| Tilly:
So what is it that you are painting? Fling:
The idea occured to me again the day that we were in the library making copies of the newspaper accounts. I thought the stories would look more "real" if only they weren't on that white copier paper. I plan to go back and look up those stories again, only this time I'll stuff the copier with my own newsprint. What I hope I'll get are the newspaper accounts that look a bit closer to the real thing. Than I'll use those to create a collage of the courthouse in the photo I have of Equi the day she left for San Quentin. The concept being that it was the media that influenced the court, and sent her there... My first attempts at this weren't wildly thrilling. I tried a
piece of stretched arches first, which I like because it's "toothy", and
can take a lot of paint. But the collage requires several layers
of book paste to achieve the effect I'm after, and it's too heavy, and
when I added paint the paper really buckled, and the collage cracked as
it dried. Hot press illustration board wasn't much better, so I've
decided to use gessoed masonite. I need something more substantial
than paper to hold this work, and the roughs that I've done on quarter
inch scrap plywood using the technique seem to be working fine. All
I need to do is get the stories copied on my paper, and get the photo made
into a slide so I can project it onto the board, and get a piece of masonite
prepped and sanded... well, I don't think I'll be actually be *painting*
yet for a few weeks, but you get
Then, thinking back to that exhibit I told you about in the art museum,
the one where everything was covered in wax, I thought perhaps I'd cover
the whole thing in layers of book paste, which I think will give it a milky
"obfuscation of the truth though the mists of time" quality... But I suppose
I'll see when I get there.
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| Fling to Tilly
As I read over what you'd written about yourself, what struck me most was how through your work you seem to journey home to yourself. This is an important distinction I think for artists. I suppose there might be other professions where this is the rule, rather than the exception, but I can't think of any off hand. |
| I finally found that archive site I was hunting for, and they had a page there devoted to equi, with lots of information that I was missing from my files. Dates of Harriet's marriage and divorce, Marie's birthday (which you'd think would have been mentioned somewhere in the the stuff I have on her, but nooooo...) I was pretty stoked when I found it, as it also contains the information that many of Equi's letters form prison were photocopied and placed in a National Securities file (now the FBI) and these are all located in the national archives in either Maryland or DC... which means that they're shouting distance from 'M', btw... I've been to the national archives site, and found that I need to get the file number in order to request it, but they are all available through the Freedom of Information Act, and it shouldn't be a problem getting copies of everything. |