Work in Progress

 So here are my flames, so far, and the way I am making them. I'm just pouring out five different colors (red, yellow, gold, flourescent pink, and a whiter gold) on plastic wrap on a tub lid, and drying them. They're about a foot high. I plan to glue them up vertically with some kind of wood (probably paper-covered cardboard rolls or maybe actual sticks) and add whatever smaller flames it takes to make it look realistic. Just going with a vague image I have in my mind to see what it comes out like as I go. I want it kind of life size.

As you can see I put some cutlery under the plastic to keep the two from running together, and because the lids are not flat, it moves around a lot for effects I like. I tilt it to enhance that and prevent really thick parts in the middle. I stuck one piece of already dried stuff up at the top left just to use it up. I haven't always used the plastic but I like it. The gelatin releases easily and you can flip it without tearing it up by mistake. I just cut up a plastic bag but I tried the packaged wrap too and it's doable.

 These already dried ones don't look amazing to me but the full effect of them together will probably be fine. I'm planning to fasten them at the bottom to a piece of plastic netting I already had hanging around with some turquoise gelatin already embedded in it, so it will be strong at the bottom for moving around. I may abandon that plan if it looks too weird. Will probably add some green.

I'm setting that aside for now to work on cardboard and paper props I also have in my mental gallery. I love having a visual formed for what I expect to make, a gift of my brain that pleases me. I've learned that what I end up with rarely approaches my visual idea, but that is an interesting challenge too, to see if I can figure out how to align my skills with my ideas. I well remember this  frustration from my early days as an artist, which I guess starts to kick in during childhood when we start to make ambitious art. I'm so glad I didn't give up like so many kids do, and I thank my Mom, not my art teacher, for loving what I made and saving some of it for me, as she consistently did. After I had a mean first grade teacher, I never took any classes until I was an adult, and then only a couple. No doubt I have a lot of untapped potential but that's the way our life choices work out. 

I have an autobiographical piece I did when I had a broken foot I had to elevate, something I did to keep busy, which turned out to be my favorite piece ever and something I usually bring to every show. I call it an artist's book, a genre I love and have a huge desire to explore. As you may know that is an open art form that doesn't have to be a real book, but this one does have pages and a story, so.

The story is that Jell-O made me an artist. I was working at art when I got to Eugene in my  twenties, but I had no formal training and had avoided taking classes in school and had no confidence. I just kept making things and trying to sell them at Saturday Market, plus giving them to Mom. She had a nice collection of Mother's Day cards I sent home from my travels. When I met the women who became the Radar Angels, they kindly took me in and persisted in making me feel welcome despite my resistance, and the first Jell-O Art Show in 1988 was pivotal. Showing what I made in a gallery was a big step up, and Jell-O Art had a wonderful freedom. There is no critical structure for it, no credentials, no judges, prizes, evaluation. It stands on its own and says what it wants. I remember listening to people who were looking at it as I lurked, which I still do when I can. 

This was all so affirmative I just kept at it, and my offerings at Market also expanded as I gained skill and ambition and made a life in art production. I painted a lot of signs, was fascinated by lettering and also fabric, paper, and woodworking, and just made whatever I wanted for all of these decades in a mix of stuff I could sell and stuff I made anyway if it didn't sell. It wasn't always great and there were always times I was very disappointed (some of my clients were, too.) But I'd just go on to the next thing.

With the annual Jell-O Show, I really got deeply into the exploration and joy and did a lot of writing about it too. Learned to screenprint and made a million t-shirts and paper things, but Jell-O was the only place I didn't have to answer to anyone's expectations. This freed me to actually do what real artists do and after probably at least 20 years I discovered I actually was a Real Artist. 

It took so long for a lot of reasons: shedding the idea that credentials were necessary, figuring out what made me real, allowing myself to not care about external validation. It was a very personal journey and I wrote about it a lot, so you can go back to the earlier posts if you like that sort of writing. Becoming crowned the Queen was pivotal in adding in that social piece where I had a bigger role, promoting art and artists and actively encouraging other people to free themselves. I even mentored a couple of kids and did quite a lot of volunteering in school when my son was young, probably preventing him from doing it in some ways but you never know when someone will decide to be creative. I'm sure he'll find his own areas of creation to fill in his own life. There's no shortage of ways to do it out there. 

