BANKRUPT is a biting commentary on the state of the world today: “mom and pop shops” are being forced out of business by heartless conglomerates, while American jobs are being sent overseas. Quality of goods and customer service decline as consumers demand ever-lower prices.

Set in a Manhattan Men’s Fine Clothing store, four generations of the Pasquale family and the employees who have depended on them for years prepare to close up shop for good.

BANKRUPT (one-act drama) is the latest title published by LavaPress (publisher J. Thomson). Written by emerging playwright Mark Hanlon, it is the story told in three scenes of a family-owned men’s clothing store being forced into bankruptcy and closing the shop for good. Inter-generational conflict arises among the family and employees as they go through their last day of business and the bankruptcy auction the following day.

Roles for seven men (ages child – 80′s) and two women (20′s and 60′s).

Action: Set in the present day. Scene One occurs before opening the shop on the last day of business. Scene Two is set after closing the store. The third scene occurs on the day of the auction.
Availability for performance: Contact the author for performance rights.
ISBN: 978-1-105-36403-7
Print copies available on Lulu.com. Coming soon to Amazon.com and iTunes Bookstore

About LavaPress

Publisher J. Thomson (dba LavaPress) specialized in publishing plays by emerging playwrights, as well as art-related books for artists, galleries and museums. For more information about publishing with LavaPress, please contact publisher Jay Thomson or read other posts about LavaPress.

Other titles include:

Sherlock Holmes vs. Godzilla ( a melodrama in two acts), by Benjamin Schroth.

Holmes and Watson  fight the greatest evil yet in this spooflicious comedy. Time travelers, a fictional giant lizard and a villain from drive-in movies challenge our deductive hero with evil and seduction of every stripe. Watson helps as best he can but is distracted by the call of the wild in the form of both automaton seductresses and an unwillingly cross-dressed assistant. In the end, Holmes must face Godzilla and his own gooey inner demons to save the world from a farcical fate.

Published by LavaPress in 2011. Available on Blurb.com.

Asher Texas ’82 (one-act drama), by Bruce R. Coleman.

In this new one-act drama (4M, 2F) by Bruce R. Coleman, four teens from a small Texas town, confronted by a violent act of bullying, must choose to stay as they are, or change forever.

Available on Blurb.com and Amazon.com for Kindle

Published by LavaPress in 2011.

New BACON! fabric by J. Thomson now available for sale on Spoonflower

I have a new collection of BACON-inspired (OK, more like BACON-obsessed) fabrics for sale on Spoonflower. I created these from my own high-resolution photographs of bacon, and they look good enough to eat!

But what would you use BACON fabric for, you may ask? Well, for starters, you can create the perfect one-of-a-kind gift for the bacon-lover in your life (shirt, tie, placemat, apron, curtains, sheets…) but my favorite use for bacon fabric? Use it as camouflage to hide anything in a pile of bacon! (Hint: For extra realism when making a bacon pillow for example, slip one of these bacon-scented air fresheners inside!)

The prints are available on a wide range of fabrics from basic cotton, to silk, knit, sateen, twill, canvas and more. See the entire collection below, and click on over to my account on Spoonflower to place an order.

Woodgrain bow tie by J. Thomson. Fabric by Timeless Treasures (#KATE-C 4053)

Since I made these for my own use, I just made them the correct size for my neck, but they could easily be made adjustable for other necks. The hardware is pretty difficult to find online, but I found a few sources for it.

Cowboys reversible bow tie by J. Thomson. Fabric by Timeless Treasures (# ERA-C 4154)

The print for the Cowboys reversible bow tie is a little too big for a bow tie, but it sure is a fun pattern. It reminds me of the bedspread I never had when I was a kid. When tied correctly, the knot is a different color than the bow itself, and it can be tied with either the blue or the yellow side showing.

This is probably the start of a new obsession, since they’re so easy to make and they require so little fabric (I figured out that I can fit at least six ties on a single yard of Spoonflower fabric). So look for more of these in the future.

So, instead of spending a relaxing day immersed in artwork and a visit to the Philadelphia Art Museum to see the new Zoe Strauss exhibit, I toiled away at plumbing. This of course is much harder than it sounds… I had to make room to do the work by removing a huge metal legal-size filing cabinet that weighs about the same as a small Volkswagen even when it is emptied of all the files and drawers. Of course, I had help too. I hired some friends of a neighbor to make the connections, but I had to go and buy the replacement water heater, and somehow get it up to my loft by myself. You should’ve seen me trying to wrestle a 40-gallon water heater up the spiral stairs to my loft.  But I did it. Never underestimate the will of a poor artist who really likes a long soak in a hot tub.

