Velvet Va Va Voom!

Sailor Gal Betty & the Pin-up Honeys invite you to
the pre-Christmas exhibition opening of

Vintage Velvet

6.30pm, Monday December 8^th

Deluxe Café, Kent Tce, Wellington.

Bubbles will be served for your viewing pleasure.

Vintage Velvet

I have been busy creating for my next exhibition at the Deluxe Café (8 Kent Tce, Wellington) opening Monday 8th December.
Following on from my sell out exhibition ‘Velvet Resurrection’ last year and my win at the WOW awards with ‘The Birth of Velvet’, I have continued exploring the medium and come up with a collection of 'Pin Up Honeys'.
Sweet and sexy gals from the 40’s and 50’s, each are painted and airbrushed on hand cut shaped board stretched with velvet and finished with black felt backing and brass hanging ring. Every honey wears a piece of vintage jewellery and will be flanked by framed seamed (and sometimes silk) stockings in their original packaging. My works are around 45cm high (Carmen Miranda is a little taller because of her sumptous fruit basket hat…) Pictured here is 'Betty'.
If you want to see the works before the show, you may visit my studio at 26 Wright St, Mt Cook where they are in residence on my gallery wall, have a coffee with me and enjoy a bit of Vintage Velvet.

Preserving with Hirst

© Damien Hirst, photo by Prudence Cumming

The news that Damien Hirst's ‘The Golden Calf’ was up for auction and consequently sold for £9.2 million to a telephone bidder at Sotheby's, coincided with the call for entries for Page & Blackmore’s Short Story Sandwich competition. The rules were simple:

Write a short story with the following as your first sentence as written by Emily Perkins: The smell was overpowering. …and conclude with this last sentence contributed by Joe Bennett: Dear Stella. Don’t forget to include your kiwi food item in your story Maximum word length = 1000 words

What fun! I thought I’d give it a go and this is what I came up with. Obviously I wasn’t the winner, but I often think of this blog as a Second Life for writing that never got to print and used illustrations that I can’t afford to frame. My effort isn’t likely to make the Six Pack, but if you make a cup of tea and sit down with it, it may just entertain you as much as it did me in the writing of it.

I did start out with a woman sitting in a café, but, Dear Stella, it all went another way when Hirst put his calf up for sale and my character took over the story…

Influence

The smell was overpowering, it completely drove me out. The poisoned rat in the roof; I can’t create another thing until it goes! You have to understand Stella that my art needs solitude and brevity and aesthetic to happen. Not rotting corpses. I should never have fed it all that bait but it was feasting on my creation as fast as I was making it and turning it in to crap. It was me or the rat. At the moment, the rodent is winning. I should have put up with the droppings. Have you ever inspected them close up? They looked like henbane seeds. Fabulous narcotic properties; drops one in an instant. The henbane, not the droppings.

I’m losing track of how many days I’ve been here, except that the bach has ponged for at least four, so I’ve escaped to the nearest café. Five kilometres down the road. There are only two to choose from and very hard to gauge from the exterior which might serve an approximation of an espresso. Both have net curtains and dim interiors, so I went for the ‘Du Pop Inn’.

I immediately regretted walking in the front door and pretended to look at bottles of water in the chiller until I saw that there was indeed a flat white on the menu board not that dreaded filter coffee, so I’ve taken a gamble and passed over $3.50 and stroked the cat which has now knitted itself around my trousers. The wrinkled old gargoyle manning the counter is all smiles now; nothing like brisk trade and cat appreciation to break down barriers. I was just about to turn away when I saw the lamingtons and you sprang to mind again.

Oh God, the coffee is awful after all. Milky and lukewarm; soy isn’t even an option here. Damn. The lamington looks digestible though and it’s sitting here on a very collectable Crown Lynn plate. I wonder if I can slip it into my pocket? Not the lamington; I’ll eat that. This one’s not made from foam rubber or covered in pink paint. Oh how you laughed when I bit into the jam and coconut you’d rolled it in. My jaws sprang back immediately; I couldn’t understand it. Thought my teeth had lost their edge. The paint was only a teeny bit toxic; I recovered eventually didn’t I? You were so full of pranks my dear; I never knew if I’d be brushing my teeth with haemorrhoid cream or finding a kipper in my dress shoe. The day you painted over my latest canvas with test pots and said you were dragging me into postmodernism was a hoot.

