Tonight's been productive, as far as I'm concerned. I spent part of the day looking through old notebooks from my senior year art classes, and reading journal entries I made during that time and just after graduation. I was reminded of brainstorms and ideas I'd totally forgotten about. Hopefully, in a few years, I'll stumble upon this blog and it will fulfill the same purpose! One thing I was reminded of was how much I experimented with tracings in my junior and senior years, to various effects. I pulled out my handy pad of tracing paper today, and magic shot from my fingertips like some sort of strange energy field! Before I knew it, four lovely Wesleys lay before me. (Pictures soon!) I took my tracing paper home from the studio, and tonight, during two consecutive viewings of Desperado (commentary off, then on), I maniacally traced Rubies. Part of me wants to consider tracing a form of cheating, and I probably would if I was just going to take the tracings and hang them on the wall. But they're building blocks to a bigger piece of art. Tracing is just another form of duplication in this case, like photocopy transfers, except with more handwork going into the duplicates. I also love the layering possibilities presented by the transparency of the tracing paper. Tracing is comparatively mindless, so the parts of my brain that weren't concerned with getting Ruby's inane expression right or listening to Robert Rodriguez's brilliance or admiring Antonio Banderas' shooting skills were pondering MEANING. On the car ride to my studio today, driving through a heavily latino neighborhood, I started to think about culture, and how much inspiration I get from Mexican art, though I have no ties to their heritage. Do I have a right to borrow that aesthetic, or the ideas behind it? America is such a young country, and we have no long-standing identity. Our modern identity is one I struggle to eschew when abroad. My own cultural heritage is pretty white-bread - I have no deep connection to my Jewish heritage, though I've found Chagall to be incredibly inspiring partially because of the way he incorporates religion into his work. I've talked a lot, and in college written a lot, about how through painting I'm building my own religion, setting up my favorite actors and artists, pop culture figures, as deities. In college, a lot of the aesthetics of my work were drawn from both Medieval religious art and Mexican votives. I feel like I've moved away from that to an extent. At this point, it feels more cultural than religious. I'm building around myself a cultural language. A lot of it references other cultures, but a lot is American. I mean, what is more American than Point Break? (Though hey, the climactic parachute scene takes place over Mexico!) Today at my studio, and tonight while watching Desperado, (more Mexico! My subconscious was really working tonight!....or perhaps Mexico is just a great place for shootouts) I thought a lot about Andy Warhol. It was impossible not to, while working on a painting tentatively titled "Ten Rubies." I'm not as obsessed with celebrity as Warhol was - my choice of subjects is a lot more personal than his Marilyns or Jackies, (Ruby Keeler instead of Angelina Jolie, for example) and hence the paintings I make will be a lot less universal. But I remember reading in a biography of Warhol that he was obsessed with the movies and was absolutely referencing religious art when he created his modern icons. I had admired, but never really liked his art before; once I read that, everything clicked into place. I got it. So I'm glad that these tracing paper duplicates reference that language, because there's definitely a similar idea behind them. I don't really expect anyone to read all of this, it's more for my own reference in a few months (or tomorrow) when I start feeling all dispirited and think my art has no direction or purpose. Oh, yeah. Dave Foley crept in there. I guess I reference Canadian culture, too.
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Julia Cooper
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