Monday, October 13, 2008

Search and Research #105

Yes. Yes, it feels good to gt this idea out of my head and on paper...and now online. I have tried in the past to make the color strips the sort of things that are worthy of rendering in color. I really liked the idea my friend Bryan had of blending works from the history of art into the library setting, such as Strip #30. I'm a big fan of the surrealist painter Dali (and most of the rest of the surrealists actually) and so for this one, I settled on his The Persistence of Memory as a subject. It is not an exact copy as the Magritte was, but more like a homage to the painting. This strip is my tribute to the mind numbing and ongoing task that many student workers perform called Inventory.

In my student worker days, inventory was a regular task we were asked to perform for almost the entire school year. I think that anything we didn't finish during that time would be finished over the summer. The data would be analyzed and put to use, and the process would begin again the following August. I hated doing inventory. I hated it even more when the clipboard I had been using was replaced with a 5 pound portable barcode scanner that was not only unwieldy but emitted a loud beep for every barcode it scanned. Even now, sitting in my library office, comfortably away from the possibility of having to perform the task, I do not think of those times fondly.

This is for all of us student workers who were at one time or another called upon to sacrifice sanity in the stacks with a clipboard and a pencil (or a portable barcode scanner.) Enjoy!

3 comments:

Jason said...

Nicely done, Eli! I wish I could say I contributed a lot to this strip, but for this one, I was pretty much a sounding board for the artist to bounce ideas off of!

And besides, surrealistically speaking, brown is the only flavor I walk glass.
-Jason

Anonymous said...

I am glad that you have been able to do the interesting surrealist panels.
How many times did we crack ourselves up just thinking through weird story lines?

Bryan

Anonymous said...

By the way, I just did another shifting project. I relied again on my trusty tape measure, clip board, and excel workbook. But these shelves were uniform in length. Not the crazy variability of the Peabody stacks. Do you remember recall that the shelves ranged between 5 inches and 41 inches in length with little predictability? Thankfully the collection in the VDOT Library is only a fraction of the size of Peabody's.

Bryan