Blocks

I've had a very productive couple of weeks in my studio. My main project at the moment is working on what had been an elaborate frame for a bureau mirror that I got (sans bureau and mirror) at a barn sale several years ago. I started a painting where the mirror had been, but I reached the point where I knew that it wasn't finished, but I didn't know what else to do with it so I decided to let it rest for a while and work on something else.

That something else was a set of stacking/nesting wood baby blocks that I bought at a garage sale, also several years ago. When I bought them they all were pretty much the same; each block had the same decal of an inane farm scene on five sides, the only difference between them was that every block was smaller than the other and that the decal was scaled to fit the size of the block. I thought this was a sad waste of potential and set about to remedy the situation almost immediately. I sanded off the decals, cleaned off the dust, primed, and painted each block a different pastel color; colors that were just slightly muted whenever possible.

Then I nested them back up and put them away for the better part of a year.

I had several ideas of what to do with them: elephant to mouse, hyacinth macaw to bee parrot, blue whale to krill, ect. (all of these ideas I might use still of I find other block sets), but the idea that stuck was to make the set of blocks that I would have wanted as a child; one that Charles Addams and Edward Gorey would have approved of. So I thought about all the animals that most people are afraid of- the real stuff of nightmares- and set about making them as creepy/cute as possible.

There's a delicate balance between creepy and cute; I didn't want to make the subjects so cutesy that they weren't recognizable, but I did want them to be so cutesy that it was funny (at least to me). For inspiration I turned to some children's books from the 1930's.

For consistency I wrote the names of the animals as well as a big capital version of the first letter of the name in the same grey on the tops of all of the blocks. After drawing all of the animal characters, it was just a question of painting them.

The animals I chose from large blocks to small are:

Giant Squid

Vulture

Wolf

Crow

Bat

Rat 

Toad

Asp

Spider

Wasp