[New-Poetry] Mole Update -- Art Exhibit

[TheOldMole]

It's  kind of a technique of my own invention. When Rachel Loden and I 
were doing "Affidavit," my art work for that was black and white, drawn 
directly on my computer screen using Microsoft Paint and one tool -- the 
one called "free-form select," shaped like a star on your MSPaint 
toolbox. I'd draw a shape, then invert it (using a little trick I had to 
discover -- you can't just invert with MSPaint), and keep working 
positive and negative space against each other until I had an image I 
liked. It's the same technique I use for the Film Noir images.

Then, because Rachel's amazing poem was about a gruesome murder, I 
decided I'd put some blood into each picture, which meant adding red, 
which scared me a little, because I'd always worked in black and white, 
and had no confidence in my ability to use color. So I started sending 
the new bloody images to Rachel, and she kept responding "Great! But not 
bloody enough." So I kept changing the color, looking for ever-gorier 
shades of red. Which should have been relatively easy -- you just take 
the paint bucket tool, and pour the new red over the old.

Except it wasn't. I discovered that MSPaint was an inefficient program 
that could not save color true. Once you saved an image, when you 
retrieved it, the middle of it was true, but it pixillated around the 
edges. It became discolored, mottled, and the new color wouldn't cover 
that part. None of this is a problem with PhotoShop, but fortunately I 
didn't have PhotoShop then, so I had to work with the frustration, and 
ultimately get it to work for me. While the mottled effect was driving 
me nuts for "Affidavit," it was also intriguing me, and it occurred to 
me that if you worked with dots of color, and saved frequently, every 
part of the image would have that effect. So I gathered up all my 
courage and made the jump into color -- computer pointillism, beginning 
an image with separated dots of color, and gradually merging them.

It is a horribly painstaking process -- each one of these can take up to 
three months to finish. But it keeps me off the streets.



jforjames at aol.com wrote:
> Don't know that I'll be able to make it to the show, Tad, but I like 
> the sample from the poster. What kind of prints are they? A refreshing 
> medley of scenes/themes going on there...
>
> The one with all the kids with bats and none with gloves reminds me of 
> my childhood baseball days. Everyone wants to be the big hitter. No 
> glories in the glove at that age. And it's hard for young arms to find 
> the plate with any consistency.
> Finnegan
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: TheOldMole <Opus40-01 at opus40.org>
> Bcc: jforjames at aol.com
> Sent: Fri, 8 Feb 2008 11:43 pm
> Subject: [New-Poetry] Mole Update -- Art Exhibit
>
> For your invitation, http://opusforty.blogspot.com/ -- click to enlarge 
>  
> -- Tad Richards 
> http://www.opus40.org/tadrichards/ 
> http://opusforty.blogspot.com/ 
>  
> The moral is this: in American verse, 
> The better you are, the pay is worse. 
>  --Corey Ford 
>  
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-- 
Tad Richards
http://www.opus40.org/tadrichards/
http://opusforty.blogspot.com/

The moral is this: in American verse,
The better you are, the pay is worse.
  --Corey Ford