Check out my new site!

I have just gotten a new site up for the work I am doing as part of the Cumulative Project requirement in my MA Ed in Art Education at East Carolina University. This site will include the images, stories, lessons and process journal components of the project, which deals with local history retold through digital and mixed media art works. The url for the new site is http://perceptionsbwilliams.weebly.com/ Check it out and leave me a comment in the journal section!

Completed Ten o'Clock Scholar + Story

Ten o'Clock Scholar has been finished for a while, but I have been so limited in time I have not had a chance to post the final image--or the story behind it. The young boys in the image are Willie Williams, aka Papa, my husband's paternal grandfather and his brother Milt. The photo was taken when Papa was around seven or eight. Somewhere around this age he left school and never returned. The story goes that the one room school he attended was divided into younger and older classrooms by a curtain. One day during class Papa, who was seated near the curtain, was stuck with a hat pin by an older boy on the other side of the curtain. When Papa yelled out he was punished for disturbing class while the culprit with the pin "got off scot-free". Papa told his parents what had happened and that he didn't want to go back to school--and so he didn't. Despite his lack of "schooling" he was an extremely intelligent man and frequently outwitted his "more educated" peers! Notice that he has a bruise on his forehead; this was the result of getting hit in the head with a rock thrown by one of his siblings while the family was hoeing corn.

The substrate for this piece is a couple of pages from an old reader published in 1899, and would likely have been in use about the time of the hat pin incident. The handwritten nursery rhymes feature Papa's name and are somewhat relevant to his personality. The hat pin, now that you know the story, has obvious connections. This image includes photo transfers, painting, and drawing. Media include ephemera, acrylic paint, pencil, gel pen, and photo transfer.

New Virgie Image-New Transfer Technique

new image of Aunt Virgie...working at school today experimenting with color laser prints...i had forgotten my solvent at home...tried brush conditioner...no go...tried hairspray with no better success...hand sanitizer didn't work either...last ditch effort...krylon clear spray...gave nice watercolor effect to transfers...image is much more subtle and soft-edged than scanned image shows...more experimentation with this technique to come...size 5 x 7 inches on bristol board

Photoshop Planning/Pondering

new image in the planning, pondering stage...old pages...old images...old story...more to follow

Latta House

This is the latest image from my grad school class. The substrate is some muslin fabric that I rust dyed. I began the image by doing solvent transfers of the crow and a photo of some bare tree tops. This phase of the image stood in my dining room for a couple of weeks trying to decide what it wanted to become. I downloaded a 1920 census document from my Ancestry.com account (the family featured are my husband's great grandparents; his grandmother is 11 months old at this time) and flipped it horizontally so it would read correctly when transferred. After printing I went to the photocopier and fiddled with the sizing and then did a solvent transfer of the copy. I love the name of the township--Tally Ho.
The house image is from a photo of one of the tenant farms (also in Granville Co) that my mother-in-law, daughter of the Annie in the census record, lived on when she was a child. At the time the photo was taken the house had been vacant for many years. The old oak tree was cropped in the original photo, so I reconstructed a top for it in Photoshop. I also eliminated some of the extraneous farm stuff around the house to simplify the image. This image was printed on my inkjet and transferred using the water method. After the transfers were done I again "lived with" the image for a couple of days mulling over where it wanted to go. I began to think about the similarities between roots and branches, both in real trees and in family trees (also explored in the Roots Cellar piece), and decided to manipulate the image to emphasize that connection. Acrylic paints, Pitt Pens, and gel pens were used to draw/paint into the trees, entwining the roots of the oak with the branches of the trees at the bottom and side of the piece and with the text of the document. The house at the top seemed too dominant making the piece feel out of balance so I used some transparency sheets to play around with drawn text on the right side of the image to give it better balance. Once I decided on the size, I drew the lettering on a sheet of paper and used the lightbox to transfer it onto the fabric, adding color with my Pitt Pens. Below are details of the house and the bottom right corner of the image.




The finished piece is 11 x 14 in. I stretched the fabric over a canvas panel and taped it to the back so I could move it around and have a stable surface to work on.
The siennas of the rust are complemented nicely by the touches of blue. While the piece is pretty complex I don't think it is too busy. I really like the linear qualities added by the branches, roots, and document. I am pretty well satisfied with this piece.

Cousins finished

Well folks, I think this piece is finished. I have reached the point at which doing anything else would be too much, so I am calling it DONE. I will be mounting this onto a gallery wrap canvas a bit later so it will not need a frame.

