And by 'a thing' I mean Terry Rathje, Heidi Hernandez, and I just made another collaborative piece called Roadside Attraction -in conjunction with this year's Riverssaince art festival hosted by MidCoast Fine Arts.
Terry Rathje was the driving force behind this idea. In the most streamlined way possible, the project can be described as: An imaginary billboard, on an imaginary road, during an imaginary road trip.
In different ways, Terry and I find inspiration from old road signs and the carcasses of abandoned billboards. This was a project to bring forth some of these influences.
Here is a rough sketch of a billboard skeleton I saw while passing through New Mexico.
For a while now, I have been intrigued by billboards built out of fragments of older billboards. I've only seen it a handful of times while out driving, but it always intrigues me. Just fragments of old signs assembled together to create a new sign, it's just the new sign hasn't been placed over the cobbled together fragments so the old(er) messages are scrambled and combined. And here are a few sketches playing around with the fragments of a reassembled billboard.
These are some of my panels for Roadside Attraction.
Here it is all assembled.
Slowly working my way around the piece in a counter clockwise fashion.
One of Terry's sides.
Heidi Hernandez's side.
Terry is also intrigued by old grain elevators and other slices of Midwestern Americana!
Back around to the first view.
One additional note: At this year's Riverssaince, Terry Rathje was awarded the Harley Award for his years of not only helping shape MidCoast Fine Arts, but also the art community of the Quad Cities area as a whole. Terry's exciting work, imaginative problem-solving, keen insights, and contagious good attitude have been a constant fuel-source/inspiration to artists in this area for several decades now. Huge fan!! Thank you for all that you do Terry!
Next time we'll take a peek at my new website!
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