We have spent countless hours on playgrounds, and attempting to plan playdates with other kids. The pandemic has complicated this process, and made the scheduling of playdates more interesting. A play date is an artwork. My role in scheduling and planning these play dates has shifted, and challenged me to learn new skills. Sometimes we arrive at a playground, and another kid who wants to play with us, just happens to be there. This is a kind of Happening, a term first coined by Fluxus artist Allan Kaprow in the 1960s, is an event with rules for participation, so it is different each time. The variations are created through score, verbalized agreements, and careful selections of location, duration, and time.
Let me just say, these are not the slides that I grew up. They are soft plastic which land you, shock-free, on squishy turf. The slides I played on yesteryear were metal and towered over the playground at heights that made us tremble. They boomed or popped as we slid down, and sometimes burned our thighs on hot summer days.
The white butcher paper roll is useful as both drawing surface and drop cloth. Arlo begins with a stick of black charcoal and eventually chooses two colors; pink and green. He uses color to show different layers of information in the drawing. Scale shift, or depictions of varying scales with repetition and overlap, gives me a fairly good idea of how large these forms are imagined to be.
This drawing expands the limits of scale and reach with the ladder. I believe we should feel as comfortable as possible when drawing, but consider the body as a force of energy and affect. Working large scale invites the whole body to think, makes choices, and improvise. It also needs breaks. We usually have a couple of projects going on at a time, to keep things going. On the large table, we pour acrylic paint and water-based ink on circular acrylic signage that I picked up from a closing department store several years ago. They are perfect for painting planets for shifting constellations. We hang these in different ways, alone or in groups.
We sanded the clear acrylic on both sides, so the paint sticks to the surface. and we can see both painted sides simultaneously. Arlo picks out three colors and becomes immersed in the meditative swirls of color interaction. “What planet does this remind you of?” he asks.
The low viscosity paint tends to go everywhere, so we work on top of unfolded cardboard boxes.
iwishiwaslight 