I like to think you contributed to my art in a positive way; because without you, there would be no ‘big idea’. This one’s a real winner. I resisted applying for funding; I didn’t think the panel would get the concept, even if I pointed them to Hirst. His Golden Calf has been quite an influence. I don’t expect this piece will sell for millions of pounds; in fact, I don’t plan to sell it at all. You’re such an integral part of the thing; it would be hard to part company with it. I want to have it installed and stare at it for hours. It’s my magnum opus. My homage to you; you had such fun with me. Such a tease; every time I look at my work in progress, I have to grin.

Laugh? I virtually split my sides when you announced you were leaving. With the contents of the house. You were quite right, failing artists earn diddly squat and that property developer; well yes, I can see how you were attracted. It was nice that you let me stay in the bach; for my work. Pity he put it on the market last week. Nice you came down to see what you could take with you. Pity we fought over the Sydney. I thought you were going to tear it in two for a horrible moment. It was more than I could bear and well, yes, I reacted badly. I’ll admit that.

My stomach is churning at the memory, or perhaps it’s the coffee. I really don’t think I can eat this lamington after all; I’ve completely lost my appetite. Its just the smell in my nostrils won’t go away. Bloody rat. I should have grabbed it, squeezed it, trussed it up, fitted it with golden feet and pickled it in the formaldehyde too. Dear Stella.

Because you liked the last ones so much...

... here are some bugs and blossoms; the Huhu beetles were snapped up before they'd barely had a chance to crawl up the wall! Click on the pic for a better view.

Velvet for you

As requested by Bookgirl, here are some of my velvet birds from the Velvet Resurrection show.
Each one is a clear cut from 5mm MDf board, covered with stretch velvet, backed with hand stitched black felt and painted with airbrushed and brushed acrylic. They measuring 60cm from beak to tail with legs made from foiled copper wire. I am working on a new exhibition for the 8th December 2008 at the Deluxe cafe in Wellington. Called 'Velvet Honeys', it features birds of a different variety, designed to tickle your nostalgic senses.

A whole new lease on my artistic life

Well, tired of working off my kitchen table and having the teen aged son make comments about women in the kitchen (just to rile me), and having suffered the longest dreariest winter in recent history, and completely had enough of waiting for the work to come to me…I can now report that I have done just what my horoscope advised; taken a lease on a studio in town. Not just a studio, as in a room somewhere sharing with a bunch of others, but a whole house! Well a small house- a two roomed cottage type of thing in the Production Village in Mt Cook. From there I can run art workshops for kids and adults, illustrate whatever needs my touch, write, blog and create Wearable Art. And the best thing is I have free parking so I can rock up to the door, unload my recyclables ready for transformation into art and craft and won’t have to catch the bus. If you have been following my posts, and understand my feelings about the bus service in Wellington, you will realise just what a relief that is to me!

I will be putting in a link to a new blog about forthcoming workshops in due course. So, keep an eye out. In the meantime, thanks to Google Earth and the Wellington City Council, here’s an aerial shot of where I will be from Labour Weekend. Just me, the tuis warbling in the greenbelt and a whole bunch of other artists working in the village.

The Birth of Velvet Wins!

Well not the entire Air New Zealand South Pacific section of the 2008 Wearable Art Awards, See the winners here but I thought Commended and a cheque was pretty darn good. The cheque will go into my Pacific Island holiday fund and the joy of walking up on the stage to recieve it will stay for ever! Photo below courtesy of WOW and the others are from my files (many thanks to my models Haley and Steve). Click on the photos for a bigger view.
You can also see it performed on this video link about WOW- mine is right at the end!
Click here for the video

The Birth of Velvet: High Art meets Low

Edgar Leeteg, the velvet painter of Papeete idealized Tahitian women as noble savages, with full breasts, fertile hips, and starry eyes. Tourists loved these souvenirs of the South Seas, a holiday from Western morality. They represented an innocent sexuality; like Eve, their nudity was without shame. But was he more exploitative than celebratory? Was he just a philandering white man disempowering and objectifying his Polynesian models? Or did he just love them as Sandro Botticelli adored his model, the beautiful Simonetta, mistress of the Medici on whom he based his Venus; the mother and patron saint of all the forces in creation.

reference source http://www.seattleweekly.com/1999-09-01/arts/paradise-painted

15 entries since 1995, 15 on stage, 8 times Finalist,
4 times Award Winner.

