Mail Art-Maddy Cartwright

Mail Art

     When doing the mail art project I was pondering how during quarantine, our only connection to each other has been through electronics which, while its better than nothing, leaves me feeling fairly empty inside in comparison to in-person interaction. I have always struggled with communicating over devices, as my social anxiety leaves me overanalyzing every text or email that I send to the point of not wanting to ever respond to anything. It's not that I don't use my phone, because I am on it 24/7, but when connecting with people that I know in real life, it feels empty and stressful. Learning things about my niche interests digitally, however, is fantastic, I can connect to information from around the world, rent a digital library book, curate my social media feed to have images that fill me with a sense of calm, and remind myself that some of the issues that I'm dealing with are issues that are felt by thousands of other people. In order to express these ideas, I chose to change the color and tone of each image to highlight the dichotomy of social interaction. While it is not emotionally fulfilling, as represented by the missing torso on the figure, at times digital connection can be extremely mind-opening. I thought this would be a good topic to use for the mail art project, as there is a sort of irony in expressing an idea about digital connection through a physical medium. My art style was inspired by Gabrielle Marin and Adam Riches. I found both of these artists on Instagram and they represent how my style has been influenced by the online art community.

Translation/Abstraction-Maddy Cartwright

Translation/Abstraction

     For my translation/abstraction piece, I took the photos from my last project and traced the parts of each photo that I enjoyed the most. My process was inspired by automatic drawing, one of my favorite examples of this is by Andre Masson, I wanted to get lost in the process of this piece without caring what the end result would look like. I switched between colors based on the emotions that I felt from the photos and layered them over the top of eachother. I did not have a plan for the composition of this piece, but I enjoyed the disorganized but flowing feel of the end result, similar to Botanical Theater by Paul Klee. I attempted to keep the line quality firm, which was aided by the use of Prismacolor pencils, which give off a strong and consistent color in comparison to many other colored pencils. I struggle with memory recall as a result of my ADHD and it was interesting that despite having no intention for the outcome of this piece, by simply drawing without thinking I was able to create imagery that I feel is similar to what memories feel like in my own head. The scattered drawings represent the tangled mess of memory snippets that I have to mentally dig through in order to retrieve what I'm looking for, and often the surrounding context gets fully lost, as in this photo. 

Automatic Drawing by Andre MassonBotanical Theater by Paul Klee

Symbolic Self-Maddy Cartwright

Symbolic Self

For my symbolic self assignment, I wanted to explore how my concept of self has changed over the years. I was inspired by the forms of self-expression in The Ants by Salvador Dali and Indian Dancer by Hannah Hoch, in which the internal self seems to be protruding from the physical form. I chose to make the main figure devoid of recognizable features because I wanted the collage of my past drawings of myself to culminate into one overall idea of self. The figure is shown exhaling this collage and looking to it blankly to represent how the best representation of who you are is not something that you have to work at, but something that comes naturally to you like a breath of fresh air. The best way of connecting with yourself is to let go of all preconceptions of who you are, or who you are supposed to be, and to simply be. 

The Ants by Salvador Dali Indian Dancer by Hannah Hoch

Mail Art Project- Lilly Stene

Mail Art Project

Even though this project was time consuming, I had a lot of fun creating the pieces. At first, I was going to have a theme to each of my postcards: stamps. However, I found a stamp that I really liked in the process, which was a smiley face one. I had fun overlaying this onto one another, and the patterns that it made. I still wanted to add more color and texture to my postcards, so I used India Ink, drawing pens, glitter, and collage. On one of the postcards, I collaged smiley faces that I had stamped onto canvas on top of a postcard. I also wanted my postcards to look cheerful and bright during this current time of the Covid-19 pandemic, so I used bright colors. I wanted to write a message on the postcards as well that could be positive to look at, and decided on the consumerist phrase "have a nice day!" to go along with the theme of smiley faces. I wanted the back of the postcard to be as visual as the front, so I decided on adding this phrase to the back, and also added some pen work to emphasize the font with dots. I also liked the idea of my project being a postcard, since they are a symbol of something that is sent from another location by another acquaintance or friend. For this assignment, I wasn't inspired by any artists in particular, but did look up inspiration of Have a Nice Day for font options and played around with different fonts in Word before printing them onto pink paper. Below are pictures of my final project:

Mail Art Project - Zane

        The mail art assignment was a stressful one for me. Not only would people see my artwork, but they would see it without much context as to what is going on within the work. I wanted to use this assignment to practice using a brush pen(which I am not very skilled with) in order to force the graphic intensity of my drawings. I am one who has strayed away from using pure black pigment or ink in anything, but once I really began indulging in its effectiveness, I've been using it for everything.
       With this project I decided to create a series of different drawings, that I only used a brush pen for and only had one attempt. I really didn't plan the poses or ideas, I only made sure that the concept of the character I was drawing stayed the same. I'm not sure what to call him, but he's been appearing in a lot of the digital work I've been producing over the quarantine, and he's my go-to-character when utilizing bold lines and expressions. He's a frightened, yet curious fellow in which you never know what he's really thinking about or what he might be seeing.

