Mid-Month Marginalia: May!
Hello and welcome to the margins! I’m hoping to share with you a little bit of everything that’s on my plate. Sometimes it might be things I didn’t speak about much when they happened, sometimes it’ll be stuff that’s teasing what’s coming ahead, or announcements about events. It might even be sharing a bit of inspiration or a thing I learned. Let’s play this a bit loose! But please do let me know if there’s anything you’d love to hear about.
Starting out by sharing this last piece of a series I did exploring my mosaic style for a more commercial market, thinking about flavorful creatures. I worked on a few simple illustrations in 2022-23 for Two Good yogurts (seen below) :
and it really got me thinking about how fun it is to see art on packaging, especially if it has personality in it.
Of course, this was adapting a pre-existing style, and it was just ‘draw fruit’ so the personality wasn’t the focus. But I’ve been pretty convinced that this mosaic approach would be great for packaging or book covers— it’s eye catching, stands out, but also feels a bit timeless. So I thought it would be fun to just work with flavor and character and color together. The mosaic approach makes something simple feel a lot more lively, which I like! Sometimes I feel like simple things feel like cheating when I do them, so this seemed like a good way to trick myself.
Fragments and juxtapositions connect the other art I wanted to share this month too.
Over the winter, we spent a weekend putting together the puzzle I did with Fred + Friends and it’s been sitting on my dining table ever since. But now that it’s spring, it was time to take things apart. But taking it apart reminded me how fun it is to just look at the bits and pieces that make up your work.
Color combos, textures, snippets of details all make a dizzying blur! But it’s fun to see how when you cut something up you can make new contexts or ideas, because you let go of what the piece should be and consider new possibilities.
Here’s a sneak peek of the four coasters I painted this week for Nucleus Portland’s SALUT! 9 show. I haven’t done them in a little while and I forgot that I kind of freak out when doing something at a small scale. Connecting back to the mosaics, I went kind of kaleidoscopic with my approach. They definitely went some weird ways (look at that fluorescent red!), but I found some interesting techniques (painting over looser acrylic with a thin gesso as underpainting; adding fountain pen ink and oil pastel on top for details) that could be fun to try at a more leisurely scale later…
And I want to regularly share some inspiration I’m drawn to (audio, visual, writing, etc!) and any call to actions that I can, so the end of every Marginalia will feature that. First up, I wanted to share some art I recently learned about:
I’ve been looking at a lot of murals and public arts projects (especially from the Federal Art Program/ WPA era) lately. Maybe because art feels so devalued these days with AI and such? Anyway, while looking through the Library of Congress, I stumbled on Anton Refregier’s work. Refregier was a Russian artist who immigrated to the US and worked on a lot of WPA mural projects— I was amazed I’d never heard of him! His work feels very in line with a lot of the Soviet murals I’ve been drawn to in the past; I love how he focused on labor and community in these pieces. Plus, what amazing shape language and juxtaposition of different scenes to build an engaging space!
I need to explore further, but I love that in addition to murals he explored printmaking, ceramics, drawings, and even… mosaics! Coming full circle here.
He made a stunning mural for NYC’s 1199SEIU Labor Center in 1970; the building was slated to be demolished and the mural couldn’t be moved without damaging it, so they actually recreated it piece by piece in the new space.
And my last little bit, though by no means the least: it’s hard to be creative and share when genocide is going on in Gaza. I’m inspired by all the students and protesters fighting for what they believe in though, and while I am not the best at balancing talking about art and the world, I figured one thing I can do is take some space and share a few GoFundMe’s for individuals trying to get their families to safety right now.
Duha Latif and her family/ The Ghabayen family/ And one for four families trying to get to Australia.
Til next month!
Yay for WPA art! I happened to catch this show at the Met (closed in December) https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/art-for-the-millions so much incredible work!