We had an interesting discussion one night about how gaming taps into that when you get fascinated by a game that some brilliant person or team created for you to play. You're participating in an essential way with what they are making, just like the people who come to the Jell-O Art Show are an important part of what we do there. I reflect on that often when we gather to write and practice the performance part, which I only started to do in 2013 after I was made Queen.

I had always wanted to sing with the Angels but thought my stage fright would be too debilitating. I sang plenty, even as part of a garage band for a couple of years, but there was never an audience (not a sober one anyway) and I downplayed my abilities and contained my desire. I decided as Queen to try to do it, and again the Angels said the right things to support me and I found my place. I love to write so now I put together a good part of the script and help us channel all of our brainstormed ideas into a somewhat coherent narrative. It's really top tier fun to collaborate with smart and funny people and the whole process is maybe the most fun thing I do. I don't love performing, but one thing I said in passing last night was that I love to be clever in public. Everyone is so kind to me in the process, the whole audience just beams their delight up at us no matter what, and it goes by so fast at the show that I always cry at the end. The next day is always disappointing when it is over for a year and I put it all away. 

So it's a good week in my Jell-O Art world. The script is almost finished, our singing was really fun last night, and we feel like we always do...this is going to be the best show ever. It's one of our running jokes. The old shows fade from my memory fast, but the spontaneity is something to remember when I think I might be too bored with Jell-O to keep going with it.

Laughing at yourself is a good thing to learn to do in life. Kind of helps balance those moments when your friends and relatives laugh at you. I don't always remember to tell people how deeply meaningful the life of a Jell-O Artist actually is. There's a lot more to it than you might expect. Make some Jell-O tonight!  

Oh, and I meant to say, if you want to work in the jiggly realm with real Jell-O, just try the Jigglers recipe which is usually on the box. It's simply less water. With Jell-O brand, you can use hot water as they direct, because it's engineered for it with sugar and other things that need to dissolve. That firmness gives you a more sturdy result that you can cut and get out of molds easier, but also feel free to use the regular recipe for the ultimate amount of jiggle. It doesn't keep well, so your final piece might have to be kind of last minute, but you could always eat your prior experiments if you want to. It's not really food, in my opinion, but a lot of people sure love it.

Jell-O Research

Jell-O has a long and rich history, and is well over 100 years old, in the form of  a convenience food you can buy with instructions. As it is a byproduct of rendering animals, it was used for probably centuries as a luxury product or maybe even a regular item in any home that kept and used animals for food. Things like consomme, molded savory or sweet dishes, and many common foods used gelatin for its interesting properties and mostly neutral taste. Someone finally packaged it up for people who did not want to take the trouble of raising meat animals and parting them out to make other useful things and substances.

Get this book if you can find it, Jell-O: A Biography by Carolyn Wyman. It was published in 2001 and she did contact some of us to include us in her book, which is super fun and put us on the map internationally. If you are on Instagram, just look around for jellies and Jell-O and you will find tons of working artists and lots of leads to find out more. I have a few posts down in the archives about some of it, with links to the people I discovered awhile back when I had the notion to be a world-famous Jell-O Artist. If I have time later I will try to add a few to this post. You may still be able to find The Jell-O Knight on FB, or David Gibbs who is one of our most prolific and dedicated local artists. He can lead you to many others.

Due to my discomfort with social media I have lost touch for the most part with all of that, just staying in my own little realm using enough energy to get each year's show to happen and to keep my hand in, but some years I have low energy for it and this year is one. Not sure why, probably the world situation which is about as easy to navigate as a cream cheese and celery lime Jell-O salad in the middle of your plate. You know you CAN eat it, you just don't really want to.

But I copied out a few things from the book the other day. There's a lot more! 

 Things people say about Jell-O as something impossible: 

Like nailing Jell-O to the wall 

Like trying to find bones in Jell-O 

Like eating Jell-O with chopsticks 

Like lassoing Jell-O 

Nothing’s set in Jell-O 

That sounds like legal Jell-O 

Jell-O for brains 

Slogans: 

There’s always room for Jell-O (1964) 

Jell-O again (1946) 

The best of everything (1967) 

How sweet it isn’t (1968) 

Just for the fun of it...Jell-O tonight (1956) 

If it was there you’d eat it (1970) 

Somehow it’s always right (1971) 

Make someone happy. Make someone Jell-O (1972) 

Don’t say no, say Jell-O (1975) 

Jell-O is thrilling but not filling (1978) 

Make some fun (1979) 

What being a kid is all about (1987) 

You can’t be a kid without it (1988) 

Jell-O gelatin’s place is a kid’s face (1990) 

Still the coolest (1995) 

It’s alive (1995) 

Smile more (1998) 

Make some magic (2001)

In the Kitchen Today

 I know I need to write more...but it's not that easy thinking of new things to say, so I just repeat myself which isn't that fun either. But today, along with making some adjustments to what is now an actual script for the performance, and practicing some songs, I am planning to make Jell-O again! 

