adorned and embellished, grace notes of roses

In getting a proposal ready for a show of my tar paper roses, I’ve been thinking a lot what the title should be.

Adornments
Adorned and adored, open and shut, making do
Shopped, captivated, sculpted, fabricated, woven, web, statue
Adorned and trimmed, notions of adornment, notions, trimmings
Decorated, enhanced, covered, shielded, hidden, layers, tiers, layers, shells, layers, peeled away, having a core, hard nut to crack, gristle of fat and bone.
Layers of meaning, nature, and nature run amok
Appropriated space, appropriated imagery, materials used out of context
Apples to apples, apples to oranges, dust to dust, ashes to ashes, new life

Adornment: deck and furnish, be an ornament to, bedeck, ornamental adornments, embellishment, frill, grace notes, accessories of worship, gewgaw

Embellishment: beautify, add interest to
Adornments of desire, accouterments of success
Trappings of power, trappings of wealth
Ornaments of worship, embellishments of beauty

Caparison: have trappings, obscure, to adorn richly

Rose: Everything is roses, Roses all the way, Ease, success, favorable
Optimistic, Rose colored glasses, unfounded optimism
War of roses: red vs. white

Rosary: Rose garden, rose bed, bed of roses
String of 55 beads to keep track of prayers
Form of devotion in which prayers are said while counting on a special string of beads

Grace notes really sticks with me.

Tar Paper: What's the big deal?

Amazing, there are people who don't know about tar paper. I took a small wall hanging of tar paper roses attached to a 5" x 6" plywood to the Artist Exchange at the Copley Society this past Wednesday evening to show to the group. Jason Brockert didn't know what to make of the piece until I explained tar paper to him, and then he found it interesting. It is a tar (just like the stuff that goes on roads) impregnated paper, that is used extensively in roofing. It comes in huge rolls, about 36" wide, is black (just like tar), costs around $20 for the roll, and has faint white lines on one side to help in laying it out on roofing projects. It has a wonderful soft black color, very dense and with deep tones. It also has a very pronounced grain, which enables smooth tears along the length. It folds well with the slightest crease. It is also called roofing felt by some people.

All of the above is why I like using it so much. I've used it as a support for collages, I've made little boxes out of it, and now I'm using it for folded roses.

Tar Paper Roses

Tar Paper Roses are so cool!

I started making more tar paper roses after a long break. The picture on the right shows the first piece I made which is about 22" wide, 20" high, and 4-5" deep. I love the way the light bounces off the folded surfaces, and the shadows that are created on the wall. I finished 5 smaller pieces, which are 7" by 8" by 3". I took four of them to the holiday exhibit at the Concord Art Association, and kept one for a spare. I showed them to Faith after the fourth grade coffee, and she laughed, saying now that is getting weird. Like my earlier work wasn't? No, she could fill her walls with it. Anyway.

Leaf and Roses

Ok, every woman loves them, the little folded ribbon roses. They are usually made in pink and sometimes even have the little green leaf at the base. You'll see them as adornments for sweaters and kids clothes, or even used in topiary standards for the fireplace mantels. I like them too, but I really like them made from tar paper. Why? I don't know exactly, except that the texture is wonderful, and I like the contrast between the tar paper, roofing felt, construction material and the feminine identification with adornment.

The piece on the right uses teeny roses to enhance the bark dress form, which is placed on a monoprint of a leaf image. Just to give you an idea of how to use roses to elevate the mundane to a new level. Shown at Concord Art Association 2006 Members Juried II show.

Anyway, after I had to listen to various people tell me how they didn't understand what I was trying to do, I went and did some research on various meanings for black roses. It turns out there is a famous song "Little Black Rose" the Irish sang back in the 1600s during their battles with the British. Often a woman would give her soldier lover, heading into a doomed battle, a single black rose as an indication of undying love. Many people still consider the black rose a symbol of death or vengenence towards an enemy. But, black roses are also potent symbols of anarchy, dissent and defiance, and are used as tattoos and on flags. And of course they could be used as a symbol for the death of old ideas and habits, especially those that hold one in a rut. C'est moi!

Do black roses really exist? Of course not, despite the extensive effort to breed one. To date, black roses are just very dark blood red, so dark that the shadows appear black.

How I work

I am a self-taught artist and have been making art off and on for the last 15 years. I develop my ideas by making many variations of what ever I’m working on. The work I did over the course of two years with the Ladies is a good example. I started doing monoprints in 2003 with a vague idea of making skirts, which evolved into making collage figures with paper bag heads that I placed on the monoprints. I worked exclusively with found household papers such as sugar and flour bags, candy and pasta wrappers, torn scraps of wrapping paper, onion bags, and other trash, to create fantastic outfits complete with accessories. I started writing short vignettes and dialogues for backgrounds, and decorated the ladies with hair and faces. By the time I finished with the series in the fall of 2005, I was still writing dialogues illustrated with ladies, but I was also experimenting with contrasts in scale between the foreground and background images.

This particular series was shaped by my fascination with fashion, style and clothing, which I see as tools of cultural assimilation and social camouflage in a world infused with inequitable distributions of power. I’m intensely interested in the contradictions between the outer persona of an individual and their inner experience in small intimate settings. I’ve been haunted with Robert Trivers’ view of evolution: that our survival depends on our capacity for self-deception, not to deny reality, but to avoid detection by an attacking enemy.