Softcup for keeping paint wet. Just hang with me for a minute.

So in the day to day life of a studio artist and art professor, I find that I am inundated with odd objects, strange collections of bugs, bones, plants, dog toys, pool toys, kid toys, toy models, old paint tubes, strange brushes, old bottles, cans, containers with the Mona Lisa printed generically everywhere - I even have a wooden box of dessicated mice corpses.  Somewhere in all of this, I recently found myself in possession of a box of Softcup feminine hygiene cups.  (For the correct application of this product you must look elsewhere - I watched a video of how to use it for its manufactured purpose and well...I still don't get it, but that's not what this is about.)  I very nearly disposed of the box as I have no use for a product of this nature - for its intended purpose.  But as I looked at this strange little object and turned it over in my hand and mind, it occurred to me that I might have a use for these after all.  Let me explain, but first the Softcup:

  
A Softcup is comprised of a flexible rubber ring that stays in the default position of a circle when not being squeezed and a thin "plastic" cup (I don't actually know if it is technically rubber or plastic but its close and that gives you the right idea).  On a flat surface the pink rubber ring gives it a nice airtight seal.  The cup is waterproof and therefore pretty airtight as well.

If you are a painter, who has ever squeezed out too much paint, mixed a dollop of paint that you didn't use or worked with acrylic in a hot room - you know that a lot of paint drys into little hard balls of worthless plastic.  This is true of oil as well (well not balls of useless plastic) but useless bits of crusty stuff that once began its painting life with colorful promise.  With acrylic though, its a constant battle,  even with a little spritz bottle to occasionally hydrate the surface of the paint, I loose some.   
So there I was in my studio chair in intense study of the strange little pink plastic cup and in a moment of true divergent thinking it occurred to me that this plastic cup was not entirely unlike a large dollop of acrylic paint mounded up in an irregular dome.  "This thing could keep paint wet for hours" was my first working hypothesis but little did I know, this thing can keep paint wet for days.

The Test.

 

  On Monday March 10th at 5:30p.m. I squeezed out two dollops of Liquitex BASICS primary yellow.  I spritzed water onto the Softcup (not a great deal mind you) and placed it over the dollop on the left.  I checked 3 1/2 hours later and the paint was wet in the Softcup and getting firm on the exposed dollop.

I checked again the next day March 11th at around 11:30a.m.  The exposed dollop was completely dry and exited our test and therefore our story as a little hard ball of worthless plastic.  The Softcup dollop however was still as wet as if it had been just squeezed out of the tube.

Again I checked the Sofcup dollop at 11:30 a.m. on March 12th - still completely wet.  11:30 a.m. March 13th - still wet but firming up.  I did not spritz water inside the cup on March 13th.

 

On March 14th at 11:30 a.m. the paint was dry.  The paint stayed wet inside the Softcup for roughly 3 days and would have lasted longer if I had spritzed more often.  Conclusion:  These little plastic cups are fantastic at keeping air out and therefore paint wet.  I know that some people will say that this is not as useful as plastic wrap or Tupperware etc.  Well, possibly but the problem I have always had with plastic wrap is that it has no shape but as you see in the following picture the Softcup is very similar in shape to the paint dollop.  Tupperware is often too big for the amount of paint I am trying to keep wet.

 

 As a final thought, Softcups are not very expensive as they never actually get very dirty, they are infinitely re-usable.  Give them a try and you might notice from the picture above, they also fit nicely over a small aluminum can. The only downside to these new objects in my studio is the oddly disapproving looks that I seem to get from, well everyone. Perhaps I should stop making everybody hold one. 

Flesh Pod, Flesh Pod sketch, Flesh Pod - in the round

First, the Flesh Pod.

The work I am calling your attention to is the fleshy meat pod on the right side of the image, the one that seems to be fat rolls mounded up on a large fleshy belly.  The above image is from an exhibition that Travis Townsend and I had as the Smith Townsend Collaborative at Miami University in Oxford Ohio in Nov 2012.  (For more images of that show click this link.)

I don't remember the original idea kernel for this painting but like most of my work, it had something to do with a large and ungainly physical presence.  I found the first sketch for this work today as I was roaming the occasionally fertile fields of my sketchbook looking for that long forgotten sketch that must be squeezed to life from pigment and oil.

 
 So here it is just above, the sketch before the pod.  The final work is surprisingly similar to its loosely scrawled beginnings but for the top mound.  That particular mound of flesh which carried from this initial sketch into the final work, looked too much like a phallus.  An adjustment had to be made and in the final painting the top is more like a fleshy thumb and mitten-ed hand pinching upward.

In Oct 2013, Travis and I installed a show at the New Harmony Gallery of Contemporary Art and I brought a stack of work to the gallery not knowing exactly which pieces we would include.  Flesh Pod wasn't included in the show at New Harmony because we went with paintings of meat pods that had stronger connections to boats and vessels.  The title of that show was "Smith Townsend Collaborative: The Grand Armada."

 

When I store my large sticky decal paintings, I stick them down to clear plastic and roll them onto cardboard tubes.  I tend to store 5 or 6 on the same roll.  This image was taken during the New Harmony install and I thought there was something interesting about this semi-transparent stack of pods and how much it emphasizes the flatness of the paintings.  In the background you can see a large 3-D pod that I created for this show and in some ways the 3-D pod looks less volumetric than the painting.

The smaller sketch from my sketchbook drawing is not a preparatory drawing for the 3-D pod but it almost could be.  One idea I had for the Flesh Pod painting in the beginning was to have it constrained with ropes and chords and in the end the painting wasn't but the 3-D pod was.   The future of 3-D flesh pods is uncertain but the connection between original drawing and final work is always part of my process.