Happy Father's Day

This post is dedicated to my grandfather and dad. I thought about sending out cards but i thought it would be more fitting to show the work that they have inspired me to work on.
The big project was the series of family pictures that I screen printed on to fabric. It took me something like 72 hours to complete and in those 72 hours i found some really great pics. It was really fun to look through all our pictures and find that we really have had some great times. The images that are drawn were the ones that i related to the most and the ones that i felt summed up our family the best.(for the images, if you click on them, you will get a larger view.)

A portrait of myself if i was the perfect mixture of my mom and dad.

In closing. Happy Father's Day! I love and miss you both and can't wait to see you soon.

Love, Jes

wrapping up

The following are just some of the designs i was selling at this year's spring art sale. if you are interested in purchasing a scarf, feel free to drop me an e-mail which you can find in the profile area of the blog. also, thanks to everyone who purchased a scarf and those who dropped by to show your support.

the following are 100% cotton that are dyed with a natural dye and printed with a bleaching solvent.


These are done on a synthetic fabric and created with fabric paints that activate to heat. I begin with painting the image on a sheet of paper then i take it into a heat transfer press and that is when the design is cemented. This process also allows for the scarf to be double sided.

Front
Back

Mother, Wife, Husband and Harry

I found these four gravestones in Graceland Cemetery. They was no family name or dates, just the four name plates. These are sewing machine lace samples that have the grave rubbings printed onto the samples. The Harry grave is made of human hair.

All in the family.

My first big project for my print class was to make a piece of work that was 36 inches by 72 inches. i decided to make a piece that investigated the economic divide between my mother and father's families. I did so by printing actual photographs from either family and illustrating some photos myself on a piece of fabric 36 inches by 118 inches. what i came to find that my father's family, which was much wealthier than my mother's family, had far more photos and the quality of those photos was far superior. i inserted the space for picture frames for me to paint in. the divide is not very apparent at this stage but once i add in the picture frames it will be very apparent. the fallowing images are of the process and the "final" piece (this is still a work in process).

print print print

This semester has been crazy. The new rule of each class having to have at least 3 hours of outside class work per week is just about killing me since i have 5 classes. BUT regardless of all this work and all this stress i am in love with screen printing. Here are some of the pieces that i have been working on in the last few weeks. I am incredibly excited for next week because we are going to be dying fabrics and using dye to screen print, which means scarves for everyone!

The following two were my first and made with paper cut outs.

I did this print by painting on the screen then running a discharge paste over the screen.


This is a comic that i did a for another class. This image was burned into the screen.
(the above image is not blurry but the piece itself. please click on to see in detail)

Little Boy Blue

Every time I want to experiment with a new form of painting or drawing I find myself going through all the Ryan McGinley photographs online and in old Vice Magazines i have. The one picture out of them all that I am drawn to is "Brennen (Blue)". The shape of his posture, the look on his face and the amount of shadowing is something incredibly interesting to me. So here is the original.

Now here are the two pieces i have done off this pic.

I did this one in April in preparation for my figure drawing final. I had just gotten some new colour inks and wanted to play around with them. No matter how permanent the bottle says the ink is, blue runs like a bitch on fire. Blue and Green are the two most difficult coloured inks to work with. Anywho, this was done on watercolour paper and is 20in x 15in.

This piece was done for my painting practices class last month. the assignment was to use a chance system to determine how i would paint an image. My system was to create a 20 count colour pallet, then i would roll a 20-sided dice to determine what colour would be placed in each shape i had sketched out on the canvas. I also rolled a 4-sided dice that would dictate if i would use walnut oil, turpenoid, linseed oil or no solvents. I decied to work with this image again because it has so many shadows and interesting shapes to it. This piece is 18in x 13in.

First Times, Part I

This semester I was in a class called "Working In Comics" which taught how comics are produced and the impact they have on society. The class was split into groups and each group was told to produce a comic book that would count as our final project. The group I was in decided to work off the idea of "first times". For the first installment we were talking about working with the "first time I fell in love" or the "first time I rode a bike" etc. In the end we agreed to work with theme of first time but not necessarily anything specific for the whole group. I liked the idea of doing a comic involving the first time i was in love. After contemplation, I decided to split my two page into the "first time I thought I was in love" and the "first time I knew I was in love". The time I thought I was in love would chronicle my relationship with Adam while when I knew I was in love would follow my relationship with Sharad. I settled on showing each event or moment in a Polaroid because they are just fragments of time and usually photographs are used to remember certain events.

"The First Time I Thought I was In Love"

"The First Time I Knew I was In Love"