Saturday, January 16, 2010

Looking Ahead - Nothing Ghastly, Please!

New England Wax members are undertaking some projects to entertain ourselves and widen our horizons. Rather than work a project with another group as we did with the NEW/IEA Diptych Project of 2008, we're doing it on our own as mini-groups within the larger membership. I have signed up for Paper with Encaustic, Found or Salvaged Metal with Encaustic and Exquisite Corpse with Encaustic. Notice the common thread?

So today I received a jpeg image from Earl Schofield who first suggested and now is organizing our Exquisite Corpse (ExCo) project. Traditionally ExCo is worked on one folded piece of paper so that each participant does not see what came before or just sees the tail end of it so that it so that drawings can be joined. The way our ExCo will work is that Party A (Earl) will send a jpeg to Party B (me) of a work that Party A has completed in encaustic (or encaustic-plus) on a 24"x24" panel. Party B will send a jpeg of her/his own 24"x24" panel to Party C. Party C will send a jpeg to Party D and so on. Ultimately all the panels will be collected in one place and hung together in the order in which they were created.

So essentially you get to see the panel that will be hung on one side of your own panel, but you have no idea what will be on the other side. It could be fun to see how color, surface, texture and technique changes from panel to panel even if everything is abstract, but I'm sure there will be some landscapes or portraits or still lifes in the mix. I just hope that no one is is the mood for traditional ExCo with all those creepy bleeding skulls or bugs or enlarged genitals. Ghastly, I say!


A drawn ExCo and a collaged ExCo. Apparently the ExCo game first began with words and thereby received its name when the sentence "The exquisite corpse will drink the young wine" was created by several game-playing Surrealists who got together to experiment. Another example: "The dormitory of friable little girls puts the odious box right" and "The Senegal oyster will eat the tricolor bread."  These strange combinations demonstrated what Max Ernst called "mental contagion," apparently not a bad thing in his book. Images from http://theexquisitecorpse.deviantart.com/

















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Not to change the subject, but here's the...
ENCAUSTIC CONFERENCE NEWS
Holy moly! ONE day of registration for the encaustic conference and already ONE HUNDRED PEOPLE have signed up! That's incredible! And given the fact that enrollment is capped at 250, looks to me like it's a sellout. Between now and June 11th when the conference begins, there are 146 days. Maybe if only one person a day signs up, it won't reach capacity. (Or 146 more days at 100 people a day = 14,700 attendees. Quick, is Fenway Park available?
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3 comments:

Donna said...

I signed up for the conference at 10:30 Colorado time and was #83! I had thought to get up early to register and if I don't get the workshops I wanted, I'll wish I had. But, I do know that whatever I get in to will be great!

Gwendolyn Plunkett said...

I signed up to but didn't get FAX sent until around 9 pm. I'm not even counted on the list yet. Evangeline had gone home by then.

Nancy Natale said...

Wow, what a rush to get in! It has never been this bad. This must be a reeeeeeally popular conference.