I had a little thing that restricted my ability to lift, but I'm figuring I can lift a half-full quart jar now, and the actual Jell-O I make is light and doesn't require a lot of hand and arm strength to manage. Also I have worked out some ways to do what I'm not quite recovered enough to do.

I'll just tell you that I'm going to work on what will be a campfire...with flames made of big pieces of Jell-O shaped like flames, that may or may not move around a bit or be illuminated from below to look like they're moving. I made a small fire in this piece a few years ago, so the plan is just make it bigger, but also transparent since it will be on the stage and can't block visibility. It is going to use up some gelatin.

I'll use my regular formula, 6 ounces of gelatin in  two cups of cold water in a quart mason jar. I mix it up thoroughly, and with cold water you don't get the lumps you would if you used hot water. It only took me about fifteen years to learn that bit, rediscovered from old Jell-O salad recipes. The gelatin has to "bloom," or absorb water, for about ten minutes and it gets solid though grainy. I melt it in the microwave for two minutes and then another minute or two, until it is liquid and clear, though it will be hot! Don't keep it in there if it starts to boil or rise up and threaten to spill out of the jar. Cleaning up molten gelatin is pretty tough. If you do spill it, let it harden a bit until you can peel it up cleanly so you don't have to scrape and throw it away. If there's a little dirt or crumbs in it, you may be able to peel that off, or just let it settle to the bottom of the jar when you remelt it.

I rarely have to throw the used stuff away...I remelt it, sometimes with a little water, sometimes just as is. If it gets moldy, you can possibly remove the mold, but generally I do throw that on the compost pile for the squirrels. It takes s few days or a week to get moldy, but rotting gelatin has a smell you don't want to become familiar with. So if you plan to keep some around a long-ish time and it isn't fully dried, keep it in the fridge and pay attention to it. When it starts to rot it gets liquid at the bottom. Fair warning.

Whatever you use to color it, put it in the molten gelatin. I usually divide the big jar into smaller pint jars, with one half-pint with a wide mouth kept partially full to use as glue, either spooned out with little spoons or poured out. I generally don't color that but if you use a lot of glue for your piece, you may want to color it to avoid it looking like glue.

So I pour my gelatin into pyrex dishes usually, for the glossy surface of glass, but for these bigger pieces I use lids of big plastic tubs, which will make it look dull on one side, but you could maybe use an old piece of window glass if you have one, or something you have around. Be careful. I have a whole set of pyrex I use only for Jell-O Art because it can dry so strong that it pulls chunks and shards right out of the pyrex, ruining it for food use and also getting a little bit dangerous for you, if you aren't careful. 

A few hours or a day after pouring these big, thin sheets, I peel them up, maybe tearing or cutting them, or twisting and shaping them according to my vision. I flip them over so they can dry on both sides, and I'll do that several times over a day or several, until they are throughly dry so I can keep making pieces until I have what I need. 

Then I will find a way to glue them together to shape my piece. Sometimes I need some kind of support for it, to drape it over a bowl turned upside down, or prop it somehow so it will dry the way I want it to. If it doesn't, I can brush it with a little water, soften it up a bit, and try to re-shape it. The "glue" can be removed or left there, melted again with hot gelatin, whatever works.

When glueing, you either have to hold the pieces together for a minimum of 90 seconds, of have them sitting in a way that will allow the glue to stay in place. You can get it kind of cool so it doesn't run all over the place, but you have a short window of time when it is the right consistency to work. If you wait too long, or move the pieces before they're stuck together, you get this chunky break-up of the gelatin which is useless for your purposes and you have to scrape that off before you try to re-glue, or you just get too much gelatin piled up and it won't dry properly.  Ideally you want everything to dry within a couple of days to avoid that mold. 

I put everything on top of furniture or on a clothes rack in my living room, which has electric heat, or if it is nice outside I sometimes put it in the sun, though you risk dust getting stuck to it, or squirrels getting interested. 

