Technique Tuesday: From the Vaults of 2005!

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2005
Originally uploaded by lessherger

Most of my older journals are spare on the art side of things and focused much more on the words than images. In this case I glued in some business cards I picked up as we traveled my old stomping grounds in rural Maine. I wrote little notes about them. I used a waterproof ink in a rapidograph (shock) or something like a pilot precise grip or something else with waterproof ink. I let the ink completely dry and then work back into the page with watercolors.

When I wrote in these journals I purposefully wrote in chunks. Each idea or thought had it's own little section. Larger ideas had larger bubbles and smaller ideas smaller. In some cases I doodled outlines to the spots of thought, in other cases like this page I just used watercolor over the top of the ink.

I was working on 140lb cold pressed strathmore 400 series watercolor paper. At the time I used it because it was inexpensive, but also very serviceable. The page measures 5×7 and there were 24 pages in a journal.

It’s a little more complex

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So last week I’d been trying to figure out how to write this
post… And it wasn’t coming to me so I started journaling about it and came up
with an idea for a page. I hadn’t done an AJ in process video in forever so I
recorded the making of the page. I’ve posted it to YouTube. I’ll post it after the cut here
too. It’s vaguely NC-17 because there is a nude involved in it.

At least one person has vastly missed the point of what the
image and journal page is about. So, let me tell you a story. A friend of mine like
to show me dirty pictures, he really likes them and likes to share. The most
recent set of pictures involved a woman, fully nude, with clearly fake breasts,
tanned and posing in an orchard. She’s in a variety of poses smiling for the
camera. I found the orchard setting kinda creepy. I mean, orchards have spiders
and bugs and poisonous sprays. Yes, this is the sort of shit that goes through
my mind in the 30 seconds it takes to show me a couple of pictures. At the end
of everything he asked me what I thought, I was honest and said, “Meh.” He
looked at me and said, “What the hell is the matter with you?”* It was really
too hard to explain to him in that moment that it’s more complicated than that.

As a lesbian who is usually “one of the guys” I’ll have to
admit the dirty pics don’t offend me and I appreciate them but they don’t do
much for me. It’s just that sex/sexuality is a little more complicated than
dirty pictures for me. Sure I appreciate the female figure and form and yeah I
more than glance when I see a nude. The fact is that, like most women (I
suspect), its more complicated than that. Yeah I’m gay but I’m still a woman
and the hardwiring of my brain is really no different than most women. Sure I’m
more comfortable with short hair, you’ll never catch me in a dress ever again
and I’m very practical and pragmatic; but I’m still a woman.

The initial point of my journal page  was that it takes more than a dirty picture
to get me going but it has a dual meaning, the more I look at it, in that it
also means I’m more than just a piece of ass. (There really is no other way to
put it that makes the statement less offensive.) I’m glad though, that the
piece means more to people than just my initial meaning. That’s part of  the beauty of art, we all make our own meaning
when we look at a piece, and  instill our
own life story to the meaning.

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