While I was between the easel and wall adding thin layers of oil paint to Signs Left Behind, when he wasn't sorting through Melusine's papers or practicing writing in Sütterlin, Franzi joined me in the greenhouse where he continued his explorations into blue and squares documented a year ago in the post Franzi blue.

However, in the ten months since that mid-spring posting and our late winter days in the greenhouse a shift had occurred not just in my way of working but in Franzi's, and eventually, as we will come to find out, Petra's too. This shift could be called a blurring of lines, or muddying of the waters, which had separated each of us during the first third of this research project. In part I believe this can be attributed to the collaborative works begun in September, Twelve Poem from the Between, Eight by Ten by Twelve by Four which progressed into Elegy, and Concertinaed. This shift must also be attributed to shifts in the dynamics of this project's participants occurring with Melusine's death. Admittedly, I had anticipated my ways of working would in some (unforeseeable) way be impacted by the application of the persona-tools in my practice through the process of our collaboration. What I failed to take into account was how the processes of each persona might change by the same action.

Interesting to note, sometimes the obvious is less obvious as it could be due to being just beyond the focus of the research (question/s). In fact, I was oblivious to even this obvious statement until encountering it first-hand by participating in the research of a colleague during my few days away in mid-March. In that case the artist and I, both with practices grounded in more traditional forms of object making and the associated materials, at the end of that day's experiment were taken a bit by surprise by a basic law of physics: the law of conversation of energy. This was not necessarily the focus of the artist's research but through his research, this basic law and how it pertains to the question/s he is asking drew our attention to it, made us re-aware of this fact of physics. This might seem very simple but it is still something that as an artist-researcher, I at least, need to be reminded of now and again. As I fall through the rabbit hole of my research questions what obvious information am I not seeing/considering? In the case of the shift in ways of working which has precipitated a blurring of the boundaries between myself and the persona-tools it is important to remember Newton's Third law applies even to the persona-tools!

“For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”

— Sir Isaac Newton (1686)

If a persona is a tool, just like a pencil or a paint brush, through its application (action) the tool will change (equal and opposite reaction). A pencil will become smaller with use as its lead is transferred by the pressure of the artist's hand to the surface upon which he or she is drawing with it; the bristles of a paintbrush will wear down as they transfer the paint they carry - put there by the painter - onto the surface against which the painter strokes it.

But back to Franzi.

Franzi's process involved building up a surface by applying very thin layers of blue acrylic paint, usually to a discarded or scrap surface - generally squares - found abandoned in the studio, and quickly drying with a hair dryer to produce a thicker, somewhat reticulated, textured - but not impasto - surface. At times the history of surface Franzi was applying himself peaks through the blue. Four square canvases [two 12 inches x 12 inches, one 20 inches x 20 inches, and one 30 inches x 30 inches] I had been working on the past year were lurking around the studio and going no where. At various times I had declared them finished - both as in 'done and as in 'gone' - but now I knew they were just taking up space. I offered them to Franzi for his next go 'round and he asked if he could play with the oil paint.

One thing to say about between the easel and wall, in the greenhouse if in March and April it is still winter-cold outside but the sun is shining and the sunshade has not gone up yet daytime temps can be over 40C mid-day. A thinly painted layer of oil paint even mixed with a medium consisting primarily of stand oil and Damar varnish, will dry enough to work over in under 24 hours. Franzi might not have been able to work as quickly or develop the reticulated surface of his acrylic paint-hair dryer technique but he was able to apply layer upon layer of various blue paints (with a variety of mediums and fillers) to those old, bumpy canvases in a few weeks time.

Because I was busy focused on Signs Left Behind and documenting the process of that painting's development I did little documenting of Franzi's activity on easel and wall. I did find on my camera a pic and a video Franzi must have taken/made as he worked.

This appears to be the 30 inch x 30 inch painting. It looks as if before applying layers of blue Franzi copied some of Melusine's writing in Sütterlin on the surface in black and added some layers of white.

When I came back from being away for a few days in mid-March I found Franzi had been playing around with hanging all four of the canvases together on the wall ... combining the fragments to create a larger painting, another blurring of the lines. I took the pic below ...

