Ideas List 1: Materials research

Ideas:

• Scrolls: sized with different levels of solution (start at 50/50%), paint with watercolor, ink, and absorbant ground + those things. Roll, and see if it cracks. at least one with oil
• Water down frisket 50/50 and see if it pulls up rag paper and rag paper with paint.
• small wood bits: one with cloth, one with DS absorbant ground, one with strait watercolor. one with transparent ground?
• In the scrollforms, try to arrange them like historical stcrolls 
• REACT to the cloth in the paintings (A la surrealism) instead of planning it out beforehand. make bases for these images and react to those in paintings too. 
• PRINT on cloth. Do one etchig, one watercolor monoprint maybe (to see about its visibility)?? and then try to combine the two? sizing the cloth first would likely be a good idea.
• • consider making collages out of cloth scraps and using those as substrates and/or reacting to those in paintings. theoretically cloth can be layered on itself with the same sort of technique as sizing, which would also size it. 
  
  
  surrealist games

Trace suggested stitching on the cloth paintings with some kind of thick string to make them more of an Object and justify their non-stretched-on-stretcherbars existence/justify them being displayed in the way they were painted. 

Interested in doing this. must find a way to incorporate such stitching while keeping the focus on the paint. don't want to abandon the paint, that's the fun stuff. 

possibly a border or can ALSO be used as a way to shore up the extremely fragile edges of the cloths, which were never made to be canvas and even sized have some structural difficulties.

Potential drawback in association/meaning; leah cooper asked about the cloth as a substrate for the paintings, said that any kind of cloth/stitching/etc might bring in associations of feminism/reclaiming crafts/etc. I told her it was a reference to tapestry and cloths of honor. Adding stitching onto the cloths might add additional layers to the other meaning, which while not nessicairly something i want to spurn is not what i'm going after in my paintings and are somewhat distracting to the meaning (especially the ones about being alternative gender; i already get misidentified as female).
Rebuttal: tapestries ARE made of cloth and stitching so this shores up that association; that association is not globally accurate since there are several cultures for whom the making of clothing is associated with masculine identities (and still other cultures that had non-binary concepts of gender but we won't go there outside of a seriously researched paper). and also that i can make whatever associations i want so fuck off.