You can use a lot of different things for color. I use powdered dye, since I have a lot here that I use in my other crafts. I've used different kinds of paint, powdered metallics, and youcan sue food coloring or other things like milk, candy coloring, or whatever you have. If it's liquid, be careful not to dilute your gelatin too much with it.

It really is rather easy to do this type of gelatin, and you want some challenges to work on, so go ahead and be ambitious. I tried many things over the years with varied amounts of success, but all that is part of the fun. The best part of the dried gelatin is you can start now. No need to wait for spring break or get anxious about the deadline of the March 28th show, when you might want to go to No Kings and your Jell-O has to be finished first. Again, if you anticipate missing the drop-off time, let me know and I may be able to help. 

And feel free to make edible Jell-O if your family will eat it or you want to make Tacky Food for the Buffet.  That you will have to do carefully, in a very clean kitchen and not in advance, so no one gets sick. It doesn't really spoil unless you have some dairy product in it or something like that, but do everything you would do for a potluck with your inlaws. If you treasure your inlaws that is. 

And for those of you who celebrate tomorrow, I made this with beets, and it was delicious. Nobody would eat it though, and not because it was too pretty.

 

 

Post-Show Review I Never Got Around To in 2025

 I see that I only wrote about the sets and props and then never got around to much of anything about what happened in the gallery, or even on stage. Briefly, I played a buffoon, and my two compatriots were other iconic fools, and we got yeeted into space by the populace of the world. We tried to grift the Space Buccaneers, who had left for space years before and survived by selling Jell-O to other space dwellers.

 We villains forgot to bring any food, just brought our crypto, and as it was worthless, the buccaneers didn't accept it, but took it anyway, giving some Jell-O which got turned into magic Jell-O by a couple of sprites. In a surprise to everyone, we villains were transformed into the Golden Girls and everyone loved each other in the end. As I did say in another post, no one got their just deserts, which I found usefully punny. 

 I told the audience to let loose on the villains as it was a melodrama, but our audience is too nice, though someone did abscond with my "No Kings" crown. They booed a little. It went by fast with lots of fun and ridiculousness. We had two videos, both embarrassing as they captured our missed lines, bobbled cues, and need for more practice. Sorry we couldn't just post them. I presume the Community TV one did air. I felt somewhat responsible for not staging things better; for unknown reasons I like to place myself at the corner of the stage as if I planned to cut and run when it got too bad. It wasn't that bad.

 

 The Jell-O Art itself was not that ridiculous. there was the one attention-grabbing torso, by Dan Armstrong, who returned to Jell-O Art after several decades with this huge amount of perfectly jiggly flesh, er, gelatin. It was delightful or disgusting, depending on how tall you were perhaps. We get a lot of kids at the show who are about pedestal-height, so they sometimes miss the full effect. Edit: I know it is art, but I took out the photo of the nude torso. It's just not a good time for me, for one, to look at it. Sorry if that offends.

 

I like to take photos of the artists with their pieces as soon as they get them set up, though some people kind of sneak theirs in. I caught an Old Slug Queen coming back for a second try, this time with an elegant wall hanging. 

The Raining Slug Queen had to attend to give her Benediction, but she has come a few times, once as a substitute and now for her big moment. She has brought Jell-O Art quite a few times and hers was springy. I gave her a Jell-O Slug-on-a-Stick, which she stuck in her piece. 

 

And that is it for useable photos from last year. My own piece never got put together properly as I became enamored of a set of springform pans I got in a free pile and didn't really make the Jell-O Art that would have explained itself. I tried for a young, mature, old kind of progression but it's lost to history. My real piece that I worked on a lot was the wig, which sadly didn't fit quite as well as I planned. Gelatin tends to shrink and it did fit a one point. So it sat on my head but since my whole costume was over the top that didn't really detract.

You all have my apologies but due to a personal situation I won't be able to type for a few days or longer, so I am going to just publish this as better than nothing. I hope to do better this year. 

The show is the Jell-O Art Show, not the Radar Angel Revue or something, and though I love the performance and do my best to make it entertaining, and it did give a lot of joy, the show should be about the art and the artists who make it. I hang out all day to take photos of people as they proudly display their pieces and call themselves Real Artists, and that is what I think should get top billing. So I will work harder this year to make that happen, post-show as quickly as I can. 

Intention matters. Hope to see you there, March 28! Come between No Kings and dinner maybe. We'll have Tacky Food! (No guarantees there will be anything to actually eat, but there's usually something.)