First Graders Respond to the Christine and Terry

This Tuesday Terry and I were invited to speak to Nancye Hesaltine's 1st grade class about our project. She began by asking them "what do you see" and we were immediately bombarded by talk of tire tracks, rocks, garage doors, bushes, weeds, antenna, and a fierce debate between whether or not the building on the left was made with rocks or bricks- an interesting response to flattened photographic space!

Nancye sent along these images of small watercolors the kids are making that will be assembled on the floor into a larger grid. I think they completely relate and can't wait to talk to the Third Graders.

Bench

This is the last piece of the collaboration for those of you following along.  I adore the composition on this one. Since we were shooting against an approaching storm the sky is far more grey than blue- a happy accident if you ask me since it makes the pinks in the bench pop out against the green of the landscape.

This piece keeps growing on me,  the wonky slats on the bench were a pain to work with when I was weaving but the picture just feels like a little bit of colorful fresh air like the knit graffiti that's been hitting the streets for the last decade and my neighborhood for the last year or so.

big print!

2' x 3'!!! It's absolutely incredible! That's my sketchbook next to it for scale. At this scale you can see a little blue post it against the silver tarp that escaped the wall during the shoot-again- exactly the same kind of move I'd make while drawing.

10b/Green Building

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Oh do I ever love the composition on this one. The two point perspective is so dramatic and the yellow flowers are just a little bit off center. This one is full of angles and big shapes and I feel like I build up drawings in much the same way.

Our super assistant Emma mentioned how much she likes all the little notes that have fallen down on the left side. I do too, it keeps the piece from being too perfect and brings movement into the expanse that otherwise feels almost diorama like.

Terry and I decided that for the exception of Niagara Falls each of the pieces would just use their locations as their title. This is the only one that I feel a little goofy about. I like saying 10b but it feels a little meaningless and random especially since we covered up the sign that said 10b with little yellow office-style post its. There's something to be said for keeping the title that we'd use in our conversations. Neither of us are big fans of titling.

Tractor Building

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This piece really benefits from being viewed at a larger size. Seriously- click to see it bigger and then continue reading.

When I've been telling people about the results of this project I often find myself talking about Terry's compositing technique and how the image therefore contains far more information than one could see with just your eyes. This one does this both with  the level of detail one can see within the image and in the composition. The location is so busy you simply can't take all this in at once when you're on site.  We'll be printing this one at 2" x 3" I can't wait to see that. There's just so much information in this image I think that'll be spectacular.

I'm really happy with how the post-its worked to create the image, the vertical surface seems key for making this kind of work. Terry was particularly interested in how the floral pattern made out of little squares references how digital images are built- that they too are made from little pixels the handmade meets the digital (meets STAPLES).

Niagara Falls

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YES!  As I told the group yesterday in the presentation I feel very excited about this piece. I think it's the one that resonates with the rest of my work most clearly.  The use of party supplies, the transformation of them into a faux-natural form, the way the man-made elements around the streamers mimic the rocks and river of a real waterfall.   

This image also really showcases the range Terry was able to capture with the image. When you view the print from a distance you see the colored streamers right away, up close it's clear they're covered by another layer of silver. So far we've only printed it at about 8" x 10". I'd love to see it at least double since the image has such a play between the graphic composition and the detail and texture of the stone, Mylar, and foliage.

The Hill

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Considering  how I felt after the shoot I was really surprised at this image. The plaid is even more unreadable than I expected but I love the way the light dapples across the image and how that cloud just seems to pose for us between the trees!

The angle on this hill was much more difficult to work with than we predicted so the image ends up acting as an abstraction rather than a readable pattern, again a fairly lovely image but more decorative than true to it's intentions. 

Paper Chain

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This piece feels really goofy to me. It's nothing like I expected. I think it's because this image almost more than any other looks so different than it did during the shoot. During the shoot I could see the sculpture in the context of the entire site- the expanse of the metal, the sky, the gravel parking lot where my car was- and in this shot it becomes so dense with information and much more abstract that I imagined.

We've shown the images to a few dozen people now, and this one gets a really positive response, I find myself listening really intensely to what they have to say about it- I'm hoping they'll help me figure this one out.

I think I like it, it's just not at all how I imagined it would look. I think that's really the best part of collaborating- seeing things in an entirely new way- and making work that you wouldn't make otherwise. Since the sculptural set up on this one is so simple I wouldn't mind taking it to a few new sites.

