Uniforms and Child Forms

Still playing around with those girls and the rusty child form.  All of this is just messing around.

And some more.  I feel like I'm finally getting the child form proportions more or less right.  It really is a cage.  Next week I'm going to do some monotypes of these images to loosen things up.  I'm also thinking about carving the child form out of a piece of rubber eraser stamp material and printing it over the drawings, tiling it in the background, combining it with monotypes of the girls with their head dresses, in the boat.

And while I was drawing and painting, Jesse played under my drawing table with a dried Japanese lantern flower, then did some grooming, and finally went to sleep.

Corrective Shoes

Jesse has been having a hard time dealing with our below zero weather this week.  He's a life-long outdoor cat who comes inside to eat and sleep and socialize a bit, but he really comes alive outside, and he has never used a litter box.  So all week we've been going outside with him for a few minutes at a time and then scampering back inside with him as soon as he gives up and races back to the door.  Today it finally warmed up enough for him to have an outside day.  Drawing 1301 shows him on a really cold day hunkered down on our screened porch looking woefully outside.  Drawing 1302 shows him from the rear looking like a meatloaf.

 Then this morning Ghengis sauntered into the backyard, and Jesse demanded to be let out.  Ghengis is really a gentle cat, but he and Jesse have had their differences, mainly over who gets to go inside Ghengis's cat door and who gets to sit on Jesse's porch railing.  Today they seemed to have reached some kind of accord.  The drawings on the right show Jesse watching Ghengis.

 Here's Ghengis on the left, and then Jesse on his high porch railing perch watching Ghengis stroll freely in the backyard.  We were encouraged that there was no hissing or growling at all, and also no torn up ears or tufts of hair missing.

 Switching subjects here, I spent some time tonight drawing Corrective Shoes, as they seem to fit into what is veering toward the general topic of Correcting the Flaws of Children, or, Dealing with Original Sin.  There seemed to be a big emphasis, when I was growing up, on straightening children up:  their teeth, their table manners, their handwriting, their feet.  Girls with straight hair were given Tonette permanent waves, really a torture.  Girls with curly hair had to put up with having their hair wound into ringlets.  No part of the child was left uncontrolled.  We were like little plants being espaliered or topiaried.

I found a picture of myself and three other neighborhood kids when we were around 3 or 4 years old.  We are all dressed in party clothes, fluffy little dresses and bows, but we're also all wearing heavy duty Corrective Shoes, those stiff, ugly, hot, embarrassing things that doctors told our mothers we needed and that our mothers hauled us down to Sears to the shoe department (with the fun fluoroscope machine in the corner) in order to buy.  We could never buy tennis shoes, regardless of how much we whined and moaned, because we had knock knees and vague other problems that made it necessary for us to wear Corrective Shoes.

On the right is my husband's actual Corrective Shoe, mummified.  His mother took his shoe and had it dipped in bronze to make a book end.  The outside is coated in a thin layer of bronze, and the inside is the mummified remains of the little shoe, and it is a Corrective Shoe!  It has an arch lift remnant as well as some other odd forms still inside.  The main features that it has, which all Corrective Shoes had, were high tops and laces, and the requisite leather uppers and sturdy soles.

Feet, Hands

Today's drawings all seem to me to go with the rusty child form-- for their stiffness, their relation to bodies and body parts, their air of oldness and oddness and poignancy.  The two metal shoe lasts, one in child size and one in women's size, were used in shoe repair.  They functioned like a sort of anvil when slipped inside a shoe that needed heels or soles or heel caps replaced.  I use mine for studio weights, but I keep them on a window sill and enjoy their silhouettes with light coming in behind them.

On the right hand page are some hands:  I bought the mannequin hand at the top from a mannequin shop in the garment district in NYC.  It was an older model and priced to sell fast.  I could not tell it from the newer model, however;  the difference was too subtle for me to discern.  The two tiny hands were made by my friend Loy as part of an art installation.  They are impossibly small and perfectly articulated, made of bisque-fired porcelain clay, and they live on one of my bookshelf edges in a small matchbox.

