THROWBACK THURSDAY

I remember checking out a book from the Memphis Public Library of contemporary painting.  I was really taken with Julian Schnabel's broken plate paintings.  So I gave it a go, but cardboard just doesn't compare. Somewhere there is also a ho-hum attempt at a Chuck Close grid style portrait. Stay tuned.

THROWBACK THURSDAY

I found this in a sketchbook. The summer before my junior year of high school, Memphis City Schools mandated uniforms would be worn by all students. The rules were pretty lenient -- black khaki or navy bottoms, and a white collared shirt (or a collared shirt in the school colors). But I went a little off the deep end wearing pleated skirts with knee socks, and I started wearing some of my dad's old neckties. Sometimes around my neck, and other times in my hair.

THROWBACK THURSDAY

A black and white acrylic painting of  my friend Megan. We met in the 8th grade and had a friendship forged on the track team. Megan and I used to get asked all the time if we were sisters or cousins. People just wanted us to be related. We were just tall and blond. I hardly get to see her because she moved to another country. I've forgiven her though, because she is one of my all time favorite people. Megan once told me that my love language was my freakish memory and attention to detail. To prove a point,  I remember this night. It was one of many spent at the Ugly Mug, where we would hole up on Friday or Saturday nights, drink overly-sugared coffees and draw or take pictures or read books of poetry.

This was part of my concentration for AP Studio portfolio review.

ID

Several years ago, I was looking through some boxes of family photographs and found my grandmother's ID badge for Fort Benning in Georgia. I'd never seen one like it before. It was metal and weighty, and wearing it would be more like wearing a very small framed picture of yourself than any laminated, holographic, plastic card people use today. The badge is over 60 years old, and is in far better shape than my sad looking student ID. After 4 years of swiping it at the dining hall and the library, it resembles more of a faded smear than me.

I found out about this exhibition that opened last Friday at Ricco/Maresca in New York. It is a very small portraiture show focusing on ID badges from the '30s-'50s. If you visit the link, you can scroll through several badges featured in the show. I had never seen another badge like my grandmother's before, and here on the New Yorker website were 15 more I could look at. The show features 250 of these tiny portraits, and Frank Maresca, co-partner of Ricco/Maresca says, “The show is an important portrait of the American worker, during a time when workers changed America as we know it.”

My grandmother's badge. Wasn't she pretty?