In the Name of Art

Tearing Up Art History

Slowly, very slowly, my pile of old art history books is being reduced to a mound of gluey rubble and the good bits are being transformed into postcard-size (and larger) art. The source material I've collected should last me at least 2 life-times! Today a friend brought me some vintage crochet magazines with all these funky photos of crochet that I'm eager to incorporate with some Baroque nudes. The concept of Baroque sensibility and all that obsessive handwork seems to fit together. The first nude here is Venus by Cranach and the 2nd is Suzanna (from Suzanna and the Elders). I've always felt sorry for Suzanna but she looked very serene in this particular painting by Guercino.

Suzy Snowflake

It was a good day to work! Everyone around declared snow days and I love snow days, even though I'm home all the time. Great excuse to go to the studio and make stuff. Still working on a collage a day though I've increased the size to 8x10 and the time to an hour. Sometimes the inevitable failure bogs me down but I just keep plodding along and whaddaya know, sometimes everything just WORKS! I'll post some of the larger examples later on this week.

I've shoveled the drive on breaks and it really is beautiful out there so I took these 2 snaps from my front porch. Couldn't resist a bit of Photoshop magic. Loving those colors I get with posterize.

A Blue Valentine from Bronzino

Mannerism is strange. When I taught art history to highschool students there were moments when, flabbergasted by the details of a work, all I could do was attend to the qualities that reflected the movement's principals. And I muddled through. But Allegory of Love is frankly titillating and, to viewers who have just a bit of knowlege about mythology, incestuous. So it wasn't one of my favorites.

But now that I don't have to worry about how to present it to 17 year olds with inquiring parents, I'm more and more drawn to its cryptic elements.

So these 2 are the result of that fascination, they've been collaged first, color pencil was added around the figures, watercolor was splattered on them and then a little photoshop magic was involved. As long as there are cheap reproductions, Bronzino is not safe from my, admittedly, more toned-down version of his vision.

Woven Narrative Q and A.

Just in case you have questions about the materials list and procedures! I recently received an email from a woman who is taking the class and she asked the questions answered below. Questions are very good!
If you have any other questions, please feel free to email me. Examples of work done with this technique are posted under the category Artfest on the right side of the blog.

1. Am I to assume I should come in with a theme or
story to tell?
* It can be as little as a sentence
about a day at the beach with photos to back it up,
I'm not talking Gone with the Wind, more something to
say about pictures you combine.
2. Should I have a color scheme in place?
* Possibly, you
may want color of string and copies of photos to match
up. I used B&W photos in my first ones and white
string. It worked.
3. What is a transparency?
*At most copy centers you
can have a written document copied to a sheet of
acetate that you can see through to the stuff
underneath. Will we be learning about
4. How do I transfer
the transparency to the surface?
*Simple, we'll be sewing the transparency to the paper
weaving.
5. Will we be sewing on the paper directly?
*Yes.
6. What kind of paper
should I be looking for?
* Nothing fancy, copy your
photos to the paper normally used for that (even
regular B&W copies though I like the color copies
better, even of B&W photos).

Collage a day-art history

A couple more with photos and reproductions lifted from old art history texts. The way the painting subjects look out at the viewer is more disconcerting than the photographs, possibly because I expect subjects in a snap-shot to regard me. The centers of these are a bit blurry because they're recessed by about an 1/8th of an inch and scanners are not kind with those kinds of situations. I took the frames out of a small turn-of-the-century photo album and they didn't fit a 6x4 format but that gave me the opportunity to add other things in that space.

More collage a day

Some more results from the collage a day experiment. Both of these were in black and white and just fooling around hit posterize and, voila! They were transformed into color! And that was cool so I'm posting them that way. Right now I'm gravitating to art history, dictionary and photographic (as usual) images. I'm also wrapping the cardboard with text and other bits of ephemera, like the vintage Ohio sales tax receipts radiating out from Lacoon. I thought about calling that one "Anne Rand's Fever Dream".

Collections

These ladies adorn some shelves over the windows in my bedroom and seemed just right for a Valentine's display. I collected them about 10 years ago and their girly poses were seductive but also a bit silly/vampish. They were parts of lampshades, clothes-brush handles and pin cushions from the 20's and 30's and many of them have lost their functioning parts but the ceramic coquettes remain.