So I have had the bestest week this week- also I have been trapped in 20th-century Olympia, WA, where there is limited cell phone service, and can you believe that The Evergreen College doesn’t have any internet in their theatre building? Damn hippies. I was cut off from the world!
Anyway, the reason that I was in Olympia is thus- I got a call from a designer I worked with a few weeks ago- I was her costume minion then, but she is more known for her scenic designs and I foolishly told her that I paint as well as sew. So she calls me and say “OMG, they haven’t hired a painter for A Winter’s Tale, can you come help me paint this week?” And I said “hell yes!” because I am sick of wardrobe gigs and have been dying to get my hands into some nice gooey paint. Also this designer is awesome and I wanted to work with her again. Because she is Hot Stuff. I made friends with her dog too. He’s a Jack Russell (just like Rowen, mom!) and very well behaved and cute.
The catch was that the show goes up at Evergreen before it comes to Seattle Center, so the company put us up in Olympia for the week. It was kind of like theatre camp. They put us into this huge empty house, which had towels and blankets and soap, but no shampoo. The soap was really crappy too, I washed my face and hair with it, and not only did it not clean so good, it stripped my bodily moisture all away, so my skin is both broken out and really dry. This is not supposed to happen. I have oily skin, always have. Applying moisturizer is as foreign to me as curry on toast. But I had to do it yesterday, because I swear I was molting into a new exoskelton. So between that and the obligatory layer of smelly paint all over, I’ve been feeling kinda unfit to occupy space with other human beings. Good thing I’d been hanging out with all the hippies there at Evergreen..
I have been having a blast! I do loves the paint. I got to do some sculpting too, and I used both a power sprayer (like they use to paint cars) and a big dyevat. A big, big scary dyevat, and I figured out how to use it myself, and the dyejob and cleanup went great. And I learned some new techniques (who knew that laundry starch was such a useful paint surface?) and am genuinely thrilled with the work. The design is beautiful and the pieces are incredibly fun to make. And it’s been really great to see firsthand how a really successful designer lives and works, and how to get there.
So this project has sort of inspired me to pursue the scenic art more fervently, and lay off the costume design until I have a better network and the time to go to grad school. Because scenicly I love the Craft just as much if not more so that the Art, and Scenic Artists (some might call them set painters) can get decent steady work much more easily than young inexperianced designers can. And I’m feeling kind of all or nothing about costumes lately. If I do costumes for the rest of my life, I want to walk into a nice big shop with drawings and swatches and tell the peeps to “build this”. Stitching is not a love-filled career for me, and I don’t have the skill or the patience to be a cutter or draper at this point. And Costme Designing is still a long-term career goal, but the tools I need for that I won’t have for at least another six years.
So screw it, I’m a Scenic Artist. I will still go to New York, it will be a grand adventure that I can’t afford not to do right now, but I will only stay as long as I’m enjoying myself. I will do paint and props, because those be the jobs I can get that don’t involve washing anybody’s tights. And if I get this internship I want, it will be an immediate place to hide out and network for a while. But a good painter can get work just about anywhere, and I think that is what I need to do while I can still travel and my knees and back and hands are still good. Because it is brutal physical labor, painting, and I can’t do it forever. Now is the time!
