Sock Dolls Dance Painting by Carolyn Oberst

Sock Dolls Dance Painting by Carolyn Oberst - as part of the series on arts by GeoBeats.

My name is Carolyn Oberst and this is my painting that is called Sock Dolls Dance. The inspiration for this piece came from my collection of vintage toys, handmade toys, toys that are just not that commercial basically is what I collect, and in this instance these were two sock dolls made from argyle socks. A sort of a rabbit piece I guess you could call it and a duck, and that was where I started from. What I usually do is I take the subject for the work and I turn it into a drawing and then I take the drawings and cut them up and make a collage and cut them up until I get a composition that feels like something I want to work on, and in this case I ended up with the largest piece I have made so far. This is 64 inches high by 82 inches wide.

So once I have the drawing done, I make shapes, decide which shapes that I want to cut, which things I want to pop out and which things I want to make flat, and then they are cut out of wood starting with like quarter inch up to an inch in depth. I cut them on a bandsaw, and once the pieces are cut, they have to be gessoed and then painted and the backboard gets painted, so because in order to look at the work on the wall, it has to be screwed together, I mostly work on the floor. So the painting would be on the floor, I had be making the pieces, and then I get up on a big ladder and look down to try to decide how I want it to be, and once all the elements are painted and the backboard is painted, then I screw the wood pieces onto the backboard from behind.

The idea of screwing them together instead of gluing them together is that once it is up on the wall, if I change my mind and I want to move things around, I can just unscrew it and move it. So that is the way they are done, and then once everything is together and it is up on the wall, if I need to make any painting changes, then I go ahead.

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