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April 29, 2006

Studio Saturday, at long last

First let me show you some new prints from last night, then I'll tell you about a decision I've made that has changed my whole outlook on life (or at least on grad school). This week was really emotionally draining, and I felt so sick and miserable on Wednesday that I was ready to quit school and go home; I just felt completely at a loss to define why I'm making art and why I'm here in grad school a thousand miles from home when I'm clearly just a fraud. I didn't talk about those feelings here partly because I promised a long time ago that this wasn't going to be a personal diary, and partly because I didn't want to appear to be fishing for compliments and I really couldn't stand for people to comment telling me that I'm a good artist and blah blah blah. Because I know that I've been fucking around for the last nine months, wasting my time and not growing artistically. I've made a few decisions that I think will help with that. But first, some new prints:

This one is a combination of monoprinting from a sintra plate, monoprinting from a carved wood block using paper stencils, and a life sized linocut that I carved last year and haven't really made many prints from yet. I really like this one and wish I could have editioned it, but I'm not going to; it would be too much of a pain to reproduce the monoprint background. So it'll be one of a kind.

This one is the same sequence of paper stencil and woodblock and then two separate printings of the lino block (orange and then blue), only starting with new paper instead of an old monoprint.

Those of you who know me won't believe I can leave a print this minimal. Surprise! It might get a bit of stitching, but no more ink. It's hard to tell in the photo but the entire surface of the paper is embossed with the texture of the lines. The image was printed using paper stencils, from a wood block that has this pattern carved all over (the same block I was using to cover up stuff before).

Now. Remember this?

This print has become the bane of my existence. When I got to grad school I felt that my final undergrad work had been pretty accomplished, and while I felt the need to break with the past and not repeat the same work, I also felt that maybe I hadn't said all that I had to say about it. So I set about starting a huge project that I thought would be bigger and better than the work I exhibited the year before. Well, it was bigger but it certainly isn't better. It was foolish of me to start a project like this at that time; your first year of graduate school should be about opening up and exploring new ideas, not closing down and expending all of your creative energy on one huge misguided project. I had all of these other idea nagging at me for pieces I wanted to start and ideas I wanted to explore, but felt like I needed to focus on this thing to get it done, and the result has been that I now feel trapped by this project, I desperately want to work on something, ANYTHING else, and I've begun to resent it for keeping me from all of those other ideas I have and want to pursue. And because of this resentment I've let the project languish until it's become something I can hardly bear to look at, something that makes me feel ashamed and useless every time I walk into my studio and see it, ugly and unfinished, on the wall. So I've taken it down, and pulled all of the pieces of it out of my print drawer:

A hundred and twenty sheets of Rives BFK, and all for only 15 prints. Argh. It's clear to me now that I need to let this piece die and move on. I'd been moving in that direction over the last few weeks, first by finally starting to work on some of the new things I've been wanting to do (like the maps, and some other things you'll see images of soon), then by taking all of my old work (except for the wretched woodcut) down off the studio walls and putting up the map images and a bunch of other things meant to inspire me for my new projects. The last thing I needed to do to free myself and feel like maybe I do belong in grad school is this:

Turning all 120 wasted pieces of paper on their sides and beginning to print new things on them. This particular one will be torn down into little rectangles and run through the letterpress, then added to my sewing project. More on that next week. And of course, I can't throw anything away, so I'll be reworking the woodblocks and continuing to print from them, and I think it's okay that there will be little bits of a body still visible in them. I can hardly wait to begin hacking away at them, but unfortunately this week is for printing. And I'm on my way back to printing right now.

Posted by jodi at 08:25 PM | Comments (13) | categories:  art stuff : in the studio : school

April 27, 2006

Okay. OKAY! I won't get a perm. Jeez.

Well. The mob sure has spoken. Peter pointed out that it's a habit of mine to solicit advice and then to ignore it and do what I want, so just to prove him wrong this once I've tallied up the votes from the other day and am letting you guys decide the fate of my rat's nest. I took a vote around the shack on whether to spend the time to make a fancy vote-tallying graphic, but luckily the only one here to vote was me, so we're going the lazy way (it was unanimous). The results:

Keep growing/cut layers garnered a whopping eighteen votes. Eighteen (and I LIKE it)!

Getting it by the short and curlies put on a pathetic showing at only six votes. I'm choosing to ignore the fact that the only two people in my family (other than Peter) who offered an opinion both chose this option. They, of course, have seen me with long, long, incredibly long hair. Mom, I promise, it's not going to be like that. This time, it'll be styled! Michael Hutchence! Oh yeah.

