I sent out an email to help ward off the creative block I was in a few weeks ago…
“here’s how it works:
i give you 3 abstract words and 3 concrete words and you make me a piece of art on a postcard size card and mail it to me. you interpret the words however you see fit and with me in mind. you do the same, send me 3 abstract words and 3 concrete words, and your snail mail address!!!, and i’ll mail YOU a postcard with my interpretation of your words and with you in mind.
you don’t have to be good at making art. in fact, i love bad art. yeah, send me bad art.”
…and so now the art is rolling in! and here’s what a sample of my postcards looked like before i sent them out.
Are you counting down the days until you can get a Chicago Graves Calendar in your hands?
The Calendars will be available starting October 4th at the Artwalk Ravenswood. The good folks who organize this artwalk have graced me with some wall space at the corner of Berteau and Ravenswood. Come find me and your calendar both Saturday, October 4th, and Sunday, October 5th, from 11am-6pm. (I will remind you all about this plenty!) I will be standing by some unrelated paintings of mine trying to explain why I dressed people up in costumes, drove them to a patch of grass in a graveyard and why there’s this polka dot car always in the background…and this will help you keep track of your days throughout the year, too. Makes sense to me! So what is to be expected in this calendar?… let’s see, you might recall sneak peaks of Resurrection Mary (vanishing hitchhiker), Frank and Peter Gusenberg (gangsters), the Clowns (clowns), Oscar Mayer (sausage maker), Enrico Fermi (father of atomic bomb.) Also expect great months of the year that will feature: the famous ghost of Inez Clarke, Ignaz Schwinn (bicycle maker), Mrs. O’Leary (whose cow did NOT start the Great Chicago Fire-the family has officially cleared her name,) Marshall Field (department store maker,) Emma Goldman (troublemaker,) Chester Gould (DIck Tracey cartoonist,) and the 12th mystery grave???? You will have to buy the calendar. If you can not make it to the art walk, you may find me crashing your holiday parties with calendars in my trench coat. If you don’t throw a party, I will have them for sale at my etsy store. So many options.
Finally, it’s appropriate to call the polka dot car a clown car. It was full of clowns this weekend! I took some clowns to visit Showman’s Rest of Woodlawn Cemetery in Forest Park, IL. Yes, this blog post, among many of late, are shameless attempts at promoting my forthcoming 2009 Chicago Cemetery Calendar. These are just sneak previews of what is to come. These clowns–this is not their day job– just looked so good I had to share some pics before the calendar debut! Meet the cemetery characters pictured below: (L-R: Vivian, Alan, Erin, Dave, and Scarlett.)
The whole crew got suited up at Alan and Erin’s place in the neighboring town of Berwyn. (They did not know me and my project until the day of the photo shoot; this speaks volumes of their character.)
You know you have good models when they come with sketchbooks of their own face paint designs!
There are so many amazing pictures of this photo shoot I am tempted to purchase a “Pro” account at Flickr and share them all. I’d like to think my 200 picture limit on my free Flickr account keeps my picture sharing to a finely crafted and curated venue of only my best. Otherwise, I fear my pictures would be interred in its own vast, unvisited cyber graveyard. These are the decisions of our generation, folks, to go “flickr pro” or not…
And what better way to end a perfect clown day then with a perfect Italian ice from Gina. I’m not sure Gina fully understood our clown agenda but that’s okay, she gave us free refills.
So, our road trip dreams came true! We got in the local paper at the end of our musical road trip through the mountains. The Franklin News-Post tucked us neatly in between the obituaries and the animal control report. I mean, the polka-dot car was meant to brighten up a newspaper page like that, no?
And, if you can read the fine print above, we committed no crime to achieve this fame in the “Moonshine Capital of the World.” (Our whiskey’s legal as far as we can tell, ladies and gentleman.) Our 3 copies were mailed to us from the great staff at the Blue Ridge Institute…who originally spotted us with our instruments outside their museum. The top picture is Stacie, Natasha, and I with “Polkie” in front of the Crooked Road Sign. So, if there is ever argument about where “Polkie” first went into official print, it was in Franklin County, Virginia. The band-aids painted on the car even got some coverage! Get it? Coverage.
