![]() Over the years I've done a lot of fundraising for other groups and individuals, mainly putting on Seattle Bach Choir's annual fundraiser, Bachtoberfest, for 13 years. Now I've reached a rough patch and need to have a fundraiser for myself. It's always embarrassing for me to admit I need help, so this is hard for me, but the good news is that I can see a light at the end of the tunnel if I can simply ask for assistance. ![]() I've been trying to make a go as a full time professional artist since September of 2020, and I've been able to survive this long, but it's been a tough run and soon I will likely need to get a regular job, and a virtual one so I can keep my dad and myself safe from COVID. To be honest I don't have a lot of marketable skills. For decades I've worked in food service, but now my body is telling me that it can no longer stand for eight hours a day, plus the virus is spreading faster than it ever has before. I don't know how to code, I have a phone phobia, and even the technology of my trade is still beyond me. If I knew how to use Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator I could find a lot more virtual work in my field, but at the moment I am still a very analog artist. But I've found something that can give me proper training not only in the technology but also in a field that can help sustain me as an artist. I am hoping to raise the money to enroll in Bonnie Christine's eight week surface pattern design immersion course which starts on February 28. Surface pattern design is the design of whatever you might find printed on a surface, especially repeating patterns like you see every day on wallpaper and fabric. This course is fully online and teaches not only how to create repeating patterns but also how to reach out to potential clients and negotiate contracts for art licensing. I applied for a scholarship, but only eight people will be chosen out of thousands. I should know if I've been chosen on January 25, and will certainly let you all know too. ![]() There are opportunities in getting art licensed for use on a wide variety of products: everything from stationary to packaging, fabric, bedding, wallpaper, coffee mugs, and more. My work relies heavily on patterned paper, both as a drawing background and as collage, but these are the patterns of others, either used with a commercial license or simply found vintage and antique papers, but I can take my art career to a whole new level if I could create my own repeating patterns and license them. I can finally see my own artistic visions working in tandem with a viable income stream. Imagine if I could use my own patterns as backgrounds, in collage, and even as image transfers in my shadow puppets! Of course it would be best if I could raise money not just for tuition but also for living expenses while I'm taking the course so it can be a true immersion experience. Here's a budget breakdown:
And of course there are some very fun perks in it for you if you wish to donate!
This fundraiser will take place mainly through IndiGoGo, but if you don't want to sign up with them or use that platform I can also accept donations through PayPal or Venmo or in other ways. Feel free to contact me for alternative ways of donating (rotarybear@gmail.com). And I need to say that I am not a nonprofit organization, so your donation is not tax deductible, but you can still get some cool rewards for supporting me. You can also become a monthly Patreon donor if you want to continue your support of my artistic endeavors. Of course purchasing anything from my online store would help me too!
I'm hopeful and excited about the viability of art licensing as a supportive income stream for my creations, but I need help to get pulled up enough to make this happen. Thank you so much for your generosity!
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It all started with a meditation with my higher self. She told me that without a core we are all just tools for capitalism. You may have gathered that my soul and I aren’t big fans of capitalism, but unfortunately we need to use it to survive. Without a core we have nothing to give from, nothing to create from. She used not just an apple without a core to illustrate this, but also a sunflower. A sunflower is all core, all center, virtually all seed. Everything blossoms from this center. When we are centered in ourselves we can create, give, and help others because we feel fulfilled. Images from my meditations as depicted in my book of mirrors. Learn more about the book of mirrors tradition here.Back in the summer of 2020 I created a couple of bird drawings based on this concept that set me on a new path. One I call Warbler in the Void, which became the logo for Birds for Brains, and one I call Owl Core. It is this latter piece that became the jumping off point for the current drawing/collage series that I call BirdCore. I was finally realizing and embracing who I am as a symbolist artist. That summer also saw me expanding my use of decorative drawing backgrounds to include collage, and the summer of 2021 had me learning a little bit of botanical drawing via Wendy Hollender's books, mainly apples and pears. I had already been drawing lots of birds, so I thought to combine these elements. Apples and birds are highly symbolic. Apples tend to symbolize some kind of knowledge, but also fertility/creativity/sexuality. Birds often stand in for the soul itself. What these pieces stand for is simply the prayer for something to fill us, the need to have a core, the longing for our own soul to make itself known in our hearts. Without understanding and feeling deeply committed to what is most important to us we become susceptible to the whims of others, to becoming corporate shills, to abuse. When we are not filled with our own purpose we become tools for whoever wants to use us for good or ill. Two Crows: colored pencil on decorative paper collage, 2021Accompanying this art series will be a couple of books. The one available in December will be a small self printed booklet featuring all of the drawings with a set of short poems. I have another story written that needs illustrations, but I’ve barely started on these pieces, so this book will have to come out later. I can clearly see that BirdCore will be inspiring me into 2022. If you would like to see the show live and in person I will be displaying it outdoors beneath a tent on December 4 and 5 with two other wonderful artists (Janet Fagan and S. Jordan Lee) in the Bryant neighborhood of Seattle (5547 38th Ave NE), and in my dad’s carport in Ballard on December 12 from 10-3 (7035 26th Ave NW). I will also have greeting cards, jewelry, prints, and my self published books for sale for all your holiday needs. There may also be free cookies or popcorn depending on which show you attend. All works from BirdCore will be listed for sale in my online store soon. If you would like to support this ongoing series feel free to become a patron via Patreon. All monthly payments as a patron count as installments on an original drawing from me to be received one year after your patronage begins. I won’t be offering this particular perk forever, so become a patron today!
