papercut in half-hour increments
Aug. 6th, 2018 01:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
corviI take a ferry to work, which has been good for me. It's easy for important-to-the-soul things like longform reading, or creative hobbies to get completely pushed out of my life by work and chores and tiny but urgent nonsense. But an hour each weekday spent on a boat is time I can't actually wash dishes or do taxes with. Oh no, how dreadful, I guess I'll listen to the waves and keep an eye out for goofy seals and read or write or do art or something else wonderful. Woe.
I took a progress photo of this piece at the end of each ferry trip, so each photo represents half an hour of work, or less if I finished a section but didn't feel there was enough time start start the next step, or hadn't brought the next sheet of paper. The finished piece is four layers of paper, each with holes cut to show the next layer down: black over white over red over gold. It took almost a week of ferry trips to go from the sketch to the final piece, plus about two hours of fussing with frames and mattes, which I didn't do on the ferry.
(Warning: It is a picture of a Christian saint made for a church event, so perhaps don't look if you're uninterested in that sort of thing.)
According to The Golden Legend, a collection of saint stories written sometime around 1260, this saint (Mary Magdalene) once spent three years living in a cave that men were prevented by an unseen force from entering, and during that period lived by consuming music instead of food. Regrettably, The Golden Legend does not say where the cave is; I know several people who would love to vacation there. :)
I love how weird the saint stories in The Golden Legend are. Saints should definitely be people who live in man-free caves and eat music and less, I dunno, being suffering and perfect and graciously sad about how everyone else isn't perfect enough. The universe and the people who live here are wondrous and strange; if we are to have holyfolk to walk with us, they need be as strange and wondrous as we are. The modern Christian church gets saints all wrong. But that's another rant entirely.
I took a progress photo of this piece at the end of each ferry trip, so each photo represents half an hour of work, or less if I finished a section but didn't feel there was enough time start start the next step, or hadn't brought the next sheet of paper. The finished piece is four layers of paper, each with holes cut to show the next layer down: black over white over red over gold. It took almost a week of ferry trips to go from the sketch to the final piece, plus about two hours of fussing with frames and mattes, which I didn't do on the ferry.
(Warning: It is a picture of a Christian saint made for a church event, so perhaps don't look if you're uninterested in that sort of thing.)
According to The Golden Legend, a collection of saint stories written sometime around 1260, this saint (Mary Magdalene) once spent three years living in a cave that men were prevented by an unseen force from entering, and during that period lived by consuming music instead of food. Regrettably, The Golden Legend does not say where the cave is; I know several people who would love to vacation there. :)
I love how weird the saint stories in The Golden Legend are. Saints should definitely be people who live in man-free caves and eat music and less, I dunno, being suffering and perfect and graciously sad about how everyone else isn't perfect enough. The universe and the people who live here are wondrous and strange; if we are to have holyfolk to walk with us, they need be as strange and wondrous as we are. The modern Christian church gets saints all wrong. But that's another rant entirely.
