The Reckless Boys

The Reckless Boys
© Natalie Schorr 2023

The reckless boys fervently embraced their debaucherous opportunities.

Sounds like Animal House, doesn’t it?

I kind of know these guys. These are my people.

Working on the campus of a small private university, I’m perfectly aware that these things still go down, but not nearly as brazenly as when I was in college when people counted campus streakers by smacking them on the butt as they ran by, which is kind of a shame.

College doesn’t appear to be as fun as it was when I was in college.

Of course, we had no computers or cell phones, so we had a great deal more time on our hands to plot amusements and colleges didn’t have surveillance cameras recording our every move so we got away with a lot more stuff.

Those were the days.

Exquisite Corpse 18 - The Saucy Wench

Exquisite Corpse 18 - The Saucy Wench
© Natalie Schorr 2023

Exquisite Corpse 18 - The saucy wench zealously seized the forthcoming day.

I love this piece. It feels like Shakespeare would be proud to make her part of a future play.

The devilishly delightful smile on her face was supplied from a sketch by Rubens. I just know she’s up to something.

The body is a big metal urn which kind of reminds me of something you might put the ashes of your Great Aunt Ethel in. There are some sculpted marble wings, Michelangelo torso and Leonardo legs, and a large modern fashion eye. Finished with gold metallic Krink marker dots and halo.

This is so much fun!

Exquisite Corpse 17 - Her Illuminating Epiphany

Exquisite Corpse 17 - Her Illuminating Epiphany
© Natalie Schorr 2023

Exquisite Corpse 17 - Her illuminating epiphany immediately transfigured her dolorous life.

When doing an analog collage, you have a couple of choices. You can photocopy/Photoshop a picture to be the correct scale for what you want, or you can “play the hand you’ve been dealt” and use what you’ve got in the size it came in.

I’m a “play the hand you’ve been dealt” person.

Things being out of scale or being lit from multiple angles by impossible light sources never bothered me, but I was pleasantly surprised by having this sculpted collar and the painted face lit by a comparable source, thus leading me to the aforementioned epiphany.

The head is Michelangelo, something Sistine perhaps? I don’t recall who did the sculpted collar and cape. The lower body is the layout of some floor mosaics from Italy, which has this stuff everywhere. The halo is from the same cathedral floor. The hands and feet are from Glamour or InStyle or some modern fashion magazine.

What’s not to love about denim platform shoes? If I had some, my life would, indeed, be far less dolorous.

Exquisite Corpse 16 - Her Improvised Wings

Exquisite Corpse 16 - Her Improvised Wings
© Natalie Schorr 2023

Exquisite Corpse 16 - Her improvised wings greatly broadened her meager opportunities.

Now that I’ve gone down the rabbit hole of cutting up my old art books, I really feel the creative juices flowing again. So I started putting together a series of fun little pieces in this long, thin format.

If you are of “a certain age,” you may remember Sally Field as The Flying Nun, which was a little bit of the inspiration behind this piece. I found a painting of a nun in an impossibly cumbersome robe that made her look like she’d been attacked by silk worms, and decided to liberate her.

The halo is Michelangelo, the arms Leonardo. The body is an Egyptian sculpture below which we find a Ralph Lauren belt, a fashion mag skirt bottom, eye and mouth, and some delightful brocade shoes. It’s finished off with a bit of marker and a gold metallic Krink paint pen.

Exquisite Corpse 15 - Her Generous Proportions

Exquisite Corpse 15 - Her generous proportions never encumbered her ambitious viewpoint.

I don’t exactly know what happened, but somewhere along the way I kind of went off the rails and decided that I should cut up a bunch of art books, and then this happened.

I needed to get out of the rut of the little 12” squares I was doing. They had started feeling stuffy, and I wanted something a little lighter. I don’t exactly remember how I came to this, but I think it was around looking for some sculptures and it morphed into something entirely different.

I feel like I crossed a line here, but it did yield a fun piece.

The generously proportioned body is a ceramic piece, African I believe, to which I added some legs and hands and an eye from an InStyle magazine. The head is an old Dutch painting, I think, but it’s hard to parse these things out once you cut them out and remove them from their captions.

Which is kind of the point, I suppose.

The halo is a mosaic floor piece from some European cathedral. They have so many. And the leaves about her head are a drawing by Leonardo.

Not DiCaprio, silly.

Exquisite Corpse 14 - The Unconventional Mermaid

Exquisite Corpse 14 - The Unconventional Mermaid
© Natalie Schorr 2023

Exquisite Corpse 14 - The unconventional mermaid secretly suspected a questionable ancestry.