For me the most exciting part of the Weill Project has been the opportunity to design placards. In a former post I said a little bit about what placards are and how they were used. For the Weill Project shows these will be 22 x 28 inch posters displayed onstage to announce each song before we perform it. Right now we are aiming for a total of 15 songs, so the design work has been divided between me and Yvette Endrijautzki, an amazing artist now based in Wuppertal, Germany, though she used to have a gallery in Georgetown here in Seattle. You can follow her on Instagram to see her placards and her process in making them. As I’m the art director for this project I had to decide if I wanted to take on all of the placards or just a portion of them. Joe Mabel and I agreed that “angry” isn’t a typical flavor of my artistic style, and some of these songs are very angry, so at Joe’s suggestion we included Yvette to work on these, plus a few more! We each have very different styles, and yet we are both very controlled and precise artists. The main element tying our styles together is the font, since each placard must include the song title. Yvette is taking inspiration from Weimar era art while I’m using a technique I’ve just always wanted to try. ![]() Scherenschnitte, or cutting paper with scissors, is an old German and Swiss art form originating around the 17th century. The height of Scherenschnitte’s popularity coincided with the popularity in Europe of shadow puppets, which were called ombres chinoises, that’s French for “Chinese shadows," because European shadow puppetry was inspired by Chinese shadow puppets. You can read a history of puppetry in Germany here. Since I’m a shadow puppeteer I have also wanted to make more permanent art from cut black paper. Here was my opportunity to do so! Scherenschnitte was already an old art form in the 1920s, and a popular one, so popular that the handmade aspect of the art was beginning to be replaced by machine made replicas. In the face of such commercialization of the art form there were a few souls devoted to keeping it alive (Eva Schonberg for one) and even stretching its boundaries. Perhaps the most famous Scherenschnitterin (that’s a lady paper cutter for you English speakers) was active in Berlin in the 1920s. Her name was Lotte Reiniger, and she is considered to have pioneered feature film animation with her Adventures of Prince Achmed in 1926, that’s a full 11 years before Disney’s Snow White. Reiniger’s husband and chief collaborator was a film director named Carl Koch, Koch and Reiniger met Brecht some time between 1923 and 1926, and it appears they made Kurt Weill’s acquaintance around the same time as the release of Prince Achmed. ![]() Koch was approached by Weill and Bertolt Brecht in 1927 to work on a piece called Ruhrepos, a sort of musical landscape spectacle commissioned by the city of Essen. In Brecht’s words, “The Ruhrepos should be a document of contemporary history along the lines of the Orbis Pictus of the seventeenth century, reflecting this century’s view of the world in simple pictures. Songs are written and composed to elucidate large placards, depicting mines, types of people, etc. Slides and film projections show the actual documents that are treated by the poetry and the music.” Given such a collaboration I can only wonder if Reiniger would also have been called upon to help design these placards, but the project was not to be as Essen couldn’t get the funding together. However, in the following year the association between Weill and Koch becomes more of a Weill Reiniger collaboration. ![]() In 1928 Lotte Reiniger created her second feature length shadow puppet film called Dr. Dolittle and his Animals. The composer Paul Dessau was in charge of the score. In addition to his own compositions for the film he also included pieces by Paul Hindemith, Igor Stravinsky, and possibly Kurt Weill. There are tantalizing clues all over the internet about Weill's involvement with this film, but it's hard to pinpoint exactly what that involvement was. There is some implication that he wrote a new score for one part, likely the part called Affenbrücke, or Monkey Bridge, as seen in the image here. Unfortunately the only version of this film available includes new music. Any original scores appear to have been lost. This film was originally supposed to be animated in six parts, but only the first three were ever completed, amounting to 25 minutes of total film. Talking pictures were becoming popular around the time of its release, so Dolittle was a flop in spite of the rave reviews, and funding was withdrawn for the continuation of the project. Since Reiniger and Koch were good friends with Brecht, Koch was allowed to film parts of the premiere of Threepenny Opera. Brecht had some stills taken from this film that are now the only surviving photographs of the premiere. Reiniger made papercuts of Threepenny from memory afterwards, apparently altering the ending slightly to be more aligned with Brecht's original vision. These papercuts were included in a newspaper article as well as in the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm during Threepenny's run. As a side note, Carl Koch nearly collaborated with Weill again in 1933, this time with Jean Renoir who wanted to direct a musical comedy based on Octave Mirbeau’s novel Diary of a Chamber Maid. This project also didn’t happen, though Renoir did turn this into a movie in 1946. That was all some back story to introduce my placards for the Weill Project. Here I’m sharing five of them with you, but you’ll have to wait until the show to see the other two. Each of these has a background painted with watercolors before cut paper is glued down over it. I made these on mixed media paper measuring 11 x 14 