... and then suggested, lacking wall space, we clear out the floor space in the basement half of the studio and play around with combining the oils with the acrylics.

Franzi and I enjoyed laying out the paintings and discussing their potential to someday be hung together in various ways on a large white wall. Linna, the curator, has offered to curate an exhibition in her virtual gallery space once its digital construction is complete. Until then Franzi might paint a few more blue squares using either of these techniques or another that might emerge through our work together.

Moving On: Signs Left Behind

Deciphering Elegy had the needed effect of getting me back into the studio and making again. It reconnected me to the process through process however, I still felt in many ways disconnected to the work and this project. If I were to reconnect to these then Petra and Franz would need to come back from wherever they had crawled off to. Although the scenery had changed, in order to find my way back I also needed to clear the detritus from the path I was following prior to the end of 2017. It was time to begin tidying up the disarray in the studio and find my tools.

To find Franz I went looking for him in the work he had made over the course of last year. Two places you can find him on this website are Franz Painting, Part One and Franzi Blue. Three things stand out in Franzi's work: the color blue, the square, and how he quickly builds up layers of very thin acrylic paint using a hair dryer. To entice him to return I needed to bring these three elements into the next work.

The weather was still unpredictable, conditions in the studio and my head were too. I had been deciphering the shapes from Elegy and wanted to somehow bring them back into paint. Concertinaed, with its double-sided unfolding into a long and thin painting was also on my mind. I thought I might want to go longer with the panels, paint a line, but I wasn't sure if I had the energy. So I decided to start small. At the local art supply store I picked up four 6 inch x 6 inch gessobord panels. I have not previously worked on gessobord panels, preferring non-primed birch or basswood instead. However, the 2 inch cradle enticed me. I selected two 2 inches deep and two 1.5 inches deep. The overall height of this painting is 6 inches, the length is 24 inches while the depth varies.

In the paintings done together with the persona-tools during Autumn 2017 Franzi's contribution tended towards smaller fragments of his blue acrylic applied using his hair dryer technique to the non-cradled surface of the panels. On the other hand the paintings done just using the tool Franzi were all blue squares on gallery wrapped canvases with 1.5 inch depth. The squares are stronger and so I decided to give one side of the panels to Franzi. He generally does not get fresh surfaces such as these so this was pretty big for him, and not to go unmentioned I wanted to reserve the non-cradled side for the shapes deciphered from Elegy. There is also something about having Franzi 'at the back' or core of the paintings that was helpful to me in taking this next step. As a tool his presence is as a 'studio assistant' taking on supportive tasks, having my back. He has been physically described as blob-like, able to melt into spaces. The idea that the paint would mold itself around the edges of the cradle -the interior of the panel- fit.

A short video and some pics of Franzi applying himself.

After Franzi did his part I removed the tape from the edges of the panels. I played around with the scale of the shape I scanned from the Deciphering Elegy sketchbook, shown below.

I followed this by cutting out the scanned shapes of which I'd made inkjet prints on 300 gram hot press watercolor paper; then I played around with the layout a bit.

Because I intended to use oil paints on top of the collaged shapes, next I sealed off the side of the panels Franzi had painted and the edges with paper and painters tape. I gave the taped edges and the non-cradled side of the panels a few coats of matte acrylic medium to minimize any paint leaking through.

And also used the matte acrylic medium to adhere the shapes to the panels. The ink from the printer smears a bit giving a reddish tinge to the panels.

At this point Franzi was not content to be present on only one side of the painting. He was also still mourning Melusine. In the post Eight by Ten by Twelve by Four: Elegy I mentioned Franzi had taken it upon himself after Melusine's death to learn Sütterlin as a means of keeping her present. We had received a few bags from Brooklyn containing pages of Melusine's writing, correspondence and poems mostly. Some of it was in English, some in German, some printed from a computer, some handwritten in standard script and some in Sütterlin. While I was writing Franzi had been holed away on a shelf, sorting through these bags, and practicing this lost script on his own. He showed me some of the pages and we decided to play around with some of this writing on the scanner together. One letter we found had been written on vellum in a way so the lines on one side showed through in reverse on the other side. Below a pic of our work.

