prompting myself

It’s summer, the windows are open, my studio is newly cleaned, and I’m preparing for my summer workshops at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art. The first workshop is called Fotoplay and More, a week focused on creating “strange and wonderful hand-made images merged with camera-made images.” I’ve been playing with lots of photo-based project ideas, one which you see in the photograph of my studio, above. You’re looking at my book, all 53 pages which I’ve removed from their binding, and taped to the wall. The idea of turning my book into a large canvas for sketching, painting, or graffiti was the result of, not ironically, some recent play.

During the past few weeks, in the course of putting together the new Fotoplay Gallery, I was itching to work on some of my own pages myself. I used crayon, oil pastel, watercolor, and collage, and approached a few pages as if I had never seen them before.

Working on the pages above somehow led to the idea of working on the whole book at once. I wanted to find a way to see the whole book in a way I had not considered. And I wanted to almost discard or disregard the prompts, and work in a hyper-graphic way, making new connections between forms and lines.

I’m at the very beginning of a long-term process…

and I have no sense of what might become of this experiment…

but I do know that I’ll be setting up another exploded Fotoplay book for my students at CMCA…

And guess what?! It’s not too late to sign up your children: Click HERE to register!