A bit of info about the persons in this piece. The original photo was this:



The individuals are (L-R): Lee, Roy, and Fletch Jenkins; William Hobart Holder; and Fred Higdon. The Jenkins boys were cousins of my grandfather, and Lee looks remarkably like Grandpa when he was younger. Hobart and Fred were both married to Grandpa's cousins. When I was a child Hobart ran a little community gas and grocery in Stecoah. I used to go there with my Uncle Bart in the evenings or on Saturday. The cinder block building was always cool and inviting as we moved from the hot dusty parking lot to the cool gray concrete floor of the inside. The walls were lined with homemade shelves stocked with every thing from motor oil to fresh hot dog buns. Wire racks near the door enticed Uncle Bart with Moon Pies, Sno Balls, and Honey Buns and a smaller one against the wall on the counter held Snickers, Three Muskateers, coconut bars and Pay Days at eye level so he could not miss them. You see, trips to Hobart's store were not for gas or groceries, but to appease Uncle Bart's famous sweet tooth; those two racks were his primary target as he ambled through the door with a "Howdy boys" to the locals perched on straight back chairs around the room. Uncle Bart would always treat me to an ice cream or a soft drink. The drinks swam in icy water in a huge box-like cooler; I can still feel the edge of the cooler pressing into my stomach and rib cage as I hung over the side fishing for a bottle of Coke or Nehi Orange soda. Once my selection was made the bottle cap was removed by placing it under the bottle opener attached to the side of the cooler and giving it a quick downward snap; the cap would fall into the metal box underneath, clinking to rest among the caps left by other thirsty patrons. When I turned the bottle up and took a long drink, it was so cold it almost made my teeth hurt. The Coke,stronger than it is now, would make my nose and eyes tingle as I took my first sip. Soft drinks just aren't as refreshing now as they were then--or maybe it has something to do with rarity? I don't know, but I know that my Coke in a can just doesn't have the same effect as that tiny little bottle did after being fished from the icy depths of the cooler in Holder's Shell and Grocery.

Cousins

The Blizzard Warning gave us about 5 inches of snow night before last. Today the roads are pretty much clear so all can be out and about--for a bit anyway, as we are again under a Winter Storm Warning for the next 24 hours or so with an expectation of another 3-5 inches on the average with higher amounts at higher elevations and near the Tennessee border (I suppose that means me!).

But on the more encouraging things...After taking what seemed like forever to become comfortable with a background fabric and arrangement of the component images, I think I have finally brought the Cousins piece to a conclusion, other than mounting it on some sort of substrate for display. Here is what it looks like now:

I did some color washes with dilute acrylics to tone down the white areas and reduce the contrast along the edges of the smaller images. More gold paint was added around the main figure and additional green color was washed into his shirt to add emphasis to him. The pine needles and cone on the left side were further developed using a Pitt Pen, which was also employed to push the values on the small pine cones as well. I think the images is much more unified as a result of the added color washes and the banjo picker is now more clearly the center of interest in the piece.


The addition of music and lyrics from the traditional folk ballad In the Pines provided a unifying element for the composition and set the "mood" for the piece. This is a lonesome mournful song that wails and moans like the wind through the tall hemlock trees that stood head and shoulders above all the other trees in our forests until they were destroyed by a tiny little foreign invader, the wooly adelgid;now they are simply silver ghosts of their former regal presence, waiting for the winds to strike the final blow that will bring them to the ground. Like the hemlocks I have loved for so long, the singer's love has gone and he is left to "shiver when the cold winds blow" without a true love to protect his heart from the darkness of loneliness "in the pines, in the pines, where the sun never shines".


I am currently mulling over how to display this piece. Current thoughts are to display it: between layers of glass with minimal framing; mounted onto a stretched linen canvas, or a regular stretched canvas with some sort of color/texture painted onto it; or it might work well mounted above a piece of wood so that the fabric image was raised from the surface (this would not provide any protection for the piece, so it seems less desirable).

Progress on Cousins

The Cousins piece is coming along. I have finally attached all the pieces permanently to a piece of nubby silk using fusible webbing. I cut the banjo picker from the group shot in Photoshop and fiddled with the color to make him a nice warm brown, then printed him out on muslin and cut him out. Since I forgot to put fusible webbing behind him before cutting him out, rather than mess up my iron, I attached him with some spray adhesive. I began to use some crayon and dilute acrylic paints to add color over parts of some of the images to tie them together. Stitching was added next with feather stitches used to add some pine boughs over the right top corner of the group shot and running stitches and french knots anchoring the edges of some of the pieces. I located some sheet music for the old folk ballad In the Pines recorded by Bill Monroe (and Nirvana, among others) and mirrored it before printing. I took the music to the photocopy machine and moved it back and forth while copying it to make it wavy, then using Goof Off spray transferred it to the top of the piece across the small images. Pine cone drawings were also copied and transferred using this method. I continued to work into the piece with a sepia Pitt Pen, adding shading to the pine cones, pine needles around the larger cone, and lyrics running throughout the piece. I am thinking this one still needs some work; some parts have too much contrast while others need a bit more. We'll see what else it begs me to do.