And now, the weekend is over and I can finally take a hot shower again. I still have to dispose of the body, by which I mean the now superfluous old water heater tank. Which again, is much easier said than done. First, there’s the task of lowering the hulking beast to the ground level. The old one is much too big to go down the spiral stairs. I’ve bought some rope and pulleys and I’m going to construct some sort of rudimentary dumb-waiter for the task. But for now, the carcass is sitting between my desk and the new water heater, in place of my filing cabinet. Like a warning to the new recruit: the proverbial head on a spike. Or like the carcass of a giant dead whale…

But that’s not what this post is about…

This post is about the drawing I found wedged in the back of the aforementioned filing cabinet. I had forgotten all about this drawing I made sometime around 1988-1990. I made it for no other reason than because I wanted to, and I like fish. Although the construction paper is beginning to yellow, it survived the decades pretty well tucked away in a forgotten folder at the back that filing cabinet.

Seeing this drawing again made me happy, because it reminds me of a time when I could spend an hour or two doodling away at my desk on something for no other reason than it made me satisfied to do so. This was a time before I had a computer at home; although I was using one at work and learning how to do “desktop publishing” (as we called it then) using programs with funny names that always had two words smushed together like Aldus PageMaker and WordPerfect. The hand-lettered word in the background is evidence of my blossoming interest in graphic design, and now I’m fascinated at how much the hand-drawn letters look like one of my favorite fonts: Impact, although I’m sure this was done years before I’d ever used Impact.

He’s not a real fish, either. It’s a fanciful one… sleek and fast, he reminds me of an ocean-going sailfish or salmon. He’s awfully colorful, and maybe a little sad… kinda like me. (Naturally, I am a Pisces.)

I’m also reminded that around the time of this drawing, I made a giant fish for a theatre production I was involved in. (The Sad Lament of Pecos Bill on the Eve of Killing His Wife, words and music by Sam Shepard and Catherine Stone.) That show was a surreal musical tale of Pecos Bill and his wife, Sluefoot Sue, who rode the waves of the mighty Rio Grande River on the back of a giant catfish. The fish was made of canvas, stuffed with packing peanuts which gave him a rather lumpy skin. But I painted him with a fantastic array of metallic and iridescent pigments. I loved the music of the show, but our production of it was perhaps a little too low-budget. Instead of an orchestra or even just a guitar, we had an electric piano. There was no set. Our Pecos Bill was the late Tom Reaves, who was wonderful and beautiful and macho, but as queer as a three-dollar bill. Our Sluefoot Sue was Audra Hans, who was beautiful and had an amazing voice. I sometimes still find the melodies haunting me. (I couldn’t find any videos online to link to, but here’s one of the songs from an Australian production of the show.)

Here’s the poster of the show that I designed. It’s too small to see in the picture, but the poster was studded with sequins and glitter, because you know, it just wasn’t gay enough already. We paired the show with another one called Savage/Love that was really just a string of monologues. I have no idea why we put these two shows together.

A few years later, I had decided to leave my career in theatre (at 24, I’d already been doing semi-professional theatre for 10 years and it had yet to pay off) and go into art school. One of my first drawing class assignments was to create a 3-D drawing using any media and any subject. Since I loved that show and never was really satisfied with the poster I designed for it, I decided to tackle it again for this assignment. I illustrated it in pencil and oil pastels, and mounted the pieces on foam-core to create the dimension. I really wanted to keep it flat like a drawing, but make it pop-up like a theatre set. (I remember my classmates and instructor being wowed by it; while I was disappointed that the rest of the class seemed to misunderstand the assignment… most of them painted a shoebox and glued crap to the inside of it.) It was bigger than it looks here… about four feet wide and three feet tall. That’s Sluefoot Sue herself, just before Pecos Bill shoots her to save her from an eternity of being bucked as high as the moon by her horse.

I guess the moral of this story is that you never know when some fish is gonna show up and take you for a ride, but you should hang on tightly because he’s mighty slippery and it’s gonna be a fun ride!

But thinking about censorship today reminds me of a time when I was a young art student, and one of my art installations was censored by the University I attended. The controversy seemed to consume the student body, and threatened my grades, my reputation, and my personal safety. This post tells the story from my point of view… that of the censored artist.

Early College Life

I didn’t go to college until I was 25; partly because I was already working a full-time day-job, and putting in long hours doing semi-professional theatre in Dallas. When I finally decided to go earn a degree, I looked for a school with a good studio glass program that was not too far away from home, and yet far enough to escape the Texas heat in the summer. I settled on Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, which is about as far away from Chicago as you can get and still be in Illinois. It was 750 miles from Dallas, which was just right.