Presentation Write-Up

Yesterday morning Terry and I presented to the FACA Committee (for those reading who don't work with us that's the committee at our school who helped fund this project). Considering we spoke early in the morning in a remote location on campus we had a good turn out including Nancye's golden retriever!

We spoke about the impact of the project on us as artists and of course a little bit about impacts for our school community. Most importantly it was the first time people who aren't married to us saw the work and even in 30 minutes we got a great amount of feedback- it felt like a little condensed art opening with people sharing their insights and thoughts about the work.

Extra special thanks to Nancye Hesaltine for taking photos during the presentation.

Presentation Preview

Today Terry and I met up to prepare for our presentation to the FACA Committee tomorrow morning. We hung prints of all 6 pieces in the Richman Gallery and talked about how we wanted to structure our talk. Of course this could only be done properly by moving our office chairs into the gallery.

Now that the blog's been sent all around school we'd love to have any Park people there to get a first look at our work! I won't be posting them here until after our presentation!

Christine's Studio-July 14th

I did make some drawings based on the supplies from this project. This drawing is based on that image of the zip lock bag full of crepe paper streamers from yesterday's post.

Christine's Studio-July 13th

At this point all the studio work is happening over at Terry's and I'm getting my studio back in order. I'll be posting drafts of our images later this week to get ready for our big presentation to the funding committee, but right now I'm spending my time tidying up and reflecting on this project while I tackle some other tasks for projects I've been neglecting.

I've left a few things around the studio from this project that seem inspirational for some new drawings.

The stack of post it's above are all the notes I'd used on the flowchart during the project. I like how they don't line up perfectly and look like blocky stripes. As much as I've been putting things away and recycling them I'm keeping this around.

I love the colored circles all squished together from the leftover streamers from the bench shoot. I think this'll show up on paper later this week.

Shoot Report- Tractor Building

After we shot The Green Building/10b (man! do Terry and I ever need to talk titles! I hope he's better than I am) we took a break for lunch and headed back to Woodberry to shoot over at the Tractor Building at Clipper Mill. 

From the beginning this was Terry's favorite location. All during the process I was looking forward to this piece especially the color combination but was always a little nervous that the wall would respond like the rusty metal did during the Paper Chain shoot. Lucky for us the post-its stick like a charm and we had to do very little reinforcing for durability although we did end up using balls of masking tape at the end to get that last flower to go faster.

The flowers in this  pattern were borrowed from a William Morris design in a book my mom had sent me when I was starting on this project.  Working from original needlework patterns ended up working quite well rather than designing my own like I usually do. I was a little worried that I'd feel less connected to the sculpture in this piece since I did a little less of the design, but I like that the piece has a connection to William Morris. He's on my imaginary Top Ten lists of designers and I look at his work a lot but have never Incorporated any of his designs directly into my work. I like that my little shout out to him ended up temporarily stuck to a building in my neighborhood.

Here's Terry taking 1 of about 95 photos he shot of this space. The finished image (which we'll post soon!) is horizontal and has so much more information in it. Also, his camera didn't capture the glare on the paper like mine did so the color is super vivid.  You might notice Terry wears his Nikon baseball cap backwards when he shoots so it doesn't interfere with the camera.

Back when I was still brainstorming about this project I so badly wanted to work more dimensionally. I'm quite comfortable being a "very flat sculptor" in fact the phrase is in the first line of my artist statement. During the brainstorming phase I kept wrestling with the idea of dimensionality and wanted to use this project to push myself in that area since the end piece would be a photograph and therefore flat.  Ironically, now that I've seen the images the I think flattest pieces are probably the strongest. 

 We've made a big effort to not only leave each site perfectly clean as if we had never been there but also to recycle or reuse everything from each shoot. Lucky for us the parking lot next to the Tractor Building had paper recycling. Here's the piles of post-its all mixed in with the office recycling.

A Visit To Terry's Studio

Today I went to Terry's studio to see the images. I'm pretty stoked!

He's still working on them so dear readers will have to wait a bit for a big reveal. Each image is made of over 15 separate images and is taking roughly 20 hours to process since the file size is over 300M!

We'll be able to print them fairly big if we want!





Here's a sneak peak of the Niagara Falls piece. It's the first one to be printed and I'm super happy with it. The composition feels just like a photograph of a waterfall with the bike path acting as a river and the cinder blocks acting as the rocks surrounding the waterfall.

We'll be posting the final images by next week.

