Exquisite Corpse 8 - Her Recalcitrant Attitude

Exquisite Corpse 8 - Her Recalcitrant Attitude
© Natalie Schorr 2023

Exquisite Corpse 8 - Her recalcitrant attitude inevitably beget an unloved station.

That’s an awful lot of red eye shadow, don’t you think? I personally rarely wear makeup. It seems like a lot of effort without a lot of reward, and besides, I lack the visual acuity to actually apply it correctly, which is another great hinderance.

On the rare occasion that I so wear makeup, it’s usually limited to mascara and lip gloss with some vague tint to it. I apply the mascara, put on my glasses, try to clean up all the spots I got all over my face then I was trying to put it on, and in the end usually edit most of it away.

Too much stress for me.

I think the red eye shadow is part of her recalcitrant charm. I would likely have been so labeled in my childhood if anyone had known the word recalcitrant, although it wasn’t entirely true. I wasn’t uncooperative, but I did add an annoyingly artistic flair to whatever I did that drove my family crazy.

Life is so much more fun now.

Exquisite Corpse 7 - The Manly Attire

Exquisite Corpse 7 - The manly attire eventually transfigured her sense of power.

Exquisite Corpse 7 - The Manly Attire
© Natalie Schorr 2023

I don’t exactly remember when I started wearing pants more than dresses. When I started school way back in the 1960s, little girls usually wore dresses, even the ones with the built in crinolines, but I’m guessing somewhere around 7th grade I got my first jeans and never looked back. They rode low and had the classic bell bottom flair that made me feel almost like I fit in. Only for fleeting moments, but it was better than most of my childhood up to that point so I went with it.

I can’t say that I ever felt more powerful when I wore pants, possibly because I have never felt powerful, but I can imagine some women did have that sense, especially women of my mother’s and grandmothers’ ages.

This collage features some moments from old paintings, vintage wallpapers, print made elements, an old yearbook, modern ephemera, colored pencil, paint pens, and assorted memories.

Exquisite Corpse 6 - The Voracious Omnivore

Exquisite Corpse 6 - The Voracious Omnivore
© Natalie Schorr 2023

I am an omnivore, although I tend to go for the veggies and fish. Nowadays, however, I get kind of worried about what’s on that buffet line. I know it’s not organic. I know it’s a lot of leftover stuff that’s being recycled into some other thing, so I tend to pass.

I take my mother to church on Sundays because I need a good dose of criticism and regret from which I can recover for the remainder of the week. The pandemic has pretty much put an end to the church pot luck, that and the fact that most people don’t know how to cook anymore, but I do miss especially the congealed salads.

The 1950s, 60s, and 70s were all about the congealed salads, and everyone had a salad that was their signature. My mother’s signature salad consisted of lime Jello with cabbage and Colby cheese in it.

Criticism and regret incarnate.

Exquisite Corpse 5 - Her Mercurial Temperament

Exquisite Corpse 5 - Her Mercurial Temperament
© Natalie Schorr 2023

I’ll just go ahead and say it: this piece reminds me of Trump. Mercurial, capricious, pouty. And he’s not the only example, just the most public. We all have these people in our lives; ones who kill opportunities as fast as they come along by their lack of impulse control.

I kind of enjoyed doing this piece as it was a bit cathartic. I hope someone else finds it equally so and takes it home as a reminder to behave as a normal, reasonable person should.

Exquisite Corpse 4 - Her Novaturient Outlook

Exquisite Corpse 4 - Her Novaturient Outlook
© Natalie Schorr 2023

I took a hard look at the three previous Exquisite Corpse pieces, and realized they were all kind of dark, so I thought I’d do a piece that was a little brighter, which brings us to Exquisite Corpse 4.

I’ve been looking for beautiful words, adjectives really, to coincide with these pieces. Novaturient is such a word. Various sources cite it as meaning “desiring or seeking a powerful change in their life, behavior or a certain situation,” and “a compelling desire, a deep and energetic call to arms in the name of personal change.” It’s so obscure that even spell check has a hard time accepting it. Wonder what AI will think? Will we find it in a student’s essay sometime soon?

