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Madame Rhinoceros

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Madame Rhinoceros collage shadow box I made, oh, err 2004? Look, sequins!
Yesterday I found myself killing time in the cosmetics section at an upscale department store. I don’t generally loiter among the lipstick but I was early for lunch with a friend and was running low on mascara.
Ten minutes in, a chipper young sales clerk with a dolphin tattoo successfully deployed a sales technique that I learned years ago while training for my first retail job. I’m sure there are lots of variations on the technique but I know it as CCI (Compliment, Comment, Introduce).

   Step 1. Clerk compliments the Customer = Customer feels good.
   Step 2. Clerk comments on the Customer = Customer feels insecure.
   Step 3. Clerk introduces a product = Customer buys it.

The basic concept is that if you can make a woman feel insecure in a “friendly” way, she will buy anything. I wish I could tell you that the technique is wrong and it never works and we are all too smart for that…but alas, sadly, it works all the time. We are a manipulative bunch. Yesterday, the conversation went something like this:

   Clerk:  “Oh my you have such lovely skin!”
   Customer: “Well thank you very much. I try my best.”
   Clerk:  “You know, you have such unique coloring. I can see how it would be difficult finding the right color pencil to tame those brows. Have you tried one of these?”
    Customer slumps her shoulders, lifts right hand to eyebrows to smooth them out while left hand reaches for the pencil.
    …

Five minutes later, Customer walks out with one eyebrow pencil, three eye shadows, foundation primer and countless packets of product samples.

Thing is, Customer went in looking for mascara.

Oh dear me, I feel just like Madame Rhinoceros!

Madame Rhinoceros and Her Dress
From Aesop’s Fables by Arnold Lobel

Madame Rhinoceros saw a dress in the window of a shop. It was covered with polka dots and flowers. It was adorned with ribbons and lace. She admired it for a moment and then entered the shop.
“That dress in the window,” said Madame Rhinoceros to a salesperson, “I would like to try it on.”
Madame Rhinoceros put on the dress. She looked at herself in the mirror. “I do not think this dress is at all attractive on me,” she said.
“But Madame,” said the salesperson, “you are completely wrong. This dress makes you look glamorous and alluring.”
“If only I were sure,” said Madame Rhinoceros.
“Ah, Madame,” said the salesperson, “everyone who sees you wearing this dress will be filled with
admiration and envy.”
“Do you really think so?” asked Madame Rhinoceros, turning around and around in front of the mirror.
“Absolutely,” said the salesperson. “You have my word.”
“Very well,” said Madame Rhinoceros, “I will buy the dress, and I will wear it now.”
Madame Rhinoceros left the shop. As she walked up the avenue, she saw that people were smiling and laughing at her.
“Admiration,” thought Madame Rhinoceros.
She saw some people who were shaking their heads and frowning.
“Envy,” thought Madame Rhinoceros.
She continued up the avenue. Everyone who saw her stopped and stared. Madame Rhinoceros felt more glamorous and alluring with every step.

o-o-o-o-o



Paint Chip Art

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Artwork courtesy of Behr, Premium Paint Chips. Pudding Face Kitty Snoof courtesy of Tzeitel, The Cat.

Did you hear that? It’s the sound of my Crazy Cat Lady Ranking exploding. Yes, again. Totally worth it.

Kitty and the artwork belong to my friend Bird, who is not only my bestie, neighbor, and aunt to Lola, Bird is the one person who lets me hang random art experiments all over her walls. As you can see from the background on these photos, I make a lot of, um, art. This piece is an off-shoot of my birthday resolution.

Birthday Resolution? What’s that?

Why I’m glad you asked! A birthday resolution is like New Year’s resolution, but without the dieting and unpleasantness. I use it an excuse to take on a new daily habit, skill, ritual…no big whoop, just something that helps me look back on a year and feel really good about some aspect of personal growth. Feel accomplished. Make up for the serious lack of smash cake in my life. One year I learned a new word in Spanish every day. Another year I read the newspaper every morning. One year I said I would learn the ukulele…errrr…that didn’t go so well.