Five days later...the snow is still laying about three inches deep in our lower pasture. The weather service is predicting rain/freezing rain for us this evening and tomorrow...but...the "old folks" say that if snow hangs around three days it's waiting for more... Also, smoke from everyone's chimneys is coming to the ground...and...it clouded up over a HUGE frost this morning. We'll just have to see about this weather prediction.



Roots Cellar--version 2: This is a second version of this piece with some of the changes suggested by Amber. I went out yesterday afternoon and shot some photos of roots hanging over the edge of the red clay road bank and payed around with the image again in Photoshop last night. I think it is getting there.



I also scanned the Alice piece, although the colors may be off a bit.



Eat Crow: This is the first experiment I did this semester with the water method for transfering inkjet prints to fabric. The garden are of the image is done with this technique. I use Goof-Of to transfer photocopies of a crow feather and some of my crow and tree drawings for the other parts of the image. Crayon and Pitt Pens add color and text to tie the image together. The text relates to myths and sayings about crows. This piece is small--about 5" x 7" on unbleached muslin.

An in-progess piece: I am calling this one Cousins; it is based on a vintage photo of my Grandpa Jenkins' cousins. I think the photo must have been taken at a wedding or something, as they all have flowers in their shirts/overalls : ) The images are water transfers on muslin. I am going to stitch/glue the parts down when I finally decide where this one is headed. Below is a detail:

I want to add some drawing/painting to the image to break the grid up and unit the parts more. The green background was not working very well for me in this direction, so here it is with a different ground.

I want to also add a larger image, maybe of one of the individuals. I am thinking about the banjo player. To check this out I did a gel transfer yesterday so I could put it on the piece and work with placement. There is a bit of glare from the "plastic" of the transfer in the photo below, but you can get an idea of what I am thinking anyway.

Alice update for Amber

This is the 4th version of Alice. The base layer of the image is a sepia toned photo of Harold's great grandmother, Rebecca Alice and her little Chihuahua. It was cut and woven with strips of a small toile print cotton fabric. This layer was then glazed with a sienna acrylic glaze. In the upper left corner is a waxed oak leaf. A piece of tea stained cotton cheesecloth was the applied using clear acrylic gel medium. Alice was printed out on an index card-sized piece of acid free card stock and was cut out paper doll fashion; color was added to her skin and clothing with colored pencils. The remainder of the negative area was cut into a grid and color was added with metallic crayons and then heat set. The grid was glued in place with rubber cement and then another grid of turquoise thread to pull the color from Alice's dress into the background. Another wax coated leaf was hand stitched to the background image using 6 strands of embroidery floss. Extra layers of card stock were glued to the paper doll to make her more substantial and stable, then a thin wooden strip was glued up the length of the back side to raise her off the surface. She is attached with jeweler's contact glue. Sorry about the quality of the photo; I was in a hurry because the power kept going off!

Wow! It's Been a Year!

I haven't posted on this blog in almost a year! It's really difficult to realize that time has flown so quickly. I am still here, but just pretty much overwhelmed with the rest of my life--so--blogging has not been my #1 priority. Since my last post I enrolled in grad school and have been working on my MA Ed online through East Carolina University. It has been fun, hectic, invigorating...Some of the classes are quite interesting. I am currently taking my second class with Audrey Kilgore. One of the requirements for the first class was the creation of a website featuring the work we were doing. You can check it out at http://www.modusvivendi.webs.com/ On this site you can see both in progress and finished pieces I completed during my first semester with her. This semester she has graciously allowed me to do an independent study that continues with the exploration of combining digital and traditional art media. We are a week into the semester, and I am at the experimenting phase, so I haven't added anything from this phase to the site, but I will be adding things throughout the spring. If all goes well I should be able to finish up my degree either during the summer, or fall at the latest. I am also working on my National Board of Professional Teaching Standards certification renewal; that is due on April 30th. Between these two projects I have very little free time, but after the NBPTS portfolio goes in the mail I should be able to have free time back in my vocabulary! Check out the other site and see what I have been up to!