Hitting the Big Reset Button

It would be great to take you through all the stuff that it took to do this piece, but the story took a turn.

The Echo Chamber, © Natalie Schorr 2021

My husband of 27 years decided that he no longer wanted to be married. I lost my home and my awesome studio space. I purchased a house in Augusta, GA, near my daughter, packed up and moved. The day after I moved in, she was transferred to Colorado Springs.

It was a really big blow. Not exactly ideal, but I am working through the reality.

I finally got things set up enough to pull out this piece and get it finished. I had originally planned to make it square, but it got very heavy and sculptural, and I began to like it better as its own heptagon, so I left it that way. It is, of course, inspired by the horrific political climate in which we find ourselves.

So, it’s on to new work and new possibilities.

Let the Layering Begin

Here is where I start dealing with layers. I turned the whole piece over and glued a number of pieces of brown paper to the back. Then I cut it out an eighth inch away from the previous edge,

Then I did it again with pages from an old dictionary, and I cut those to show about an eighth inch, then I did it again in brown. Now it’s beginning to get very stiff and thick.

Minds out of the gutter please.

I’ll do variations on this for probably several days. Because yes, I am anal that way. The Freud way. Not that other way.

Talking Typography

I enjoy typography, which strangely enough, never comes up in casual conversation.

I spent some time with my good friend Mr. Thesaurus to come up with a list of words that were appropriate for the piece. You’re probably wondering what the piece is, so I’ll go ahead and tell you it’s called Echo Chamber. If it doesn’t make sense, then you probably are one of those people on Parlor. Not that there’s anything wrong with being conservative. Just with being naïve.

Let me not digress. I pulled out the usual suspects for interesting letters: 1953 Fortune Magazine, True - the Magazine for Men, Early 1960s McCalls Magazines, and early 1970s Playboy Magazine, for that bit of funk. And then I started composing, which is not as easy as it looks. Typography takes a lot of time.

By this point, I had cut the whole thing out, and adding the lettering started to bring it together for me.

Sealing the Deal

I spent a lot of hours in the studio and managed to make really good progress. I had glued all the heads to these pages from the index of an old atlas, so I cut those out with about an eighth inch border, so you see just a small amount of the page.

Then I made my final layout of the heads, moving them around until I got them where I wanted them to be, and I glued them down, weighting each head so it would dry flat. That never works entirely as intended, but overall it’s pretty flat.

Then I had some coffee.

After all the heads were dry, I taped down some pieces of tracing paper so I could make some patterns. I want ribbons of words going from the mouth of one man to the ear of the next man, Then, where they are facing, the ribbons go from mouth to mouth and where they have their backs to each other, the ribbons go from ear to ear.

It’ll make sense eventually, trust me. I used another atlas page to cut out the ribbons from the patterns I had made.

Then I had some more coffee.

Fun With Geometry

I spent a good portion of the day printing and playing with these background pieces and heads, working out a configuration. I wanted to use a heptagon, which in case you were wondering is a seven sided figure, wherein the spokes are at 51.43 degrees, more or less, which means I was able to make good use of that round protractor I’ve had for decades. I think I’ve got it worked out, so I cut and pasted the frameworks in, and pasted the heads to some old atlas pages, weighted them down to hopefully dry reasonable flat, and we will see what tomorrow brings.

Time to Compose the First Part

A carousel of heads

In case you were wondering, I do break things down into steps in my planning process, which doesn’t mean anything is set in stone, but I do have a direction in mind. So today I took all those pieces and parts and put them together into some faces. I originally planned for eight faces, but I tend to gravitate to odd numbers, so I actually ended up doing seven.

I took each face and worked each part of the face a little differently, adding ink and colored pencil. It’s more interesting than just the linocut alone. I’m pleased with the way they have turned out. I feel like they have definite separate personalities despite having some of the same parts.

Cut and Paste

Are there times that I wish I could just paint something in that abstract expressionist vein and be done with three pieces by lunch? Ok, no, not really. My work takes a long time, and that’s Ok with me since I really don’t know any other way to express stuff so I guess I’ll have to be satisfied with that.

Because I want layers of separation between the elements in this piece, I took all the pieces I really wanted to work with and pasted them down on brown kraft paper and cut them out again. In case you were wondering, it takes hours to do this, but in the end I have lots of stuff to work with. Yeah, I said that before, but it’s a process. So another day of cutting and pasting and cutting brings a pile of good results.

Playing with Body Parts

Playing with body parts

I don’t know what it is like for other artists, ones who paint or compose music. For me personally, I like the flexibility of collage; moving bits around, adding and subtracting things. Now that I have all this stuff printed, that’s the thing that happens next.

I cut out a lot of stuff, and developed a head shape I liked. The heads are from these brown paper scrapbook pages I bought at Goodwill. The rest of the elements are from linocuts I’ve made over the past several months.

I like where this is going, but because of the nature of the piece as I am envisioning it, each piece will need to be cut out, mounted on kraft paper, and re-cut. The layers of separation are going to be an important part of the overall theme.

Days of Wine and Rose Colored Glasses

Love, or the Lack Thereof

© Natalie Schorr 2020

I started this piece with the woman, and unlike most collages, I wasn’t sure where it was going, so I set her aside. Maybe I just liked her vibe. I actually ruminated on this for months until I decided where I wanted to go with it. She originally had different arms / hands, that I tore off and changed.

Her leggings are part of a June Christy album, which also found its way into some of my OOTDs. Record albums, readily available at your local Goodwill, are a great source for pattern, typography, and general inspiration, not to mention the fact that they’re cheap.

I later created the man when I decided where the piece was going. I wonder what would have been the result had God created women first?

Love generally fades, and rarely at the same rate. We all kind of see what we want to see.
Read more about this piece here. It’s for sale.

The Seconds Tick the Time Out

The Passing of Time in a Pandemic

So on my “seeking sanity” road trip, I was drawn to, or should I say Spotify was drawn to playing “On the Road to Find Out,” from Cat Stevens’ album, Tea for the Tillerman. For whatever reason it came up a number of times, and I was kind of drawn to it, particularly the line: “The seconds tick the time out…” which kind of led me to do this piece.

I’m about to turn 60. While my age has never really bothered me much, the days and weeks of the pandemic and the isolation from that have taken a toll on some parts of me. Day after day, get up, teach, work in the studio, go to bed. Repeat. I feel confined as if I have taken root, and not in a good way.

There really isn’t a place I feel is home, and maybe that’s part of the problem. Of all the places I’ve been in the past , it seems as though any roots I’ve put down there have withered. Maybe I am rooted in the pandemic.

So this piece is about time, and there are a lot of ways to interpret it, as I had a lot of thoughts about the passing of time as I did it. The background is inspired by Paul Klee. The rest is just me, thinking about stuff.

Detail

You can read more about this piece. It is for sale.