Cigars, Stain and Cornell

Cigars, Stain and Cornell

With readily available materials, some encouragement from an instructor, and inspiration from Joseph Cornell-- I have put together a couple of 'painting boxes.'


(Cigar box 1)

With several of my recent ideas, my instructor asked me why the pieces should be on canvas. He was encouraging me to 'think outside the canvas,' if you will. Get outside the confines of the square or rectangle. Think of installations, collage, sculpture.

Well, I got off the canvas-- but stayed in a box. I tore apart some old cigar boxes, and have begun using both the boxes and lids for ready-made surfaces and frames. With these first two pieces, I used cutouts of scrap paper that had picked up woodstain in an interesting pattern.

I'm intrigued with the idea of both found and created art, and liked that these stained sheets of paper were both something I created-- albeit somewhat 'accidentally' (when I was staining wood for frames)-- and something I discovered, when I noticed the interesting marks and decided I had to keep what most others would see as garbage (or at least paper for recycling).

Instead of throwing these sheets away, I saved them, knowing I'd do something with them at some point. When I decided to work with the box lids, I remembered these sheets. I tried different sections, selected and framed the compositions that most appealled to me, then added pen and pencil.


These two pieces remain basically two-dimensional (except perhaps for the slight bit of paper that comes up the side of the box frame), wheras Cornell's collage boxes are unique and odd assortments of 3-D objects.


(Cigar box 2)

Next ... to again use the much-overused phrase... perhaps I'll go even further in thinking outside (and inside) the box, and go 3D. I do have other scraps and ideas on hand -- wire, saved papers, broken glass, twigs.

For information and images of Cornell's work:
http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/cornell/ http://www.artchive.com/artchive/C/cornell.html

Cornell's Pink Palace, currently on display at SFMOMA: http://www.artchive.com/artchive/C/cornell/p_palace.jpg.html.