This man had an amazing outfit he made of beads, buttons and mirrors. His hat was beautiful and fluttered in the wind.
This float was created for Burning Man. It lights up at night!
Today I went to the Fool's Parade in Occidental. Had I not been puppeteering I'd have a lot more photos of all of the crazy, creative and playful costumes. Since I didn't have time to make my Cabbit puppet a body I used an aluminum pole used for washing windows. It pivoted and bobbed and had an extension so I could stick it way above the crowd. Still, it would have had more impact with a body. Something I've got to find time to work on.
Mermaid Parade, Coney Island, 1991, photo illustration
Realizing my true calling at 50! At 4am I woke up unable to sleep, thinking about how I could convert my new garage into a puppet making facility. The more and more I thought about it the more excited I got...when I realized, I have always been interested and involved in puppetry of some sort. I guess I just never identified as a puppeteer because I never performed with any of my creations or thought of myself as a sculptor.
HR Pufnstuff
Growing up in the 1960's and 70's in America I watched numerous TV shows with puppets. Shows such as: Sesame Street, Davie & Goliath, Mister Rogers, Captain Kangaroo, Gumbi, The Banana Splits, HR Puffinstuff and The Muppets. While often I felt the content was silly I was mesmerized by these animated characters.
Working on the clay set for the bar room series. 1990
I had some finger puppets as a child and made my first puppet when I was 12. In college I found myself making clay characters and sets. The first was a set and characters for Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis", when I was 20. Two years later, after trying to make an animated film about race relations I realized I didn't have the patience for animation. I kept on making the clay figures as a form of 2-D illustration-though never making the connection that they could be 3-D puppets.
Self-Portrait, photo illustration, 1989
Peewee Herman, photo-illustration, 1989
Barman, photo-illustration, 1987
Carney Girl, photo illustration, 1996
These images sold as illustrations over the next 15 years before I abandoned the process. In the meantime I'd been painting portraits, another passion of mine for years. I became obsessed with painting large heads.
Laughing Geisha, photo illustration, 1989
Prince Valient, encaustic, mixed media, 2008
Over the years I collected heads, faces and masks without even realizing
the underlying connection until someone pointed out that my home was
filled with them.
Alan Cook discussing the different forms of puppetry.
Alan spent an hour showing me thousands of puppets stashed away, while I shot hundreds of reference photos.
I'm not sure what inspired me to go abroad and study traditional marionette carving in the Czech Republic in the summer of 2005, but once I did, the spark was ignited. I'd never seen such progressive and traditional, creative, mature theater work with puppets until I attended the puppet festival in Prague. The HERE Theater in New York has also been a place of reference for innovative puppetry. After that summer, I brought students to the Czech Republic in 2006 for a similar workshop and started introducing puppetry into my studio art classes over the next few years.
Me and my students in Zapy, the Czech Republic, 2006
Students carving their puppets late into the night.
From there I created an intersession course and then a full semester course for high school students in the various forms of puppetry.
I even got permission from the Tiger Lillies band to use their music for student puppet videos. I had so much fun teaching the class that I wanted to make the puppets bigger. I had dabbled in making large paper mache heads in a school production of "Faust" but found them a bit crude and clumsy looking.
The next step was to learn about pageant puppetry. With my two art department colleagues and a former student (Currently in college studying puppetry!) we traveled to Italy one summer in 2013. (I mention this in an earlier Blog post.) This is when I had an epiphany. After working 10 days straight constructing large puppets without knowing how we would manage to pull off a procession, the local people showed up. About a 100! It was so exciting to see how all ages had participated in dropping by to help us and then, how all ages participated in the procession. This is when I realized that this is what I wanted to do with my art making skills. Share them and bring people together!
That same year, a local store was going out of business and I purchased some amazing Wayang Golek rod puppets and shadows puppets from Indonesia. The broken puppets were donated so I had my student re-purpose them into new creations.
With over 10 large scale puppets left over from a school production of the Canterbury Tales, I started asking friends and neighbors to puppeteer and brought the puppets to a few local events.
The enthusiasm generated from the reaction of an audience to the puppets got me thinking about starting a puppet making performance group, hence, the birth of The Trompin' Manikins'. With a few meetings and numerous workshops, the creation of a logo and this blog, I started applying for local grants to get the project underway.