I have often wondered through the years if maybe I had somehow been switched at birth. I think my real parents are living in a yurt in the Pacific Northwest carving gourds for a living while their upwardly mobile Republican daughter wonders how she got there.

Yeah, I tend to exaggerate, but it sure would sure explain a lot.

My boss’s boss’s boss loves mermaids, and I mentioned that I had a mermaid in my upcoming show so she’s really excited. I hope that doesn’t wane when she sees this piece. I’m pretty excited about the show, too, although I have a huge number of friends and coworkers who have no idea what I do in my off hours.

It’ll be a revelation, no doubt.

Exquisite Corpse 13 - Her Patchwork Attire

Exquisite Corpse 13 - Her patchwork attire perfectly mirrored her essential quiddity.

Exquisite Corpse 13 - Her Patchwork Attire
© Natalie Schorr 2023

A quiddity is a peculiarity. That’s pretty much my world.

I’ve never been too good at conforming, which is fine for me but not so great for my parents and siblings who love an orderly, conforming world. Surely the pandemic would have disrupted that, but apparently not as everyone seems to have slipped back into their old ways.

I have a big solo show coming up at the North Carolina A&T State University galleries. It’s my first big solo show, and I’ve been working like a fiend every night after work and weekends for the past few months to get ready. I mentioned it vaguely to my older brother, who seems to like me despite my quiddities, but I’m unsure what to do about my mother and younger siblings.

My mother won’t come to see the show primarily because she is physically unable, and that’s certainly for the best. She would only be confused.

My younger siblings, however, are likely to be embarrassed on some level - pick a reason, any reason - so I’m unsure how to deal with them. I suppose the thing to do is invite them and in the same breath say they are under no obligation to come. That should absolve me of the faux pas of not inviting them while giving them an out to say they are busy for the next two months. This way we can remain on speaking terms, sort of, and they don’t have to be exposed to stuff that will doubtless make them uncomfortable.

Everyone else I know or have ever met for more than two seconds is invited, which includes you. I hope you will be there too.

Mixed Breed 7 - a mixed media analog collage

Mixed Breed 7
© Natalie Schorr 2023

This is the seventh piece in my Mixed Breed series. I enjoy doing these with all the different parts, because we all are just a mixture of backgrounds, and that’s cool.

The small private university where I work is all about diversity and wokeness, to the point where I’m always walking on eggshells for fear of using the wrong pronoun and being ostracized for it. I’m trying to avoid pronouns altogether now.

My coworkers complain that no one understands all their identities. I get that, but it is a bit of a mine field. I try hard to respect all the ways they show up. They think they’re perfectly respectful, but at the same time they all seem to think that since I’m a Boomer that I must surely have been at Woodstock.

I was 8 when Woodstock happened. And we couldn’t ALL have been there.

I don’t get my panties in a wad over the error. My identity just wishes these fellow persons would not get the undergarments that these fellow persons may or may not wear in a condensed form when my identity misuses zir or perself.

Goodness knows I’m trying.

Mother 7 - A Double Celebration

Mother 7
© Natalie Schorr 2023

I have no doubt Mother 7 is what my own mother envisioned for her life. Not the orange halves for breasts mind you, but the two prim and proper daughters.

Where did it all go wrong?

My mother was pregnant with me at the same time Jackie Kennedy was pregnant with John Jr. She once told me she had dreamed that one day I would marry him.

Wow. Dodged a bullet there, huh?

I’m sure I would never have made that happen even if I’d lived next door. but when your kids are just babies, I guess it could be easy to attach your own dreams to them. I tried ardently to not do that to my children.

A quick internet search let me see that there wasn’t a single famous person born the same year as my daughter that I would wish upon her. Actually, the list was mostly actors I’d never even heard of.

Goodness, I’m getting old.

Exquisite Corpse 12 - Her Augmentation Obsession

Your mother always said to eat your fruits and vegetables.

Exquisite Corpse 12 - Her Augmentation Obsession
© Natalie Schorr 2023

I enjoy most types of vegetation, but growing up we didn’t have a great variety because we only ate the things my mother liked and cooked. Mom is not a big veggie eater and she’s 91, so you can’t really rag on her about it. She’s gonna do what she’s gonna do, and since she’s lived this long on about 8 different vegetables, you can’t reasonably argue with that.

Breast augmentation began in earnest in the 1970s. It was around before, though, albeit not very successfully. It’s safety is still in question, but that doesn’t stop people from getting them. I think in the end, you should do you and if augmentation is your thing, by all means go for it.

This piece is #12 in the Exquisite Corpse series. It includes ephemera from cookbooks and seed catalogs, vintage wallpapers, an old yearbook, linocut, colored pencils and acrylic.