Print Concept

Based on my original series of randomly selected words, I chose to work around the theme of Emperor Norton while maintaining a similar aesthetic for the other two prints. For those, I drew upon the popular mythology of San Francisco surrounding Norton's reign as emperor. One is based upon a specific incident in which Norton was said to have prevented an anti-Chinese riot by placing himself between the rioters and their Chinese targets, and reciting the Lord's Prayer until the mob dissipated (thus, the inclusion of the Chinese text overlay, which is in fact the Lord's Prayer.) The other images included in this print are drawn from a period photograph from Chinatown in San Francisco, and landscape and art nouveau elements similar to those in the first print.

For the third print, I focused on Bummer and Lazarus, San Francisco celebrities of the period in their own right -- much-beloved rat-catching dogs often said to belong to Norton (who, however, staunchly denied this, though as lovingly as his fellow San Franciscans in regarding the dogs as their own autonomous individuals.) The overlay of this piece is drawn from a comic of the time depicting Lazarus' funeral, attended by other local celebrities.

Book Concept

For my book, I decided to work with one of the groups of ideas I've been wanting to delve into on my own in depicting various dreams that I've recorded over a period of time -- though, save a few recent dreams, the one I chose to work with is the only remaining recorded dream I now have after my laptop got stolen this semester...

I wanted to work with lyrical prose and a somewhat surreal illustrative style which would go well with the text. This went so far as a visual parallel between the two -- I decided upon a font called Mom's Typewriter due to the fact that when I write, it's usually on a typewriter (especially now!) From there, I chose to incorporate a stamp-like quality to the images. I toyed with the idea of color, but ultimately decided to leave it black-and-white; I liked the starkness of the images and feel they go better with the text as is, and furthermore this makes reproduction of the work much easier -- I'm interested in making copies of this to either distribute as placed public art or for sale. Overall, I'm very happy with how this piece turned out.

Mural Concept

I was in the group with Jess, Jeff, Keith and Nick. For our mural, we decided to work with the theme of the human figure, a concept which was extended to movement/dance. The body was segmented into five pieces, and each group member worked on their respective part. The aesthetic incorporated anachronistic juxtaposition as well, as an expression of the gradually accelerating blur between organic and inorganic elements of humanity.

For my segment, I chose to work off the idea of the Shiva Nataraja, the Hindu deity whose cosmic dance maintains the balance between creation and destruction -- or, for that matter, any of those binary elements which are in an engagement of self-perpetuating opposition (such as the inorganic and the organic, or the natural and the constructed, as focused on in our mural.) I chose to represent him drawing upon one of Alphonse Mucha's art nouveau posters (a personal influence in a fair amount of my work) for his dreadlocks, a portion of his iconography which also plays a fairly large role in the god's mythology. For his face, I drew upon a classic Indian statue of him -- in which the role of technology and inorganic creation is implicit.

Print #3

Second print

Print #1

Mural piece

Seven Words

Place: park
Environment: stormy
People: Emperor Norton
Mood: bliss
Object: pipe
Flora: those small beepy bouncy birds
Period: Belle Epoque

Typface: Strumpf
Style: Open

Photoshop Composite

Not too much to say about this -- a composite of a sketch I did and a photo I took. I liked the overall effect.

The Chickenfarm Coffeehouse, ft. Molly and his mullet.

Greg and I prepare for camping.

It begins at our house, sort of, though it vaguely resembles the setup of Elaine's bedroom, and the girls and I have set up a sheet-and-blanket fort (I think we're much younger, I'm about 8, maybe?), and the rats are appearing here and there, having fun, and making ridiculous poses -- sort of Nataraja poses, but transcribed to the body of a couple of fat rats. They are grinning and bruxing.

Greg is coming down to visit me! He arrives at my house, and we head out for the Location. On the way, we make a stop at the Coffeehouse; I had been here only once before, but it was pretty neat, as I remembered: there was a Brower-esque atrium, with brick and all, and numerous siderooms that somewhat resemble Wildflower's. In the center were Injuns and Gypsies selling all sorts of things in the atrium center trading area / marketplace. It was all sorts of hippie-groovy (but kind of dorky as well, in a Magic-the-Gathering sort of way?), and there was some damn cool decor on the walls.

We were with a couple of people, I'm not sure who, but I understood that they were Greg's friends from home; altogether, we are four boys and two girls. We went to the wooden door, Greg said the password... and no one answered. So we went in, and it was dark on the inside, and nobody was around. All the lights were out. I spotted a cop on the second floor going up some wooden stairs, lurking by the rafters with a flashlight. Somehow, we were all wearing masks now; and I remember the maskface of one of the people who was with us was like a deformed rainbow mask: lumpy and misshapen and with holes for eyes and such in all the wrong places. This is Greg's Relatively Unattractive Gay Virgin friend from home.

We decide to pick up the stash of weaponry that is there, sort of flaunting our presence in the face of the cop, because while we're inside no harm can come to us. We leave with katanas and axes, then sprint to hide out in a nearby barn, because once we leave they can get us.

