Category Archives: Fantastic Memory
pieces that combine traditional portraits with more fantastic elements
Piece of LA
This piece was a little bit of an experiment but something I’ve wanted to try for a while. One of the things I love so much about working with textiles is that there is so much detail and tactile beauty in everything. Of course, when you’re farther away from the piece the details are harder to make out. It is true that this should be something that pekes the viewers interest and draws them closer but in this work the user is confronted by the piece from a much farther distance. The photograph was taken on an 8×10 camera by the photographer, Miska Draskoszy, and then I cropped and digitally manipulated it, making this unfinished piece into a distinct work of its own.
Baseball Player
- Baseball Player – mixed media, 2009
A baseball player with bling…
L.A. – study
- L.A., study – 2014 – approx 9″ x 14″
In this portrait, the figure is shown deep in thought while an unknown (and incomplete) figure hands him a rooster.
Hooky Kid
In this piece, I tried to bring a lot of different ideas into the mix. Up until this point, I had been sticking to a regular three-quarter facial view and here I tried bringing the full figure into view. At the same time, I was also addressing more of the background with stitchery than I had before, speaking to how a person’s environment affects the person as a whole.
In a new theme, I added more fantastic elements to the figure – a hook on the youth’s right hand and a cybernetic eye on the youth’s left eye – to emphasize that there are other external aspects that are affecting the personal makeup.
In a third subject, man’s relation to technology is being addressed here: the cybernetics and industrial parts melding with the body, the regular, predictable patterns in the background and 3-d rendering-like nature of the youth’s hair and shorts, the regular stratifications created by the yellow and green bands behind the youth and the formulaic sphere beneath him, the similarity between the background stitchery and lines of computer text. With all these themes simultaneously juxtaposed with the similarity between a stitch and a computer pixel along with using such a traditional medium as sewing to represent and contrast the modern digital age, I am thinking about and attempting to make the viewer think about how the “traditional” world of the hand-made fits in with the contemporary world of today.