Being a large University in a small town, it had the best of both worlds: lots of arts and culture, and yet lots of small-town charm. It even boasted one of the oldest gay/lesbian student organizations  anywhere. If memory serves, SIUC’s GLBF group (for “Gays Lesbians, Bisexuals and Friends… we didn’t know to include transgendered people back then) was started around 1968-1970, before most of the students there had been born. Ironically, the GLBF office was in a former janitor’s closet, on the third floor of the Student Center. It was like being in Siberia, but hey, at least we had an office. The 35+ members of the group took turns volunteering to answer the GLBF hotline, where we would offer anonymous counseling services to anyone that called or dropped in. Even though we had a listing in every issue of The Daily Egyptian, (the student newspaper) the phone hardly ever rang. On the few occasions when someone dropped in while I was manning the desk, it was a straight person concerned about a friend of theirs that was gay. (As in, “is there any way I can make them not be gay?”) One particularly memorable client was an african-american woman who wanted to know if there were any physical tell-tale signs that would help her determine if her husband was cheating on her by having gay sex on the “down low”. (“Yes, his nipples will turn neon-pink”, I wanted to tell her.)

It was the early 90′s… we wore Freedom Rings and “I’m not gay, but my boyfriend is” t-shirts from Don’t Panic, and frequently held demonstrations and protests in support of equal rights for gays and lesbians. A group of us even drove to Washington DC for the “The March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation” in 1993. Every October 11th, we celebrated National Coming Out Day, and we wore red ribbons and draped the artwork in the Student Center with shrouds on December 1st for “A Day Without Art/National AIDS awareness day.”

Hate Crimes (or fear of them) became matter of fact

Even though it was a large art school within a large university, I was the only “out” art student I knew, and none of my professors was out to me or anybody else I knew of. Can you imagine an art school with hundreds of students, and only one out gay student? Neither could I.

One day, I saw a listing in the Daily Egyptian that a new group for gay and lesbian artists was starting up. When I went to the first meeting, my boyfriend and I were the only ones who showed up. The instigator of that group was an out lesbian filmmaker and folk-song writer, and she seemed disappointed too that only 2 gay guys and no lesbians showed up. We didn’t last long. Still, I took up the call to be the out gay art student on campus (hoping that it would encourage others to come out). Whenever I had a class assignment, I tried to incorporate my out gay-ness into it. In my color theory classes, I painted icons of interlocking male+male and female+female symbols. In my psychology class, I wrote about being an out gay man. In my glassblowing classes, I made glass dildos and engraved pornographic drawings on my blown glass vases. Mostly I was tolerated, if not celebrated, on campus. Remember, this was the early 90′s in a rural area… gay couples I knew were afraid to hold hands on campus for fear of being beaten up, and even a night out at the one and only gay bar in town wasn’t always a safe bet. I’d seen more than a few fist-fights in that place. But overall, I was happy expressing my freedoms, and being who I was.

It was an early October Monday in 1993, when I discovered, along with 2 or 3 other GLBF members, that someone had tried to set fire to the GLBF office on the 3rd floor of the student center. The wooden door was scorched, and the calendar of events on the door was burned off. Around the same time, we discovered that the entire tape on the GLBF answering machine had been filled up with nasty messages from a group of drunken frat boys. There were threats and lots of expletives. And it went on for 30 minutes. We filed complaints and talked to campus police officers and officials in the student center, but they did nothing. They seemed to want to sweep the incident under the rug, and basically told us to just forget about the incident. That was pretty much the vibe I got from everybody (gay and straight) on campus… “why do you have to make such a big deal out of everything?” was constantly ringing in my ears. It wasn’t that it didn’t matter to them that gays and lesbians were being discriminated against (sometimes openly), but most of the students and residents of Carbondale were too scared to do anything about it.

One fag bashes back (part 1: the performance)

Click to download the program as a PDF.

Exactly one year later, one of my art professors assigned an open project for the semester. We could do anything we wanted, and we met at regular intervals to discuss our progress. I decided to mount an ambitious two-part project I entitled “Labels: One Fag Bashes Back” as a response to the anti-gay discrimination I had experienced on campus, and in particular to that answering-machine tape full of homophobic comments. The first part was to be a performance piece, and the second part an art installation in the Student Center’s Art Alley.

In the weeks leading up to the performance, all was going well. My professor was supportive and encouraged me to think big and be more ambitious, even if it had nothing to do with glassblowing. I had already applied for, and been granted an exhibition space in the Student Center for the second part. (“Art Alley” as it was called, consisted of three very large glass display cases on the second floor of the Student Center, each about 20′ wide and 3′ deep… bigger than some small theatres I had worked in.) For the performance piece, I enlisted the help of my friend and partner-to-be Richard to play the part of my accomplice, “Sissy”. It was his job to document my performance AND the audience with a Polaroid instant camera. (Yes, it was still the pre-digital age.)