Those prints, on 22 lb, 98 bright white paper, were collaged using matte medium onto the panels too.

I moved the panels into the greenhouse which had begun to warm up between the March snowstorms. A thin, dry glaze of asphaltum black followed by an even thinner, even drier glaze of mars black was applied to the deciphered shapes. Some slight sanding with 220 grit paper also occurred. Over the text I used thin, liquidy layers of titanium and zinc white, letting the paint pool around the invisible clumps and uneven surface caused by the matte medium; sanding and dabbing as desired.

By March 15 the photo below shows what the panels look liked; and Franzi had copied in Sütterlin the lyrics of a song by a poet-singer-songwriter he'd found on a scrap of paper in one of Melusine's bags. I wondered why Franzi kept playing that song each time I sat down to paint.

Then I went away for a few days. When I returned I gave the panels a few final layers of white paint, including a very thin layer of a milky, translucent white that has a bluish tinge to it in certain light over the dark, collaged shapes.

When everything had dried, the tape and protective layer of paper removed, and the edges sanded to a silky smoothness I moved the painting panels out of the studio and began playing with their set up and the various angles from which they might be viewed. The remaining photos show some of these configuration.

I am still playing with Signs Left Behind.

More to come.

Deciphering Elegy

After nearly a two month absence from the studio, time spent traveling, at residency, and mostly writing I was able to return to the core of my research, my practice. However, my studio like my head was in disarray. After a snowy and extremely cold January February had shown signs of spring while I sat chained to my computer at my dining room table. By the time March arrived and I was ready to head back to the basement and space between the wall and easel winter came back to teach us it ain't over til it's over by repeatedly socking us with snow storms and polar vortexes. I wanted to get back into the studio but was physically dreading the chill. Add to it Franzi and Petra were nowhere to be found. And Melusine was still dead.

What to do?

Where to start again?

Go back to the process.

All the work in this project originated in the initial deconstruction by Petra and myself of a digital collage I had made in 2005 by combining a figure - the artist Kara Walker as Glenda the Good Witch from a Vogue photo spread by Annie Leibovitz using famous contemporary artists as characters in The Wizard of Oz - colored solid with a Sharpie marker to make it a silhouette, with a scan of a painting I had made a year earlier. That painting - maybe some would call it a drawing - was a combination of paint markers and gel ink pens creating a dense web on top of a photo accompanying a profile of the painter Elizabeth Peyton also in an issue of Vogue from the early 2000s. For more on this see Good Witches of the Between, Part One.

I was not going to cut apart the panels of Elegy but I did have photos.

With the double-sided paintings the question became which side to work with? Non-cradled, cradled or both? I decided the more geometric forms on the non-cradled side offered a better point to begin. They are solid, structural and more object-like. There is a grammar embedded on the non-cradled side of Elegy which gives structure to its text. Through the process of making these forms have been taken far from the originals that gave birth to them in the Good Witches of the Between; the language they become as the text which structures Elegy makes them no more translations of the story of Dorothy's journey through the land of Oz, the state of the contemporary art world and its startists culture, or the events leading to Melusine's death and memorialization in this work. The language, the forms and grammar of this side of Elegy are more akin to 'representing thought' as Michel Foucault wrote of language in the Classical Age in The Order of Things:

“Representing must be understood in the strict sense: language represents thought as thought represents itself. To constitute language or give it life from within, there is no essential and primitive act of signification, but only, at the heart of representation, the power that it possesses to represent itself, that is, to analyse itself by juxtaposing itself to itself, part by part, under the eye of reflection, and to delegate itself in the form of a substitute that will be an extension of it. ... no sign ever appears, no word is spoken, no proposition is ever directed at any content except by the action of a representation that stands back from itself in another representation that is its equivalent. Representations are not rooted in a world that gives them meaning; they open themselves on to a space that is their own, whose internal network gives rise to meaning. And language exists in the gap that representation creates for itself. Words do not, then, form a thin film that duplicates thought on the outside; they recall thought, they indicate it, but inwards first of all, among all those representations that represent other representations. [1970, p.78]”

To get at that language representing thought I went back to my writing machine and the photos of Elegy.