Last year, I said I was going to start a blog. Setting up the dang thing took ten minutes, but figuring out what sort of blog I wanted took some time!  I’m big on research…started out by noting the blogs that I liked that crossed my path the first couple of months…then everyday I would comment on something I liked….then everyday I would note a post/article I liked for its content….then every commentary formula…..then every layout…the color scheme…then font face…etc, etc. Six months and a whole lot of cyber surfing later, I identified enough patterns of stuff I liked to read, and used it as the skeleton of stuff you might want to read. In July 2010 this blog was launched. Let me tell you, for all the buildup, it started out, uh, shall we say, anti-climactic. But now, it is one year since the journey began and y’all are here and reading this. Goal accomplished. Give myself a cookie!

This year, my little ritual is something closer to a journal. I’m not big on keeping a diary, but a small memento to take away the sentiments of the day would be nice. Playing off my old 1,200 Names for Yellow piece, I’m going to name colors. I made myself a stack of blank swatch cards and grabbed a lot of painting scraps….a little snip and a dab of glue, I’m in business. For the next year, every night, last thing I‘ll do is select a color card and write down a name and date. I know this sounds very artsy fartsy, but really, all I’m trying to do is make a memory. My hope is that at the end of the year I can randomly pick up a card dated March 31, 2010, with a blue swatch called “STORM CLOUD” and recall that was the day I got stuck on the train in a tremendous thunderstorm and met a charming lady in a straw hat sitting behind the bearded man who smelled of Amstel Light.

You see, it’s all very logical.

So, 365 days in the year means I need a lot of color swatches. Initially I was going to rely on paint swatches from the hardware store, but decided it would I wanted to make use of the piles of scraps in my craft stash. Problem was, I already started grabbing pinches of paint swatches from various hardware stores. What to do what to do what to do?

Art! The answer is always art.

There are so many cool people out there making amazing stuff with paint chips. This one is easy, but you should check out some of the possibilities. I initially saw something similar to this in a model home five or six years ago. It was a giant 6’x8’ piece in a simple dining room with one of those glass tables. It was the first piece you saw when you walked through the door and I just thought WOWZERS I WANT ME SOME OF THAT. I apologize for not crediting the original artist, if you happen to know, please feel free to let me know. I’m big on giving credit where credit is do.

Materials

One painters canvas from the art or craft store (can also just paint a board white)
Paint chips
Foam Mounting tape
Bias tape or ribbon to run around the edge of the canvas.
This is so quick/cheap/easy, it hardly warrants a tutorial


1. Get yourself a bunch of paint chips (go rainbow, or coordinate your home interior)
2. Cut out squares of solid color. You could try to make them the exact same size, but that would drive me crazy. I just eyeball to keep them within half an inch of each other.
3. Tear off 1” squares of foam mounting tape. Mounting tape is super sticky, very durable, and more important, it will raise your color squares off the canvas just a tiny bit. The shadow it gives really sets them off. You could just hot glue them to the canvas, but the foam tape makes a BIG DIFFERENCE. Give it a chance!
4. Figure out roughly how many squares you can fit running the length and width of your canvas. You can try to line them up exactly, but again, that would drive me nuts! This isn’t brain surgery, so don’t take it so seriously. Just stick them up and go for it! No one is going to notice if some of them are slightly skewed or off center. In fact, it will enhance the overall character and charm of the piece. Embrace imperfections!!

Hot glue some ribbon or bias tape around the edge and SHAZAM you are done!

I’m generally not big on the concept of “filler art”…Personally, I would rather live with an empty wall then buy something just to fill the space. However, this piece is sort of a happy medium. There is no great thought or skill in making it, but by gosh, it makes for crazy eye candy!

1,200 Names for Yellow

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My friend said his shirt is blue. I said, it’s cobalt. He said, that means blue, right? And I’m all, yeah, but it’s specific. And he’s all, ok, you keep busy being specific about my shirt and I’ll keep busy eating this here fish sandwich. And then I go, it’s pecan crusted catfish on black olive foccacia. And he’s all, like I said, fish sandwich.

You know what this art piece is? It’s 1,200 fish sandwiches.

Interesting Fact: The Dani people in Southern Indonesia have only two words used for color, roughly translating to day/light and night/dark.

Another Interesting Fact: Research indicates most American children, on average, learn 11 standard color terms by the age of five; red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, pink, brown, black, white, and grey. Eleven. That’s a lot more than the peeps in Indonesia, but eleven is surely sub sufficient. People, I ask you: WHO WILL TEACH OUR CHILDREN MAGENTA?

