World Renown

 Oh, hey, I am famous in the Oregonian! Video to follow soon.

 

https://www.oregonlive.com/living/2023/03/eugenes-queen-of-jell-o-art-elevates-the-art-of-gelatin.html

Oh Golly Gosh

 

Just a week now to do a million things. I'll get most of them done. I printed the shirts yesterday, with my last screen, which I had to use no matter if it came out perfectly or not. Of course it did not. I had to think on my feel and accept imperfection, and if you are a Jell-O artist, you know all about that. 

If you think you will have control of Jell-O, you had better choose another medium. Everything is about not trying to make it do things it doesn't want to do. 

I had fun with the art, very old school in construction, with just the use of ancient pattern films I have a ton of, and a few changes in conception and design as we went. I did not use a pen, just an exacto knife. I did have to reduce it to 85% to fit the screen but that's okay. I lost some quality in the lettering that way but no one will care much about that. 

The shirts are green, which you can't tell in the photo. The contrast is okay. I had some shirts I had to use up, so I knew I was going to do a one-color with black ink, and that turned out to be great, as I was running out of time and energy. It looks great in person and I'm pretty happy with it overall.

Working on some very fun props and I realized this week that for the first time we won't really have much of a set. Mostly just us. It helps to simplify a bit. We might end up throwing some things on stage at the last minute; that's happened before. A big change from 2018 and previous years, when we had a lot of set. We used to have a lot more people in the troupe, too. We are down to a minimum. 

At least one person quit in fear of getting Covid, and another got the covid  before even coming to one rehearsal. So no one got it so far from meeting in person, but of course we still have the show, where I don't predict a lot of masking. We'll see. I got another booster just to help that out. It's a real risk. It will be interesting.

I'm not sure if I am finished making Jell-O or not. Not, I guess. I still have some crowns I can make and should, though I got an easier idea for a piece that will help me in this time crunch. 

Ack. Gotta go practice my lines. See you so soon!

Two weeks and Counting

Two weeks from today I will be putting everything away and getting ready for an intense week of getting ready for Saturday Market, which I've just been putting off since there's so much to do for Jell-O Show.

Spent a LOT of time getting things out and rearranging my house to do a video interview with Samantha from the Oregonian. Just remembered I'm supposed to be sending her photos. I went to find my photos and realized I've put some of them somewhere else, and I don't know where that is. I hope I put them in an album as archives, and that might be true. I can look through the dozen or so portfolios I have that look identical, as I am archiving so many things right now. All of the things, because I am of the age when something is worth saving right, or not worth saving. That is not going to be easy, for me, or for whomever gets stuck with sorting through the last of it. Which will likely be a lot.

The interview was a lot of fun though. She had done some research, and had great curiosity and questions  prepared. It didn't seem to bother her that there was low light, little pleasing empty space to use as background, and so much clutter there was like one place for her to put up her tripod. She was so very professional. 

She's had the job for 10 years, she told me, and has the best beat: the weird and quirky. I will have to go read up on her own portfolio. I know she did a piece on the Slug Queens last summer, and that is how she stumbled upon the Realm of Gelatinaceae, the Jell-O Art Queendom. She had it on her calendar since then. I feel so important.

Indi came and did it with me, both of us costumed. Indi is very good at speaking about history and anecdote...she has a great memory for it. I have a more rambling style that needs a good editor. I've written and spoken a lot about Jell-O Art, but it's eclectic history and so connected to the other things in my life that I can't really separate it. 

The first Jell-O Art Show was in 1988, which seems impossible but is after the Radar Angels had been going for probably ten years...it was maybe 1978 or therabouts when the group got started doing teas and shows and wild abandoned activities around Eugene. And by 1988 I was solidly into Fibergraphics and my success as a t-shirt entrepreneur, and it was the early days of the t-shirt heyday. We did the Fish Tie spawning in 1986. In 1990 I had a son and turned 40 and then things really sped up, but Jell-O Art was even more important going forward, and kept growing. 

No one would have predicted us here and now. When we gave the awards at the 30th Show, Jell-O Goes Gold, I remember Angela telling Indi she had to do it for 30 more years. Okay...four down now. Our stage is one where old ladies are welcomed, though, and maybe we will still be up there decades from now. No predictions. 