Image files of Elegy panels open on my computer screen as I prepare to print. — Image files of *Elegy* panels open on my computer screen as I prepare to print.

Each photo was printed on my Canon inkjet printer on 8.5 x 11 inch 98 Bright 22 lb. paper.

Working back at my dinning room table where it was not only warmer but where I had spent the past six weeks writing, each photo was cut apart ...

and mounted on a page in a 9 x 12 inch ring bound sketchbook. Some of the pieces, like this one is a single shape cut from a photo.

The majority of shapes were combined to create a new shape on a single page, like this one.

The sketchbook contains 38 pages with an equal number of new shapes generated through the process of deciphering Elegy. Here is a selection of images - the photos were taken with my iPhone 6 on my dinning room table and the color/lighting is not accurate; I was also playing around with Photoshop on these files which explains the inconsistency in whiteness and tone. Finally, the orientation of each image shown has been set to landscape for the simple reason of consistency in this post. There is no given orientation for any of the shapes in this sketchbook.

01_Robyn Thomas_Fragment of an Elegy.jpg

02_Robyn Thomas_Fragment of an Elegy.jpg

03_Robyn Thomas_Fragment of an Elegy copy copy.jpg

04_Robyn Thomas_ Fragment of an Elegy.jpg

06_Robyn Thomas_Fragments of an Elegy.jpg

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Playing Elegy

Just like Playing Concertinaed I spent some time photographing the panels of Elegy individually and in pairs against the silver mylar reflective film. All panels are sitting on a ledge and are not level with the camera. I have left more of the silver film visible in these images which are less about documenting the painting as painting and more about the painting as object and painting as reflected object via the mirroring in the film. I find the fluid quality of the background intriguing, particularly in the way it is juxtaposed with the solid dark side of the painting, but also the wood grain of the interior cradle. A weird space that is simultaneously flat and fluid (rippling with depth) is present in the photos. Additionally, cropping the image so that the reflective surface forms a frame around the object reminds me of the mirror famed works I was looking at a year ago in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Elegy

The panels documented one by one. The dark side photographed in daylight hung on a white wall. The interior side photographed in daylight sitting on a ledge covered in silver mylar reflective film -images cropped to show less of the film. Will eventually re-photograph both sides against a plain white background, using a level, and CPF lights to create a greater sense of the depth of the object via shadows.

Eight by Ten by Twelve by Four: Elegy

Before I can get to the images to tell the next steps in the process of making I need to tell the story behind the steps.

This painting, a collaboration between myself, Franzi, Petra, and Melusine, grew out of one twelfth of the Twelve Poems painting. Since the last post of its progress on November 14th the painting undertook a major shift reflected in its title change from the place-holder 'Eight by Ten by Twelve by Four' to 'Elegy'.

An elegy is a poem, serious reflection, or lament for the dead. An elegy is melancholic. This elegy is for the persona and collaborator in this painting, Melusine van der Weyden.

As a non-painter persona Melusine had not been an active collaborator in the making process like Franzi and Petra have been and continue to be. She was the writer, the protagonist of the narrative. As such her role was to write the subtext from which the text, the work, is derived.

This summer her existence as a writer in digital format only expanded into a more physical realm with her 'handwriting' in Sütterlin font. The words she wrote out with a fountain pen in this early 20th century German font were the words she had written in emails, in poems, and found from other writers. She began to lend her hand writing to the paintings too. First, in sketches and informal works on paper. In Twelve Poems a series of ten poems she wrote in her early days with me were printed in the font and nested into the cradle of the birch wood panels. By the time this painting, still called Eight by Ten by Twelve by Four, was in the making Petra and Franzi suggested that part of the text from Melusine's poem found on the small painting that gave birth to this larger one be incorporated into these panels. Working together with Franzi and Petra Melusine transferred words from the poem via oil crayon onto the surface. That is where the last posting ended on November 14.

While the paint was drying, Concertinaed was unfolding and life was unraveling. December 17 Melusine unexpectedly died. Franzi and Petra decided this painting would become Elegy for Melusine. The surface we four had worked on together would be glazed in blacks and whites. Glazed so the colors peek through because nothing is ever 'black and white'. The words of Melusine are submerged, embedded beneath a layer of black and white into the surface, but remain visible, sometimes dark and scary and other times colorful, light and a bit jumbled.