Shoot Report-10b/Green Building

Right after we finished the paper chain shoot we took a short drive over to the Green Building/10b back behind Clipper Mill. It was clear that the clouds would move out of the way while we were working and we'd be able to get started.

The center of the design was meant to wrap around the corner of the building which also made for a good place for two people to be able to start working on the gridded flower pattern in the same space so we knew everything would line up.

The plans for the shoot involved about seven flowers but a good chunk of the space turned out to be in accessible due to the overgrowth making an uneven surface for our ladder to stand on. A little quick thinking (or at least as quick as one can think after an hour or so in the sun) and I eliminated two of the flowers and moved another down to a more accessible space.

My favorite part of the site has always been how morning sun impacts the light. One side of the building is super bright and the other much duller- I was excited about how the light was going impact the varying colors of paper on the sculptures.

The breeze ended up knocking a few of the post its over which added little bits of yellow along the edge of the building.

I try to take a "good picture" of each piece for my records even though I know Terry's will be far superior. My documentation for this piece is my favorite so far.

Just for fun, here's the back of my car for the day all filled with supplies for the three shots that day.

Shoot Report-Paper Chain

Wednesday morning we planned on shooting at 10b and the Tractor Building but were worried that with the slight cloud cover in the morning we'd get all set up and then lose our light. After the way the bench shoot ended we were a little gun shy. We had one of our stellar assistants line up for the day to do the post it shoots so we decided that we should stall a little by shooting the paper chain.

This was hands down the easiest shot since all we had to do was attach my tiny paper chain to the rusty metal. Too bad that no adhesive would stick to the rusty metal that was still wet from the previous night's rainstorm. However I was able to drape the chain from weed to weed in all the overgrowth in front of the metal thing. Baltimore's urban overgrowth has become a recurring element in our series and I'm glad we were able to incorporate this into the shot a little more directly.

We took two shots. One from the right with a little more rust and one from the left with negative space and shadows. I haven't been looking through Terry's viewfinder at all I'm letting composition be solely up to him, which has been one of the unexpected challenges for me from this project. However I suspect that that last one shot with all the white space behind the chain will the the most like one of my drawings.

Since there was really nothing for our assistant to do in this shot except hang out and hope that the weather cleared up. Since I hadn't ever tested out out how post-its adhere to the surfaces we'd be working on I sent our trusty assistant over to see if we'd need reinforcements on brick and metal. We got pretty lucky.

Shoot Report-Druid Hill Bench

About 10 minutes into the set up for this shoot I knew my plans were WAY WAY off. I had planned on attaching over a dozen crepe paper streamers from the tree to the bench so they would look like lasers shooting back into the space. Having never worked with steamers outside I realized why streamers weren't a major staple of backyard birthday parties while I was growing up. Wind.

The weather was hardly windy but the slight breeze quickly turned my straight line of streamers into a giant arc as I struggled to get masking tape to stick to the bark. This wasn't going to work. I couldn't get one streamer to stay straight much less over a dozen.

This is where collaboration can be kind of tricky but also really great. I had to change plans on the spot. It was too windy to drape streamers from point A to point B. To windy to drape them anywhere and still be able to control them, not to mention that Terry would have to be able to shoot those images and moving makes the shots much more complicated.

Having someone there at first was a little nerve racking- I didn't know what I was going to do and there Terry was asking questions and giving unsolicited advice. There was a minute there where I didn't want any of it. Then Terry reminded me that I had talked about weaving streamers into the bench. YES! That was my first idea, I had just wanted to use the space differently but I also love the idea of weaving on site and gave it a try. After the first row of purple I knew this was the right move. An hour later I still had my gradient still and was making stripes across the park bench.

It took about an hour to do the weaving, then Terry got a chance to shoot. The breezy weather that was bringing in Tuesday's afternoon showers was kicking into high gear so Terry needed a lot of time between shots since he had to wait for the wind to stop before taking each photo.

He began by shooting for the panoramic photo, since that will be a composite image that process took about 30 minutes before Terry was able to switch tripods to get the straight shot.

By that time clouds had rolled in completely changing the light between images.

Good thing Terry's quite the expert in shooting in overcast light.

Shoot Report- Plaid Hill

Hands down, this was the hardest shoot. Sadly I don't think it was our best.

