Change, the oft heard mantra of Democratic campaigners, has made an early stop in our house.
This post may serve as a small contribution to the ongoing conversation between Steve and myself about waterfalls as a cascade has here come undammed. It was time to get a new printer, and we got one. This drip was followed by a new Laptop to supplement our revered, but elderly desktop. I found that my equally elderly and revered Olympus camera could not be supported on the laptop. Not to worry as Jo received a new Canon Powershot for Christmas – but then its USB cable disappeared. Meanwhile the jewel case to my Photoshop program has itself gone missing. At this point the video card on the desktop went out, stranding my installed Olympus and Photoshop programs, leaving me with the option of buying a “new” card. These problems are – most of them – solvable with a precipitous flow of time and money. So, in the nonce, and failing anything new to show, I wish to present a little song and dance about t-shirts.
For the last four or five years I have done t-shirts for family and friends. I use simple iron-ons and depend upon humor and sentimentality to carry the day. Call it a little hobby of sorts, and different from anything else I do. So, granted my predicament, I beg your patience and forbearance.
I thrust my camera at a goose and added the moniker in recognition of my daughter”s – in – law old English major.
More apropos than not.
Actually, I’ve never put this on a shirt.
I wore this in a pool hall.
The last two separate images are in one file. This saves on very expensive transfer paper.
I am granting myself license to include this shot of Hermes the exhausted poodle at the end of a long day at a Ren fair. He is on a shirt as well.
These images raise a longstanding issue with me: does a sideline such as making t-shirts, dilute one’s standing as a serious artist? In my case I’m sure that you have come to your own conclusions that may accord with my self image as a kind of expressive portmanteau. And, frankly, the billboard flavor of a T-shirt, is well suited for presenting simple pronouncements such as these. But your opinions are solicited.
Jay,
Great pictures!
With something as large and demonstrative as a picture on a Tshirt, I prefer the fun-poking face you wore in the pool hall and the art theft over the serious/moralistic.
I sense a juxtaposition of the sublime with the ridiculous.
Jay, your t-shirts are a mild version of your whole family’s playful streak of theatrical exhibitionism. Sublimated, of course, and tamed by the plasticy residue of the iron-on motifs.
I challenge you to take up doing t-shirts that don’t make the chest itch having similar motifs that are embedded into, rather than stuck on top of, the cloth.
Embedding, that’s the operative word…..
June:
I’ll grant you a son who is actually making a living in the theatre and some shirt tail relatives who variously walk on stilts while throwing knives and yell into mikes. Except for these extremophiles, the familial bulk is sedate to a fault.
So Pop Hess is rubbing you the wrong way? Plasticky these iron-on transfers are, and prone to wear and wash away. The alternative is to find someone on the web who does these things at a more professional level. But on the other hand, the printer generated, iron-on technique is mighty quick. I was able to generate a design and produce a finished shirt for a fellow who survived Katrina by punching a hole in his roof, and do it with the same alacrity that he brought to his hammer-work.
Birgit:
That was actually a nostril-poking face that showed up at the bar. But the “Ain’t oeuvre” plays unexpectedly well on a shirt.
Jay,
Don’t try to hide your real proclivities from the group — I’ve seen those photos of the family dinners in restaurants and hi-jinks elsewhere — not to mention your grandson’s parental-chosen attire.
But to the more serious issue — you can generate images on t-shirts that aren’t plasticky all by yourself, although you have to paint them rather than iron them on. And you have to have the right kind of paint or fixative or whatever…. So it’s not as fast as hammering a hole in the roof. On the other hand, Pop Hess is hiding his light in my closet, because I can’t stand the itching.
June:
Perhaps you are suffering from the effects of a cheap Wal-Mart shirt.I take it that you are no fan of silk screening.
Am I wrong? Pop Hess didn’t feel silk-screened.
Silk screening is great except that it requires equipment and expertise (that I don’t have) and it’s hard to work on dark fabrics. Silk screening with a discharge agent, on the other hand, would work marvels. YOu also have to be careful not to use acrylic paint in silk screening, or at least not thick acrylic paint, because it feels like a version of the iron on stuff — it itches!.
But I’m not going there (to silk screening, I mean) — been there and decided once was enough.
Jay,
I think you need a caption for the dog. How about “Shall I paint your picture?”
Steve:
Very good. Or we might have the poodle doodle.
June:
Spent the better part of two years as an intermittent silk screener in the army. It’s a messy and consuming process meant for multiple copies.