The second picture is Natasha in the center, fiddling with the band. You may never know how good they sounded…but, wow-wee, they sure were good-lookin’! Many thanks goes to the Blue Ridge Institute staff for submitting our story and reminding us that our trip was, indeed, worth a bit of ink.
Now, fingers still crossed about next year’s brochure!!!
So here’s the moment you’ve been waiting for…go to my sloppily rigged podcast on this temporarily generic “big sister” sponsored blog (pardon the cyberdundance)— you’ll hear the fiddle tune: “Chief O’Neill’s Favourite Hornpipe”, Bob’s stories, the wind, among other things. It’s even an “Enhanced Podcast” with an accompanying slideshow. Notice the well thought out zoom-ins!
As planned from my previous entry, I can now present the audio dimension of my expedition to Mt. Olivet Cemetery.
I’d like to give a shout out to my big sister, Theresa, for helping to put my very first podcast up. Just like she’s let me crash on her couch many times, she’s letting me crash my podcast on her site for a little while until I get my cyber-self on its own two podcasting feet.
Theresa is an amazing art teacher who puts clay-mation videos from her 5th graders online! It makes me want to go back to the 5th grade! They’re hilarious little videos that make any self-respecting grown-up say: I, too, can use technology to better the world. Hey Theresa, care to share the link to those clay-mation videos?
“That is the most Jean Fitzgerald photograph I’ve ever seen….you know, sans Polka-dot car.”-Natasha. This was taken at the Swap-o-rama-rama in good ole Chicago. I arrived Saturday at the event with my dear friend, Liz, pictured to the left of the giant mound of free and amazing clothes:
I did put on a personal small-scale clotheswap in my own home a few weeks ago as featured earlier in this blog but that pales in comparison to this event. This specific Chicago Swap-o-rama-rama -there have been many held in other cities- served as a fundraiser for a newly proposed school called Three Sisters Folk Art School to be located outside Chicago. Their tag line was “Creators not Consumers” and they described the event as “part Project Runway…part clothing swap…learn to turn “fiber trash” into wearable treasure.” I can get into that…old clothes manipulated on the sewing machines and then displayed on the runway in celebration of the thrift.
Here is a quick clip from the founders of the Swap-o-rama-rama:
At that event I learned how to make way cool earrings (tba at a later post), silkscreening techniques, loom demos, and my favorite…the 3 minute scarf!
First, I gathered random shreds of yarn, especially the fluffy, poofy kind. I cut them at unscientific lengths that I thought sufficed. I suppose you could shred a t-shirt or other non-fraying fabric into your desired length as well.
Then I knotted them randomly, I mean, intuitively, together. The more knotting you do, the shorter your scarf length will become.
Presto! A scarf in just minutes from scraps of yarn.
Although, I ‘ve been altering and knotting while at stoplights and in line at the grocery store— I guess it’s the 3-minute scarf that reincarnates.
An altar was created this evening in my home. If you don’t recognize these angelic faces, then you probably never went to Catholic school and you haven’t gotten the latest “Men” issue of BUST magazine, featuring Jermaine and Bret of Flight of the Conchords.
At this point I am going to partake in what I call “cyberdundancy.”
cyberdundance: the act of re-posting, regurgitating, or recycling Internet information in another Internet location.
So pardon my cyberdundant youtube link but I think we should all spread the Good News during this Easter time :
And while I’m spending time in the adoration-sphere, let’s take a visit to Leslie Hall Land. You may be aware that I had the privilege of posing with the famous ‘cewebrity’ last month in front of the Polka-Dot car. After our photo shoot we totally high -fived.
In true cyberdundance, I have just recently made a comment on her myspace page. Check it out before it gets buried under her other comments from fans.
The pictures are also on my flickr page…hmm, where else can I be cyberdundant?