       I personally like the concept of mail art since I think it aligns with the type of person I am, an introvert. I'm not the best with frequent communication between my friend groups and when I do communicate, it's usually through a phone call from which I thusly disappear for another month until the next time I reach out. With mail art, it's almost like a little surprise or reminder that someone, they you may know or not, is out there and they put the effort into sending you something. Now, while a personally written letter is very touching, a piece of art work is almost even more personal, or it can be silly, maybe irrational. The interesting thing about sending a piece of artwork out of context, to me, is the intention behind the need to send it to someone; is the artist seeking critique, advice, a "thank you," who knows? When I send my artwork to people through an instant message, I am usually seeking critique and opinions, but there is something liberating about sending physical work through the mail. In this case, I wouldn't really want to hear anything back as it feels more like the mailing of a thought or idea that once it's out is gone. The primary joy would come if the recipient of this thought would have to articulate it in their own way, and express their own opinion by sending me one of their works; a delightful exchange of energy.

Mail Art: Droplets Gather

This was an intriguing format of not only sharing art, but also creating art.  For my own personal account, I had never heard of mail art till watching the short documentary "How to Draw A Bunny" that examined the peculiar life of Ray Johnson and his originations to mail art.  Throughout the film, I thought it was humorous how he would send art to his close friends, but also created a puzzle with a hidden dialogue that only he seemed to understand.  Therefore, through inspiration on this particular idea, my mail art was to create a "story" that involved all participants.  The art-form of this particular story that I created was influenced by Japanese comic-style, manga.  Manga has been a huge part of my life and was one of the main reasons why I became so passionate about the art world.  The purpose of using manga was due to my sense of nostalgia and straight-forward story-telling.  The reason why manga was a "straight-forward" way of dialogue was because in each of the participant's mail, there would be a short page of a manga, and only when brought together as a whole can we all understand the meaning of the story.  Through this, I wanted to create a personal relationship as well as group bond in my art.

Now to describe a little bit more on the story, the main character is seen to be looking outside of the window and completely dissociated from her work environment.  As the story progresses in the next few panels, we see her going outside with an umbrella in hand.  As she walks in the rain, she stops to look at her reflection in a puddle, until eventually crying in defeat as if she exposed herself to some truth that she had hidden away.  In the last panel, we see her completely slumped to the ground in the midst of a raining city, however, there is no rain that is pouring on top of her.  The ending is to be determined by the audience members, "did someone help the defenseless girl by covering her from the rain with their umbrella?", "does the rain not falling on her symbolize how she is completely dissociated from herself and everyone around her?", or "maybe she is the only one who can protect herself from the harsh conditions of her environment?".  I want to create a final puzzle for the participant and to intrigue them to probe further, maybe even asking the original creator what the meaning behind the manga is.

Therefore in conclusion, I wanted to create a story dialogue that demonstrates separateness and integration.  This can be seen by the very format of the mail art as I send each individual their own panel, but to understand the entire story, you need the collective effort of all participants.  Just like how raindrops are separated and fall individually, they come into conjunction with each other to create a large and whole puddle.

Only through// collective// realization, // will once // separated // raindrops// combine to // become a //united// puddle

Mail Art

Mail Art Assignment

For this assignment, I just wanted to make something that you would want to put on your wall because it made you smile. I feel like this is the kind of painting that someone would put on their Pinterest board. I decided to do a watercolor painting of a loaf of bread along with a pun because I just wanted to make something light hearted. I remember at the beginning of this quarantine, I decided to make cinnamon rolls, but I couldn’t because I couldn’t find yeast in any of the grocery stores. I then went to twitter and learned that all of the yeast in the world evaporated because everyone wanted to make bread. So I decided that if bread is such a large staple of social distancing, I’ll put it on a card. I also added a really bad pun, “you are loaved,” because I haven’t made a dad joke in awhile I thought that this was the perfect opportunity.