Inspiration

Have you started planning your Jell-O for the show? Here are some photos from last year to get you thinking about the possibilities. As you can see, many people use props and the regular Jell-O brand to express their creative idea. We don't have rules against your oddest of ideas; we don't have rules! You can make what you want. We don't judge. So there is no "Best of Show" although lots of people have their favorite pieces and artists. We have artists of all ages.

I try to give each artist some attention to thank them for participating and encourage them to be proud of their accomplishment. For many, as it was for me, this will be your first chance to put art on a pedestal in a gallery and really call it Art! It's good to let yourself be proud and at the same time embrace the silly, non-competitive, non-evaluative structure of what we do. If you say it is art, it is.

No degrees or credentials are needed. Lots of us use "Jell-O names" just to add to the silliness. We have certainly had many famous artists participate, as well as local celebrities. One man used to bring his exhibits all the way down from Seattle although he was from the edible Jell-O art universe (there is one) and he was surprised that we didn't have that requirement, or winners. He brought five pieces the first year, I think, all wonderful, precisely engineered works of food art, and I think he was disappointed that he didn't win anything. My Queenly view of it is that if we have no winners, we have no losers.

Everyone has had a chance to feel like a loser, and no one needs more of it. I don't like hierarchies and judgements for self-expression. It takes courage to put yourself out there, even in a silly way, so I want that to be the mark of the artist, that simple courage to step up and display your emotional and artistic pursuits to the public. I'd like it if all of us were unafraid to do that.

I make and sell crafts and have for decades, so I have plenty of experience with rejection as well as acceptance. It's still thrilling when someone chooses my products over all the others available, and I won't deny that my ego thrives on that "winning" represented in my sales total. The regular marketplace is competitive but we can work against that by sharing information, being welcoming to other artists, especially if they make what we make. The less we try to dominate the more we all can succeed. You can see the end result of competition in our economy as companies get bigger and bigger, swallow diversity of offerings, and smaller entities are driven from the marketplace for lack of opportunity. My life is not going to go that way, so I work against it as hard as I can.

I never studied art formally, either. I was devastated by the interference of my first grade art teacher, and hardly tried again. My outlets became Hallowe'en costumes, singing, cooking, Girl Scout badges, and other safe spaces for little girls in the 1950s and 60s. When Jell-O Art came along in 1988, I was hesitant, but thrilled with the results. Through it, I found a creative process, and an awareness of what making art was all about, and although it took decades, eventually I was able to embrace the idea that I could be a Real Artist just by doing Real Art. I don't find the art world closed to me, except in the spaces where judgement, credentials, and hierarchies rule (like almost all of it.) So holding the Jell-O Art Show every year and reinforcing that open creative space has been my vital force that keeps me going.



Each one of these pieces was made by someone who went through their own, personal creative process, and had their own emotions about it, which I hope included joy and laughter and a few of those moments when intuition takes over and the internal critic stays silent. That would be ideal. Some people put in incredible amounts of time and effort; other throw it together the morning of the show or the night before. Anything goes! And if you really don't want to make pedestal art, there is always the Tacky Food Buffet! Just make sure it will be safe to eat. Jell-O treats are always popular at the table, and we've seen some spectacular ones. Sometimes they are even very tasty.

Generally the show is lighthearted and fun for all, though of course we are sometimes disappointed when our results don't match our imaginations. Don't give in to your critic. Bring your piece no matter what. We can all learn from your efforts, and the happy accidents that creative chaos can spawn. Just make some Jell-O tonight. Make some magic!

Saturdays in Winter

I feel pretty guilty about how much I love Saturdays at home in the offseason from Market. Staying in bed past 5:00 am, only needing one cup of coffee, putting on sweatpants instead of rain pants...but April will come. At least this year I don't have to miss Opening Day of the Market for the Jell-O Art Show. That's quite a valuable gift to me.

But that means our show is on March 31st instead of April Fool's Day, as it was last year. That juxtaposition added so much of the joy dimension to our planning. Getting to emphasize our foolishness was a lot of fun, so we could pull out all of the stops and really get down into our silly. It made things so easy. This year, a whole different story.

