Journal Project #2: Throw it all Away... 23.7.2016

               I am posting a day early as we are heading out for vacation tomorrow morning :)

 

               For the 2nd entry in this series I have chosen the Toad the Wet Sprocket song

title: “Throw it all Away”. I know that the song is about more than just material possessions and emotional baggage, but we have had an extraordinary number of tenants moving out of the apartment complex lately and the sight of all the old and broken furniture, as well as the general excess of garbage outside of the bins lately, is driving me nuts… so, I have been thinking (OK, obsessing) about this song and what we need vs. what we want for the past couple of days.

Just a couple of the items outside of the garbage bins this week

               
Also, one of the lines is about burning your TV in your yard… and, ironically, there is a TV sitting outside of one of the bins… I understand what they are getting at and it is a more chronic issue now, as to when the song was written for their 1997 album “Coil” – we need to unplug. We are watching far too much TV (myself included), which is why I have been making a more conscious effort NOT to turn the TV on unless we are planning on watching something specific.

 

               We went without cable for a couple of years and when people found out, they were shocked. “How can you live like that?” was pretty popular. Well, you CAN live without cable. By taking full advantage of the public library system, NetFlix and Red Box one can get pretty much anything they need for a fraction of the cable costs AND you watch much less TV – because there is a purpose to your watching.

In the attempt to convey the idea of "too much", the initial design started to look overworked.

Phase 2 was an effort to "tame" the design.

  

Phase 3, in all honesty, was a mistake. The idea was to add lines to only the outer ring... and I goofed, so I had to continue on with the design.

 

So, for the past two days I have had it in my head that the result looks a lot like the old TV test patterns I remembered as a kid... apparently, my memory is not exactly what I thought it was, as you can see by the example below:

The idea of the project is not to produce an 8x8 inch masterpiece every two weeks, but to examine possibilities, so even though I am not entirely happy with the results, that is not to say that there are not elements that are working and can be used in another piece.

Team Toad :)

Jenn White

White Rooster Studio