An Angel was lost this week, though, Rita, to a heart attack. Here and then gone. I didn't know her well but I am still sad and a little despondent about it. As it gets closer and closer to my turn to transition to a less earthly form, I'm not anywhere near ready. And I don't like grieving all the time. I feel like it is still the shutdown of the pandemic...everything normal is suspended and we're all just supposed to keep getting on with things. Doesn't feel right. 

Make more Jell-O, my solution to every emotion I can't handle. Write and make art. I did spend time outside yesterday in the sun, moving sticks around and sweeping the sidewalks. As it is windy again, I will have to do it some more. But getting outside was wonderful, and I sat on the deck to go over the script. Had some fun ideas to embellish it a little. Got a pretty good idea of what to do for my piece.

It's not crowns now, although I may still make some. I'm probably going to go with the theme this year, Jell-O Bizness. Changed my whole shirt design idea too. That is what I should be working on right now...but we have practice today. I have to learn those lyrics.

See ya! Make life fun, make some Jell-O tonight! 

Jellescalation

The Jell-O-scape in my house took a turn toward the serious this week as I fielded a request from a reporter from the Oregonian who wants to do a feature. Initially I was horrified at the idea of letting a camera into my space but gradually I realized that it is the easiest of the many choices for getting a video of my techniques.

So I launched into a whirlwind of moving things around and decided that I can make it look okay in the kitchen and can make a couple of pieces, at least partially, as I did last year in my workshop. I started trying to pin down in hours the kind of prep I will need to do to get the several stages of gelatin demonstrated well enough to show the artistry of the medium.

I can flip it over at anywhere from 3 to 6 hours and get pretty good results at getting it out of the dishes and into the next phase of drying. At overnight, or 12 to 18 hours, it mostly comes out of the dishes and sometimes frees itself as it shrinks. That's about as close as I can get. I just remembered I used a little crockpot last year to keep the molten gelatin warm so I didn't have to constantly stop to microwave it as it jelled too much to work with it. Good detail to remember. I had to clean the stove anyway though, as it was a mess of neglect, and I should probably remove my toaster oven from the kitchen on general principles because that is something I rarely if ever clean beyond taking out the crumbs in the bottom tray. It looks unsafe. Lots of my life does when I try to picture it in the Oregonian.

I moved my office off my kitchen table and now it is just Jell-O, with many pieces in various stages of production. I have one crown made and two others kind of planned. Some will be wearable and some won't, and I'm not all the way sure what I will be wearing in the show or just displaying. I always think I should wear Jell-O throughout the whole show, performance and all, but it usually happens that something breaks or is too unwieldy to dance and sing in, so that's kind of a later-in-the-process

decision.

Jell-O Art does not photograph well, maybe partly because the viewer doesn't have context...nothing about it really resembles natural objects people are used to seeing. It's usually made to view from at least several perspectives, which you can't do that well without a light box and lots of preparation. But here are some bad photos for you.

The golden thing is an actual head-sized mold I covered with flowers for the 30th show, but I couldn't get the flowers to stay on so I finally resorted to tape. It looks amazing in person but is too fragile to wear. The green and peach crown is way more beautiful when worn...I'll probably wear it during part of the show at least, although since I have a new purple and blue apron I'm making a purple one. The crest thing is probably going on that. All of the other things are just pieces that have not experienced their magical transformation yet.
And on the subject of transformations, the last photos are of a cathartic Jell-O piece I made to work through a personal situation of disappointment. It was super effective and I loved the whole process but a loaf of bread fell down on it the next
day so I get to make it again. I have some ideas...

Jell-O Time Progress

 

All over town, people are working on their Jell-O. Well, probably not, but I know one guy in Portland who is (the Jell-O Knight) and surely someone here besides me has it all over their kitchen. Mine is also filling the living room.

That's because I am visually oriented and need to see all the differently colored pieces out on plates and trays so I know what to make and get stimulated in new directions. I have more in transparent tubs, divided by color, and sometimes size, but I like to lay out my pieces first before I glue anything up (and when I say glue, I mean fasten together with melted gelatin. It's super-gluey.) 

