There’s a little spot of lavender paint near the bottom of my brown button-down shirt. Can’t see it when the shirt’s tucked into my jeans. It’s been there since Spring of ’99, sophomore year of college. Somewhere around April, before our first Odyssey of the Mind competition, I laid out reams of newspaper on the tiled floor of the wide hallway that connected the larger, collective studio in the back of Leazar Hall to the smaller ones in the front of the building. <\/p>\n
All the freshman design studios are held in the larger room, which was a cafeteria before Fountain was built on west campus. I pulled more all-nighters than I care to remember in that huge, partitionned room–times of delerious, sleep-deprived laughter with my classmates interrupted by frantic bouts of drawing, sketching, painting, constructing, whatever the project was that week… It’s where I spent most of my time, even sophomore year when my studio was in Brooks Hall proper. People started specializing in their respective degrees after the first year… Friend groups were more homogenous, stratified.<\/p>\n
But that particular evening I was in the Leazar hallway, laying out newspaper for a painting experiment. I found a big rectangle of cardboard somewhere, cut it to size (still large), and laid it on the newspaper. I found rolls of duct and masking tape and created a gridwork of rectangles and squares on the cardboard with the overlapping bands of silver and white. I only had buckets of house paint at my disposal, but it was just as well. I dipped a stirring rod into the orange bucket and flung the paint down on the cardboard, over and over again, before repeating the process with lavender, then orange again, then lavender, back and forth randomly. After a while I paused and applied more tape to the work in progress, impressing structure on the randomness. Then more color, and more tape. More color… When I was done the cardboard was a mishmash of multicolor paint and tape, coming forward, receding, interacting, swirling around and again. Unfortunately… the newspaper hadn’t helped much as far as sheltering the floor, and when I removed it a nice stencil of overshot was evident. My clothes came through relatively unpainted, although I think those jeans were relegated to work\/art duty from then on, and the spot of paint I wasn’t able to remove is still on my shirt to this day. I think there’s a reason Jackson Pollock stood on ladders<\/i> when flinging his paint, and not just because his canvasses were so large, either. Well, come to think of it–he would get down and interact with the paint with his hands, too. Nevermind.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There’s a little spot of lavender paint near the bottom of my brown button-down shirt. Can’t see it when the shirt’s tucked into my jeans. It’s been there since Spring of ’99, sophomore year of college. Somewhere around April, before our first Odyssey of the Mind competition, I laid out reams of newspaper on the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/848"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=848"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/848\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=848"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=848"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=848"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}