Take Your Own Picture

Are these "Take Your Own Picture" booths still around? I haven't seen one lately! It took a while to locate these photos which were taken in the machine at Salem Willows. These are of my daughter and me, back in the early 1980's:

And here's a couple of my sister and her best friend Laurie:

Triangular Design

That triangle stamp from Obock really set me off in a new direction. I like the fact that a combination of six equilateral triangles will give me a hexagon. Brings me right back to my "Grandmother's Flower Garden" quilting days.

I love the patterns that can be created out of various elements. I have some portrait drawings which would make nice collages in a style similar to my second Blanche (which is in the collection of artist Charles Kartsonis). I will use the triangle patterns as backgrounds and as frames.

This technique is highly suitable for folks with obsessive tendencies. Since I don't have a punch for triangles, I trace them with a template using a black ultra-fine Sharpie. The outline is retained and when the triangles are positioned on a black lined grid, the double outline effect adds dimension.

I'm using a bead sorting tray to keep my colors separate. Each triangle measures 23/32. It fits on my thumbnail and my nails are short. This technique works best with thin paper. I'm using Thai unryu and another type called Chiri.

The technique is a quilters joy, really, with all these ready-to-apply shapes: custom colorforms applied to gridded 140# watercolor paper. Coat area with Golden's acrylic gloss medium, apply shape, and coat completely with medium.

AnitaNH Cover Contest

There is a nice article in the December 2009 issue of Artforum on the postcards of Walker Evans. "Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard" is the title of the show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The show mixes artworks with ephemera from the artist's career, presenting walls of gridded postcards arranged by Walker Evans' own subject categories. Evans was an obsessed collector of postcards.

I was so excited by the dotted design of this month's Artforum cover that I created my own adaptation featuring collage work done during the period 2004-2009. There are 32 collage vignettes. All but numbers 18 and 21 are shown on my collage site.

Vignette number 18 is from a digital collage called Risking Absurdity (Digression No. 1) and vignette number 21 is from a collage called "Pecking Order."

The first person to correctly name the remaining 30 titles will receive their choice of either a set of six AnitaNH Art Cards, or a 90 minute one-on-one collage workshop (transportation to Wakefield, New Hampshire not included).

Dump Stuff Run-On

The thing about the dump is to go with an open mind. I never know what I am going to find. From this time of year until "mud season" book pickings are somewhat limited mostly to paperbacks. But I managed to find a couple of interesting ones:

I'm actually reading The Sun Also Rises for the first time since high school. And after that, I might tackle the W.H. Hudson book that Hemingway mentions:

"The Purple Land" is a very sinister book if read too late in life.

I'm tempted to skip ahead to Hudson's book as soon as I can find a copy. I'm not getting any younger so it could be dangerous. I wouldn't mind a copy of the University of Wisconsin Press edition:

This facsimile of the 1904 Three Sirens Press edition includes striking woodcuts by Keith Henderson illustrating the characters in the novel and the fauna of Uruguay. Ilan Stavans's introduction offers an opportunity to revisit The Purple Land as a "road novel" in which an outsider offers reflections on nationality and diasporic identity.

I had to look up the word diasporic and it took a few tries before I found a dictionary that included it:

I might take advantage of this copy of "The Purple Land" in the Internet Archive before rapid decrepitation sets in. There's even a character in there named Anita:

Poor girl, someone cut her bangs too short! Might be the fault of the illustrator, Keith Henderson, who I suspect holds some sort of grudge against womenkind. How else could he depict something like this found on Artnet, titled "A young man making a frenzied attack upon the head dress of a woman":

Beverly, Mass. - Part III

I'm so glad that I published all of the old post cards from Beverly. I got to participate in something called "Postcard Friendly Friday" which is organized by Marie Reed over at The French Factrice, her vintage postcard blog. And I was even contacted by the Beverly Citizen newspaper regarding my post.

One thing I learned today is that the business side of the postcard is also important! So here are a few of the most interesting ones:

I mentioned the Lynch Park lions in Part II. You can see a nice postcard view of them guarding the rose garden. I found it on a site called Primary Research: Historic Beverly Postcards and Images.

They also have this view of Woolworth's on Cabot Street. I love the trolley and the long dresses on the women! And here's a woman in summer white at Dane Street Beach.

Here's an interesting photo of President Taft's summer residence being moved on a barge.

There's even a shot of the construction of Rte. 128 - my old commute from hell!

From the North of Boston Library Exchange, here's a more recent shot of Beverly Plaza . One of those cars in the parking lot could be my mothers. We shopped at Star Market a lot!

