Tag Archives: Ginger Burrell

Saying Goodbye to Art

Posted on April 4, 2011 | 3 comments

I have a love/hate relationship with my art (I suspect many artists do). If I made it, it must be marvelous, and I love it. Until I look at the same work through the lenses of new techniques or an improved skill set and then I want to toss all of it and start anew.

I have a few pieces of “student art” from my classes at SJSU that I still like a lot — even though they are taking up extra space I don’t have and they are not works that fit with my goals as an artist. I keep moving them from place to place in my studio and often they topple over as I have to push past them to get to something else. Clearly the solution is to say goodbye to this work that is valuable in that I learned techniques doing it, not in its quality as “great art.” Sigh.

I have a hard time getting rid of anything and for some reason these pieces have been especially hard to part with. Perhaps in the case of the paintings it is because I am not a painter and I worked much harder than the results reveal in making these canvases. In the case of the 3-D work I think it is the whimsical and political aspect. I like making political work and these make me smile when I look at them. Unfortunately they’re also the hardest to store.

So. This posting is to give them their send off.

First up, the “make a 3-D form out of shapes” assignment. By the time it was constructed it looked like some sort of dangerous device. Hence the label:

Keeping with the political and 3-D motif, the “How to Survive an Election Year” hat:

And on to the paintings. This painting is as basic as it gets, but it’s one of my favorites:

These last three are a series which include a jewelry box and a tablecloth I inherited from my grandmother and clearly show the influences of Mark Rothko, Magritte and Martin Puryear. With apologies to each of them:

And now that they are documented (for what my husband assures me will be the “early works” in my retrospective at the Met someday), I bid them farewell. Back to the studio where I am working on some new artists’ books in my newly found free space!

~Ginger

www.gingerburrell.com

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Altered Book for Marin MOCA

Posted on March 31, 2011 | 7 comments

I’ve always wanted to make an altered book and I’ve started a lot of them. Started being the operative word… Many of my students have made incredible altered books and when I see their work I’m tempted to try again. And then I have another “started” altered book.

This time the starting point was a request by Eleanor Murray of Marin MOCA for their Second Annual Altered Book Show/Auction. Eleanor has always been very kind to me and is a good friend of book arts so I quickly said, “yes” without thinking too much about the “how.”

Again I started a new altered book, I began by gluing pages together and cutting out windows and again I got stuck. I finally realized that my way of working was different and that I needed to figure out a way to alter a book that worked for me.

 I’d been making coptic bound books with my students at Palo Alto Art Center and thought that perhaps rebinding  a book was the way I needed to alter it. So I found this book, Better Handwriting for You 3, on a shelf in my studio. As you can see it was barely holding together but I was attracted to the colors and graphic design.

 

At the same time I found this book, I read an article about how cursive is being dropped from the Core Curriculum of schools all across the U.S. I happen to love handwriting and my mother always encouraged penmanship so I was appalled to see this bit of news. (My husband disagrees and reminded me that he never needs handwriting for his job and can’t even remember how to form a lot of the letters except in his signature.)

I started by taking the book apart. I created new covers by folding the old ones in half and gluing them together and then I created signatures  by choosing the most interesting inside pages and folding them in half.

 

I researched writing and human communication and decided to include new content and images about hieroglyphics, cuneiform, typing, etc. in the book. I used Adobe Illustrator to layout pages with the same colors and layout as the original book and then added the new content.

 

 

 

Finally, I rebound the book using coptic stitch and there it is, my first (finished!) altered book.

 

 

 

 

 

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You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby

Posted on September 24, 2010 | 1 comment

This is a new artists’ book, You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby, that was inspired by an ashtray I found in my grandma’s things after she passed away. You can see the ashtray, open, in the middle, with the little flip book in it. The ashtray, called a Silent Butler, was named after the device used in the late 1800s to collect table crumbs and ashes.

I found the little ashtray interesting and decided to make a book to go in it. One thing led to another and pretty soon there were two books and a custom matchbook that go inside a vintage purse.

The matchbook has a vintage ad on the back and stats on the front about a depressing term called YPLL. Years per life lost. In the case of smokers, the CDC estimates YPLL of 12 years per person.

The cigarette pack has the accordion book inside with vintage advertisements, aimed at women, from the early 1900s to the 1970s juxtaposed with passages from medical books from the same timeframe as the ads. There is a paragraph from a 1960’s era medical book that informs ladies that, although they probably won’t feel like smoking for the first three months of their pregnancies, they’ll be fine to resume in the next trimester.

The book in the Silent Butler ashtray is a flip book with a girl about the age my grandmother was when she started smoking. She is holding a cigarette and as you flip the pages her lungs change from pink to an unhealthy shade. It ends, perhaps a bit melodramatically, with a gravestone.

The last element is a handkerchief I made using printable cotton. It’s quite lovely and took the inkjet printing very well. It has the colophon printed on it along with a dedication to my grandma, Virginia Elizabeth Ginn.

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