My artistic path - the early years

[gregography]

During this last trip to my mother's she pulled out out a box of stuff that she'd kept since I was a child and told me that *I* had to decide what to keep and what to get rid of. My solution was to photograph them and then toss them.

The journey starts with clay:

Angels were a consistent theme. This was very early. The hair was made by pressing clay through a sieve. Both of the wings are on one side. This has a neanderthal fetish vibe that I like. I brought this one home.





A little older now. Is that a halo or a hairdo? Is it reaching out to hug, or to dismember?





I was learning about "cute" and enclosing space with structure. I remember I wanted the hair Lucy Red but it came out this drab disappointment. Or maybe I was just anticipating the Teal and Mauve trend - or even started it, decades early.





My brother was often troubled, and this is one of his angels. I'm serious. My parents explained it away by saying he was making a dinosaur but he denied it.





Now we move out of clay and into the ouevre of Michelob beer bottles and paper mache. Note the touch of the flower - Joey Heatherton was a big influence on me at that point.





I remember being pleased with how this came out - the base color, the glaze, and the dusting of gold. I could never understand why my mother didn't put flowers in it. I do now.





Because I was a child interested in crafts I had a Creepy Crawlers oven. I liked being able to make bugs but really came into my own with the friendly dragon kit. Each color was applied separately.





My aunt Margaret, who was always trying to one-up, bought me a whole set of Dip-it Fantasy Film - you form a closed shape with wire and then dip it and it's viscous enough to fill the area and dry hard. But delicate. I made some *fabulous* arrangements.





Junior High School. Shop. Hand hammered aluminum bowl. Too concave for me to buff it out completely to a beautiful shine. Unhappy.





Vacu-forming plastic. My masterpiece. I created the shape myself. Very moderne. I kept this one too.





I wonder if I can find a Creepy Crawlers oven.....

Comments

We were all angels then . . .

[swankyjournal.livejournal.com]

The things we did when we were kids! (That reminds me of the drawing I gave you guys that you kindly display on top of the piano. . . how old was I? 9? 12?) I just found hand made magazines I did when I was 10 or so . . . I guess it explains why I do graphic design, 40 years later . . .

Love all those pieces! Interesting that you photographed them and tossed them. Wish you could see a FABULOUS show here in the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art by one of my favorite artists, Vic Muniz. His web site is swell! He did all these clay sculptures, photographed them, reshaped them, photographed them again, and so forth. Clay is gone, photos stay!!

[mhgagnon.livejournal.com]

I love these! Especially the clay pieces. I'm glad you photographed them, but could also have seen them placed as a collection in your home. Wonderful pieces.

[quuf.livejournal.com]

Sounds silly, but acid-green plastigoop sizzling on the Creepy Crawler griddle is one of my favorite childhood memories. I can even conjure up the smell.

[jazzbearny.livejournal.com]

Ah, so you had the "heat mold until dangerously hot and then use tongs to put it in a tray of water to cool" version of Creepy Crawlers.

[mondragon.livejournal.com]

Yes! I loved it.

[quuf.livejournal.com]

Yup. And to this day, I wear my burn scars proudly. :)

[mondragon.livejournal.com]

It is a very strong sense memory for me too, like the sweet rubbery smell of my Itty Bitty toys (I think they were made to be pencil erasers.)

[robearal.livejournal.com]

Target was selling Creepy Crawly kits around christmas.

This post takes me back to my childhood crafts. I got 3 cans of the Fun Film one year. The best I made, though, were a couple bunches of grapes. What I had the most fun with, however, were these kits where you glued down gold and silver string then filled in the spaces with crushed glass and crushed stone. Sort of a variation on mosaic. Mom still might have the diptych of parrots hanging in her house.

[jpeace.livejournal.com]

I want that green thing.

[mondragon.livejournal.com]

It really is Jetson-y fabulous, no?

[jpeace.livejournal.com]

Very specifically, it's Ozatastic. In the half-assed adaptation of Return to Oz, the evil witch Mombi turns all of the inhabitants of Oz into green objects. Fairuza balk figures out how to reverse the curse and saves the day. I don't know! DO WANT GIVE.

[urbear]

Thank you for bringing me back to my childhood in a hurry.

I was near-obsessed with Creepy Crawlers. I had two Thingmaker hotplate sets, both of the exposed-metal-glowing-red-hot variety, and dozens of different molds and bottles of goop. The smell will be with me until my dying day, not to mention a few small burn scars. I even managed to score an Incredible Edibles set, basically a variation of the Thingmaker that operated at a lower temperature and used a heat-cured candy-like substance to make edible critters.

My mother still has some dusty Dip-it flowers lurking in her condo somewhere. It was one of the summer camp arts-and-crafts standards of the time, along with tie-dyed shirts, clay figurines and ashtrays, and copper enameled trinkets. My mom still proudly wears one of the trippy enamel medallions I made when I was about 12, but we dumped most of the rest of the bad child art when my parents moved to a small condo in the late 90s.

[njbearcub1.livejournal.com]

I love the aluminum bowl. (I love all of it, but the bowl catches my eye most).

Did your mother not want to put flowers in the green paper mache vase because it resembles a butt plug? A possibly outsized butt plug, since I have nothing to compare it for scale?

;-)

[mondragon.livejournal.com]

It was a Micheloeb beer bottle.