Returning

I'm back after a short break to give you more information...which I hope that you deeply and truly desire.  I would first like to show you the madness of the spare bedroom in my house. 

I'm truly lucky that there is an extra bedroom at all.  Otherwise I would be sleeping beside these books as they would be surrounding my bed.  They are getting dryer.  I think within a week I should be able to cut them in half on the crazy saw in the wood shop.  

I've also been doing a couple more portraits of my grandmother.

I feel that they are all very different and unique.  I think that this is something that I will continue to explore.  I went to the Contemporary Arts Center today and there was an exhibition on miniaturist painting, which is a technique in Pakistan.  Although some of the artists' works were not as interesting to me, there were two that definitely stood out.  The work of Ambreen Butt and Imran Qureshi.  Ambreen does a lot of mixed media with sewing, text, and watercolor, while Imran works primarily with gouache and paper.  They both do beautiful work, but it is their unique ways of using watercolor and gouache that makes them stand out.  They both make me want to rethink the way I use the watercolor medium with these timed portraits.  And, maybe I want to explore making a portrait in a different way...maybe not just her face.  Imran in particular did these painting of feet and arm prints to discuss a bombing that he experienced.  He wanted to show the beauty and sadness in such an experience.  Here are some links to some of their bodies of work:

Imran Qureshi:

http://universes-in-universe.org/eng/nafas/articles/2011/political_patterns/photos/10_imran_qureshi

http://www.sharjahart.org/blog/2011/february/sneak-preview--imran-qureshi

Ambreen Butt:

http://www.ambreenbutt.com/web/works.php

They both just make me want to explore new watercolor techniques and new ways to explore a tragedy or death.

I have also been looking into new ways to display my books.  I feel that each book is like a memory, and what do we do with memories?  We try our hardest to keep them by photographing them.  We then hang them in picture frames, keep them in photo albums, and put them in boxes.  This is all so that we make sure not to forget.  Yet, it is not these photos that keep these events in our life, it is in the memories of them.  These memories can be found in the things they touched, in the marks they made, in the things that let us know they were human and they were here, and in the things that say they were not just a person in a photo.  I thought it would be interesting to explore the books in this regard by putting them in place of the photos since they are in a sense a memory of a humans existence.  They touched the book, they read it, they became apart of it and the splice of the book shows the essence of this. 

    

I wasn't able to actually put the books in a frame yet since they are too thick for that, but I was able to make a cropped image of what they would look like in the frame.  What is interesting is that I could repeat this with things besides books.  Or I could create scenes for the books to live out and I could photograph them as though I'm trying to capture a memory, so that later i will be able to have a memory of a memory.  Its a thought!  I will talk to you soon with more updates.

Rachel