However, novaturient is the right word for this piece. Exquisite Corpse 4 - Her novaturient outlook extravagantly manifested the perfect day. Big pink wallpaper flowers, swans floating aimlessly on turquoise waters under delightfully pink skies. Clad only in a feather skirt and some bright, lime green floral shoes, she looks like she’s manifesting with every fiber of her being.

I really hope that works out for her.

Exquisite Corpse 3 - The Geometric Patterns

Exquisite Corpse 3 - The Geometric Patterns
© Natalie Schorr 2023

If you have spent more than 10 seconds looking through my work, you will probably have seen dots. Lots and lots of dots. Dots make me feel safe, and if I could explain that I would but I can’t. It’s a personal issue, maybe from a past life. So it made a lot of sense to me when Walter Tevis from The Queen’s Gambit says:

“It's an entire world of just 64 squares. I feel safe in it. I can control it; I can dominate it. And it's predictable. So, if I get hurt, I only have myself to blame.”

To be honest, this piece makes me uncomfortable. Yes, there are dominos with lots of dots, There’s a grid pattern with squares and dots. And the body is surrounded by dots, so I really ought to like it. But there’s just something about the butterfly wing ears and the cowrie shell mouth that weird me out and I don’t know why. Feels like it ought to have fangs.

I think there’s value to stepping out of your comfort zone a bit every so often, but people really seem to respond to this piece, so maybe I’m on to something. Or maybe I just need a good night’s sleep.

Exquisite Corpse 2 - The Seething Medusa

Exquisite Corpse 2 - The Seething Medusa
© Natalie Schorr 2023

I actually think this is a pretty amusing piece. What woman has not felt this way at some time in her life? Medusas are great images to work with, and who doesn’t love a head full of snakes.

I have it in mind to make some pieces to enter in this show, and they all need to be 12”x121”, so I trotted down to Jerry’s and bought some more cradled wood panels and got to work.

I thought I would break down the components of this piece. Down the left hand side is a very old vintage wallpaper in dark green with a pseudo-woven pattern. I can only imagine how dark a room would be covered in that.

The head is a linocut of Mona Lisa, which is also the basis of the head on Exquisite Corpse 1, and will likely be a recurring feature of this series. The snakes are also linocuts that were further embellished with colored pencil.

The sky on the right behind the city is actually the surface of Mars which I toned down quite a bit with marker and pen. It was from a book on, of all things, Mars.

The city was an art piece I found in a book about the Machine Age in America which has many cool pictures and photos.

The delightful cowboy boots are from a book on shoes. Don’t ask me which one, I have destroyed many shoe books in the past few years.

The torso is from a 1970s era Playboy. Playboys are cheap and easy to find and they have a ton of great pictures and mod typography from the time. Don’t look at them under black lights. though.

The eyes and mouth are from some fairly modern ad, and I kind of love the attitude they convey. This piece took a really long time to find and assemble all the parts, but I’m pleased with the result.

Exquisite Corpse 1 - The Numinous Twilight

Exquisite Corpse 1 - The Numinous Twilight
© Natalie Schorr 2023

I was reading recently about the surrealists because it was a little slow at work one day and I came across the game of Exquisite Corpse. It’s pretty simple, really. You take a piece of paper and fold it into thirds, then one person draws a head, folds it over so it’s obscured, and hands it off to the next person who does a body and then the next person who does legs and feet. Easy.

The second version uses parts of speech to do something similar: The adjective noun adverb verb the adjective noun.

I decided I would do some pieces along those same lines that would play on those ideas. Here’s my first try.

It was kind of fun to put together random parts and textures, and the square format was also challenging, but it did render some cool textural moments.

The piece is much smaller than my regular pieces, which are mostly 18”x24”, while this is only 12”x12”. I decided on the size based on a prompt for a show I want to enter which requires all the art to be 12x12. It’s a different way of thinking which s always good.

Exquisite Corpse 1 - The numinous twilight gently revealed the tragedies of yesterday. The piece has linocut, printed ephemera from books and magazines, vintage wallpapers, colored pencil. paint pens, and acrylic paints.

I think I’ll do another.