It's kind of layered on a card table and when I get interested in another project, that just goes on top. Right now I have a large papier-mache project in its final stages taking up all lf the working room in my living room and I need to stash it somewhere. I'm making props, something I can never resist.

Mostly I use big cardboard boxes, sometimes flattened, to make set pieces and other props, and of course they also take up a lot of space in my small house. I'm doing one drawing today that is almost ready for going full-size, and another big drawing that is not for a Jell-O project but just because I wanted to see if I could do it.

It's an optical illusion that I got off the internet, a floor painting of a chasm with a wooden plank bridge over it. I sketched it out and quickly realized there is a lot more to it than I expected. For one thing, the photo is taken from the perspective of a person who is viewing it on the floor, which is just one of the several views it will get which will all have to be coherent. Someone looking at it from the other side will have to understand it, as well as someone looking at it from above, and from the other two sides. And it's big, over four by four feet, and I don't happen to have a space on the floor clear enough to put it down. Every so often I take it out on the porch to look at it from several angles.

What is saving me is that I keep reminding myself this is only a pencil drawing. I can keep working on it endlessly until it looks right, and maybe the drawing is all that I will be able to make. I may need to enlist a painter with more skills than I have at rendering textures and perspective. I could also collage some of it if I want...like use wood-grain contact paper for the wood, for instance, or colored papers for other parts of it. A co-project with that is a very, very tiny miniature diorama that I just want to make to see if I can do it.

Problem-solving is a lot of fun. I guess that is why I am still a self-employed artist with a lot of projects like maintaining and repairing two houses and a yard full of fruit trees. I like ongoing projects I can think about and plan, sometimes just letting my brain ponder them on its own while I do other things. Gradually I get a visual plan for the steps I will need to take and work myself up to launching into the project, or at least getting the materials together. I'm working on at least a half dozen things like that, some stretching over years, some just staying on the list while I don't really get started. I'm not going to run out of things to do, though I may run out of the ability and will to get to them. 

But Jell-O has a hard deadline of the end of March (the show is the 25th of March) and props have to be ready or not get used. I rarely have to compete for the task of making them...other people in the troupe seem to have less time and energy for producing the visuals of the performance outside of their costumes. Sometimes we will get people who like to coordinate the costumes with similar accessories for all of us but mostly we just do our own and hope they coordinate somehow. I have not worked on my costume yet, though I got a purple apron at the HM which I plan to build it around. Being the Queen of Jell-O Art is a delightful role, costume-wise, and I can have as many aspects to it as I want or have time to fit in. Usually there isn't a lot of time and I don't really plan any costume changes at the moment...though it just occurred to me that I could use some accessories to enhance each scene change and that could be a lot of fun. Sometimes we like to add details to our costumes just to amuse the other actors in the troupe...and those rarely even come out at the Dress Rehearsal because it's more fun to wait until the show. Some of us do that with our lines, too. 

I finished the third rewrite of our script this morning, and anything from here on is just tweaking, with the main narrative pretty pinned down. We'll continue to change our own lines to fit our characters, make more jokes, and say things more cleverly as we rehearse. Hopefully we won't bring in any more major themes...it is always a big challenge to integrate the themes we all want in it. Each one has to be articulated somehow to the audience and we use parody songs to do a lot of that, but it all goes by fast and it's doubtful that anyone really gets all of our jokes or that all of them are even gettable. If we don't have a good sound system and the right placing of the mics, they might not even be hearable. One of our best shows, Jell-O Wave, included a few Beach boys songs with complicated harmonies and all kinds of subtleties but our sound was so bad, you can't even really watch the recording. It was a bit of a heartbreak as we worked really hard on that show.

And of course the last three years have not really been live shows at all. We had to jettison 2020, which was promising to be amusing, and then did zoom and recorded shows in 2021 and last year, which were a lot of work still, but felt incomplete and somewhat less than satisfying. Like so many things that were compromised, I'm glad 2019 worked out. I did learn to try not to take it all quite as seriously though. Like everyone keeps repeating as we brainstorm the narrative, It Doesn't Have to Make Sense!