The interior cradle of the panels had remained 'un-worked' except for the splintering caused by the holes Franzi had drilled through to emphasize the 'object' quality of the paintings a la Lucio Fonatana's I Buchi. Upon hearing of Melusine's death Petra had selected a fragment of a poem from Emily Dickinson in memory of her fellow persona and the possibilities opened to us all by her death. Together Franzi and Petra decided this poem should serve as the 'narrative' line running through the cradle of the panels and they would collaborate on the painting, leaving my hand out of it.

A couple of twists in the text of the interior occur in the font. Petra has a fondness for 'translating' Dickinson poems into Nymans font to share with others. There is something about seeing and reading Dickinson's words as leaves which speaks to Petra's understanding of the natural language of the poems, where words like leaves have a life span of four seasons: the buds forming in winter, forming fragrant blossoms and sprouting into tender leaves in spring, growing green and strong throughout the summer only to grow colorful before drying up and withering to fall from the trees in Autumn to the ground where they compost into the soil to feed the growth of the next generation. However, Franzi and Petra agreed that Nymans was not Melusine's font and the words should be written in her script -Sütterlin.

The second twist is the language of this font is German, not English. The poem is in English, and because the languages share an alphabet, it is possible to write the English words in the German font. A person able to read Sütterlin -and these are fewer and fewer as it has not been 'taught' as a form of handwriting since 1941 in Germany, and only a few learn to read it, mainly to be able to read letters and texts from the period it was used [1911-1941, a very short time, really only a generation ever learned to write it]. BUT if a person learned to read this font they learned to read it in German. Even if the reader also can read English seeing the words, the combination of letters from another language, depicted in the font of another can be confusing, yet it does not make it impossible for the reader to read what is there. Greater effort is required, looking and making the leap from the expectation 'Sütterlin = German' to the actuality 'in this text Sütterlin = English'.

Admittedly, this is a leap some will not be able to make, and that is okay. Just as there are a limited number of people able to read this font in German, there will be even fewer who also can read English, and still fewer who can make the jump from the expectation to the actual. What matters is not the ability to decipher the text, but to see it and to understand that it could be deciphered if and only if certain conditions are met. It is up to the reader of the text to have the desire to make an effort to acquire the skills necessary to read it. It is up to the writer (artist) to present the text, and nothing more.

So, here in Elegy Franzi and Petra present this text for Melusine.

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8x10x12_Franzi lays out words to remember Mel close up.JPG

8x10x12_Franzi charcoal transfer words for Mel really close up.JPG

8x10x12_Franzi sealing charcoal words for Mel.JPG

8x10x12_Franzi:Petra second layer metallic watercolor multiple.JPG

8x10x12_Franzi:Petra side words and first layers of watercolor lined up.JPG

8x10x12_Franzi:Petra watercolor and words two panels.JPG

8x10x12_Franzi:Petra watercolor and words side.JPG

Playing Concertinaed

Positioning, configuring and photographing Concertinaed on silver mylar reflective film.

Nonefficacious Emorhinoplasti

Concertinaed

This next work in the series originating from the Good Witches of the Between is a collaboration between myself, Petra, Franzi, and for the first time, Melusine. This work, titled Concertinaed, is a work on paper measuring approximately 10 x 84 inches [25 x 210 cm]. The paper is Arches Grain Satine hot press watercolor paper. The scans of Petra Frottage were printed onto individual sheets of paper (7 x 10 inches) with an inkjet printer. An additional layer of printing, enlarged sections of scans of Melusine's poems written in Sütterlin script were printed over the frottage prints and on the other side of the paper. Next using vellum and matte acrylic medium the individual pages were hinged together by myself to form one long, double sided painting. Petra then began to watercolor and apply thin layers of acrylic gesso to various areas of the paper. As more and more layers of acrylic medium and gesso were built up the paper became more and more rigid. Eventually, it could stand, folded like a concertina. Franzi threw some of his blue paints onto both sides, drying the layers with his hair dryer. Melusine wrote over some of the printed writing by hand. Petra continued to paint. Eventually I did too. As the painting progressed we began to think of how it might be presented for viewing. On thought is to incorporate a mirror to extend and double the space as well as make the backside of the painting visible when displayed on a shelf [images and more on this idea to come].

