May 11, 2016

The Story Of A Severed Penis

If you follow me on Facebook or here on my blog, you know that I have been making body of work that I call "Knitting in Art" - I add knits or fiber to my acrylic paintings. CLICK HERE to see an example of one of my pieces in my last post.

Just like any other artist I think about my projects all the time. It doesn't matter where I am. I can be walking in the woods with my husband or I can be shopping in the grocery store. Simply, I think how I will execute next canvas or a clay board or whatever I am working on constantly. On many occasions, I caught myself either painting or knitting in my head even when I was talking to people!

Today, I would love to share with you the process of my latest project, which was (originally) supposed to be an abstract depiction of someone hiking.

After the last exhibit I've been thinking about how to make my "knit art" a bit different. I thought that if I introduce a torn out paper into my next knit-painting it might be more interesting.

First I knitted my fiber pieces. Then I gathered few other items I was considering to use.  I prepared my paper, which I painted with a water color. After that I tore my painted paper into couple of shapes. I also dyed my string that I decided to use for sewing my paper shapes together.








In the image below you can see my next step - sewing the shapes together




I painted my clayboard in an abstract style that would represent a nature. It looked a bit boring to me so I decided to add some scratches to make it more interesting.




As you can see in the image below, I started to "play" with the prepared shapes on my painted clayboard .




I moved my shapes and knitted pieces around. I tried to find out what would be the best possible combination and best possible visual layout for my project. For some reason I just thought it is not working out.




I went back and forth while playing with the shapes, then again back to playing with the knits. It was going nowhere. Not happening. I could not figure out what was bothering me about the layout.




I thought it was perhaps the shapes that were bothersome. 
"Should I use only knits instead?" I thought. 
So, for a while I tried to position the knits and my left over string around on the clayboard in various ways.




In the end I decided that I will use only my sewed up "tear-out". Before I placed it on the board the way I wanted it, I toned down the background with my brown paint some more. I decided to outline the shape on one side and add pencil and ink marks to give my painting more dimensional look (which actually looks more like hair instead). Finally, I glued my shapes to the board and signed it. 

After about 20 hours of my labor, I asked my husband what he thought (he is the most critical critic). He liked it and said that it looks like John Bobbitt's severed penis
So, I decided to call this painting "Bobbittized".

"Bobbittized"
mixed media
20" x 16"
$395

BTW - anyone interested in purchasing "Bobbittized" can contact me via message on my Facebook Page "BronislavaArt"