So, I thought about calling this blog post "Dead Girls and Bondage", but then I realized what kind of readers I would attract and how terribly disappointed they would be.... I've been suffering from a vicious bout of insomnia these days. Not that this is anything new. It always takes me a while to fall asleep and I've had insomniac phases on occasion all of my adult life. Torturous, yes, but I've been trying to make the best of it by getting some creative work done instead of sleeping. Not that this actually HELPS me go to sleep. Anyone who does not chronically suffer from insomnia may believe the advice "Drink a cup of hot herbal tea and all will be fine", but it is a big fat lie....The only thing that helps sometimes is reading (but DEFINITELY not t.v. or the internet!!)or changing where you are sleeping, i.e. go lie down on the couch for a while. The problem usually is you have zero desire to do these things. All you want is to sleep and it's the one thing you absolutely can't do....
Anyway, as I said I'm doing the lemonade from lemons approach and working on a lot of new art and jewelry and even some hand-altered clothing. I've been buying vintage photographs on ebay on and off for the past six weeks or so.
Whenever they come in the mail I often find myself deciding to keep them for my collection rather than using them for anything (I've been collecting vintage photographs for over ten years.) Every once in a while, however, I do get one that inspires me. Last night it was the one pictured at the beginning of this post.
A young girl, her dark hair braided, a somewhat pensive look on her face, her hands in her lap. I got out my sewing materials and sat down at the dining room table but then suddenly realized I wasn't interested in stitching the picture. I started thinking about the girl. What hid behind her serious expression? I imagined her, a good girl always doing as she is told, but secretly wishing to run off and join the circus. She wouldn't want to be a trapeze artist is a glittering costume or to ride white horses. She would dream of being an escape artist.
I have to admit this idea may have been planted in my head by Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay which I read about a month ago. One of the main characters trains to be an Houdini style escape artist when he is a boy in Prague. He practices cracking locks and hiding picks inside his cheek. Later, in New York, he creates a sucessful comic book with his cousin called The Escapist. Of course, the idea and longing for escaping is also symbolic in the book (the character is an Eastern European Jew at the beginning of Hitler's tyranny)the stories of escapism and the obsession people have brought to the art really stuck with me.
I started thinking about chains. I put some gold ribbon around her like some bonds that she was dreaming of escaping from. I added some vintage snack skin copper chain (perhaps a snake handler would be another of her dream jobs...)and black lacquer chain to the side.
My husband came and took a look at the photograph sometime before I had done much work on it. "I wonder what they meant by that," he said. He had read the back of the picture which read 28.5.1940- Im Gedanken an Eure Annelie (In Memory of your Annelie.) "It sounds to me like the girl must have died."
It seemed strange, almost spooky, to me to be working on a picture of a girl who died in childhood in 1940. She would be in her 70s now, so of course she could still be living. To know that she probably passed away so long ago made me wonder if I should stop the project. But then again, the show must go on....
As a last touch I added a black glass pendant to her neck. I imagined it was from her beloved uncle Horace, the only adult who understands her. It is a symbol to her to never stop dreaming. When I showed the finished work to my husband he said, "Hmm...Very bondage-like." Not what I had intended, but I can see what he means...
Yep, I'm at it again with the photo stitching. I liked one of them so much that I just had to frame it and keep it for myself. It is now hanging in my kitchen.
I really love propaganda art. I know it was created for the purpose to manipulate or instill fear, but often it is really just great illustration. About a year ago our neighbors upstairs moved out of their apartment. Their son was born just a few months after our oldest daughter (who is now nearly two)and they decided as many do, that they would rather move somewhere where they could have a garden. Is it just me, or is this often a mistake? I mean, if they really wanted a quiet place with a garden wouldn't they (and all the others who did the same)already have one without a child? Having children is already stressful enough without trying to force yourself into a lifestyle you're not really interested in....
Anyway, when they moved they left a box of books in the stairwell. One of them was this big, coffee table book about propaganda art from World War II. Great stuff from both the allies and enemies. I used an image from it for the following collage.
Keep mum, she's not so dumb! Careless Talk Costs Lives. In other words, no battle plan talk in front of your German mistress!