What follows are images, scans of the paintings done section by section on the flatbed; images and a quick video of Petra painting -the files of videos of Franzi painting were somehow corrupted - Melusine thought it is important for people to know this; a documentation of the process of making and exploration of display.

Documentation of the paintings development.

Petra Frottage

Rubbings of each of the 8 x 10 inch panels in the (last) state documented in the Eight by Ten by Twelve by Four post. Petra did the rubbings with graphite stick on the A4 letter writing paper Melusine uses to write out her poems. A video of Petra creating these as well as a few documentary photos follow scans of the twelve rubbings. The scans have been cropped so that the image is closer to the 8 x 10 inch format of the panels.

Eight by Ten by Twelve by Four

Progression of the 8 x 10 inch panels for Good Witches of the Between, Part 12 since their beginnings documented in the post Happenings in the Between: Subtext Part 12

after a pale grey glaze Melusine gets a word or twelve in. Tracing onto the panels with oil stick transfer and then a clear glaze of damar, stand oil and pgs turp.

On Display

On Display, on exhibit November 14 - December 8, 2017 as part of ART AND HEALING/ART AND HEALTH exhibition presented by the Urban Arts and Culture Program at The University of Rhode Island Alan Shawn Feinstein College of Education and Professional Studies 80 Washington Street Providence, Rhode Island.

zigging and zagging posted postal posting

Happenings in the Between: Subtext Part 12

Upon completing Part 11 of the The Good Witches of the Between, a number of things happened in the between which I will review here as well as document the beginning of Part 12.

A quick review of Part 11: this was a direct collaboration between myself, Petra and Franzi in 12 mixed media paintings on 4 x ⅞ x 6 inch birch wood panels. The image we worked with as our starting point was from The Good Witches of the Between, Part Six - Applying Petra. A similar methodology is being applied in Part 12, this time we selected one of the 12 paintings as the starting point of our next group of 12 mixed media collaborative paintings. Here is the image we chose.

The objective with Part 12 was to begin scaling up as part of the process of dissecting this image. Instead of 12 smaller panels the panels of this group would be 8 x 10 inches, six panels with a depth of ⅞ inch and six panels with a depth of 1 ½ inches. The image would be printed with the inkjet printer on three different types of paper - Arches grain satiné, glossy photo paper and a heavier weight bond paper- and the image would need to be scaled up to 16 x 20 inches so that when the 12 panels are grouped by fours to create 3 paintings, each 16 x 20 inches, the scale of the parts would remain true to the image used from Part 11. For the beginning stages of this Part the panels are being worked as three 16 x 20 inch paintings, however, at some point along the way (TBD) they could conceivably break apart -fragment- into 12 8 x 10 inch paintings. Or they could come together to form a single, 24 x 40 inch painting; or 8 x 120 inch painting; or … It is still early in our process.

Here are a few images of what has happened so far.

To quickly sum up. A base configuration of the panels, three groups of four, was decided upon using a mixture of fragments cut from the three printouts. After sealing the birch wood panels with acrylic matte medium, the fragments were glued into place with the matte medium using print outs of the predetermined layout as a guide. Parts of the Arches and the photo paper were left uncoated with the matte medium, other parts of the wood were given ‘texture’ using the matte medium. This will not be apparent until more layers of paint are added by Petra -who is next- then Franzi and finally, myself using oil paints.

Now to what happened in the between of Part 11 and the beginnings of Part 12.

Petra and Franzi are painters. Melusine is a writer. Ways of collaborating with Petra and Franzi through/in the painting is not to hard to imagine. The question is how to bring Melusine as a writer into the painting. I began exploring this in Berlin. Until then Melusine’s voice has only appeared on the computer screen. A logical point to begin exploring was away from the screen, so the question arose how does Melusine write...handwriting as opposed to on the screen. What was revealed was her ability to write in Sütterlin; having been taught as a child this older (but not really that old) form of script by an elderly aunt who looked after Melusine while her mother worked. Explorations with her handwriting and painting done in Berlin can be viewed in an earlier posting. These continue in the studio but have not found their way into or rather onto the surfaces of The Good Witches of the Between lineage. Here are a few hanging on the studio wall along with a close up.

