When words fail, create. Here is a new series I’ve been working on — a daily Calvin and Hobbes remix, the coronavirus version. I call it “COVID & HOBBES”.
Author: Ingrid Murray
Ingrid is an American self-taught mixed media artist and art journaler living and working in Germany. This website is human-generated.
Art Journal Inspiration: Mixed Media
I have a deep love of mixed media in art journaling. Check out these fabulous artists and their incredibly rich pages. You can click on any image to be taken to their Instagram page and see more of their work.
My Toolbox: Birch Panels
“All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson
Over the past year or so I’ve been exploring going bigger in my art. I have been painting and collaging in books since at least 2008, the largest pages of which have been about 11 x 14 inches. Creating single, stand-alone art — as an alternative to a bundle of spreads to be viewed as a multiple-paged whole — is new territory, as is experimenting with new materials.
Being used to a smaller, hard surface, attempting to switch to large canvas has been a new learning curve. Canvas has a lot of give, and it pushes me to use a gentler hand — something that ultimately changes the style of my art, I think, for better or worse.
A few weeks ago, though, I decided to try out wooden panels. They don’t come in as wide a variety of sizes as canvas, but is a good place to start broadening my horizons while working on a surface that retains some of paper’s characteristics. I bought some small panels on sale at Michael’s (their website is currently down) and later ordered larger ones from Amazon.
I’ve had a lot of fun experimenting on these. More experiments will certainly follow.
If you work or have worked on wooden panels before, I’d love to hear: do you gesso or otherwise prep the surface? Do you varnish the piece when you’re finished? Any other tips?
Recent Finds
Here are a few things that have inspired, interested, or entertained me recently:
- Master collager iHanna writes about cultivating happiness in art
- This post by Austin Kleon, about why it’s hard to fake kids’ drawings
- Pamela Bates’ wonderful markmaking, which I’ve been trying to emulate in my own work
- I’m all about dogs, and videos of dogs, and videos of dogs that make me laugh and remember that the world can be a wonderful place
- Mandy Fariello’s fun collaged library cards (and a reminder that we should all take art less seriously!)
- Watch poet Sarah Kay read the moving poem “Titanic” by Laura Lamb Brown-Lavoie
- Here’s a mysterious and lovely story about a missing ring found 4,700 miles away and decades later.
- More animal content? Yes please. @TheDailyJames shares lovely photos of LA wildlife, from ravens to ground squirrels to vultures
- For content makers: how to design for accessibility
- Let’s debunk an American myth: “George Washington’s teeth were yanked from slaves’ mouths”
Rod Serling: The Dimension of Imagination
I’ve been watching The Twilight Zone (original series) recently. I’ve seen episodes here and there, but had never seen enough to see the patterns of storytelling and the themes that executive writer and narrator Rod Serling created.
The philosophical questions in the scripts are still hugely relevant to today: identity, morality, success, greed, happiness, love. I highly recommend watching or re-watching some of the episodes if you have the time. Jordan Peele’s newly revived version launched in April 2019, but I haven’t caught any of it yet; I don’t have cable. I’m sure he’s expertly bringing today’s issues to the screen.
Challenging Racist Tropes
It was the 1960 episode “Big Tall Wish” that got me curious and sent me down a rabbit hole into Serling and the history of The Twilight Zone. The the plot centers around an aging boxer, whose young friend wishes for him to win an upcoming fight. What’s extraordinary for the time period is that the episode — which aired in the midst of the Jim Crow era and the heart of the Civil Rights movement — features a majority African-American cast, and is done respectfully and without racist tropes or stereotypes.
Rod Serling seems to have been somewhat an anomaly in the that age: he was a white man who recognized not only the social and racial injustice at the time, but also his own power and influence to change it. Before beginning The Twilight Zone project, he sought to create a television showabout Emmett Till, a black teen brutally murdered in Mississippi by two white men in 1955. The perpetrators were tried and acquitted by an all-white jury.
The powers that be wouldn’t allow Serling to execute the show he wanted, leading him to conceive The Twilight Zone, where he could explore socially controversial issues like race and prejudice through a veil of science fiction.
In the episode “The Monsters on Maple Street”, for example, Serling narrates:
The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices – to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own – for the children and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to The Twilight Zone.
Check out this 20-minute interview with Serling, who speaks about Emmett Till, capitalism and the influence of money on what stories are told, and the power the audience wields. It’s worth a watch.
And if you’re interested, a few links to explore more: As I Knew Him (memoir published by Serling’s daughter a few years ago); a much longer analysis of Serling’s life, creativity, and The Twilight Zone, from The Atlantis; . The Twilight Zone is currently on Netflix.
