I remember my first blog...

Blogging is as old as journals, but the word "Blog" itself has become "old school" in only ten years of common use. Nowadays with Facebook, Myspace and Twitter it seems silly to invest time in a redundant pastime like blogging. There is no immediate payback and response or collection of intimate details to decorate the pages with; only page after page of dribble to an invisible 3rd person. I personally don't see any benefit to the immediacy of the other mediums that have appeared over the years because they are less permanent are more exclusive than blogging is. Blogging at least creates an indexing of the text that is used and journals in published form otherwise never seen thoughts of those of us who don't have the time or means to communicate with the outside world. Permanence in a temporay world is an oxymoron, but then so am I.

As such I cannot help but feel that all that I have been working on has already existed in a more simpler and easier to accomplish product that I have purposefully ignored so that I can continue my work. My work is that of transfering images into plaster; a product I call "photo-frescos". I know I could put stickers on plaster or make a transfer and press it onto plaster or even make a water slide decal (a method I really like) and place the printed membrane onto the chalky surface with much better efficiency than I have accomplished, but that is not what I do. I have a wet process, much like in a darkroom, but with contact prints to plaster and this is a technique that I appreciate if for no other reason than for the pains it has caused me with inconsistent results.

My desire is for consistency, but the results are not. I appreciate this in that it has caused my aesthetic to change to accomodate the medium and because of this I am discovering art as I have not previously done. I am no longer the viewer, but the doer. Images gain meaning, then lose meaning in the process. I think I know what I want, then I am let down by what I get, then I realize that the new product is more than what I wanted to begin with. It is hard to explain where I am with the myriad of results that I have formed, but I feel like I have only just begun with these materials and these techniques can be experimented with for the rest of my life.

Why plaster? I am not sure, except that my stepfather, Stanley, a house painter by trade, worked with plaster when I was a small child as a pastime painting turkey plates that hung on the wall. So my history with this material goes way back. I once received for a present one of the most entertaining and anti-climatic gifts of my life, which was a stone-like shape that I was able to chip into and expose a figure. The figure was Fred Flinstone, but I will never forget the thrill of not knowing what was going to be inside. Later I worked with molding shapes for boat hulls from plaster for an engineering class and although plastics are also attractive, I prefer the non-caustic characteristics of plaster. Even the fragility is attractive whereas many other things are impossible to break and put back together. 3-Dimensions, but a liquid that mixes with water. A bright white background. Cheap compared to most other products. Longevity if cured and sealed. It's not quite ceramics, but you could call it the Poor Man's ceramics if you needed to. Plaster is Plantastic.