I set up a small stage in one of the glass department’s work rooms. I rigged a backdrop painted with Pollock-esque drips and splatters, and used simple clip lamp lights to illuminate the stage. It was a full house of about 35-40 fellow art students and a few friends from GLBF. Richard, my accomplice, was seated in the audience. I came out and welcomed the crowd and thanked them and my professor for supporting my performance. What came next was quite a shock to most of my friends and fellow students, who knew me for being fairly mild-mannered.

At the start of the performance, I disappeared behind the backdrop momentarily where I stripped down to my black underwear. Even I didn’t think SIUC was ready for a nude performance! Underneath my street clothes, my skin was painted a bright pink with tempera body paint. When I stepped out on stage, a recording of the answering-machine tape began to play. As the voice on the tape got nastier and more vitriolic, I became angrier. First I shaved my head with a pair of clippers (well, mostly…. I’d never shaved my head before, and I wasn’t prepared for how difficult it would be to do it myself onstage without a mirror.) Then I began to paint words on my body using sponges cut in the shape of letters and dipped into black paint. The words were the epithets being hurled at me on the tape: “faggot,” “homosexual,” “sissy,” etc. As I was doing this, “The Sissy” was snapping polaroid photos of myself and the audience all the while (I wanted the audience to feel as uncomfortable as possible about taking part in this.) At the end, I smeared all the painted words on my body and yelled defiantly at the disembodied voice. Blackout.

I invited the audience to stay for a discussion afterwards, and the comments were all positive… one person even gave me a hug despite the fact that I was a mess! It was incredibly gratifying to have surprised my fellow students and teachers, and to accept their criticisms.

One fag bashes back (part 2: the art exhibit)

Two days later, I installed the exhibit in the Student Center for part two of LABELS: One FAG Bashes Back. I took an art installation approach to the display, lining the entire case with silver mylar. The polaroids were framed, with a hand-written transcription of the answering-machine tape below. Other elements of the display included a moving LED sign that displayed the message “Nemo me impune lacessit (No one provokes me with impunity)”, and several of my quirky sculptures that had to do with ideas of labels and passing.

Keep in mind that getting approved to display something in the Student Center was a pretty big deal, as there was lots of competition for the space. I had to submit an application to the Student Center staff, which was approved and accepted many weeks prior.

The day after the installation, I stopped by to check it out only to find that portions of it had been censored by somebody with a key to the display case. They had put up black paper over all of the photographs and unplugged my LED sign, but left the sculptures untouched. Although there was no nudity in the actual performance, I did include 2 new polaroids of a “dress rehearsal” where I was nude. But all of the photos were censored, not just the nude ones.

Of course, I immediately went to the office to protest the censorship. I was refused. But they did allow me to put up signs on the black paper which said the work was being censored without the permission of the artist. I continued to negotiate with the Student Center staff, but they refused to un-censor the display. The Student Programming Council’s advisor was quoted in the paper saying that my display was censored because it differed from what I proposed in my written application. But this was a false statement, because I proposed to include my current work in the display, and this performance and installation was my current work. They even made me put a comment book out for people to write in (not normally done in this space). Of course, I insisted that the artist who occupied the other windows had to have a comment book as well! (Her paintings were really quite awful pictures of kittens in baskets—literally! The dichotomy between our work only served to heighten the drama, and I did feel badly that she got lots of negative comments in her book almost no comments in her book, and some of those were really negative.) I felt that I had a good response to every argument against my display… there were other works of art displayed in the Student Center that showed nudity; the display was pre-approved by the same staff that was now censoring it; the original incident occurred IN the Student Center, and the staff did nothing about it and this display was my response to that.

The controversy went on for several weeks, and played out in numerous articles in The Daily Egyptian, as well as the “real” newspaper, The Southern Illinoisan. I was even interviewed on camera by a local TV station, and a friend who worked at the Southern Illinoisan told me the story was sent out on the AP News Wire, where it could be picked up by any news outlet in the country. I even got a few messages on my home answering machine (mostly against my work), and phone calls at work from various groups either in support of, or against my art display.