Another thing I love are vintage photographs. In an earlier post, I presented some pictures of an old black and white photograph I had stitched with colored thread. Yesterday I completed a collage using the photograph. I added a tongue and cheek poem playing off of the nursery rhyme, Mary had a little lamb.
Mary longed to join the circus and wear a dress as white as snow.
And everywhere that Mary went the boys were sure to go.
The collage is two sided, with a lovely polynesian beauty pictured in a gilded frame on the back
So I read Memoirs of aGeisha about a month ago and now I'm hooked. I remember that my mom really hated the book because she found it to be a bit of a cheap romance novel. Admittedly, the love story in the book is one of its weaker points, but I found the world of a geisha and all the customs surrounding them to be totally fascinating. Now, I'm not a man so maybe I just don't get it, but I don't especially find them erotic. They seem to me to be something like a made-up, aesthetic, but thoroughly untouchable doll. But that there is a tradition for everything and that they wear these gorgeous kimonos that are worth thousands of dollars and are women of art, all of this is somehow both appealing and scary at the same time. I found a great video about an apprentice geisha on You Tube called Becoming a Geisha. It follows the story of Youkina as she goes through the training in Kyoto in 2005. Pretty brutal training and she's not allowed to see her family for a year even though she's only 15. I won't tell you if she makes it or not. ;)
A friend of ours works for a photography auction house here in Berlin. Every time they have an auction (about twice a year)she sends us the catalog. Gorgeous books full of the photographs for sale printed beautifully. In one of the catalogs there are some vintage photographs of Geisha that have been hand-tinted. I will probably make copies of them because it would be a shame to mutilate the book, but I really must make some sort of collage or art work from them. We'll see when the inspiration calls....
I love looking for public domain photographs. For those of you who don't know what that means, it means work that is not under copyright so you can do whatever the heck you want with it. A lot of really famous photographs from Dorothea Lange and others are in the public domain because they were working in the FSA government program.There are also some really beautiful ones by Ansel Adams of Japanese internment camps that I really love.The best place to find them is at the Library of Congress. You can also order prints from there that are supposedly good quality and don't cost very much. A while ago I took some of the images and added text to them, among other things. I'm sure I'll more images again sometime. The possibilities for ideas and inspiration are endless when you have such great material.
Last year I came to the somewhat reluctant conclusion that I am not a talented seamstress. When I was a child, I loved to do cross-stich with my mother. I found creating little rows of colored stiches to be a relaxing, peacful thing to do. All of my adult life I also fantisied about one day making my own clothes or at least altering pieces myself. Last March I decided to finally learn how to use a sewing machine. I took a course at the Volkshochschule here in Berlin (like an Adult School) and realized quite soon that I was missing some key inherent skills to get me going: I cannot, and never could, fold things neatly and cannot draw a straight line to save my life. The teacher was often exasperated when I accidently sewed something onto the wrong side or bought the wrong kind of cloth for a project (some of this can be blamed on language misunderstandings. Although my German is fluent, there were certain sewing and cloth terms that I would probably not even know in English let alone a foreign language!) Of course, if I was very patient I was still able to get the job done but I found I didn't really enjoy it. Lack of pleasure, combined with the fact that the second-hand sewing machine I bought (literally!)blew up, caused me to draw the conclusion that sewing with a machine just wasn't for me. Being, in some ways, inherently 19th century, it makes sense that I still like to do it by hand. My newest project has been taking something else I love, vintage photos, and stitching parts of them where I would like to emphasise an angle or add color. I'm adding some pictures of two I have done recently. Probably they will find their way into some collage and then will continue on to my shop, Schaufenster. Time will tell....
occasion all of my adult life. Torturous, yes, but I've been trying to make the best of it by getting some creative work done instead of sleeping. Not that this actually HELPS me go to sleep. Anyone who does not chronically suffer from insomnia may believe the advice "Drink a cup of hot herbal tea and all will be fine", but it is a big fat lie....The only thing that helps sometimes is reading (but DEFINITELY not t.v. or the internet!!)or changing where you are sleeping, i.e. go lie down on the couch for a while. The problem usually is you have zero desire to do these things. All you want is to sleep and it's the one thing you absolutely can't do....
said I'm doing the lemonade from lemons approach and working on a lot of new art and jewelry and even some hand-altered clothing. I've been buying vintage photographs on ebay on and off for the past six weeks or so.