Bitchin'

The really irritating thing about not getting my third JF novel published sooner than half way through next year (Glory- Scholastic) is that I will be that much closer to menopause. Oh it’s not the moodiness that bothers me; I can put aside irrational anger long enough to smile at my book launch. No, it’s that I will be another year older and yet a little less gorgeous for the publicity photos. At 24 I thought I had years up my sleeve and now at twice that, dammit, I find that lines, wrinkles and other age enhanced attributes increase exponentially with age. My greatest fear is that I might be 70 before I can finally afford designer clothes and will have by then lost all will to wear anything other than Osti frocks and Kumfs; I already own Hush Puppies…and then, of course is the horrible realisation that I might indeed be turning into an old dog too….

Bristle Face

Today I found a long bristle,

Upon my chinny chin chin,

And my fragile shell of vanity,

Like the little pig’s house, caved in.

I sought my mother’s wise counsel,

For the first time in thirty five years,

But the revelation imparted,

Did nothing to stifle my fears.

Apparently whiskers are common,

As you head down the menopause track,

Whilst men lose their hair, we get more to spare,

God, I hope it won’t sprout on my back.

It seems I’ll be doomed to plucking,

Or have them electrically speared,

For if I let nature have her own way,

I’d sport a luxuriant beard.

There’s always the option of shaving;

I’d bond with my husband each day,

We’d both lather up every morning,

To scrape all our worries away.

Considering my changing complexion,

From peaches to old kiwifruit,

I could then change my beauty care options,

And swop my Clinique for his Brut.

Golden Girls

I was flicking through my visual diaries in preparation for presenting at talk at Bookrapt http://www.bookrapt.org.nz/bookrapt/seminar/seminar.html and found these pics and a musing from a holiday on the Gold Coast. It was July and not particularly warm but nice enough to sit on the beach and feel like you had escaped winter in N.Z. I was taken by the contrast between these gorgeous gals I saw in Cavill Mall advertising a club and the lovely woman on the beach taking time out. They were all dressed in gold.

There’s a tanned old chook on the beach in a satin slip of a top, fussing and pecking at her straps in a self conscious sort of way. Her hair is scraped up; a cockscomb for a dowager, ballet style and secured oddly with wedding flowers. She is the colour of warm leather and her shoes are gold; placed neatly beside her. One by one: partners. Did she lose the other shoe that once partnered her? He would have been leathery too.

On the Truck with Charlie

A comment from the blue recently posted on my blog, brought me back to the time I spent in Bristol 6 years ago as a volunteer at a fantastic recycling enterprise. I wrote this piece about it at the time on foolscap refill paper, filed it and promptly forgot about it. Charlie, getting in touch with me had me rifling through my filing cabinet and bookshelves this morning, and thanks heavens I am such a magpie, because there it was. So I have typed it and posted it to share with you all the truly gert concept that it is.
For one who loves to make silk purses from sows ears, I was as happy as a pig in mud…

I arrive at Welshback early, coffee in hand, my breath issuing forth in the English winter morning, like great billows of smoke. I could be a gargoyle, or a dragon; like the artfully made head that hung from the wall in the warehouse I now stand in front of.
I am there as a volunteer; a piece of flotsam from New Zealand, looking for paying work and finding none but in my creative desperation falling across what would become my find of the year. The Bristol Children’s Scrapstore www.childrensscrapstore.co.uk ; the Charity that makes practical use of scrap material for children's play activities. The ultimate useful box; my treasury of delight.

For anyone who has seen the possibility in an egg carton, a bottle top or discarded packaging, you will understand my excitement. From the age of 5, I have plagued my mother, and in turn as I grew, my husband and children with my bags and boxes of things that ‘might come in useful one day’. I blame my dear Scottish Aunty Isabel for this; a woman who bore two sons more interested in football than felt, she and I would spent hours cutting, sewing and gluing all manner of materials in the corner of her tiny Thornton lounge. My aunt is now 82, still working, still running craft classes, still making things to sell, still dancing. What a woman!