But after weeks of this controversy, it was beginning to impact my life in ways that I had not expected. I found that nobody would talk to me in my classes, and even my supportive professors started asking me to back down. My boyfriend was a little less than supportive (was he jealous of the attention?) and even the GLBF group wanted the issue to just go away. My social life was in the toilet (not literally), and my grades were beginning to suffer, too. I had a fight with a guy from NORML (the pro-marijuana campus group) who was aghast that I didn’t want to let NORML ride on my coattails, so to speak, by letting me do the performance again at one of their rallies. Then I got an unexpected call at work one day… from a chapter of the ACLU based in Chicago, offering to take on my case. Although in retrospect I wish I had pursued the case, I didn’t because I just wanted my life to get back to normal. I felt like my work had achieved its goal of starting a dialog… one that went on for many weeks all over campus, in classrooms and everywhere else.

After the furor died down, I heard from friends that it was discussed in their classes… whether I was right or wrong, whether it was “Art” or not. I felt that the main discussions got away from what I intended… it was no longer about homophobia on campus, and became more about censorship and art. Don’t forget that the late 80′s and early 90′s was a time of a lot of art meant to be controversial… Andre Serrano put a crucifix in a jar of urine and called it Piss Christ, Chris Burden shot himself in the arm in the name of art, and Ron Athey slashed his body with razor blades and made “prints” using his own HIV-positive blood. What I did was very tame by comparison, and yet the controversy gripped this sleepy university for more than a month.

The Student Programming Council never did back down and allow the photographs to be shown. So when the exhibit was scheduled to come down a month later, I listed it as an event in the paper and invited the public to attend. Dozens of people showed up to get a look at the censored exhibit as it came down. Some expressed disappointment that it was so tame, but most expressed their support of me if they said anything at all. I still have a binder full of comments written by the public… half in support of what I was doing, and half that thought it was totally bogus. I’m still glad I went through that experience, even if it was somewhat traumatic for me. I could have pushed the issue further, but my personal well-being and education would have suffered as a result, and I was not ready or willing to be a martyr for the cause.

I never intended for the performance or the exhibit to be controversial; I just thought it would start a dialog about homophobia on campus. But it was the fact that the powers-that-be not only censored my art, but seemed to be making up the rules as they went along (and unfairly at that) that really made me angry. Of course, the controversy that erupted on campus meant that my exhibit was seen by more people, and that more people were talking about the issues involved. In that regard, this project was a huge success.

Ironically, two years after this incident, I was honored by the University when they gave me a commission to create a mural (totally unrelated to this exhibit) that is now in the permanent collection and on display in Faner Hall.

The slide show below includes all of the polaroids from the performance (but not the NSFW additions) and pictures from taking down the censored exhibit. Links to PDF scans of the newspaper clippings are below the slideshow. I’ve also included scans of the entire comment book (56 page PDF), but be warned… some of the comments in the book are pretty offensive.

The Daily Egyptian, “Artist’s Exhibits Needs Committee Approval”

The Daily Egyptian, “Art Student Questions SPC Censorship”

The Southern Illinoisan, “Censorship: Artist Says Work Censored Because Of Homosexual Theme”

The Daily Egyptian, “Nudity, Slurs Keep Exhibit Under Cover”

The Daily Egyptian, “Art Exhibit Draws Varied Reactions”

The Daily Egyptian, “Censoring of Art is UnAmerican”

The Daily Egyptian, “SPC Needs To Get Out Of The Art Business”

The Daily Egyptian, “Indecent Exposure”

The Daily Egyptian, “Pornography Sold At Student Center”

The Daily Egyptian, “Censorship, DE Cause Controversy”

Labels: One FAG Bashes Back, part 2 (comments from the public book)

I received the test print on fabric on Saturday, much sooner than I expected. These were printed on 100% cotton “quilting weight” fabric, which is the cheapest Spoonflower offers. It looks okay, but I think in the end I might go with something heavier and tighter, something like the organic cotton sateen or linen-cotton canvas.

Since this is just a test, I only ordered a single fat quarter (which is 18″ x 21″). The largest size hoop I can fit on that is a 16″ word, so I chose “indignation”. That left room for two 3″ words… there’s only one single letter word in the entire quotation, “a”, so I made two of those. (I designed them in Adobe Illustrator, adding guidelines and my signature, and then upload them to Spoonflower.com for printing.)

Of course I still hadn’t received my embroidery supplies, so I headed out to the nearest craft store for a few basics… hoops in the correct sizes, and a few colors of floss. Much to my disappointment, Michael’s did not have any 16″ hoops for sale (they had 14″ or 18″, but no 16″) so I will have to order those online. They were also completely out of black floss of any brand or kind, unless I wanted to spend $20 for a pack of different colors in what looked to be a very cheap kind of embroidery floss. I opted to just get white instead. In the final version of the piece, the embroidered words will use different colors of embroidery floss.