But of course as a writer I want it all to mostly make sense, and to be clever and original, and maybe to say something beyond Jell-O Saves the World which is generally what we end up saying. Either that, or it's someone's hero's journey and that's what so many stories are about, just with different costumes. This one is kind of neither, but it isn't finished yet either. Things have a way of settling into the familiar grooves as we leave the phase of putting everything in and enter the phase of trimming out what isn't going to work. I've learned just to ride the wave and see how it ends up. None of it is worth fighting anyone about. And for a bunch of actors who are supposed to be ego-driven, we are mostly not. Ego gets in the way of the final product, which is supposed to be pure fun. Easy to forget that goal.

So, except for the realization that papier-mache is heavier than expected, everything is moving right along. It's messy, but I like it. I hope we get to rehearse in person this year. That damn Covid seems to be circulating just as much as ever, just not officially. I know more people who are getting it now than I did in any past year of it. Still not me, so far. I don't have time to be sick, so I hope I'm lucky. Just being careful is probably not going to be enough.

Jell-O Bizness

 

We really got the Jell-O Art Show plans jelling this week. The brainstorming is the fun part that reminds me that I really do want to do it. I really do have the energy to make another show happen. It's a fine bunch of warm and talented people and we work together to create silliness and joy. It's hard to think of a better way to navigate the winter months.

I've made some Jell-O, since I have very little left after last year's Boxes O' Fun. I gave away about six tubs worth of my 12 tubs of gelatin pieces...so I can make specific ones for this year's project if I can get settled on what it is. This part is just playtime...I put them on a table and arrange them in various ways while I think about some kind of concept. 

I kind of lost interest in the crowns idea. The sticks didn't really work out, so I threw what I made outside when it got moldy. Then I picked it out of the compost and thought maybe I would just let it age outside and see what it turned into. It might become something. I might glue moss and lichen on it and make it super-natural...or I might throw it back on the compost. I have plenty of time to decide.

We settled on the theme: There's No Bizness Like Jell-O Bizness. It reminds us of a fun song that we can use at the beginning, and it seems like a good prompt for the artists...because Jell-O bizness is funny bizness. So they can go off into any kind of business they want...real estate, banking, politics, all hilarious. All worthy of satirical comment anyway. Serious Bizness.

We always have a blast tossing around ideas for a meeting or three. Tonight we constructed somewhat of a narrative so now I get to start a script which is something I love to do. It gets changed a lot, and some years has been completely trashed and started over, but we build on the framework and everyone adds their quirky things. Nothing is too weird at this stage.

Picking a character, or a song, or even just a costume is a way to start, and I thought I might play Queen Elizabeth but now I might try some other royal. Of course I always begin with my own character, the Queen of Jell-O Art, Queen Gelatinaceae. I have the wonderful role of being the bridge between the Jell-O artists and the public, and I usually introduce the Slug Queen and the beginning of the performance. I love the role of the somehow glamorous Queen, even though I know I am a dumpy old lady in a costume...it's a real glamour in the sense of something magical coming over me and everyone else in the room. It's reality and an escape from it at the same time. It's pure fun and everyone gets to laugh with me, or at me, I don't even care. If you think I'm ridiculous, that works fine.

What a piece of freedom. What a gift I have been given. I'm the luckiest of Queens. 

Make sure to put the show on your calendar and attend. It's only three hours, 5-8 on a Saturday night. (March 25th) With luck we will be past Covid enough to forget all of our grief and horror for a few hours and just enjoy that we live in a place where we have a gallery show where everyone works in Jell-O. I mean, what town can beat that?

Things to do on Saturdays

 I started my Jell-O Art season yesterday...it's a commitment of space so I dragged my feet a little. I have about ten dishes of pieces drying all over the living room, which is where the hottest air sits. It's important to dry the gelatin at the right speed so it doesn't get moldy and you also don't miss the flexible stages you want to use to reach your vision. Most times in these early stages the vision is vague and I love this part where I see what appears from my attempts and then set off to follow those accidental artistic occurrences.

