Cover Design for My Women My Monsters

 

The last task for the completion of my chapbook of poetry, My Women/My Monsters, was finished a few days ago - a picture for the cover. This concludes work that was begun in 2012 and went through various permutations, including a one-woman show at the local university art gallery.

Each poem in the book is illustrated by a meticulously rendered black and white pencil drawing. My publisher thought to use one of these illustrations for the book cover. We narrowed this down to two choices. I liked one of these choices - the half self portrait I made with my fingers reaching around my eye to grab a pencil. There are, of course, many allusions here. The swan neck deformities in my fingers allude to the connective tissue monster of Ehlers-Danlos. The fingers circumscribe my left eye. The left is the one with the color deficit, hence the illustrations are in black and white.

Yet even though black and white is the theme of the book and would therefore make for an appropriate cover, I mentioned to my publisher that a color cover would be more engaging and that I would try to do our favorite illustration over again as a color painting.  I knew that I would have to keep checking my progress with my "better" right eye but I felt that I would be up to the challenge.
It would have been boring to make an exact copy of the original black and white illustration so I decided to embellish a bit. For one thing, a simple portrait alone would not be quite so monstrous. As monsters was the theme in this book I decided to use the arm from the illustration of Tomb Guardians and paint that on to the turned palm of the hand. Everything now dovetails rather nicely. The pencil guides the eye which creates the vision and the inner monsters grows on to the hand.

Cyber Sale Art

The end of the year holiday season generally takes me by surprise. This year I decided to prepare early. In September I polished up my web site. In October I reactivated my Etsy online market and made new business cards. In November new business stationary was printed. November also saw my book signing and my studio sale.

Setting up for my studio sale  allowed me to review a large body of work and notice some previously unobserved confluences across media. The pit fired vessels harkened back to the time I made large ink and watercolor paintings. I put them by an ink painting double portrait I had done years ago which was recently returned to me. I definitely like the marks made by sooty inks on paper and black smoke on ceramic.

My recent gallery wrapped printed paintings bore an uncanny resemblance to my earlier designs in ceramic. The gallery wrapped pieces were my way of combining materials that were odds and ends from other work: leftover painted muslin with stamped designs from my Liberty Snake project, an assortment of wood frames to pull the muslin over, ceramic sculptural buttons to top everything off. The ceramic sculptures the echo these designs are musical instruments that I will be making some performance videos of next month.

Other corners of the room exhibited confluences in design. The red arc of a plastic tongue in a snake reflected the red arc of a snake in the painting above it. In fact everything in that corner had a red theme.

I found the perfect antique easel for a tile with a dog design on it, the spots also echoed in the ceramic whistle below.

Thus far there were no takers on my little square canvases so I just loaded them up on Etsy for half the price that canvases that size generally go for and will hope for a good cyber weekend. With these small canvases I’ve reached my goal of having at least a hundred works available in this online shop: https://www.etsy.com/search?q=Janet%20Kozachek

Facebook Censorship of Art and The Problem of Decision Making Via Algorithm

Tomorrow I will have my book signing at the Portfolio Gallery. In conjunction with this book signing I will also be exhibiting and selling original drawings, some from The Book of Marvelous Cats, others just on the feline theme.

All was going well with my preparations. The work had been delivered. I ran a last minute ad on Facebook while preparing refreshment snacks. Then something happened to put a significant damper on the festive mood. Facebook wrote to me with a letter of "disapproval" for my drawing. I read their justification for their disapproval and not allowing me to advertise my drawings. I blinked in disbelief at their words. The completely innocuous drawing above was labeled by the Facebook crew as "indecent," "showing too much skin," "having sexual content," and "not in keeping with my product."

I wrote back to them explaining that there in fact was no sexual content. The content was about a man who took a bath, sat on a towel and looked at a piece of art work on his wall while his cats played in the background. If anyone actually read my description they would have understood this.

Here is the narrative that went with my drawing:

"It was Christmas Eve and Bertrand was alone. He turned up the heat in his apartment, poured himself a glass of white wine and sat on the floor to admire a large painting of dancing men that he had just purchased. The painting was just beyond the boundaries of his budget, but he had no regrets, for this piece of art made his soul smile. It was Christmas Eve, and although Bertrand was alone, he was not lonely. He had his music, his art, his warmth and his cats.
Enjoy this drawing in person tomorrow at the Portfolio Gallery in Columbia, SC and meet the artist from noon to 3PM."

To counter the "too much skin" charge from Facebook I pointed out that the figure has his back turned and not even much of that is showing. I simply stated that it is most certainly not indecent to sit on a towel and look at a painting. As to their last charge that it "is not in keeping with my product" I can only say that I am an artist who makes drawings. This is a drawing. My product is an exhibition of my drawings, of which this is included. The theme of the exhibition is cats. There are two cats present. Tomorrow I can only hope that there will be people present.

What caused Facebook alarm about this rather naïve yet joyful drawing?  I can only conjecture that they had used some sort of algorithm in the screening of images and that my drawing fell haplessly into that evaluation.  Hopefully they will correct this.  In the mean time, figurative artists, museums that exhibit nude paintings,  and galleries that exhibit figurative art should beware.  Facebook might think that you're obscene.

November 11 - 12 Update: Facebook stands by their evaluation.  The image is not allowed.  "Too much skin."  I had not realized that figurative art with nude or semi-nude figures is not allowed.  How, then, would a museum trip to the Sistine chapel be advertised?  Way too much skin there for sure.  So I put the question to Facebook on how, given their restrictions, would someone advertise something like an art trip to the Sistine chapel as their guidelines would not allow any images.  In reviewing their guidelines, not only are all nude images prohibited, but all draped figures as well.  The latter are described as "implied nudity."  We'll see how they respond.  It seems like the crew that drew up these guidelines had not anticipated art or art history tours.  In the mean time, the controversy simply made for some interesting conversation at my exhibition today.

