Mixed Media Experimentation--the Class

Earth Mother Madonna

This is the latest in my creative efforts in Dennis Martinez's wonderful Media Experimentation class at Dixie State University. Dennis always gives his students permission to be whatever kind of artist they want to be, and the results are amazing! Right now, most of us are thinking about what pieces we want to submit to the student art show.

The criteria for this piece--as instructed by Dennis--was to make a 3-dimensional piece of art. He showed us a few samples of things--a series of wooden boxes with bas-relief artwork on the exterior, a wooden chair, painted and embellished...all good inspiration! I decided to start with a plastic bottle found in the grocery store. It held almond milk, which I drank, and I added a wire armature to make a head and arms from paper clay. There is no picture of this attempt. I threw it away, after feeling that it was going nowhere. Instead, I came back to my favorite medium, which is cloth! I put together a fabric doll from several wonderful prints, stuffed them with pipe cleaners (for fingers), bamboo stuffing (from Fairfield Processing, maker of all sorts of stuffings and battings), then sculpted a nose on the face of both the mother and child. The child fits nicely into a pocket attached to the mother figure. 

Once I painted the faces of the figures, I wired them to a canvas base. First, though, I adhered a fabric with a printed series of little houses--very primitive and cute! After the fabric dried, I painted over most of it, leaving just a few of the houses sticking out. I made a cardboard cottage, and gave it a little thin roof, a quilted fabric door, painted it, and attached it to the backdrop. I painted some of the fabric on the figure as well, just to make it my own.

Last month, I used more quilting to make a 'painting.' It was great fun. The tree trunk is corrugated cardboard, with some of the paper removed to expose the inside. The bushes are pieces of a burlap bag that used to hold Anasazi beans. The leaves are made by mixing paint with  vinyl spackle compound, applied with a stiff brush through a commercial stencil. I stitched little abalone-shell buttons onto a strip of silk ribbon which I glued across the bottom edge. It seemed right. 

The indigo fabrics made a perfect and dramatic background to the white stitching and acrylic paints. The figure was made using a trapunto technique--making slits in the back of the quilted piece and inserting additional stuffing (bamboo, again). This piece is called Mama Washes Away The Blues, and celebrates the wonderful solitude of a soaking tub. Water is calming; The time of night in the piece is twilight, which is a very magical time, just as the first stars are starting to appear. If I could build the kind of soaking tub I'd like, it would be outdoors, screened by a high wall and the leaves of trees for the roof. Perfect place to hide away!