Here is the very first “finished” test piece. It’s a little blurry in the middle because this is a direct scan, and the thickness of the floss makes the fabric stand off the scanner glass a bit. The real piece isn’t as blurry. Enlarged to show detail. Actual size is 3″ diameter.

Obviously, I have a lot to learn about the craft of embroidery. Not that I mind the imperfections in this piece… I actually think it turned out pretty close to what I imagined. I think it will be better with the right kind of floss, and some practice. Stay tuned…

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet… is a standardized passage of dummy text used since the 16th century by printers and graphic designers in place of actual text, when creating a layout or typeface for example.

As a fine artist and graphic designer, I often use text in my artwork. I like the additional layers of meaning pieces of text can contribute to a painting or collage, but the whole content of the piece never relies on the text alone. Although the line between graphic design and art is sometimes blurred, for me it is a question of what takes precedence in a piece: the text/typography, or the art/graphics. It is the marriage of both that creates the visual content of the pieces I create.

Last week, I was brainstorming for some ideas for a new series of artwork I wanted to create. I had this idea of digitally printing a design onto fabric (instead of painting it). I thought it would be interesting to see some graphic design (with text) but put it in the context of a gallery or other fine art setting. But because I like making things (as opposed to simply designing them on the computer and printing them out) I decided to add another layer to the piece by painstakingly hand-embroidering each letter in the text. Doing so adds an element of “hand made” and craft to the piece, which otherwise might come across as rather dead.

I had the idea of creating an installation of a multitude of bubbles (circular canvases), each with a single word on it, superimposed over the image of an eye. Taken together, the installation would spell out a quotation.

But what text to use?

So, I did what designers have done for 500 years… I used Lorem ipsum… until I could figure out a “real” quote. But that got me wondering about the origins of the “lorem ipsum” text itself, and whether it had any meaning. A little research later, I discovered (to my surprise) that lorem ipsum is NOT fake latin, as I had originally thought. It actually comes from two paragraphs of text written in 45 BCE by Cicero, the ancient Roman senator and philosopher. Sometime in the middle ages, when the printing press was bleeding-edge technology, a printer mixed up a galley of type to produce a type specimen book, and Lorem ipsum… was born. It took 20th century researchers to discover the original text by searching for other uses in Latin literature of the less common Latin words in the phrase.

It turns out that the undoubtable source of lorem ipsum… is “de finibus bonorum et malorum” (The extremes of good and evil) by Cicero, circa 45 BCE. The book is a treatise on the theory of ethics (according to Wikipedia, I haven’t read it myself…. yet.) It’s the second of the two paragraphs that I decided to use for my text. The English translation is quoted at the end of this post.

With a quote this size, this project becomes a daunting one. But as I mentioned in a previous post, one thing I’ve learned about art is that to be successful, you have to think big and add zeroes. So I’ve written up a complete project proposal and figured out a budget for the project, for the purposes of seeking a grant. Doing a full installation, with almost 300 individual words (in the original Latin, plus the English translation) will cost over $15,000 and take about 1,700 man-hours to complete. I also included figures for an English-only version that is under $10,000 and 1,000 man-hours. (If you have any recommendations for grants, please forward them to me!)

I am currently in the design-phase of the mockup. For this version, I’m using photographs of eyes downloaded from Google images, but in the real piece I would like to use photographs taken by me to avoid any unnecessary criticism about the sources of the images. I’ve already designed and ordered a sample printing on fabric, which I will then embroider when I receive the fabric. A few sample word/images are shown here.

The next update on this project will show the actual fabric, and a test of the embroidery. Here is the full quotation. Words in bold (in the original Latin) are the source of the Lorem ipsum… text.

On the other hand, we denounce with righteous indignation and dislike men who are so beguiled and demoralized by the charms of pleasure of the moment, so blinded by desire, that they cannot foresee the pain and trouble that are bound to ensue; and equal blame belongs to those who fail in their duty through weakness of will, which is the same as saying through shrinking from toil and pain. These cases are perfectly simple and easy to distinguish. In a free hour, when our power of choice is untrammeled and when nothing prevents our being able to do what we like best, every pleasure is to be welcomed and every pain avoided. But in certain circumstances and owing to the claims of duty or the obligations of business it will frequently occur that pleasures have to be repudiated and annoyances accepted. The wise man therefore always holds in these matters to this principle of selection: he rejects pleasures to secure other greater pleasures, or else he endures pains to avoid worse pains.

