Where I Work

My most recent post on Instagram was about my office. Okay, that’s a bit risky. I’m more or less a private person (despite the blogs). And the pic kinda does go there a bit.

Why are there skeletons around your desk, Tristis?

It still looks messy.

How can you work here?

People can zoom in and see things like the word “Procrastination” on my wall. It’s not done. The full statement is “Procrastination is the fear of required perfection.” Ironic, I know, but sincerely done. Now it’s a reminder that even telling yourself that you don’t have to be perfect doesn’t free you from the anxiety.

And the skeletons. Oh, so many bony bits and bobs all over my world. I have had people refuse to work with me after seeing my office. I get the notion they maybe thought I worship Satan or something. Hard to say, when they don’t explain themselves, or speak directly to me any longer. 

Relax. They’re for reference. 

Okay, I also think bones are interesting on their own, but I was using them for reference on a novel…then just kept collecting. Even though they’re the thing most people associate with me, they’re far from the only thing I collect—and, hey, another thing is teapots, so…not so Satany now, am I?

Another thing is books. I have a serious addiction to books. I collect all kinds, although I prefer reference books like dictionaries and encyclopedias. I also have a wide range of art and design books. And a personal favourite is pop-up.

I wax poetic on books and the collection of them in my other blog—which focuses on writing—Domus Comm. I decided a while back that I needed to explain my library. I’ve been curating it for a while now and have some very interesting books (and assorted things among the books). But my family and friends see only the bulk and thinking of its value—or deadweight, as some describe it—instead of the books themselves. They’re not seeing the trees for the forest, so to speak. 

This blog is supposed to be about art, though, so back to that:

For the record, my studio also stays pretty messy. I clean it up frequently, and clean it out every so often, but it is a room full of stuff to make stuff, so it's never actually clean.

I don't have a lot of pictures of it. That's pretty much accidental. I would actually like to document my work when I make art, because I so often forget how I do things. Alas, however, it's pretty rare to have a shot of it.

I’m not sure how artistically pleasing anybody else finds the myriad of things I gather around myself, but I enjoy it all. I got a notion, though, a while back about how other people respond to it. Okay, this was actually years ago and it was a different office, but (and this shouldn’t be a surprise) kinda the same look and feel. 

A prior office

We held a party for a bunch of community radio folks. This was a creative bunch. Some were musicians, some writers, some artists. They had our entire, very tidy and uncluttered house to hang out in, but everybody ended up sitting around my tiny office on the floor (not nearly enough seating) talking over drinks. I marvelled a bit afterward, until I thought about how all my weird little collectables make me feel—the cacophony of colour, shape and texture; the cluster of story (formed, half-formed, hinted at); the overlapping symbols of moments; together they provide a cushion of distraction from what is otherwise a cold world of sameness and other peoples’ purpose.

During a tour of the Museum of American History a couple of years back I came across the “desk” of a famous author. I can’t remember whose, and damned if I can find the pic I took of it, but the point of the display was to show how this man worked, what he surrounded himself with and what level of construction he was comfortable with (his desk was partially plywood). I felt vindicated then, and I guess a bit more now. This is how I work. I could win a billion dollars, move to a mansion, have servants waiting on me hand and foot and I’d STILL have this sort of space to create in. 

The Virgos in my life will just have to learn to cope.

Cartoon of me as a Victorian at work by Lisa Pardy

Those Other Redactions

❄️🍑

It was a snowy afternoon at the end of a pleasant January thaw. Our front deck, which my wife shovelled so diligently when the snow was heavy, prior to any thoughts of a thaw, was now accumulating a fresh couple of inches of snow.

Our heat pump is under the deck, so there's a certain amount of melt that always happens, making nifty little patterns through the boards, and that's exactly what happened this time.

So, I grabbed my new phone (yes, phone. I'm seeing what it does—good little camera for a phone) and took a picture. I was struck by how much it looked like highlighted columnar text.

Mysterious Read

I set about finding the right text for it, eventually remembering an old piece I'd written about the photos of real life moments. We all smile in photos. Especially back before digital, when it cost a lot to develop pictures that came days later, when the moment couldn't be re-shot so easily. All those smiling photos, marking occasions and even otherwise random times, made it seem like our lives were a series of gleeful moments strung together.

The story was about a woman who proudly displayed those other photos (it was titled "Those Other Photos") in her home. And the photos depicted her sexual journey, some of which was painful. I've only shown it to a handful of people. They were all made uncomfortable by it (I thus learned why all our photos are filled with smiles).

This new photo, with my snowy redaction, is my response to those readers and the world, I guess. The words are light, like the snow. The depths are dark and a little rough. Little FYI, the whole text is there in the photo, but the snow's highlight burns the detail all away.

Redact

Art for a year

I enjoy making calendars. I truly do. I like playing with how a year looks—or, really, any timespan. It doesn't have to be a year. I have a few designs that are on the back-burner that, in my humble opinion, are wonders unto themselves. Maybe some day I'll make them. That would be nice.