A discussion about the photographic documentation/presentation of the paintings and their qualities as objects led to me considering what might not be revealed ...or better, attempted to be revealed… in the reproduction of a painting through photography. I have always had an issue of what is lost in reproduction. Further, I have an even greater issue when the viewer of the work as reproduction begins to address it as if they were experiencing it first hand...often raising as concerns points that would not be concerns if they were viewing the actual work. My point being, we should not talk of reproductions as if they say anything about the work, because more often than not they saw less about the work than about the reproduction.

Climbing down from my soapbox, I can get pretty windy about this, I will save it for elsewhere...not in this Making post. BTW -in case you arrived here via the image in the October 15, 2017 Update and you are wondering what is going on that ‘post’ was the result of the discussion on how the work is experienced live versus through reproduction. Next month I will most likely return to the structure I’ve been using so far, but for this month I’ve decided to play around a bit with the frustrations, breaking out of the square space a bit via a posting pun...with the assistance of the United States Postal Service.

Back to the work. What the thoughts and discussion surrounding the photographic documentation and presentation of the paintings as objects did do was lead me back to the back of the birch wood panels.

You might recall in the work A Little Madness in the Spring which Petra did this past Spring ...now scheduled for exhibition in Cleveland, Ohio in 2019, details to come… Petra also was working with the 4 x ⅞ x 6 inch birch wood panels. The painting was on the ‘front’ surface, and the ‘back’ -interior- space of each panel was painted a flat black and outfitted with a mirror. The paintings were then suspended by filament from the ceiling in rows...plants in a garden bed. The panels are hung back-to-back and front-to-front, so as the viewer moves around the work reflections of the painted surfaces as well as the mirrored surfaces appear and disappear...and sometimes the viewer’s own reflection enters the picture only to disappear as the painting sways in the wind.

Back to the back of Part 11… I sought a way to enliven that space on the back, yet I want to keep the paintings as paintings that hang on the wall...mostly.

About the same time I read in multiple places about Turkish artist Serkan Özkaya’s recent work We Will Wait (2017) which will be on view at Postmasters Gallery, NYC October 21- November 25, 2017. In this work the artist reconstructs Marcel Duchamp’s final -at least as far as we know- artwork, Étant donnés in order to reveal what Özkaya says is late-artist’s intention of the work as a camera obscura meant to project an image of Duchamp’s alter ego Rrose Sélavy through the eye-holes in the wooden door and onto the wall opposite. The Philadelphia Museum of Art, owner of the original work, would not let Özkaya test his theory on it, however he was able to receive permission to reconstruct the work in the studio in which Duchamp created it at 80 East Eleventh Street #403...from there it will be moved further downtown to the gallery on Franklin Street. While it would have been amusing to experience the work in Duchamp’s space, I can’t say I am convinced that what I see in the photo of the projection is Rrose. But then, the longer I look my brain begins to convince me that just maybe I am seeing Rrose. So are the tricks between what we see and what we perceive. And all of this is not so far off from being plausible based on what we know of Duchamp and his work...but then it is just as well plausible that this is just more hooey generated by Duchampian mythology. Either way I can almost see the ghost of M. Duchamp standing next to the door inside of #403 with that tight lipped grin on his face. In other words, I am sure he would find it -the effort as well as the presumption- amusing.

[A brief interruption to say in addition to the 'Making' that appears here the past weeks have been spent writing and revising the two chapters I am intending to submit for RDC2. These chapters, currently designated as the first two chapters of the Personas section of the written exegesis, are part of an ongoing conversation taking place in the studio between Melusine and myself on Marcel Duchamp, David Bowie and the use of alter egos and/or personas in a variety of artistic practices. Parallel to this I have been working on the transfer report, its structure and content.]