Two Saturdays ago when Terry and I were taking one last look at our locations before I got started in the studio we revisited this hill. Once I took out the tape measure  I realized that this space was really big and that my plans had to work with such a big expanse. The plan was to make an enormous plaid pattern using copy paper secured with golf tees over a 80 x 70 foot expanse and photograph it repeating across the hill.  In order to accomplish this we'd need several hours and several assistants. We had the perfect assistants, and the supplies but time was not on our side.

 Each piece of copy had to be put down individually and secured with two golf tees into a hill full of roots and rocks while maintaining the plaid pattern. This was incredibly time consuming since many of the stripes were several pieces of paper wide. We moved down the hill very slowly, not because we were four slow people but because this simply took a long time.

Sadly after about an hour and a half we had just barely repeated the pattern once (the plan was two and a half repeats!) and we were losing our light. The piece wasn't close to done and we had to shoot anyway or we'd loose the light.

 Here's Terry setting up the camera as the long evenings shadows creep across the plaid. The Iowa painter in me loves the shapes and colors interacting in an abstract way.  The part of me that's really invested in the project was cringing at the fact that at this scale the plaid was probably unreadable. The biggest challenge in working on a hill and our biggest concern from the dandelion piece and the impetuous for continuing this project!

I wasn't sure. If I was alone in my studio I'd just erase it and start over. But I wasn't alone in the studio, I wasn't the only artist working here and the light in the trees WAS beautiful. I couldn't just erase and start over. We're working under the constrictions of time, of working on site, having a team of assistants and of course the number of hours of sunlight slipping away from us.

We ended up shooting from a much more extreme angle, letting the plaid go out of the frame of the composition like it would if I were drawing it. The location and light were perfect. I just hope the sculpture is readable.

I should give a shout out to our helpful assistants, all three of whom are recent alumni or students at the school where Terry and I teach. One of the main reasons Terry and are keeping this blog (outside of sharing it with the whole internet) is so we can share our process with the students we teach, so they can gain insight into how we both approach a project. 

It's fun to be able to include a few of them in our process as well. 

This week Terry will be in the think of compositing the photos, color correcting them and editing them. Since we don't share a studio and I'm headed to Chicago for a wedding I won't get my first look until next week. Fingers. Crossed.

Shoot Report- Niagara Falls

We wanted strong sunny morning light for the Niagara Falls shoot and Monday morning gave us incredibly lovely and just a little warm summer sun. 

What I didn't anticipate was that the mylar would be so reflective and hot. In hindsight I guess that NASA wants to use a kind mylar for solar sails so I shouldn't have been so surprised that the space I was working in would be SO shiny and reflective that it would also be about 10 degrees hotter. It also made all my process photographs filled with these little constellations of light flaring back at the camera. I imagine Terry's will be be too.

I decided the morning of the shoot that I should bring some of my colored 8 ft streamer curtains that I had in the studio so I could try to convey some of the illusion of the Niagara Falls lit up at night.

I used a grand total of 12 curtain panels, 4 of which I attached together to make a double layer with silver attached over a purple or gold panel. Luckily these curtains come with four grommets attached at the top for hanging. Once you tear the mylar a little it's really easy to rip the whole piece in half, the grommets are key to hanging them securely without tearing the whole curtain.

I had to work close to the edge of the 8 ft switchback, I only dropped something once during the whole process, a Ziploc bag while we were cleaning up.

Here's the 24 foot curtain expanse along the switchback. 

Terry took roughly 75 photos of each sculpture- he'll use multiple images to come up with a more panoramic composite-it seems like a lot but he needs to bracketing  the exposure and take photos from  on point of view so he can get far more information into the shot. 

It took Terry about 15-20 minutes to get all the photographs while waiting for everything to be still. A slight breeze was maddening because all the leaves behind the piece moved not to mention the lightweight sparkly streamers. I tried to capture that part in little videos on my camera.

Sitting back at watching Terry was my favorite part of the shoot. It was really my only chance to be with the sculpture sit back and watch it move and sparkle. Much like a giant moving waterfall it was almost impossible just to see because of the motion and the light flaring. When I designed this piece I had thought the streamers would resemble the Falls from shape and strong vertical lines more than anything else. The motion the light created with any slight movement was a really pleasant surprise.

Considering we were on the Jones Falls trail we had relatively few visitors to the shot.  Three groups of dog walkers, and a biker, this family and their new puppy seemed entranced by the  sparkle, as they rounded the switchback one of the boys was walking backwards away from it so he could keep looking at it.

Finally clean up was quick and easy, each curtain or set of curtains got put into their own Zip lock bag and are back in storage in my studio to be used in new weavings.