Rusty Child Form Redux

I don't buy things at Tobacco Barn very often, but when I do I never regret it.  Yesterday I went back over there to check out some details on the child form, and I made a deal with myself that if there was a child form left, I would buy it.  It took a bit of searching in the increasingly chilly space (which is impossible to heat with its acre or so of space and three story high ceilings and perpetually open barn doors) but I found it!  And now it's sitting on the brick apron of the little fireplace in my studio, looking perfectly at home.  So I had a festival of drawing it, and it is way more complex than I thought after quick-sketching it at TB.

I still haven't got the proportions right.  It doesn't look child-shaped though, more like a miniature adult with wide shoulders and a pinched-in waist.  It's only about 3 1/2 feet high and has a white wooden knob where the head would be, maybe for hanging on a hat?

I experimented with different ways of attaching the girls to it, first just a uniform, then a couple of girls-attached-to-rusty-child-forms.  They look too tall, and I want to try again tomorrow, then do some layering, maybe draw the girls first and then trace the forms lightly over them, or just five forms with girl heads, lots of ideas.  I love the tag that says "rusty child form."

Ridge Top Patterns

It was too cold to stop and draw on Singe Cat Ridge yesterday, but we managed to bring down a bag of interesting finds, which I drew today in the warmth of the kitchen.  On the left is a tightly furled pine cone, variety unknown to me but unlike any pine cone I've seen at lower elevations.  These trees were stunted and distorted from the high winds that are so often blowing up there.  To me the landscape looked like a bonzai dish garden, trees covered with lichens and  twisted, and the cones as big and round as baseballs.  The patterns on the cones were perfect spirals yesterday when they were icy.  But this morning when I went to draw them, the heat of our house has relaxed them a bit and gaps were opening up between rows of scales.

On the right is a stripped cone, obviously discarded by a squirrel.  It looked like a corn cob after being eaten, with just a tuft of empty scales at one end.  I could see the squirrel holding it by the two ends and eating it.

On the left is a smaller cone that remained tightly packed all day today, and on the left is the first cone after seceral hours in the house, now with gaps between every row.

At the top is a large acorn that has been cleaned out by something, maybe a squirrel with very long teeth. At the bottom is a case from acorns from a cinquapin oak.  These acorn cases remind me of chestnut cases only softer, and the tree finder said the cinquapin oak was mostly destroyed by the early 20th century chestnut blight.  There are still a few of these around here apparently.

Patterns on Food

Standing in line at City Bakery this morning I couldn't help drawing the patterns that had been made across the tops of the loaves of bread.  Each kind of bread had its own pattern.  I just drew the patterns.  Then I looked below the bread into the desserts case and saw great swirly patterns on a key lime pie, drizzles of icing on top of some eclairs, and even specific patterns on the different kinds of croissants. I also threw in one cake pop that didn't actually have a pattern, but the same arrangement of swirls and sprinkles was on each one.   Someone was having fun in the bakery this morning!

We brought lunch from the bakery up to some friends at their house near Burnsville.  After we ate we helped them decorate some lebkuchen that they had made around the time we made ours but had never gotten around to decorating.  I drew three of my favorites.  Then we went for a couple-of-hours-long hike up along a ridge near the Parkway called Singe Cat Ridge.  I made a quick sketch of the ridge along which we trekked (at the top of the page).  It was very high up with some steep slopes falling away on either side of us.  The cold weather felt a lot warmer after we had been climbing for an hour or so.  We picked up some wonderfully patterned pine cones and cinquepin oak cases, which I am just too tired to draw tonight but will get to tomorrow.  Stay tuned.

Rusty Child Form

Yesterday at Tobacco Barn with Maya I saw one of my favorite odd things, a form that I believe was used when sewing clothing for children.  I've seen these things at TB before, strange wire and wood things that look like bird cages with legs that end in wooden shoes, like old-fashioned prosthetic devices, like topiary forms.  The tag says "rusty child form."

I've drawn the child forms a number of times.  They haunt me, along with the girls.  And the animal heads.  So there's nothing to do but meld the child forms, the girls, and the headdresses, and see where they take me.  I drew these in pencil and white gouache with a small bit of rust-colored watercolor.  There's a little bit of black pen on the first drawing.  The girls are from my kindergarten class picture.