But in the meantime, I am making other, more straightforward years.

(Damn! Did I say straightforward?)

I have a thing about the weekly grid. It's most often wrong in other calendars. My week does not start on a Sunday. It never did. My week ends on a Sunday. It starts on a Monday. So I was always rather disappointed that the powers-that-be dictated a design that forced me to constantly self-edit when making plans. There's a J-pattern our eyes have to trace when tallying up weekly or weekend plans, "Go thus far, then check out the first block of the next line, please."

When I started managing the radio station, I was handed a lovely (not the least bit decorative) advertising calendar from our ad agent and my mind was blown. It turns out that it's not the LAW that calendars have to start on Sunday!

So, of course, the moment I was given the chance to make my own calendar, I set out to make a grid that began on Monday.

My Graphic Design instructor was not very encouraged, even after I explained the benefits of a Monday-Sunday grid. "People are used to the other way. They'll get confused."

"Okay. I know, I'll put a big space between the five days of the week and the weekend. This will highlight the two best days and remind people that they're different from work days."

"Their eyes will just track over the space. It won't look different enough."

(sigh)

And thats why my grids all have a big foggy MONDAY going down the left side of the grid. Yes, it tells you it's Monday. But it also tells you that it has to tell you this, because you're head is foggy.

My first calendar was based on my photography. I picked photos I thought meant something to the time of year.

It was a nice calendar, but very soon after I put it out, I encountered a process that has pretty much stolen my entire attention.

Papercut art is just fascinating. I think I like it for how it strains against imposed limitations. I don't know. Maybe it's because paper doesn't give me the splinters that woodworking did. I but my mind runs through endless mazes of possibility thinking about how layered 2D designs make interesting 3D shapes, landscapes and mysteries.

My first foray into paper cut calendars was with the Paper Kaleidoscope. The concept behind it was that each month was an individual pattern cut in a separate colour. There was a lot of negative space cut out of the pattern, letting the viewer look through to the next layer (and then next and next for 12 months and a cover). In January, the first colour and pattern were prominent, but when February came, January didn't disappear, it flipped around and became a background coloured pattern. February followed this in turn. What happened over the year was that a new "picture" appeared for each month, a fresh tumbled set of colours, just like inside a kaleidoscope.

I'm not done exploring that. I wanted to look at how mandalas worked and see if my art could speak as a year-long mandala. There were patterns I wasn't able to use in the kaleidoscope that would sing in a mandala.

I started work on a calendar called "At the Lake" which was a series of twelve views of a lake at various times of the year. But my notions make for complicated design and cuts. That calendar is not yet finished and it's been a year and a half.

Seriously, at 8 inches across for the design, this shack becomes an inch or so tall. Look at the itsy lines in that thing! They do not cut out easily. But I love them lots. I need to work on a bigger canvas…or simplify the shack. We'll see.

Meanwhile, this fall, I put together a calendar along the same lines, but with some much needed divisions that make the design easier to deal with. I broke the year into four, with a solid image falling behind every third month. That meant I was only dealing with three layers and could start fresh right afterward. Really, years are set up for this anyway with seasonal changes. So my name for this calendar became quite simply "Seasonal" (I know, not a creative name. It's a working title. I'm wondering how much people care, anyway).

But, hey, I'm still a storyteller. I saw the year progressing along in a theme and my art started to take on the story. It's not a complicated tale. I think it's more cute than anything. I can't describe it here, because there are little surprises in it and I don't want to spoil them for you if you ever decide to buy one of my calendars.

I am going to show off a little bit of the calendar, though. It's fairly handsome.

January here was originally going to be one big flake. But stories don't get told with big flakes taking up all the room, so we go with this mess-o-big-flakes notion, instead. I drew them from magnified pictures of real snowflakes. It floors me that we can see snowflake structure. I have a photo of a flake captured in a bead of water that I took one March morning while standing on the back deck of a house in downtown Fredericton.

Anyway, in this shot, you see the flakes of January, and beneath it, a snowman in February and a few of the snow-laden trees of March. The snowy night sky behind is the barrier between March and April.

April is a dense layer, with just a few cut-outs. I needed it to be rainy and the image behind June is a bright sunny morning. There's some cut-outs that go only to May, where huge pink flowers dominate. In April, the smaller hedge flowers borrow their colour from the giant petals below.

There had been a lot more cut-out of April, but the lines were too small and I felt it was better to use colour and inked lines and limit the cut-outs to shapes that would work with this.

Speaking of April. This was not my first design (I'm not sure it was my second, either). I had wanted to use a lot more of the colours from the pages below, so my first thought was multicoloured easter eggs. I spent a lot of time working out the math for that design, getting the cuts lined up just so, making use of the long petals of May's echinacea flowers.

Well, after all that work, I came to my senses: Easter was at the beginning of April, would come and go quickly and the image would be irrelevant.

Fine.

I kept the design, though. I will use it some other time. That's a lot of detail in those eggs. And I think that the bunny ears playing off the petal shapes was really neat.