Three people thought I should spend the money on an expensive stylist; y'all are crazy. Martina's pretty good, actually. She once cut my very curly hair into a style that I demanded based on a photo found on the internet of a model with a cute spiky VERY straight style. And it looked amazing, which never ever happens when you foolishly get your heart set on a style that you don't really have the right hair for. So, although it's really tempting to fly to LA just to see Aharon, I'll save that for another time, I think. Plus Martina is right around the corner from the fifty cent samosa place, which makes it even more worth the trip.

Two people (not including Peter) were noncommittal or didn't give a rat's ass either way, and Norma, Pete wants to know how you know me so well already. It's because you two ganged up on me that I'm going to follow the crowd and get the layers and keep growing. For now.

And with that, I hereby pledge to not waste my valuable server space talking about my goddam hair anymore.

So. My last class was tonight and now I just have a few more obligations before I'm free to skip town and go home and just hang out and make art on my own terms and mess around in the garden and -gasp- knit something for myself. Tomorrow I'm going to spend the day printing like I used to: spending ten or so hours busting my arse making tons and tons of prints and going home exhausted, then coming back in the morning to take stock and see if I have anything good. Then I need to spend the next few days finishing this:

A close up:

And just for kicks and because I haven't given you anything funny to look at in a long, long time, here's a picture of my wanker late 80s haircut. Feel free to laugh, but not too hard, because you know you looked like a wanker too. In fact, I dare you all to go find YOUR old school i.d. and post it. Double dare ya.

Ooh, that sexy teenage scowl, how it drove the boys wild and made them all want to chow down on my neck. I have no idea who gave me those hickeys, but I can tell you who gave me that haircut: it was my friend Deb, and she told me she was cutting "layers" but it turned out to be one big short layer on top and one longish layer on bottom. This was the last time I had my hair cut until June 2000, and by then I was tucking the ends into my jeans pockets.

So yeah, check it out. Black t-shirt, gray hoodie sweater (with my previous high school's total-beaver-canoe-ripoff logo on it), jean jacket, mullet, hickey, scowl. Fucken A, man. Also, that button on my jacket is from a band of a guy I used to babysit for and it says Kick Ass With Class. Oh yeah.

Posted by jodi at 11:36 PM | Comments (12) | categories:  art stuff : self-absorbtion

April 24, 2006

This right here is about as self-indulgent and vain as it gets

But people, I need advice. So I'm making a cliche of myself yet again and writing about my haircut on the internet. Please be kind and don't mock me too much when I tell you my plan. Here is a picture of what my hair looks like right now, today:

grr. I look so angry.

It's pretty bad. I've been growing it out for almost a year now (here's how it looked last year, all short and curly and cute). The bleaching looked superduperhot for oh, about a week, and in the fall I gave in and dyed it brown. Then I dyed it again when the first coat faded, and the combination of bleach and two boxes of dye has made a lot of my curl disappear.

So. My hair's pretty thick, and it's starting to look a weird kind of puffy that's not at all to my liking, although it's finally at the length that I can (just barely) get it up into a teeny tiny topknot with lots of pieces falling out all over, which is sort of cute I guess. But here's the thing. I'm going to have to get it cut or styled somehow soon, because from here it's only going to get more stupid-looking as it gets longer. It's time for me to fess up what was in my mind when I started letting it grow last year, even though it's embarrassing. When my hair gets longer, this is how I want it to look:

Omigod please stop laughing. Shut up! I want it to look like Michael Hutchence at Live Aid. No really, stop laughing. I want it to look like that, minus the goofy longish bits straggling down the back which you can't really see in this picture anyway. And also minus the sideburn-ey action. But still: side part, sort of shortish/long bang-ish on top, so that it's layered and not too heavy, because as soon as my hair gets too long and heavy the curl gets pulled out anyway. Don't say it will look like a mullet, because that won't influence my decision. I don't fear the mullet, or the mockery that usually goes along with it (it's not like I've never had one before. Shut up! You had a mullet too in 1987, and you know what? They don't all look bad. 1987 ones did, though).

