Jen McCleary Art and Design » paper

Type Tray Assemblage

Jen — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 01:40:14 +0000

Work in progress…

DailyPhoto 03-13-10

Jen — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 02:08:19 +0000

Saturday March 13, 2010.

Studio cleaning, transforming unused stacks of paper into book pages.

DailyDrawing 10-01-09

Jen — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 03:40:15 +0000

Here’s a new daily project! I recently realized that I hardly ever draw anymore. If I do, it’s just random doodling. Sorting through some very old work made me realize that I was once much better at drawing than I am now, and that made me a little sad. I think that drawing is definitely a skill that improves with practice, so I have set myself the goal of doing one drawing per day and posting it here. It doesn’t have to be a good drawing (maybe this is also an exercise in anti-perfectionism!). But it does have to be a drawing, specifically an observational one, not imaginary trees, not spirals, not weird tentacle-plants. Real things I am looking at and drawing. I hope that by making this a website project I’ll actually stick with it, and have a record of my drawing skills (hopefully) improving over time!

Here’s today’s- drawn on the train ride home.

Works in progress, March 6 edition

Jen — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 04:28:09 +0000

Some new collages on paper and canvas board, recycling some of my old drawings, some of my dad’s old engineering flowcharts, and some diagrams from a math book.

10- Day 1 (Shredding)

Jen — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 04:47:20 +0000

I have decided to call my new collaborative book “10″ in honor of it being nearly 10 years since graduating from Tyler, and almost 10 years since I last saw my collaborator Marci.

Aside from some minor painting of the cover and gessoing some pages, today is the first day I actually did anything to the book. I have been spending a lot of time this week shredding some of my old journals and sketchbooks. I already threw out one giant garbage bag full of tiny little scraps of paper, and was about to throw out another tonight, but then I decided to see what happens if I glue lots of tiny little scraps of paper to my book. I think it looks really cool, and I love the idea of reusing them this way.

(Update 2/27)- I love when weird coincidences happen! Today I opened up my Google Reader and discovered that one of my favorite blogs, Unclutterer, has an article about what to do with old journals! They advocate burning them if you don’t want to keep them. I half-wish I had a safe place for burning things because having a big bonfire would have been a great deal more fun than shredding. But then again I wouldn’t have ended up with all these cool little scraps of paper to make things with!

(Update 03-01-09) I spent a ridiculous amount of time this weekend gluing paper shreds to five small canvases. I love how it looks but I’ve had enough! I was thinking about keeping the giant bag of shreds for future projects, even possibly doing a larger canvas, but it’s just too tedious. Each one took at least 45 minutes. Five is enough. Plus it started to feel like I was just making an excuse to cling to this stuff. Down the garbage chute with it!

Eric Joisel Origami

Jen — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 20:47:14 +0000

Eric Joisel- Origami Snail

Eric Joisel is a master of Origami. The above snail is folded out of a single sheet of paper and is just one of many beautiful animals and other figures to be seen on his website.