Ever since my early painting classes as an undergraduate in art school, I have been interested in incorporating text in my work. Using text in contemporary artwork is nothing new, and some artists use text exclusively. I’ve been inspired by the works of Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, Cy Twombly, Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, and the Dada collages of Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, to name a few artists who used text in some of their artworks. I am intrigued by the possibility of adding additional layers of meaning to a piece through the use of text. Such uses have the potential to support the main idea of a piece, or contradict it; either usage is valid. The use of text in visual artwork can also serve to make the piece more accessible to the general public.  I think of it as a way of giving the viewer another handle to hold onto when grappling with the piece.

One of my early painting professors, Erin Palmer, offered a critique of a text painting I made as an undergraduate by asking whether the painting could be successful if the text wasn’t readable (ie, if it were in another language, or if it were illegible text).

The painting in question was the result of a collaborative exercise, in which students started a painting, and then swapped with a randomly chosen student who contributed to the painting, and then swapped back again to complete the piece. The rule was that you couldn’t obliterate the other artist’s work, and you had to transform their contribution in some way.

My painting started as an upside-down pentagon-shaped abstract painting (my reference was “subverted domesticity”). The student I was randomly assigned to swap paintings with was an elderly woman who was taking the class as continuing-ed (ie, not for credit), and her paintings tended towards the kind of cute puppies-and-kittens-in-baskets paintings you see in garage sales and terrible calendars. To say I was not happy about this arrangement is an understatement.

On the second week of the assignment, when we gathered to critique the progress of the paintings after the contributions of the second artist, I was horrified to see she had put a very-badly rendered horse’s head right in the middle of my beautiful white abstract painting. I was livid. All of the other pairs of artists had tried to contribute something to their paintings in line with what the original artist had begun, but my “partner” had completely ignored the intention of the piece and instead imposed her own will upon it. The conversation about the painting took up nearly the entire class period, and at the end I was cautioned that part of the assignment was that I was not allowed to obliterate the horse, and yet I had to transform it in some way.

With that miserable set of circumstances, I was challenged to rescue this painting and make it a successful piece in only one week. Obviously, I had to let go of the original idea of an abstract painting. I ended up outlining the horse with gesso squeezed from a ketchup bottle, and layering translucent white over it, turning the horse into a ghost. I also gave the horse a neck and body. I then lettered the background with a story I made up as I painted the letters in… a story in which an unwanted horse unexpectedly appears and utters non-sequiturs, much to the dismay of the artist. But apparently horses know more about art than snakes do. (Full text is quoted below.)

The final critique generated a lot of enthusiastic comments and criticism, and the general consensus was that it was an interesting and successful exercise. The two artists involved in making the piece were not allowed to speak until the end of the period, at which time the only comment the elderly painter had to offer about the piece was that I shouldn’t have hyphenated the last word, “rude”. (She was not happy with the way the piece turned out, suggesting I had ruined her perfectly good painting of a horse, which is about how I felt about my abstract piece, although I was satisfied with it in the end.) Unfortunately, the painting no longer survives, and I’ve only been able to find one blurry snapshot photograph of it, shown here.

This painting exercise taught me to pay attention to (sometimes unwanted) distractions, and not to be afraid to let go of an idea, lest the piece become too precious or overworked. I also learned not to invest too much importance of the piece into the text itself, and that even the text should contribute to the piece’s overall aesthetics.

Sometimes a horse will just walk right into your stable little life, and ask you things like “What’s so great about Art?” Or after taking one bite out of each of your apples, it will say to you “Got any peaches?” Now this horse is an intruder, and its hooves are messing up your carpet, and so you ask “What is it you have to say to me, Horse?” and the horse replies, “Art is not what you think it is. And life is not a stable.” And if you ask the horse “Is Art only commodity, or is Art the free and true expressions of the chosen few in our society?” The horse only stamps its hoof & eats your curtains. And if you say, “Well what do horses know about Art anyway?” The horse says, “More than snakes do.” And then the horse leaves as unexpectedly as it came, and you are left wondering what the horse meant and why it came to you. After a while, you miss the horse—even though it was rude.

My studio practice differs from that of most artists I know in that I don’t simply go into my studio every day (or even every week) and just paint. And when people I’ve just met ask me what I do, the exchange typically goes like this: “I’m an artist.” “Oh really? What kind of pictures do you paint?” “Well, I do paint sometimes, but not exclusively, and when I do, it’s not usually pictures of anything, because I approach a painting as a three-dimensional object, not an illusion of space…” By this point, the person’s eyes are usually glazing over and darting around the room looking for an excuse to get away. Sometimes to save us both the embarrassment, I’ll simply say that I make abstract paintings (which isn’t really true). The typical response is “oh, that’s nice.” Or maybe, “My aunt was an abstract painter. She killed herself though.”