My question is this: I can get our fabulous twelve dollar stylist Martina to thin my hair out a bit and cut it in layers like this so that it'll grow out into something resembling the style I want, but a little more than half the hair on my head right now is the stuff that's damaged from the dyeing. The new stuff that's growing out is a lot healthier though, and seems like it'll curl up again given the chance. Should I just get it cut in layers and let it look stupid until it's long enough that I can cut off all the damaged goods from the bottom? Or should I get a perm so that it'll look curly until it grows out long enough to cut off the crap, which will mean that the three inches or so of healthy new hair growth that I have now will also end up damaged and eventually have to get chopped? And, who gets perms anymore besides old ladies? Will Martina laugh at me if I ask for one, or should I do it at home? Home bleaching and dyeing is what caused this mess, so home perming sort of scares me, although I'm more of a DIY girl than one who pays for such things. Or, should I just forget about Michael and chop my hair back to where it was last year, which I could do myself right this minute with the sewing scissors and have it look sexy and amazing? That seems the easy way out, and a total failure of the growing-out test.

Also, the one and only time I ever permed my naturally curly hair was at 18 when I was forced by my mom, because I had to look good for a certain "event" and my position was somewhat weakened by some big trouble I'd gotten into so I couldn't really fight it. And the kids at school called me "Jermaine" until the perm grew out, which is sort of scarring and not so easy to recover from, you know? So. Help.

For those readers (most, perhaps?) who don't really give a rat's ass either way, I offer you this highly entertaining and very important trivia question instead: who do you think is more tense, Carrieoke or me? Bonus points to the first person who can guess which of us bent her needles knitting this.

Posted by jodi at 03:01 PM | Comments (31) | categories:  self-absorbtion

April 23, 2006

Open the doors, kick out the lights

Studios were opened, people were schmoozed, beer was consumed, art was bought: overall, a smashing success. Too bad you weren't there; maybe next year.

Erin gave us a very practical gift, with a card written so that printmakers could read it.

My throat was miraculously healed in time for the open house by the divine presense of the Little Friends of Printmaking; as soon as they began their public lecture on Thursday, the room became infused with a heavenly light and I felt the spirit rise within me and I was moved to cough up the entire glob of crud that had been sitting on my vocal cords like a playground bully all week. It was truly a miracle. I'm just making sure everyone knows about it so there will be lots of documentation for when the beatification process begins.

Here's a photo from the Poster Creeps exhibition at Updown Gallery that went along with our open house. All of these great posters and more are available for sale on the Little Friends website, so go check it out. Especially if you've got some sort of affliction; you never know when their divine healing powers will strike again.
(more pictures of the show on my flickr page).

Studio updates are coming soon; I've really got to bust it out these next two weeks and wrap some things up, and I have a couple days fewer to get everything done now that I've just found out that my (truly awesome) art history professor has changed the rules of our final exam for the 5 grad students in the class and moved it from May 5th, just so that I can get to M$&W! (holy run-on sentence, Batman!) Can I get a woo hoo?

Crap. I think I just blew out one of my stereo speakers playing Anne Murray. Is that even possible?

Posted by jodi at 10:52 AM | Comments (8) | categories:  art stuff

April 19, 2006

Stop the presses

Give that player two minutes for using the wrong cliche.

Dear reader, it's not you, it's me. There is so much to show and tell you, but I just don't have the time to regale you with stories right now. This is crunch week and we have an open house in our studios on Friday, so if you're in or near Athens GA, come on out and see our work and hear the Jaws of Life and meet the printmaking superstars, the Little Friends of Printmaking.

I've got laryngitis, just in time to have to be charming and schmoozy and talk about my work with people. Won't that be fun? (hell yes, she whispered).

But today, look, look!! Big Girl Knits hits the stands today; I'm officially a real, published designer, on paper. And as if that wasn't enough to get me jumping for joy (I jumped so much I missed the bus and now I have half an hour to waste), here's a sneak peek of my pattern.

The studio is smoking from all the activity, and I've got a lot of new stuff to show, but it'll have to wait until after Friday. Now I have to go to school.

Posted by jodi at 07:49 AM | Comments (20) | categories:  art stuff : knit design

April 15, 2006

Everything is broken

My laptop won't start up, which means that I can't access my jodigreen.ca e-mail right now. So if anybody was planning to write to me about anything, please use jodichartreuse@yahoo.ca for now.

This means that the patterns I promised to have done by the end of this weekend are totally inaccessible, and I'll have to go back to my chickenscratch notebook and decipher my notes and write the whole damned things out again, then redo all the math for the sizes. All tomorrow.

Wish me luck.

