Napkins

This work is part of a room-sized installation of 565 drawings of pen-and-ink flowers on paper napkins by artist Jim Hodges. Hodges explores universal themes, and in this piece, "A Diary of Flowers - Above the Clouds" a correlation is made between the ephemeral nature of the flowers and the material they are drawn on. The 100 napkins in this piece are pinned onto the wall. "A Diary of Flowers", completed in 1995, is now part of the collection of
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.



More drawing on napkins from "The Napkin Dad Daily" blog. He started drawing on napkins for his daughters' lunch bags and did these daily until his last daughter graduated from high school in 2005. That first year, he thought all the drawings were thrown out at the end of the lunch period, but for Father's Day his daughter presented him with all the napkins he had drawn for her as a gift. What a sweet story! And how dedicated is that?

I am more prone to obsessively twisting and folding napkins than drawing on them.
When I was younger and holiday meals were hosted by my mother and grandmother, I was the one in charge of setting the table. I often took great pleasure in lining up the plates and silverware, placing the goblets and stemware, selecting candles and making centerpieces, and rolling the napkins into holders or folding them in different configurations. My mother has a buffet with stacks of cloth napkins in different colors and fabrics to choose from, and a wide selection of tablecloths, all ironed and folded and organized just so. Nowadays I am either a guest at a gathering that uses paper plates and napkins, or I am elbow deep in meal preparation and the table gets a last minute frenzied setting as the potatoes are getting mashed or the turkey sliced. I'm thinking about napkins today, though.
I think I once had a tiny little paperback book with diagrams of napkin folds, but haven't seen it for years. There are, though, plenty of sites that have instructions for fancy napkin folds ... like the Water Lily/Rosebud, Bird of Paradise, and Bishop's Hat instructions at The Butler's Guild. (Really?) Martha's site has some simple and elegant napkin folds featured. Happy Thanksgiving!

Eugene Andolsek

Eugene Andolsek (1921-2008) was an outsider artist who had a secret life creating complex drawings (American Primitive Gallery) ... using graph paper, a compass and a straight edge, and colored inks to create these pieces which never saw the light of day ... he made thousands of them, and they were hidden away and never displayed or shown to anyone until they were discovered by a caregiver when his health was failing. The drawings - highly patterned, kaleidoscopic creations - were a coping mechanism, and he never considered them to be art. An excerpt of an article by Tom Patterson at Raw Vision notes that the patterns his mother stitched into quilts and crocheted piecework were influences on the drawings he later made. They are rather like mandalas, and I can see how creating them would have been a meditative and calming process. And some of them make me want to play the most beautiful game of parcheesi ever.

More Artistamps

An homage to Wilson's in Door County, made to go with the postcard below. Just a cropped unedited photograph with text added. I think I had the pinhole perforator when I made this, but for some reason chose to use the old Fiskar's postage stamp edger instead. The perforator might have been buried under the leaf blower and other lawn-related junk as it lives in the garage right now.


A Wilson's hot fudge sundae (pencil/colored pencil, pen), with A- waiting for me to take the photo in the background. My kids are very tolerant of my quirks, generally speaking.

This is the first artistamp I ever made, I think. No graphics software, so just text printed on cardstock, and then the sisters were collaged together on top of gold tissue paper, glued onto the background, swiped with a gold inkpad, flicked with gold paint, and then reproduced by color copy. It was made for a book group invitation to a discussion of Wuthering Heights.

Artistamp Mailing List Anniversary

It's time for the annual AML (Artistamp Mailing List) anniversary exchange. This is the 10th anniversary, though I have only participated in three of the exchanges so far. At the moment I can't find the first one I did, but the last two years were still on my desk or by the computer.

9th anniversary: digital photo of watercolor/rapidograph (old college-era) piece and added text in Photoshop.

8th Anniversary: another re-purposed watercolor, this one was unfinished (for good reason), but fixed the bird's beak and added a background in Photoshop.

Random Doodles

My daughter has a campus newspaper comic strip!

We keep up with what she's doing at Random Doodles ...

60 Books Project

This is my first page for the 60 Books Project. Sketched with a pencil and then a micron pigment pen. Used watercolor pencils and an alpha rubberstamp set. (There's a message in amongst the letters. Pay no attention to the word "stork" though... that happened before I realized that it's much easier to spell words when you're not trying to than one might think. Why I'm not better at Scrabble I don't know.)
Funny that I heard about the 60 Books Project through a yahoo group - Everydaymatters - even though it takes place in my own hometown. I looked up the details on the Wisconsin Book Festival site, though. My book group went to see Isabel Allende (http://www.isabelallende.com/) when she lectured as part of the Festival. We read "House of the Spirits" prior to seeing her, and will be reading another of her books for our January meeting.