The chickens: holy hell, the chickens. There are boxes upon boxes of them as far as the eye can see, and we try to wedge ourselves in to disguise ourselves and hide. But the chickens: I know their beaks have been cut off, but that's the only way I can identify them as chickens. They have also been already plucked, so they're raw and red and beakless and miserable-looking. I am repulsed. The bumpy red skin that most chickens already have for combs and such extends the length of their whole body, and they look like spiky tomatoes, whose faces come to a sort-of point and is simply hollow and full of what appears to be oregano. As the one boy who's moving into the chickens passes them and drops little food offerings their way to keep them from eating him, they flip face-down, feet in the air to accept the food with their claws, in a gross parody of how my rats eat.

I look to find Greg and discover he has the rats, he's had them the whole time. They're frolicking in his coat and greeting the animals and looking inquisitively at the axe he's got.

One of the slightly taller boys, in a white Tlingit mask which is almost his face, leans down to kiss the Rainbow Mutant. That lasts a while; then they pull apart. Apparently, this is the first time the Rainbow Mutant's been kissed, and then they discuss it for a while, and the Tlingit boy confesses his knees went a bit shaky when he decided to do it.

We're sitting on a bench, discussing the weapons we've got. Tlingit or Rainbow boy, I'm not sure which (I think both are discussing these very rusty very bulky katanas we've acquired) asks if, when attacking, you hold the keef of the blade out (meaning the sharp part.) Someone says yes, but if you're attacked with a club, you're fucked; they'll bludgeon you to death, the katanas don't cut.

I catch a bit of commotion; we all ignore it, thinking maybe it's the cops. I eventually turn around, only to see the place is open, and there's a stream of people going in. One of them is Mars! In an orange teeshirt, scraggly dreads out; and I try to get Greg's attention but he doesn't hear me, I think he's still talking about katanas. And for that matter, I can't quite hear him; he's talking at a normal volume, but I can't quite make out anything he's said. So I adjust the controllers on his voice, in a Flight of the Conchords Bowie-ish control panel; this is, I think, his controllers for his voice, not mine for my ears, because while I'm mucking around with them everyone giggles at how odd his voice sounds: like there are two loops of it, one going at normal speed and one going at a sped-up high-pitched fast-forwarded-cassette level underneath it. The pitch wobbles around for a bit until it reaches the point where I can perfectly hear it. He asks, "What are you doing?" I try to explain that Mars is over there, look, should we greet him? He can't hear me, though, it turns out; so he mucks around with my voice controls, and I can hear myself talking normally, but with the sped-up and kind of old-sounding cassette effect underneath it; and he giggles, and I can't help but start giggling too. So then we just muck around with each other's voice controls; it's (oh this is dorky) sort of like being in a Gundam, with the Bowie set up, and you're inside your own head, but inside the other's as well.

It starts to rain, so we all take cover back in the barn.

Outside the barn: a woman with dreadlocks is kissing some Eurotrash man, and says, "Oh Molly, make it pee out your mullet." She looks up, feels the rain; there's an effect where each raindrop becomes visible individually, and they are illuminated in the lamplight, golden-amber colored, and she says, "Oh Molly, you're back!" and completely ignores the Eurotrash man. She twirls through the rain and into the barn, where there's a corpse of a man with red (not auburn, red) hair (in a fashionable mullet, of course) laid out on the floor; and as the woman babbles, we catch visuals of Molly sinking through the water, his body intermingling with various kinds of seaweed, some the squelchy rubbery kind, and some a type that is husk-like and spiky and orangeish. (I exclaim, from somewhere off-screen, Oww! That's the spiky kind, I'm not touching that!, then giggle, embarrassed, and promise not to do anything that girly for the rest of the camping trip.)

It becomes an underwater scene; the statement, as though from some blog entry, appears: Project on Iran-Contra better [implied: more sincere] than presentation-type pee.

Then we notice, as Molly's body sinks out of view completely and instead in the seaweed we see fish, a sequence of larger fish eating smaller fish in rapid succession, a quick chain; and it says, "[Name of larger fish] better than [name of smaller fish]" and then the large fish is being scooped up by a net, and then a larger fish is in with a huge net of tuna, and then it says, "Well, any fish on its own is better than this bag of chips I've got," and we go back to Molly's wife.

Week 1.

Apparently the computer labs actually adhere to lab hours this year? I'm so used to them always being open, I've gotten spoiled. So, Lessons 1 + 2 + 3 are to-be-posted upon completion, and I've got to make an effort to get to the labs during daylight.

With regards to the book project:

I have a lot of different book ideas that have been on hold until the adamandeve book is complete, because I know there's a good chance that once started I'll just get wrapped up in that and adamandeve might well fall to the wayside. So it's really more a matter of paring things down than it is of coming up with something; for now, I think I'd really like to work on a dream-based book, specifically, The Chickenfarm Coffeehouse, ft. Molly and his mullet.

It's full of some truly bizarre, strange, and fearful loathesome images, and is actually lengthy to the degree that I will probably pare it down. But, for the next post: the dream in its entirety.

Adam and Eve.

A painting completed over the summer from my fling with Adam and Eve. There's a pretty specific reasoning behind everything that is and is not here, but it was done more intuitively than rationally.

Intro post.

Call me Lea; I'm a junior fine arts major at TCNJ, taking Digital Imaging II as part of my major requirements. It's not really my forte as far as media go, but the coursework does overlap with my general artistic interests -- bookmaking, illustration and painting. My latest independent work has been focused on personal interpretation of the Adam and Eve story, including an artbook which is still in progress.