*Edit: it seems I still have some intermittent laptoppage. The geek dudes at Big Chain Electronics Store got it working without too much problem, changed some settings to hopefully make it not poop out again and told me some ways I might be able to troubleshoot the problem in future. Just to make sure that the computer would still work for me once it had been taken outside the magical geek zone, I fired it up in the parking lot; so far so good. Half an hour later (yes, I was in the parking lot for half an hour, don't ask) it wouldn't start up, and I had to take it back inside to the geeks, who promptly got the thing going with the sheer power of their nerdy vibes. They laughed like they thought I was joking when I suggested that I stay with them, behind the counter, all night until my work is done, and they suggested that heat might be the problem. So I took it back to the studio, where it resolutely refused to start up all night. I did, however, partake of the geeks' wireless long enough to e-mail my patterns to my gmail account so that I can finish them up on the school macs if I have to. Whew! What an ordeal. And, guess what? At 3:30 am when I got back to the shack, the laptop started up. So I guess it's just the studio. Hmmph.

Posted by jodi at 03:21 PM | Comments (8) | categories:  assholes

April 09, 2006

He's got a chain of flowers, and sows a bird in her knickers

I'm not going to get all embarrassingly saccharine today, because that's just so last year. Today the person I love more than anything is 40 years old. I'll save the truly sentimental dreck for when he turns 80, because by then I'll be so old that sentimentality will be forgivable and perhaps even expected, and he'll be too demented to read it and get embarrassed by it anyway.

The birthday party? One word sums it up:

*edited to clarify: the etch-a-sketch drawing was done by our brother in law Rod Keith, not by me. I'm not nearly so amazingly talented; I can draw stairs and that's about it.

Posted by jodi at 09:05 PM | Comments (17) | categories:  sugar shock

April 07, 2006

Bless this mess

Back in Windsor means back in time: I left spring, sunshine, warm breezes, open windows and piles and piles of wisteria behind for winter's stubborn refusal to leave, cold winds, rain and this:

A wee dusting of April snow, my first morning back. It disappeared quickly and will likely be the last of it, and I was happy to have a little bit of it. And after all the sitting in Georgia with my kitchen window open and pining for the Canadian weather, I'd like it to be spring now, please. I guess I'll have to wait until the next time I'm home to wear the sexy short dresses I brought.

Walking to Green Island Centre (best Lebanese sandwich place on the continent, hands down) for my lunch the other day I realized anew just how trashy my neighbourhood is; I guess I needed a few months away, in a pretty town, to notice it. When we first moved to Windsor almost five years ago, it took us a long time to adjust. I'd lived my entire adult life in lovely old downtown neighbourhoods in Londonontario, in old houses with character and interesting architectural details, on streets with tall, old trees and bountiful gardens. Here in Windsor there's so much that's ugly: empty, scruffy lots, chain link fences, houses that used to be interesting until someone covered them in vinyl siding, abandoned couches and scattered garbage. This town has a lot more character than London, though, more interesting places to hang out and more good places for a vegetarian to eat, and I wouldn't want to move back to London, ever. But after seven months in Athens GA this town looks pretty gross and dirty. Still, I'll be ecstatic when I can come back here to stay. Maybe I'll spend the summer picking up some garbage.

Posted by jodi at 11:09 AM | Comments (4) | categories:  windsor

April 06, 2006

Not lost, just misplaced

And within about a foot of where I was pretty sure it had to be.

Posted by jodi at 01:20 PM | Comments (6) | categories:  general

April 03, 2006

Pictures of some new things I'm working on, sans commentary

Posted by jodi at 09:55 PM | Comments (8) | categories:  in the studio

Happy, happy day

Not much time to write today, but get on over and do some lovin' on Rachael and Lala, because they're getting married today! Hooray for love, and hooray for Canada! I wish you guys all the best, and I hope with all my heart that some day you'll be able to be married in your own country, too.

And tomorrow I'm going to be in Canada too, with my own beloved. Hooray for love. Hooray for Canada. Did I say that already?

Posted by jodi at 08:48 AM | Comments (4) | categories:  sugar shock

April 01, 2006

No studio today

My favourite dress, and one that I rarely wear because I barely fit into it. The MFA grad show reception is tonight, so I thought I'd pull this out.

I woke up with a migraine and had to drug myself and sleep it off. Jenn and Jeffrey were moving today (out of the house I'll soon be moving into, woo hoo!) and the day was warm and damp and the warm soft breeze just made it feel like a day off. So I ended up pitching in with the moving instead of going in to the studio. It felt good to have a day off from any of the work that's pressing on me, but I can't have another one now until the end of the semester. Even my time back home next week will be spent writing patterns and finishing up samples. But in three more sleeps I'll be with Peter, for six glorious nights and days.

Posted by jodi at 07:38 PM | Comments (16) | categories:  self-absorbtion