My idea this year, to start anyway, is crowns. I've been pruning the fruit trees and as always I love the branch shapes and have saved a lot of them on my deck rather than just tossing them in the stick tote. I might need a few more sticks to display hats on for retail, but I got to fooling around and put some groups of them together into what might be wall sconces to display Jell-O Art crowns. Then I got some ideas to incorporate the sticks into the structures of the crowns so I embedded some sticks yesterday. We'll see how well they stay in the gelatin, which is mostly going to be a trick of trying not to move the pieces until they get to the right stage of gelling. Which is not something clearly defined, so I expect some do-overs.

The crown idea came from the realization that I have been Queen of Jell-O Art since 2012, so ten years. Actually eleven, if you count the first and last, which of course I must. So this is the start of the 12th. When I was first crowned it was a joke about Queen for a Day but I didn't want to let go so I made myself Queen for life, and that has stuck. Maybe more than I wanted it to. I'm very often referred to as the jello queen although I am not that at all. Google it and you will see why. I don't advocate eating Jell-O. I don't make edible creations if I can avoid it. I'm not Queen of any of that. You might see my photo still, but mostly you find things to eat and some of them are downright inspiring, particularly if you think about making them as art pieces instead of food. Google it anyway, to get you excited about the possibilities. 

There's quite a bit on Instagram too, with some celebrities like the Jell-O Knight, David Gibbs, and some people I hope to meet, like yesyoucaneatthat and Adventures in Jelly, all of whom make excellent things of their own inspiration. There's plenty out there that is Jell-O and is art. 

But as I began doing as soon as I was crowned, I think often about what being a Queen involves. With the death of Queen Elizabeth recently, I've been looking for satirical humor about colonialism and royalty and have had plenty of thoughts about that too. One of my thoughts is about why people insist on having royalty at all...dividing some people off as elevated in station over all of us ordinary folks who just do living. It's a mystery. 

I do get some of it, for instance, starting with little girls and getting them to think of themselves as princesses, and encouraging them to grow into queens in their own self-regard. It definitely beats keeping them confined into the roles of glorified servants and "housewives" and people who are generally subservient or less important than male people who are somewhat automatically given status and titles without much merit in many cases. Even though I find the roles of princesses and queens problematic and unimaginative, it's better than the glass ceilings keeping women out of positions of power in general. I am looking forward to future times when it won't be necessary to have either real, or pretend royalty. I want some other concept where we are all able to reach whatever potential we see in ourselves or can be inspired to see.

So my initial efforts at adopting and understanding my title were mostly plebian, trying to inspire other people with low-ish self-esteem into thinking better of themselves and their possibilities. Everyone can be some kind of artist, and the whole initial idea of the Jell-O Art Show was to make art more accessible and less tied into the world of fine art, art criticism, and hierarchy. I have been transformed by Jell-O Art into thinking and feeling like a Real Artist and it has been truly joyful for me. Yet I have never really been comfortable in an elevated role. If it weren't a comedic prank and so irreverent I wouldn't still be doing it.

So I'm exploring what it really means to me to be a Queen of Jell-O Art. What part of it is just the crown, and how does that particular crown fit in the world with So Many Queens! I mean, one less, since Elizabeth died, but still no shortage, particularly on the internet. And there have now been forty years of Slug Queens in Eugene. When will it end? Can there be Too Many Queens? I sense a song coming on...and that needs to happen, too. So that's where I am starting.

Here are a couple of things I am trying...if I can get them out in one piece and curve them around into crown-ish shapes without tearing them apart, we'll see. I doubt it will work, but it got me interested. So I hope you find a way to get started. I seem to need a new technique to try...a challenge. This will be the thirty-second or third or thirty-fourth year after all. I've lost track. We started in 1988, but then skipped one year, and do we count the two years we kind of didn't have shows? Yes, I do, but not everyone feels the same. And we call it Annual, but it isn't if you skip a year. Or is it? We don't really have an Authority Figure to declare it. I sometimes act that way, but everyone laughs.

And if you are new to this, I have quite a few instructional posts farther down, but just get yourself some boxes of clear (Knox or whatever) gelatin to start, or make the edible Jell-O brand for possibilities. Make it with less water for stiffness, and just see where it takes you. It is supposed to be fun. The goal is to get into that flow state where time just goes by unnoticed while you are in your own world of art. And there, you are queen. It will all unfold in time.