Reid Barraza
Cindy Rehm
Advanced Drawing
7 May 2018
Mail Art Project
For my Mail Art Project, I created a series of cardboard and paper pieces, which I refer to has “character cards”. Each card is individual and has been specifically inspired by the person who received it. The cards began as a stream of conscious consideration of the subject, however I noticed that during my creation, when the cards were further along, they developed a personality all of their own and therefor became a kind of alter ego to their subject. In this way, the character cards give the subjects new personality traits, as can be seen embodied by the colors, doodles and names written on each card. By the end of this project, I started to see my character cards as a great party theme or prompt to an interactive event - every attendee would plan a character (dress, behavior, etc.) around the card given to them and be able to interact with a whole new ensemble of friends!
The making of my cards was very intuitive, but for some visual inpiration, I looked towards a wide variety of artists, from legendary painter Mark Rothko to playful illustrator Jessie Cave. Mark Rothko’s bold color and shape statements taught me how to endow character to a piece with the greatest simplicity. Color compliments and shape language have a loud voice in my cards due to Rothko.
Unlike Rothko’s paintings, I wanted my character cards to have a more playful, casual quality, so I turned toward Jessie Cave’s comical illustrations. Cave’s pictures come off as juvenile doodles, but the humor in them is loaded with very real, although hilarious, adult situations. Cave also relies heavily on imagery and iconography to convey her scenes. I take notes from Cave in using icons so that I can relate specific themes, but allow those themes to be colored by my card’s recipient’s own connotative association with the icons. Cave also inspired me to treat my contemplations of my classmates as unfiltrered journals. I want to be an author with these character cards.
Outside of Rothko and Cave, I looked at other textural art like pieces with layered cardboard and tactile pop-up book art pieces. Images from art in these themes inspired how I layered and folded material on top of eachother in my cards.
Love Sick
JK journals
Intuition and Compassition
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