inches, so they will have to be blown up to twice their original size once the placards are made. I also didn’t put text on them, but will do so digitally later. ![]() Speak Low: The first placard I made shows a couple enmeshed by the rays of the dying sun. I thought this fitting for a song about the devastating effects of time passing. As an aside, I learned there’s a name for this particular phobia: chronophobia. I’ve personally been struggling with it ever since my mother died a couple years ago. As a singer I’ve been approaching this song purely aesthetically, but now that I have a better understanding of the link between this song and my own chronic anxiety around time I can hopefully bring more emotion to it. Cutting all those little circles was also really hard, and I probably won't do much of that again. This is cut from a single piece of paper. ![]() Berlin im Licht: This song was written for a big festival sponsored by the gas and electric company of Berlin in 1928, sort of the forerunner to the Berlin in Lights festival today. I took key landmarks of Berlin’s skyline and cut them out along with their reflections in the river. Light bulb balloons hover about. This skyline includes landmarks that were extant in Weill's time as well as more modern buildings and features. ![]() Youkali: I was excited to figure out a technique for rendering brightly colored lights in watercolor over a blue watercolor background. Thank you, Golden Acrylic absorbent ground! The viewer is in the position of a voyeur, viewing the fabled fairy island of Youkali surreptitiously through palm fronds. Cutting out these palm leaves was really fun, but positioning them artfully was a challenge. ![]() Complainte de la Seine: This is one of my favorite Weill songs, an incredibly beautiful but dark piece about the rusty boats, jewels, broken hearts, and body parts that are lost in the river Seine. I wanted to honor this aesthetic by creating the most beautiful bruise colored sky I could. If you look closely you can see a skull: the clouds are eyes, the tip of the Seine a nose, and the posts on the bridge are teeth. This is cut from a single piece of paper. ![]() Foolish Heart: This song comes from One Touch of Venus (as does Speak Low,) a story in which a statue of Venus comes to life and wreaks havoc: falling in love with an engaged barber while stirring up the passions of the art collector who bought her statue to begin with. This song is all about the ensuing love triangle. Though technically Venus is Roman, she originated in Greece, so I took my inspiration from Greek amphorae. This placard depicts a broken heart amphora filled in with the various love interests all facing in the direction of their affections. The poor barber’s fiancée stands outside the triangle wondering what the heck happened, while Mount Olympus, Venus’ home, looms in the lower right. This is cut from a single piece of paper. Follow my blog here, as well as the official Weill Project blog, for future updates on the project. If you would like to support the project the best way is to actually support me. For a limited time a monthly donation via Patreon will get you a piece of my original artwork. Become a patron now and receive a new piece yearly as long as your patronage lasts.
It's been a few months! In case you're wondering, here's a rundown of what I've been up to ![]() House Remodel: my dad's house is getting a major remodel, and I will be moving back in soon, but in the meantime he and I have been shuffled about. I call it the Brandon Diaspora. Luckily house sitting has exploded for me, thanks to the vaccinated desperately wanting to escape their homes. I'm hoping to move into my new home by October 1. I've been painting, dusting, packing, and organizing things endlessly for the past several months. ![]() Weill Project: Joe Mabel and I have been rehearsing twice a week since May with lots of other work going into recording videos, doing research, writing blog posts, and creating placards. You can follow us via our website, and read the blog series I've been writing about the life of Lotte Lenya - Installment One and Installment Two ![]() New ZERO Album: In the spring I recorded a couple of tracks for Zappa Early Renaissance Orchestra's fifth studio release, Make an Arf Noise Here, due to come out very soon on Cordelia Records. One of the tracks was also turned into a video by Kevin Crosby for inclusion in this year's virtual Zappanale, and the other is included on Would You Like a Snack, a compilation album of choice cuts from 200 Motels. ![]() Minstrel from the Island of the Moon: I illustrated a 1920s epic poem by Ottys Sanders using pen and ink. This book will be designed and hand crafted by Peter Nelson-King and available for purchase in a limited run in November. ![]() Dabbling with botanical illustration: going through Wendy Hollender's instructional books to learn new techniques. I'm quite excited about where this could lead! Coping as best I can: Like most of us, the pandemic, climate change, late stage capitalism, and changes in my career and family dynamic have all added up to be a lot to deal with just by themselves. As is my wont, I've been reading a lot of self-help books, mainly on creating routines and confidence for creatives. Some of this is actually in preparation for my own book series. More about this below. Future Projects I'm hopeful about:
You can support me in all of these endeavors with a monthly donation via Patreon! Or via PayPal at the bottom of my homepage
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Juliana BrandonFollow me for insights into 18th century music, bizzaro spiritual trips with Schubert, love poems, colored pencil drawings, and more Archives
January 2022
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