A History of Art part 9

In the morning I did research around the house, digging up images from the basement and from the internet. I put some of this to use when I got up to the Studio in the afternoon. The thing that took the most time was working on the left side of the third level, a mall scene. This mall is going to reflect the mall experience of my youth, and I was lucky to find a couple of photos of my home mall as it looked in 1973, back when it still had character. For example, that crazy post with the light globes- I had forgotten about that, but it's perfect for the time. And the photos will be helpful when I'm ready to color it. The escalator and architecture are my design. Still needs a little work, have to put in all the trees, maybe a few shoppers.

From there I followed the movement of the escalator upward to the fourth level, the center of which is my distillation of Dempsey Hardware, my grandfather's old store. There was a trap door to the basement, and in the winter months the wood stove was a popular gathering place. As kids, my brother and I would have fun playing with the bird seed barrels, oil cans, paint chip cards, etc. And that's not even getting into the tools. This section still has a long way to go, but I did put in the trap, floorboards, and the stove (from a newspaper photo of the store, circa 1966). The barrels will be in the final version, but I don't know if these are the barrels.

The store floorboards flow across to become the benches/tables in a small piece of Homer's Country School. This part is more or less done.

Next time the goal is to finish the mall and the rest of the 4th level.

In other news, my talk with Mikki from the Coast Star last week had mixed results. No quotes from me in her piece about the Manasquan Art Walk, but she did mention that woodcut prints were on display, and I'm pretty sure I was the only woodcut artist on the street that day.