Being on the tail end of Spring Break means traveling vacationers, including some of our troupe, so we are smaller in number. Which, as you may have noticed when we fill the stage, is not necessarily a bad thing. We usually have way too many of us, and it's always better to have a small number of really committed players than a large number who can't make it to practice and unintentionally throw wrenches in the works. Working from consensus as we do, building that consensus is a task.

So today I am procrastinating re-writing the script. It was jelling, we were getting somewhere, and then forces beyond our control intervened and some parts of it are not going to jiggle properly. I know I will find a way through it, and it's simpler and will make our lives easier, but procrastination is my mode and I'm sticking to it. So today I procrastinate the script, telling myself it is working out in my creative brain even if I am not aware of it. I will definitely get down to the revisions, and it won't be hard, but these Saturdays in the offseason, well, bad habits tempt me.

Like what if I drank a beer or two like I used to in my younger days? When I was building my house I would fiddle around re-arranging my dryrun tile setups, make sketches of the cabinets I didn't really know how to build, or work some more on the tearout of the lath and plaster or the leveling of the ceiling, or the moving around of all of the piles of stuff and work equipment in the way. I still had to have my shop set up in part of the house as I remodeled it. I've been thinking a lot about that 12-year project (no, it isn't really finished, but you know that if you have ever remodeled anything.) The offseason is supposed to be the time when I work on my writing projects (I have two books going on that house remodel) as well as my Jell-O Art. But in the same way as I did last year, I got out the writing project, spread it around the living room, and then got out the Jell-O Art and spread it all out over top of the research. And then the taxes...and then the Jell-O T-shirt design...and of course the things I need to do to get ready for April. Forget making money. I'm living on savings as I like to do all winter.

So this week and weekend I was working on the t-shirt design, fairly leisurely, as it can be more last-minute (and is often better for that), but realized I had to pitch in on the poster. We don't really have a graphic artist in our crew, and we've used up most of the goodwill of the people we know who can do such things for us for the reward of a t-shirt and seeing their work around town for a few weeks. Initially I thought it would be easy to take the shirt image I had in my mind and use it for both projects. It was a good plan, but my technological talents are rather primitive. I kind of know how to use Paint but I am just not tooled up to get the image in printable shape. Spending the time to learn that stuff isn't appealing, but since I already use old-school techniques to do the shirts, I do kind of enjoy the old techniques, cutting the rubyliths, pasting up the components I copy out of books (or the internet) and making collage-style art with tape and scissors.

So I got myself into a weekend project. I'm making a good old-fashioned handmade poster. We'll use a color copier for the final versions, but for the art, I went to my files, sorted through a thousand images in magazines and books, pulled out my Format press-on lettering sheets, which are still mostly useable, and spread that all out on top of the taxes. Because fuck taxes anyway, excuse me very much. I'd pay them if they were actually going to be used to help the common good. I'll pay them. But not today.

Today I will cut and move things around, paper things, and it's pretty fun. I worked on it last night and I'll work on it tonight and tomorrow while I watch the Oscars. You don't want to live in my lving room. It's too cold out to want to plant peas and although the Jell-O is calling me, I have 32 roses already so I can easily make more and there is plenty of time. The poster needs to happen so we can get on with the promotion so we can entice some people to put our show on their calendars. Maude Kerns needs us. They need me, to be specific, to do my Queenly duties and get the fundraiser raising funds.

Sure, we could hire an artist, but we are DIY to the core. I'd much rather pitch in energy and time than money. I might complain some because I have too much to do, but I really think this poster project will be fun. It will look amateur, like all of my work always does to me, because I will probably never get over my self-taught lack of real credentials, even though obviously I am a real craft professional by now. It might look refreshingly amateur. Who needs another clever use of Photoshop and slick graphics that doesn't have a human element in it? My poster will definitely stand out, no question.

And thanks to Anne for mentioning interference powder. I had no idea such a thing existed, but now I get to play with it. When I get tired of cutting up paper, I'll make Jell-O. Yay! It's Saturday and I don't have to go anywhere!