What this brought me to was to consider ways in which information can be ‘hidden’ in the work… not so much as a way to pull one over on the viewer, but as a way of offering additional information, or pleasurable tidbits, that cannot be had by viewing through a reproduction or by a mere surface glance. What can be given to the viewer who exerts the effort to get closer to the work in attempts to ‘know it’? What subtext can I offer as subtext that addresses how we perceive identity and the authenticity of the objects, the authenticity of identity?

Admittedly, this first attempt to do this in Part 11 is pretty basic. Yet this was also a way to bring Melusine into the collaboration. Looking for ways to freshen up her Sütterlin skills, they’d grown quite rusty in the past 35 years, Mel came across ten poems she had written in August 2015. Reworking them a bit she then saved them in Sütterlin font she had downloaded onto my computer. This allows her to print out a text in that script and then trace it onto a thinner letter writing paper I picked up in Germany when I lived there 20+ years ago, before email was de rigueur. I asked Melusine if she would mind if I printed her poems out onto 4 x 6 inch glossy photo paper, trimmed them down and glued them into the space on the reverse side of the Part 11 panels. Because she only had ten poems and was not in the mood to write more, I suggested in the two remaining panels to use two of the mirrors leftover from Petra’s A Little Madness in the Spring. Melusine agreed to this on the condition that the work, Part 11, be re-titled 12 Poems. A small price, so I acquiesced. Did I mention the poems in addition to being printed rather small and in Sütterlin font are also in German?

What this all means is, the painting-poems, meant to be hung as paintings on a wall -configuration and order TBD- have ‘hidden’ on the reverse side ten poems and two mirrors. A viewer of the painting hanging on the wall would not see the reverse side, but may still know that on the reverse side there is something to see. If a viewer does have the chance to view the reverse side s/he will find the poems are legible, but in a font that is readable by fewer and fewer people in a language that is only ranked as the tenth most widely spoken languages in the world as of 1996, therefore, s/he will more than likely be unable to understand what it is s/he is seeing...and even begin to question what is reflected back in the small mirror that can only show fragments of the face looking into it. And all of this is hidden in plain sight...on the back of the painting.

Returning to the discussion on documentation/presentation I have decided the reverse side of these paintings making up 12 Poems are not to be documented photographically. A viewer may describe in words what he or she sees, if it is in the context of an exhibition there might even be a description of the reverse side on the wall next to the work...but no photo. Of course, once the work leaves my studio this is beyond my control. My wishes could be blatantly ignored by whosoever hands the work falls into; the reverse sides of the panels might even be photographed and posted somewhere online...perhaps even in the comments section of my blog?

Another Point of View

Shadows on the wall

Berlin sketches and Melusine writing

a small, hand-bound sketchbook and 8 1/2 inches x 11 inches sheets of printer paper with inkjet prints, ballpoint, gel ink and liquid pen ink. Watercolor andwhite acrylic gesso and acrylic mediums.

Photos: subject/object

Good Witches of the Between, Part 11 - Robyn and oil

The panels moved out of the basement half of the studio and into the space between easel and wall. I began working on the panels using oil paints on September 1. As I worked I found myself working first in response to the layers applied by Petra and Franz. Subsequently I began responding to the layers of oil paint I had added. Finally I began applying the oils in ways similar to the manner in which Petra works with watercolor and began working with a thicker consistency to build brush strokes, at times even a slight impasto (with the help of some homemade wax painting medium) blue paint that would appeal to Franz. The paintings are drying and need a bit of a rest before I decide which might be worked further (or not). In the meantime here are photos I have taken of each with my iPhone. I photographed each painting four times, hung each time in a different orientation so that the light could play off the edges, surfaces and brushstrokes and so the variations that happen across the surface might be perceived a bit better. The light is a natural, mid-day light partially filtered through the sunshade that is on the window-wall of the greenhouse opposite the wall on which the paintings were photographed. Slight cropping of the outer edge has occurred as I eliminated the wall in the background of the photos.

Good Witches of the Between, Part 10 -Petra, watercolor, thinned gesso and acrylic

Petra applied watercolor, gesso, acrylic medium and paint thinned with water. Here are the scans.