TarField: Part 2
You can find Part 1 here.
My goal is to make this blog week GARFIELD all the way
Back ground on TarField:
I was dating a guy who both loved Return of The Living Dead (with its brain-craving zombie TarMan) and Garfield.
It was a relatively new relationship but intense. We were staying up late night after night texting. I was still in Japan and there was a 14 hour time difference. Sleep was lost.
I’d be with him for Christmas of 2022 . We’d never exchanged gifts before.
November 27th I thought…of course… I shall make a TarField, a TarMan Garfield mashup no one ever asked for.. much less him. I started sculpting. This was the second freestanding Apoxie Sculpt sculpture I’d ever made so it was a challenge. I worked on it every night.
Previously on TarField…
There is always a risk when one handcrafts a gift.
By December 10th it looked like this:
TarField’s not real. TarField can’t hurt you.
I was sharing the process with a few friends. I was pumped about this. I was so sure my idea was genius.
Spoiler: or none of the above.
December 11th I’d wrapped up most of the sculpting and started to paint TarField.
(singing) “….isn’t she looovely?”
I had to ask myself many questions to find the best blend of TarMan and Garfield parts like “How will I integrate the stripes into his melting skull?”
You may have noticed that TarField was looking fairly matte at this point.
Well, you probably didn’t notice or worry about it but I did. TarMan is a viscous shiny thing as he emerges from his barrel. It was time to make sure TarField really captured that gleam.
GLOSS IT!
I mixed my black acrylics with a bit of gold/glitter acrylics and my white/yellows with white glitter acrylic…and then I applied acrylic gloss to everything. Many layers. Much Shine.
The Glistening
While I was making this my boyfriend reached out to ask what size robe I wore and if I’d like this one (a link to a Garfield robe)….Small and yes, please.
He wasn’t one to take a risk on a gift, both of us have been told many times that we were hard to buy gifts for. This told me I was on the right track.
My friends were excited for me.
Another friend wished there was a way to set up cameras for a reaction video…but that felt like it would be too intrusive. I’ve worked on not oversharing my private life while blogging.
And Steph said this:
Steph will play a role in my later Garfield Adventures.
I always packed a few days ahead of time in Japan so I could send my luggage to the airport ahead of me, thus saving myself the hassle of dragging luggage on the train.
By December 22th Tarfield was finished, wrapped in polar fleece, placed in a box, and placed in my check-in luggage. I was NOT about to place him in my carry-on or explain TarField to security.
I was in my hometown on December 23rd.
My luggage, however, was not.
For Christmas I showed my boyfriend a photo and 360 video of what I’d made for him. This three-week labor love-child TarField….
It was then that I discovered in no uncertain terms that the love this man had for Garfield was not ironic. He had no place in his heart for the the eldritch Garfields of the I’m Sorry Jon memes or the Buff Garfields that sometimes appear online.
He had loved Garfield from his childhood, stuck with Garfield and his unchanging wry delivery and hatred of Mondays for decades, and still held Garfield in his heart.
He. Was. Horrified.
“I’m supposed to dump you now! Publicly!”, I thought about shouting.
I answered questions like:
You made this?
Oh, I made it. This isn’t something one can just buy….What I was thinking is you like Tar Man AND you like Garfield….
Do I have to keep Tarfield somewhere I can see it?
I’d prefer it. I mean I can create a containment barrel for him if need be. I’d already considered making one but ran out of time…
He’d told me how, prior to us dating, he had decided not to try any be anything but who he was when dating. You date him and you get unfiltered him. I was experiencing that.
He explained to me that his aesthetic for creepy things tends to err on the side of cute. I once more took in the items around his apartment and, yes, even the zombies and grim reapers were somewhat cherubic and stylized. Nothing glistened with slime, oooze, or exposed bones. I understood then his aesthetic tastes…but it was too late.
I told him perhaps he’d get lucky and my luggage would never be found.
My robe? They ran out of small and he worried a medium would be too large on me.
No robe for me and the threat of a gift for him.
Merry Christmas.
December 28th Tarfield and my luggage arrived.
My boyfriend made an uneasy peace with TarField.
TarField was in clear site of things in that studio apartment.
Sometimes TarField wore Blueblockers to obscure his face. Other times TarField wore a Tokidoki hat. He occasionally was my boyfriend’s Facebook profile.
I know he was somewhat impressed/proud of Tarfield, as he once texted me about showing Return of The Living Dead to another friend so they could fully appreciate/understand TarField.
This was what kept me from offering to take TarField off his hands and sell TarField to the strange folks online who enjoy Eldritch Garfield
The last time I saw TarField was in November of 2023. I now lived in my homeown. I wrapped him carefully and lowered him into a box and then took the box down to storage.
The pipes above my boyfriend’s apartment had burst. Mercifully very few of his belongings were damaged but the ceiling, walls, and floor were severely damaged.
Everything would have to be repaired.
Over 6 hours he and I packed and moved everything he had into storage Well, almost everything. A few essentials like a percentage of his clothing, his XBox, and Fat Orange Cat the bootleg Garfield plush moved with him into a hotel room while his apartment was being worked on.
Me and Fat Orange Cat in better days
He ended up having to stay in that hotel room for three full months.
Our relationship lasted 2 1/2 more months.
Steph also isn’t filtering herself around me, but we’ve never dated.
TarField is most likely in storage.
The Garfield art, however, continues….in part because of Steph.
She popped the question. I said “Yes.”
I had no idea a simple Pez Dispenser and a year of unfiltered opinions about Garfield and what is and isn’t cannonical would so strongly influence my art but…it has.
