And the beat goes on...
Momentarily free of responding to mail artists duties, I attacked my list of friends I need to send things to. Bruce was next and he gets TERROR OF THE ZOMBIES. I had previously glued the background (it looks like an abandoned service tunnel from some sort of hospital or something) a long while back. I had no idea what to do with it--so I added a horde of zombies. It's just okay. However, except for the zombie on the left, all of the zombies pictured are photos of real corpses! EEEK! They are all from the Capuchin Catacombs in Polermo, Italy---which you can actually visit. Creepy. Also with this one, NOTHING stuck out off of the confines of the envelope. We can't have that. So, I elevated the stamps a bit. They pop off the borders. (D)
Well, this is a piece of crap--the WORST thing I have made thus far. I had stupidly pasted the background on an envelope. What do you do with a bunch of eyeballs? I should have made it something spooky (if possible). Instead I inexplicably went with a space theme (because that makes total sense--NOT!). Some new guy on IUOMA (International Union of Mail Artists) in the Philippines (who makes this incredible abstract art) friended me. As much as I like his work, I don't need/want anyone writing to me. I'm pawning this lemon off on him. Ugh! (?)
I briefly got to jump back into making Mail Art for friends. Next on the list was former co-worker Karen DeWitt. She gets this one. This one is far better than the last seance-y envelope I created--or is it? It is certainly spookier...but what about it (beyond the title and the address space fingers touching around a table) really says "seance"? I do like it, though I may need to go back to the seance drawing board... (D)
One day, I received this big packet of Mail Art stuff from some IUOMA member in Germany who goes by the name Triboulet. I have no idea how he got my address, as my IUOMA account no longer has my address and plainly states (where the address should be) that I am NOT accepting mail. Hmm.
But it was very kind of him to send this my way. What he sent was incredible. Among the items was this booklet filled with wild drawings.
There were also these mini-monster paintings of (GASP!) nude monsters! (Shut your eyes!)
Although I had no idea who this guy was at all, but I was very touched that he included a personalized picture for me, Monster-A-GoGo. How nice.
I'm NOT an artist. I just cut out things from various sources and rearrange them on an envelope. That's it. This is what I came up with for him. Although there are no monsters in it, I do hope he likes it. I like it--and somehow it looks much better in real life than it does here. The stamps, of course, ruin it. What you can't see behind one is that the skeleton hand is holding a key. There's also another gravestone covered up behind the damned stamps. We'll see if he gets it. (?)
This came out so BADLY! And it is the THIRD version I tried to make. This is for my former co-worker Jenny. She is the queen of shark movies---especially the really awful, direct-to-video schlock with bad CGI. The first version is actually underneath the shark now. It is a picture of me at a cardboard photo-op standee thing promoting THE MEG. You could pose inside the shark's mouth. But I'd printed it too small and wasn't wild about it at all. The second version utilized the large shark mouth entrance to this souvenir store here in Washington (that I hope to visit in early August. The mouth was going to wrap around the envelope--but it was just too big overall. This third version I just slapped together quickly to get it mailed (as I was heading off-island the next day). Everything about it I hate. Even the background color for the address in the shark's mouth is a bad choice (It looks like water--like the shark has a see-thru head or something. Sorry Jenny. (D)
Redeeming myself (hopefully), this piece I like a lot. It's simple, yet effective and spooky. I sent it to my mother, who lives here on the island. I HOPE the local Mail police do NOT confiscate it---or blame me for it (as I'm mailing it from off-island)! (D)
This one has a nice aesthetic, even though the title ("FEAR HOUSE") and tagline ("In buying this house, you may have just mortgaged your soul.") are rather pedestrian and tired. If you look at several of the envelopes I've posted this time AND last time, you will see that I've pretty much "mastered" (aka "have run into the ground") the "spooky house" template. Ha! The thing is, I have at least FOUR more in the pipeline at different stages of completion. This is heading off to some guy in Germany who just joined IUOMA and sent a friend request. GRRR. One and DONE for him. And those sunny, yellow sunflower stamps. UGH! (?)
Another new IUOMA member popped up. He is young and full of enthusiasm. His site-shared mail art often features "beef cake" kind of guys in it, and I also noticed that he has posted about wanting to start a "queer mail art exchange" on the site While I have no interest in his group, for his one and only piece o' mail from me, I made him this faux horror poster featuring a couple of shirtless zombie guys---"BARF cake," if you will--since they're bloody and messed up. I hope he isn't offended. The pop-offs are so minimal--just a tiny piece of the roof and the tip of the E in "Zombie"--that I am going to try and get by with using only ONE stamp. Fingers crossed it arrives. (D)
Someone going by the name "the artist formerly known as moan lisa" sent me an invitation to join a project called "Holy Spirit." That did not sound like a match for my mail art (almost always creepy/spooky/horror), so I sent a note politely declining, saying I was re-retiring from mail art, no longer reciving mail and no longer joining projects. Then I noticed that the artist formerly known as moan lisa was on my "friends" list. Huh? I had NO MEMORY of that happening. I looked at his/her page. There was no art work shared, but comments to various members saying "sent" on such-and-such date. I clicked the links and took a look. I was blown away. GREAT stuff. No longer worried about offending the sensitivites of someone hosting a "Holy Spirit" project, I sent my latest envelope. (So much for trying to get ahead...although I STILL have 8 more names on my list.) This one coincidentally fits in nicely--in an off-kilter way--with the "Holy Spirit" theme. Ha! (?)
One of my good friends back in California is a big BRADY BUNCH fan (as am I). When I made a tiki-ish piece o' mail for my best friend Erich (
HERE) a while back, I used the taboo tiki idol from the BRADY BUNCH episode when they go to Hawaii. That planted the seed for when I got around to John's name on the list. (D)
After working on the BEYOND POSSESSION envelope, the exorcism theme was still clouding my thoughts. I opted for a remake of one of my earlier envelops (a Xerox of which can be seen
HERE). I remembered the upper part of the layout (and which movie ads I'd gotten them from), but the lower half I just did on my own withOUT looking at the original. I was disappointed with the results. It is okay, but it doesn't look as... (for lack of a better word) polished as my more recent efforts. And then I realized why. There's no sort of background, just a plain, white envelope. Oh well. Carlos will hopefully like it. He's a horror nut like me. (D)
The final result of this one is just okay. Thinking it up made me laugh, though. It was meant to be THE STRANGE HOUSE
OF HORRIFIC ODORS, not
WITH HORRIFIC ODORS. I don't know how that boo boo happened. I didn't even notice it until now, as I am writing about it. Hopefully it will give my friend David in Australia a laugh. The international mail stamps...UGH! Very minimal pop-offs with the roof and the woman on the right. I HOPE it reaches him. For God's sake, someone open a window! Ha! (D)
And, of course, as usual, I've had to make some postcards in an effort to track down missing mail art--to see if it ever arrived at its destination...
My list of people I need to send to continues to get smaller and smaller. True, there are occasional blips and it goes back up, but it is shrinking over all. I might finish before the summer ends. After that, I can focus on some people who never received their mail or who got totally sucky ones (like Jenny's crappy SHARK envelope. LAME!). It is such a relief to finally be almost DONE!
Want to see the next part? Click
HERE!
Revisit my Mail Art journey:
Comments
Hello there! As I look at my list, I count 5 names left. There IS one more new one on IUOMA (GRRR!), but guess what? I have three envelopes ready to go. 5 + 1 - 3 = only 3 left to go-go! I truly am ALMOST there. And YES, there will be at LEAST one more post. (But I did get sidetracked into some mail art project... details later.)
THANKS for reading.
CHEERS