So back to my standing in the cold, clear morning outside the Scrapstore; my mission- to boldly go where (I think) no itinerant Kiwi had gone before; with Charlie to pick up clean industry waste for the warehouse. I clamber up into the truck, badly (there’s a knack to it as I soon learned through the many leaps in and out of the truck through the day) and we set off. There is a structure of sorts to the pick-up. Gathering factory and industry scrap works on a rota system; the businesses we would see that day were visited two weeks ago. The collection starts at one end of Bristol and follows a circular route, ending back at the store; we have an empty truck, waiting to be filled.

First stop, a printing firm with two pallets of corrugated cardboard, which are loaded with ease by ‘the boy’ who obviously relishes his forklift manoeuvres. He spins the machine around; practised and flamboyant. I eye the donation with glee; corrugated card is wonderful for construction; you can never have enough! Next stop, a food tech operation which makes flavourings. There is a pervasive smell of an indefinable substance; maybe cheese, but turns out to be tomato. It fills your nostrils unpleasantly- it might be better in sauce. The cheerful man in the white coat points us towards empty barrels; which are large and perfect for storing scrap in, unfortunately they also have irritation warnings on them in large orange stickers. Regretfully we leave them behind as contravening Health and Safety regulations are not on our list of things to do today. We move on.

Charlie talks about his first pick up which had started as mundane until he spotted a medical supply company and risked a cold call.
“It’s that lucky strike you always look out for; like a jackpot win.”
In this case, he was directed to two large shelves which, amongst other useful bottles and containers, housed a surprising number of unworn white canvas surgical theatre shoes.
These were swooped on with glee and the Scrapstore ran a ‘Decorate the Shoe’ competition to the great enjoyment of many schools and kids.

The next pick ups have the truck half filled with large circular cardboard cut-outs.
“I don’t know what people do with them, but they all go really quickly,” says Charlie. I can think of several, especially in the classroom. Big pie charts for maths, huge daisy flowers for science, bases for models of the Coliseum, or decorated with paper for pretend pizzas? Another packaging factory gives us cardboard tubes. I’ve used these myself to make rocket ships, desk tidies and mad dogs! The pet rat at my son’s after school care club snoozes in one regularly.

We call in at a cigarette packaging factory. No tobacco in sight; this place just makes the boxes. This is a print shop on an enormous scale; giant rolls of shiny silver card are piled high in the storeroom, each as big as a colossus. Mammoth machines spit out printed material but the whole place is as clean as an operating theatre, where you take your dirty lungs to be fixed. I try to imagine just how many packets are printed here and I cannot get my head around it. Smoking is obviously not a dying industry in Britain- except for the end consumer. Charlie is hopeful for the silver card, but there’s none left over today. Instead we help ourselves to the wooden spindles that come in the ends of the giant rolls. These make wonderful wooden stands for models. Some are plastic and look like Party Susan’s. You could almost give them a wash and serve nuts, dips and crisps in them.
A notice board industry gives us lovely bits of brushed acrylic felt type material and a lingerie manufacturer yields two enormous bags of silky off-cuts including a nice leopard skin print. I immediately see fierce jungle collages in the making.

A dodgy looking street in Bristol (one of many) with the yard next door housing baying hounds from hell, is the home of an unlikely enterprise which supplies large felt covered props and screens to the BBC. We rummage through their off cut bin and take red and white felt scraps; remnants from the forthcoming Queens Jubilee celebrations perhaps?
Just as we turn to go, a collection of felt ends on rolls in an array of vibrant colours are pushed our way. I think how much you could pay for a 10 inch square retail and I am delighted that this will be accessible to art and play workers. We get similar bright colours in PVC from an inflatables factory. This material goes down well, as does rip-stop nylon from a ballooning company.

Our final picks fill the truck with green plastic rods from an electronics industry, plastic signage material, soft, stretchy black rubber, empty medicine containers and redundant lever arch files from an insurance company. The truck is full to groaning and we’ve been out for 8 hours, stopping only briefly for a flapjack from Charlie’s favourite bakery in Kingswood. On our return, Jeff and the boys will unload the haul. Some will go straight into the warehouse, some will be stored and some will be swapped with other scrap stores around the country to ensure a wider variety and distribution of materials for community art and education.

As for me; I’ll heat up, my glue gun and get my scissors out. I have a large mural planned for the back wall of the Scrapstore, and I’m desperate to ‘bags’ some of that felt!