The Bullet Pointed Life with Painted Leaves

The next ten days will be very busy for me. When things become this active my life becomes a series of small tasks, punctuated by art that I can complete quickly. The days are filled with activities that can be described by bullet points.

In between these bullet points, I am making small paintings of falling leaves. The leaves themselves are printed with stamps that I carved from soft linoleum. I dip the linoleum in inks and paints. I print these are previously faux finished papers.

* I have an exhibition and book signing this Sunday at the Portfolio Gallery in Columbia, SC from noon to 3 PM. The books and the work has been delivered but there are still some preparations to be made.

* I have a book cover design to paint that I have only just started. I’ve finished refining the interior illustrations as well as the text. Will I have the energy and concentration necessary to do the final work?

* The house needs to be cleaned much more thoroughly than usual for my open studio visit and fall clearance sale. Can I do this in ten days?

* Bills always arrive while we’re away. Oddly enough I don’t open them as soon as we come back home. Will I make the deadlines?

I should be attending to paperwork and other mundane tasks but I find that I can only do so much drudge work before the yearning to paint or draw surfaces, insisting to be fulfilled.

* The yard needs to be straightened out a little better. Are there simply too many leaves to rake up in time for my fall clearance sale the weekend after next?

Wrapped, Painted, Printed, Sewn and Stenciled Art

Preparing for a studio sale sometimes generates more art. The point is to clear out the studio to make room for more work and a more comfortable environment in which to create that work. It is always satisfying when clean up means finding interesting ways to use up odds and ends of materials.


On a recent trip to Charleston, a friend and I stopped by a junk shop where I purchased a collection of badly made wooden box frames. I hesitated to buy them because at ten dollars for seven of them, they were still overpriced. But my friend encouraged me to get these because she thought that I could find a way to cover them up with something.

The frames stayed in an annoying unused presence in a bag in the middle of my sunroom for over a month before I finally had a chance to dispose of them. After sanding out, gluing and putting putty on all the defects, I figured that they would be best used for small wrap around canvases.

I decided to make a wrap around canvas using the extra primed muslin I had left over from my giant painted snake project. For the small squares I also used the same stamps that I had made previously for the patterns on those three dimensional decorative snakes.

I cut the primed muslin generously in order to have enough to wrap around the sides and back of the wooden frames - covering up as much as possible. This I faux finished, stamped, stained and generally had a good experimental time with. When the paintings were dried I decided to sew on focal points using my previously made ceramic buttons. I liked the end effect yet I found that I liked the full design flat a bit better than wrapped around the edges of the canvas. Perhaps in the future I’ll just make larger squares with more elaborate designs.

History Revised and Recruited

In my last blog post, I mentioned my letting go of original drawings from my Book of Marvelous Cats and my surprise at being a little reluctant to part with some. Time, accumulation, and changes of circumstance generally do work their effects on sentiment. In addition to parting with my drawings, I will be putting miniature paintings of felines up for sale as well.
 The paintings date from 2010, when the world’s attention was focused on a group of miners trapped deep underground in a copper mine in Chile. For every day the miners were trapped underground, I made a small painting. I divided these paintings in to five sections: bats for when the miners were starving while waiting to be found, folk art bats with round luminous disks on their chests for when the bore hole that brought sustenance to them broke through, jaguars for the days spent waiting for the larger escape tunnel to break through, dogs for when the miners had to work to remove rocks as the escape tunnel bore down, and finally the birds for the flight out of the mines in the contraption named "the phoenix."

I made TIFF files of the whole collection and sent this to the Chilean Embassy. I don’t think anything was done with it, but the ambassador did give me a nice book on the history of U.S. Chilean diplomatic relations.

When the Chilean miners were rescued, they became stars for a while. I had some reservations about how they were being treated, fearing that as the news cycle ended and the focus off, the same miners would be neglected. This fear proved to be well founded. The miners lost their lawsuits, they fell on economic hard times. Some returned to the mines. I cannot imagine how awful it would be to swallow one’s feelings of claustrophobia and be forced once again down a mine shaft. The miners apparently did not benefit from the movie made about their trials, either, not even being given a bit part!

In a strange sort of synchronicity, the miniature paintings I made from that time have also been readjusted and reduced in a number of ways. They were never sold as a set. The price has been reduced somewhat. And the bold, brave jaguars? They too, were modified to appear as domestic cats. I’m still at work on them - giving them cat faces and cat ears and putting them back to work. I hope that they pay some bills.

http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/639433/Chilean-miners-the-33-antontonio-banderas-juan-illanes-San-Jose-mine

The Book of Marvelous Cats Book Signing

The month of November will be exceptionally active. I will have a book signing at the Portfolio Gallery in Columbia, SC this Sunday in conjunction with an exhibition and sale of my original illustrations. In order to prepare, I spent a good part of October making small paintings and extra drawings for the occasion.

I don’t generally do this, but I held back some of my favorite illustrations from The Book of Marvelous Cats. I was aided in this by my husband not wanting to part with them all either. My husband’s sentiment was not surprising, as he has more attachment to things than I do. I surprised myself, though, by complying in tucking "The Magic Cat," "Aboriginal Cats," and "Mother Cat" back in to my folio. I also removed "Acrobatic Cats," and "Guardian Cat" for a patron who is purchasing them in advance of the book signing. The best ones!

Other preparations for my book signing event included obtaining better artist biography handouts, new business cards, new business stationary, and a great poster design. I do hope all this works and I can make a bit of an artistic comeback.