So the question is; why must creative types like us always divide and conquer our colors? Why must we label and compartmentalize something as delicate and wonderful as the petal of a flower, or the color of the sky before the storm? Of course, some product pushing sales departments do it to describe their wares and maybe even boost sales (would you rather buy a lipstick called 45605C, or Juniper Sunrise?)…but I tend to think there is something bigger underneath it all.

Of all the colors that intrigue and perplex, yellow is the top of my list. Our associations are so extreme and contradictory; it’s the color of sunshine and happiness in our culture, while in many parts of Asia, yellow is the color illness and grief. To me, yellow means school buses and rubber duckies and buckets of buttery popcorn. It means tennis balls and taxi cabs and the convertible sports cars of men in a mid-life-crisis. It’s the cautious color of street signs and crime scenes. Watch an old Western Movie and you can’t go five minutes without someone getting called a cowardly “yellow belly.”  It’s even an ethnic slur. We have so many interpretations of this color, I thought it would be interesting to see if our perceptions carried through in our names.  Internet, meet 1,200 names for yellow.

They say Eskimos have 18 names for snow. This is 1,200 names for yellow. Every single swatch falls within “yellow” on the color spectrum, as defined by Maerz Paul’s “A Dictionary of Color” 1930| McGraw-Hill| New York

She’s rather old. Born 2003, just as I was finishing up at Le Super Pretentious Art School. At the time, I thought it was right to give her an equally pretentious name; Ekphrasis: Yellow: Nomenclature. Seriously, I just buried my face in my hands after typing that.  I can’t believe I was ever so full of myself to name a piece with not only one but TWO colons! And not only one but TWO words that don’t even appear in standard dictionaries. From Wiki:

Ekphrasis is the graphic, often dramatic description of a visual work of art. In ancient times it referred to a description of any thing, person, or experience. The word comes from the Greek ek and phrasis, ‘out’ and ‘speak’ respectively, verb ekphrazein, to proclaim or call an inanimate object by name.

Nomenclature is a term that applies to either a list of names and/or terms, or to the system of principles, procedures and terms related to naming – which is the assigning of a word or phrase to a particular object or property.

So, really, I should have named her Bigass List of Names for Yellow.

And while I scoff at the idea of it now, it seemed a pretty good idea back then.  Half the swatches came from typical sources like paint manufacturers, apparel catalogs, botanical guides, cosmetic companies, etc. The other half came from myself and a group of friends who made our own color identities (“ooo! this yellow is the color of my friend Karen’s Labrador, let’s name it after him” and suddenly Duncan 878 was born)….they were all recorded and referenced in a 42 page catalog no one will ever find interesting but me. But that’s Ok. I’m cool with that. I know the ‘real art’ is the catalog and not the thing on the wall. I like my catfish sandwich, no matter what you call it.

I love the center swatch on the bottom right image, named “The Thin Squealing Noises of Children on a Play Ground Making Fun of Life” courtesy of Iona O.
Notice lower left square contains three colors containing the term Saffrom, but they are nothing alike. 

The colors came from all sources, including a number of anonymous visitors who saw it in a gallery in 2004. Some really interesting stuff came out of the wood work… Golf Leaf, Nacho Cheese, Julie Andrew’s Underwear, French Pink, Forsythia, Yosemite, Pigskin, Polar Bear, Moon Dance, Murmur, Chicken Liver, Liberia, Little Dipper, Yellow Matter Custard Dripping From a Dead Dog’s Eye, Butter Finger, Ugly Deposits of Nicotine On Fingers And Teeth, That 70’s Color, Forbidding Skies…

 It was fun. I have enjoyed her for many years. Now the time has come to say goodbye.

My office is moving. Sigh. As much as I love it here, nestled on a perch above the train tracks, we are moving offices a few blocks down.  Upside: I’ll swap my view of the train tracks for a gorgeous Chagall mosaic. Downside: less wall space.  This means my gigantic art piece will be coming down.  I have no space for her at home, so before banish her to a box in the dark, I thought I would share her with you and give her one last day in the sun. Thanks for looking 🙂

New Project: Starting on September 21st (my birthday) I’m starting something new! Over the next couple weeks I’ll be painting my own color swatches and sticking them into a drawer next to my bed. Every night I plan take a new swatch card out and give it a name. Perhaps on the back I’ll write the date and what inspired me to give it that name. Or maybe not.  I don’t know. This isn’t a manifesto, just an exercise in creativity and a way to eventually look back and survey a year through bits and pieces of color. Anyone else who feels like joining in the party, feel free. This could be the start of something interesting….