I'm intrigued by this shot of the Beverly Reservoir. I believe the flat-topped hill in the distance is Folly Hill. Amazing if it is. I spent lot's of time up there after my parents moved to Danvers. Their house was just over the other side of Folly Hill on Bradley Road. Kids would slide down the grassy slopes on pieces of cardboard and cross under Rte. 128 via a cow tunnel to get to Cherry Hill Farm.

Here's another photo of the gardens at Lynch Park. If you walked up those brick stairs to the right you would be on the ocean. It was such a beautifully mysterious spot, always quiet and cool. The record to this photo includes the note: "Italian Garden at David S. Lynch Memorial Park. Mrs. Marie Evans had the gardens constructed on her estate in 1910 after she removed the home which she rented to President William Howard Taft for the Summer White House in 1909 and 1910."

Here's an amazing aerial view of Beverly's waterfront (published by the Wakefield Trading Company of Wakefield, Mass.) and I can see the yellow billboard near the fork in the road with the house that was my parent's on Cabot Street across the street to the right.

And two other nice aerials: Cabot Street and Broadway.

I can't believe that I'm only on page 32 of 51. I'll have to come back to this another time. I'll add a link for NOBLE to the list on the right. Here's an image in closing: lovely Library Ladies of 1913.

OK, just this one more, a beautiful hand-colored bird's eye view of Beverly from the collection "Panoramic Maps, 1847-1929," part of the American Memory project of the Library of Congress.

Beverly, Mass. - Part II

It's nice to look at these old Beverly photos again. I forgot that I had so many of them tucked away! As a kid, one of my favorite places to go was Lynch Park. There were two beaches, one sandy one which was nice for swimming, and the other rocky one was great for catching crabs. The best thing was the garden, surrounded by a brick wall and guarded by twin lion statues. Dawson Hall burned down before the days that I would take my daughter there.

The view at Hospital Point made it a nice place to go parking. I did a watercolor of the view in daylight when I was in junior high . . . my first and last attempt at both watercolor and plein air painting!

This next item was tough to locate but once I started looking at the post cards I had to find it. It's something that I have been saving since high school. I almost "decoupaged" it to a pine board back then. . . glad I didn't. The Whitman building was right across the street from the house on Cabot Street.

Here are my mother and I in the front yard with the brick Whitman building in the background. The back of the photo is dated Aug. 1955. If you followed the road to the left you would come to the Salem-Beverly Bridge.

I have met a number of people from Beverly in my shop over the years. It seems that this area of New Hampshire attracts folks from the North Shore!

Beverly, Mass. - Part I

I was born in Beverly, Massachusetts and lived in my parent's house on Cabot Street until age 5.

The house was a stone's throw away from the Salem-Beverly Bridge. The next view is the "down town" area of Cabot Street.

I moved back to Beverly in 1976 and lived briefly in a 3rd floor apartment on Broadway before moving to a small cape on Essex Street where I lived until I moved to New Hampshire in 1996.

My house on Essex Street was right down the street from the Beverly Public Library where I first began my self-education in art.

The old high school across the street from the library was part of North Shore Community College and I had signed up for an adult education course in greeting card illustration there. Unfortunately, the teacher became ill so the course was cancelled.

The Piano Girl

Here is an old photo from my curio cabinet. It was found inside the used player piano that my folks purchased so I could have lessons back in sixth grade.

You can see her in my banner photo for this blog, along with this other old photo:

It's funny that I never noticed how her cheeks were tinted pink until viewing the enlarged scan!

Here's a view of the back of the photo:

Her name has been written in pencil: Kate Lewis, maybe. I can't quite make it out.

Old and Odd

I love odd photographs. The black and white work of Jerry Uelsmann fascinates me. I'm also attracted to old photos. I've had these stereo views since the 80's. I credit my appreciation of the format to a photo archives course I took in library school. It involved research at such notable Boston institutions as SPNEA (The Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities) which has now adopted Historic New England as its public identity.

All of that was pre-internet. Now I can visit any number of visually rich sites without leaving the comfort of my chair! Here's a good one that I just discovered today: Stereoviews.com .

The Whoosh Women

I couldn't help noticing one of my favorite "whoosh" women over on the End of Suburbia site. I started a collection of them a while back, filed them away, and then forgot about them. I didn't have time to track them down yesterday, but after about a half hour of searching this evening I managed to locate them!

Fits and Starts

Here's a line-up of work in progress. My goal is not to dwell too long on these. Not to build up the importance of this exercise in my mind. I like these so far for the way that the lines don't quite touch where they would otherwise intersect:

I have a lot of little coated extras to use up. They are such a pain to store. No matter how carefully I lay them out, they end up shifting and sticking together in the wrong places. Here's one called "Head Stone" with a few extra of those two Zinc Penny guys:

This one is acrylic on black charcoal paper unfinished since year when I first started painting the dots (it began as a follow-up to Primary Dots On Black) .

And this little pile of remnants holds promise: