Graphic Work I Did Inspired by a Multimedia Artist

 And the multimedia artist in question is Sandy Skoglund. Just who exactly is this?

The world around me can be such a bleak place, but the world of Sandy Skoglund: surreal, bizarre, and fascinating, is a place I wish I could dwell in. For those of you who don’t know who I am talking about, she was the mastermind behind Revenge of the Goldfish and Radioactive Cats. What you might have seen in a museum or magazine was probably a cibachrome print, but where it all started was from a lifesize tableau involving mannequins, real people, the semblance of three walled props, and inanimate objects, food, or plaster creatures.

These setups can take months to assemble; so I would imagine that Ms Skoglund has a crackerjack team at her side through it all. Wouldn’t that be the dream job-assembling the intricacies of art through Cheez doodles, raisins, jellybeans and even less enjoyable to touch food items like bacon and raw ground beef? Then the fully formed setups are painstakingly photographed. Yes, they are life sized, not scaled down replicas or anything. I did plenty of research to find that out. “The Cocktail Party” and “Raining Popcorn” are not “dioramas”. They are surreal and true to life.

“Good artists copy, Great artists steal” – Pablo Picasso

I have a funny thing to confess: I have actually made my own duplicates of her famous works, but keeping within the standards of respect, I signed the pictures with my own name and “After Sandy Skoglund” Imitation may be the most sincere form of flattery, but plagiarism is not a joke. I do not own the copyrights to any of her work; which is why I am not showing it here willy-nilly. You can do some research on the net and find plenty of sites featuring her work. I have been inspired by her work to the point that it led to some creative work that I eked out “So Many Shoes, So Little Time” “Flower Power” and “The Gamer” are my own original concepts.

What inspired what for me?

My work was inspired by “Hangers” “Accessories” & “Spoons”

Oh, Ms Skoglund does not just design and create eerily colorful full-scale scenes. She is also a graphic artist. Her series, entitled “True Fiction, Two” I can tell, was made with photo manipulation programs. Currently she has the work in progress “Winter” going on. It involves the drawing of familiar faces on the computer using a Wacom tablet; these drawings are adhered to fired and glazed ceramic snowflakes. I have a Wacom tablet; that thing takes some getting used to. I cannot confess that I use it much; there is a steeper learning curve involved.

But the best thing about the work of Ms. Skoglund, is the intricate “busyness” of it: Even now when I study her work online,I catch sight of details I hadn’t noticed before. The word “rich tapestry” comes to mind. Even now, in the work “The Invisible Web” there are actually bent up forks coming out of that purple car. I actually thought it was shredded paper. And the work “Breathing Glass” when you look at a high-res close-up…many many tiny dragonflies and mosaic glass. And “Shimmering Madness”…butterflies and jellybeans. Zany for the sake of zany, yet masterfully planned out and executed.

Sandy Skoglund is also a filmmaker, multimedia artist and photographer. I got to have the pleasure of hearing her conduct a lecture at a prestigious New England college on YouTube. Her viewpoints on the consumerist culture in America today that influenced the repetitive object theme that is her signature art trademark-only validates the awe that turned me into a fan and admirer.

How I Created My Skoglund-esque Images Above:

Program: Corel Draw X5 Tools: Shape Tool, Freehand, Pen Tool, Gradient Fill, Paint Bucket, Clone Tool, Text Tool (To sign my name and date) on a letter-sized background 11 by 8.5, 300 dpi, high resolution. Time needed: About 3 hours.

And yes….I did try to craft my own version of “Radioactive Cats” and “As Far as the Eye Can See”. Even saving one of Ms Skoglund’s images as a desktop image has its drawbacks since I usually need a pretty darn large size for it to look really good. I did the next best thing….I used her concepts as jump-off points, I did not try to make a bad imitation of them all. Thank you, Ms. Skoglund, for your magical inspiration.