If I wasn’t a badly paid writer, I would be a starving artist. Not that I’m that great at art (hence the starving part), but I really love to draw and paint and make a big old mess. A few years back I took a six month screen printing class and became totally obsessed with the clean lines of the art form. I even set up a screen printing studio in my basement and made everyone I know an Andy Warholesque print of their faces.
Then one day I was trying to screen print a drawing of train tracks and the lines just weren’t coming out straight enough. I wanted the thing to look hot of the presses of Stalingrad. Red, black and white with lines so straight they make a razor blade look crooked. Nothing was working. So I drove to the art store to see what sort of precision tool I could find to satiate my need for clean crisp lines.
The answer was not at the art store, but the hardware store. Electrical tape! I ended up making a four foot tall painting with electrical tape and was absolutely drooling at the precise cuts you could do with an X-Acto knife. I love Cold War propaganda art (the aesthetics, not the message), and my electrical tape feast was looking very much like something that would be embraced by the Red Army.
I haven’t done a project with the wonderful substance in a while, but today I spent the sunny day on my porch making an electrical tape telephone pole painting for Craig. Here’s hoping he has a love for art that could also be used to rewire the television. The essence of romance!
My first piece of electrical tape art now hangs in my living room. It's a cheerful railroad track to nowhere!
I have no idea what this propaganda poster says, probably something a tad psycho, but I do know that nothing says art-tastic to me like red, black and white clean crisp lines. And what better to make that than electrical tape!
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Tags: Craig, electrical tape, propaganda poster, red army, soviet propaganda art, stalingrad
My gift was amazing! Thank you sooooooo much. Electricians all over world will swoon once they see what you can do with that hard-to-tear tape.