But really I don’t even think of myself as a Painter. In fact, I’m quite bored with painting right now. Painting was just the excuse to keep myself in the field of art, and in the studio, back when I had a 9-5 desk job (this was right after graduate school, when the spectre of thousands of dollars of student loans going into repayment frightened me into the workforce.) Other than “artist” I really don’t like boxing myself in with labels like “abstract painter” or “glass artist” or “sculptor”. My main medium is ideas. I think of a thought or idea, and I think of the best way for me to convey it. This is what determines what media I use in my artwork, and why I don’t simply just  paint, or just make collage, etc.

My goal is to produce thought-provoking work that is multi-layered. On the surface, it should be compelling or beautiful. But there are layers of meaning that can be revealed or hidden, pushed or pulled in different directions. I’m not a big fan of contemporary artwork that is too cryptic. I hate it when I see an installation where the artist has left the viewer no clues to figure out what is going on. I try not to be so narcissistic in my work (I may not always succeed). I love seeing work that is so utterly simple, you can’t believe nobody’s done it before. (Colossal is full of this kind of stuff.) But whenever I try to reduce my work down to something so simple, it usually fails because I get bored before I’ve taken the piece to the level that achieves success.

In graduate school (and in so much contemporary art these days) one of the methods I see employed over and over is to take something very simple and repeat ad nauseum (sometimes this technique works, and sometimes it doesn’t). One of my friends in graduate school (she was a fibers major) was obsessed with hands… the images of hands appeared over and over in her work. When she didn’t know what to do next, she compulsively made plaster casts of her index finger. Frequently, she just spent all day making these little plaster casts. They were chipped and broken, or incomplete. She had buckets of them, but she didn’t consider this her “work”. It was just something to keep her hands busy.

By the end of the third semester (it was a two-year program), all of her “work” had been panned in critiques and she was panicking over what to do for her final MFA thesis exhibit. She ended up making a single monumental installation of thousands of her finger casts. It was beautiful. The fingers were attached to the wall (sticking out from it) in uneven rows and columns, which referenced the warp and weft of weaving. It took up one whole wall of the gallery, which must’ve been 20′ long and 8′ or 9′ high. She had one of the best critiques in two years, and it was one of the best pieces I saw come out of my class at graduate school.

By contrast, I start out with a big idea, and try to reduce it to just the essential parts. Knowing how much to get rid of and how much to leave in makes all the difference in the piece. If I take too much away, the viewer is left adrift in a sea of non-sequiturs… and the disparate elements of my work float by like so much flotsam. But if I don’t reduce enough, then the work fails because it is too didactic, or there is little left for the viewers to discover on their own.

Last week, I started working on a new piece that will take shape over a long period of time. [The process will be documented here under the category label "Lorem Ipsum", which is the working title of the piece. One of the mockups for it is shown above.] The genesis of the project came about when I was thinking about the use of text in contemporary artwork, something I’ve always liked to do. As the idea formed, I thought of ways I could convey the idea(s) and how I could actually build the work. The end result is something I never would’ve found any other way. [I'll describe the project more fully in an upcoming post.]

Since it’s turned out to be a rather large project that will cost thousands to make and take a long time to make, I’ll be looking for sources of funding in the form of grants from individuals and foundations, and places to exhibit the work. For this reason, the whole project needs to be thoroughly documented. In fact, I’ve already written a proposal and created some scale drawings and mockups. I could have started small (and in fact, I will begin the project by making some samples) but I learned one really good lesson at a grant writing seminar for artists at last year’s College Art Association conference in New York: the lady giving the seminar said “Think big. Add zeroes.” By which she meant that foundations and sources of corporate support like big ideas. Why ask for $100 so you can buy some paint, when you could ask for $10,000 to make a whole series of paintings? Or even more?

So that’s what I’m doing. Thinking big(ger). Adding zeroes. Stay tuned.

Cape Cod Light #9 by J. Thomson
6″ x 8″ Oil on Canvas

Cape Cod Light has been the most successful series of paintings I’ve created yet to date. The majority of the 20+ paintings have been sold. BUT I’ve selected the best of the remaining few for display at Nichols-Berg Gallery in Chestnut Hill (Philadelphia, PA) during the month of January, 2012 for the “Friends and Family” show. Not only that, but I’ve lowered the price on these paintings so that the gallery can offer them at or below the same price I sold them from my own studio.

Six of the paintings are on display, and one larger painting is available there by request (ie, it is not currently on display).

Cape Cod Light #12 © J. Thomson
36″ x 36″, oil on canvas
This painting can be seen at Nichols-Berg Gallery by request only.

Cape Cod Light #8 © J. Thomson
12″ x 12″ oil on canvas

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