Jan Saxe is my muse, since I forgot to bring my camera she mailed me these shots of the 4th and the annual bash at the Saxe household. If I missed anyone (and I know I did) apologies, I've been sitting at the computer too long to be thorough.
Just to let everybody know, I haven't intentionally been ignoring comments. Typepad had been sending me a notice of each comment on my email but apparently that has stopped. I got into my blog and noticed comments and couldn't remember any email notification. So I've been catching up and will get back to y'all. Dratted technology, its like the golf t-shirt: "I hate golf, I hate golf, I hate golf, whoa, nice shot, I love golf!'.
The title lies. I'm really not doing a collage a day but am doing as many as possible. Sometimes the papers do all the work, they are just laying there in the right combination, sometimes I'm using up the pile of papers that accumulates on my table and sometimes the papers for the stitched collages are drying and I've got some studio time on my hands. The photo is from an Akron University yearbook and once I pull out a page these things scream to be used.
Pastor Steve (the one responsible for the eggs that follow this post) is the one in the white t-shirt. The rest of the fam is out for an excursion in Ravenna, Oh at Guido's. I highly reccommend the food and the prices.
Thought you might like to see what another part of the family does for their art fix. These are examples of my brother's psanky (oh bother, I don't know how to spell it but it's pronounced pissanky). He'll just have to look at my blog to correct me. Steve is a Lutheran pastor in S. Carolina and he does these eggs and sells them at farmer's markets. His table is called Psanky by Pastor. If you're ever around Greenville SC stop in to the farmer's market and see him. Tell him I'm plugging his business.
This one is a little spookier than usual (though most of the stitched pieces have this sense of being off kilter) and I intentionally tried to produce that effect for a show coming up in October. The collage elements were more difficult to place than usual and I covered some of them up to temper the creepiness of the combination of child and organic elements. But it is spooky so all went according to plan.
it's strips of paper arranged like stitching. I think the work with paper weaving and then trying to figure out how to make that less geometric and more organic has morphed into all these pieces with warp and weft gone wild. Its been a long journey from fiber to collage to fiber again, but I'm finally getting the rhythms right I think. A friend asked me if the stitching wasn't tedious (as the separate application of paper strips may seem tedious on this). For whatever reason, the randomness of the application works against tedium and seems like meditation to me.
I'm officially obsessed with stitching on photography. The cabinet cards and other photos are the mundane variety but their quality as documents leaves them wide open for interpretation. This one has a very faint image but I liked that, it seemed to emphasize how ephemeral the image is. It may continue to deteriorate and leave a void where the face is now.
Posts have few and far between for a couple of weeks, the dog days of summer are upon me early this year plus I'm teaching at Art in the Park for a neighboring community this week. Its been an adventure with alarmed barn swallows dive bombing us because their nest and newly flying babies were in our shelter. We had to abandon the premises and hike to another shelter 1/2 mile away. Not bad, but our water source was 1/2 mile away too. These pictures are of the printmaking class after our hike. I LOVE kids art!
Lynne Perrella: Alphabetica: An A-Z Creativity Guide for Collage and Book Artists (Quarry Book)
Patricia Garner Berlin: Great Impressions: Art & Technique of Rubber Stamping
Angela Cartwright: Mixed Emulsions: Altered Art Techniques for Photographic Imagery
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