philinthecircle.com Blog

I’m giving this piece away, click here if you want it.

The words “When we have fulfilled our promise of good government I will cut my beard.” were spoken by Fidel Castro in 1959. Last time I checked he still had his beard. hm…..

I knew I wanted to make a piece about Castro but wasn’t sure how to go about it. I figured he would be a good person to get a quote from, possibly something inspirational that didn’t quite fit with my image of him. But I ended up finding the quote above that I thought was pretty funny and of course sad as well.

The picture it’s self is pretty straight forward. I hunted around to find a bunch of images to work from and then sketched them out the way I envisioned. Then I just wrote the quote over and over. I think if I was trying to make a piece to keep I would have spent a lot more time with it and made the words in the image much more interesting.

moving on

If you are able to support Goodbye Art by purchasing an 8×12 photo click here.

This was definitely a fun project to come up with and a lot of work to setup. I thought about painting a picture on a ton of my old shirts kinda like the jean picture but then decided to make it better for other people (not just me). I went to Target and bought 32 T-shirts and started planning this thing out. The idea sounded pretty straight forward to me, but it got to be a lot of work. I had to put something inbetween the layers of the shirt so the ink didn’t push through to the back, so I had to cut a ton of ply wood. Then I had took all the wood and shirts, sat down, and put the wood into the shirts (took a few hours) ugh. At this point I had a stack of shirts leaning up against the wall and I was trying to figure out how to attach them to the wall. This was difficult because I knew I couldn’t damage them in some way. I went through a few ideas and settled on putting a 1×2inch board across and hammering nails into the board as supports for the shirts to rest on. Then I put up a bunch of draping to make it look clean and sharp against the wall.

I started this piece with the clear idea of the picture I wanted to make and how. I wanted to make the piece with stars and so I had to make a stamp. I went to the grocery store and bought a sponge (I had to wring it out in the sink a ton because it comes damp). I cut out a star and had to make a little contraption to hold the sponge and give it even pressure when used.

Earlier in the week I had gone to the art store and found some screen printing ink which is of course perfect for this application as well. So I was ready to get started.

I had the cams all set up and started stamping. Some of the shirts weren’t attached really well so they got pushed around a little bit. There wasn’t a lot of questions going into the piece because I spent a good amount of time planing. And quite frankly there isn’t a lot to say about the creation part because it just involved a lot of stamping.

You may be wondering why I picked this image and who would want a T-shirt of this right? Well if you think about the shirts individually they are quite different than the entire image. You could be walking around with this shirt on and it looks like a happy shirt with lots of bright stars on it. That is the reason I picked this subject and the medium. I wanted something that came across substantially different between the small segments and the entire piece.

hope you enjoyed this weeks installment
take care

phil

If you are able to support Goodbye Art by purchasing an 8×12 photo click here.

I spent a bit of time this last week cleaning around the house and decided to get rid of a bunch of stuff. As I was trying to decide if I should Goodwill my old jeans or trash ‘em I decided my theme for February would be “Giveaway.” I know this is contradictory to the Goodbye Art idea, but oh well. It’s disappearing from me so that’s all that really matters. Each week I will give away the piece in some way.

As you can tell I grabbed all of my old jeans and stapled them to the wall. I then did a white wash coat over them. I debated for quite a while how to actually make the picture but I settled on using my toes. I’ve never done a toe painting before and can’t say I thought it would turn out real well. But that’s Goodbye Art’s goal is to make me experiment and not care as much about the outcome since it is more about the process. I think I stood and stared at the jeans for about an hour before finally mustering myself to get to work.

I dragged down the ladder, took off my sock, and climbed up. I had to use a little wadded up piece of batting to put the paint on my toes.

I then proceeded to smear the paint on my toes and work. The hardest part of this project was being at an odd angle to where I was applying the paint. I couldn’t be right in front of where I was working and the jeans were not totally flat so I had to imagine how the paint was looking from a different angle.

There’s not a lot to say other than my toes were almost raw after this. Jeans get pretty rough when they are covered with paint.

My fingers looked freaky after this because they were sitting in paint for a couple hours. I got pretty tired only standing on one foot for a few hours. That was a bother.

I was pleased enough with the final project as it was exactly what Goodbye Art should be.

If you are able to support Goodbye Art by purchasing an 8×12 photo click here.