Concealed Carry

© Natalie Schorr, 2021

I may be the last person on the planet to get a gun. I really don’t see it happening, but who’s to say what will be?

I recently moved to Augusta, Georgia, as a result of the end of my marriage, and let me say, it’s been quite an adjustment. Not just the part where I’m living alone, but the part wherein the neighbors next door have a thriving “cottage business” running out of their home that brings a steady stream of people stopping by at pretty much all hours of the day and night. There have been no shootings so far, but this is America, where everyone is packing heat, so I’m beginning to take it as a fact that most everyone around here is carrying something with lethal capabilities. I can’t decide if I should feel less safe or more.

I found these images of guns, and they are certainly works of art. I doubt they’ve spent much time up in a backyard deer stand or tucked into someone’s waistband but I imagine they can kill just as well as the plain ones. I hope never to find out.

You can read more about this piece and even (gasp!) purchase it at Concealed Carry.

Wild Pitch

© Natalie Schorr, 2021

Those of you who know me know I can bring almost any conversation back to baseball.

I had a lot of things rattling around when I did this piece. My pet duck, Norman, is in there. And baseball. Maybe it’s the elegance of her posture, as if she is holding a baseball mitt and posing. You see that, right?

The season is heating up and the Braves, well, not so much. But I never want to give up hope, so we’ll see. There are a lot of games left.

This piece uses hand printed and commercially printed elements along with colored pencil and acrylics. You can read more about Norman and this piece at Wild Pitch. And don’t hesitate to reach out and make something your own.

Beauty is Fleeting

© Natalie Schorr, 2021

OK, not getting any younger here, and finally agreeing to a divorce on my 60th birthday was not exactly comforting. But it’s done and forward I go into the abyss, whatever it is.

I would imagine that those of you who are of “a certain age” feel my pain. It’s getting harder to look in the mirror and believe that I’m still 22. I am resolved, however, that I will not be deterred from enjoying the rest of my life, and I’m going to get out there and live finally.

Yes, I’m aware that there’s a pandemic. Hopefully it will not be here forever.

In the meantime, I am getting a lot of meditating done, and finally some new art. Life is looking up.

You can read more about this piece, Beauty is Fleeting, and don’t hesitate to drop me a line and tell me you would love to hang it in your living room. I’d be incredibly grateful

Conditional Love

© Natalie Schorr, 2021

Conditional love - you will never be worthy. Boy, that’s a real downer, huh?

I am back to working, which is to say I’m not crying every day the way I was, but mostly I’m just working and spending a lot of time meditating, trying to figure out my life. Starting over sucks, but conditional love, which has pretty much plagued me my whole life as well, also sucks, so maybe the two will cancel each other out. I don’t know.

I was trying a lot of stuff with this piece, and I think that’s why it seems a little experimental. I sort of feel like that there’s some potential there, but I’ve really got to play with it a bit to be sure. We’ll see what happens with the next piece.

I used more colored pencil than usual, but I am pleased that I am getting better at letting go of my notions of scale and proportion. That’s progress, I think.

You can read more about it here at Conditional Love.

Medusa Manifesting a New Destiny

What better way to get out a bit of rage than with a Medusa?

Medusa Manifesting a New Destiny, © Natalie Schorr 2021

It took me awhile on this one, as I needed to carve both feet and a whole plate full of snakes, which took a considerable amount of time.

Why the snaky hair? Medusa was raped by Poseidon in Athena’s temple. This ticked off Athena, who turned Medusa’s beautiful hair to snakes. Of course, it’s much more nuanced than that, with lots of layers, but that’s sort of the gist of it. Medusa is raped, and then punished for being the victim. Sound familiar?

Medusae are usually depicted looking directly at the viewer, which is a show of their strength, but is also a bit uncomfortable for some viewers. To them I say, get over it. There are more of these to come.

Medusa Manifesting a New Destiny uses a variety of linocuts, colored pencil, and acrylic along with metallic spray paint, old wallpapers, magazine scraps, and, you know, general stuff.

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.