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ITSSSS HEEEERE! What a day, got email from Pam, portraits back from Lk and taaa daaaa! Drum roll please! After a 2 and 1/2 year engagement abroad, the mother of all portrait journals is back home! Check out the slide show and prepare to be amazed! Bear with me, I'm still working on getting all the names up!
A nymph known to Venus coyly draws a discreet curtain over a sudden commotion of bird feathers, Susanna, her accusers and the lady at a virginal. Vermeer's lady is demure but worries that the miniature scandal will be loosed on her quiet world, the fur will fly, the honeyed light will be ruined. It was bad enough that she was always exposed, always at the virginal (everyone knew music was slightly disreputable, especially when paired with a woman), but this was outrageous! Before she knew it, she'd be framed and blamed (she had already been tamed). Vermeer and Botticelli would be in jail and Lotto would be laughing at their miserable luck. She couldn't appeal to the art historians, they preferred to chat about the edges and the authorities simply looked the other way! She envied the bird its wings and decided to leave them all! She ran out of the room and the seat at the virginal was empty. It was quite another picture.
OK, so its not a true story, but its true that things like this go through my head after I make them. Making sense of illusion is a thankless task but its at least amusing!
The paper weaving I've done and taught in classes is spilling through into collage, there's something very satisfying about all those secret words, the ones nobody is supposed to read, being cut up and arranged into another something. It's all there, but it's not. Cryptic and indecipherable. Or nearly, anyway. I generally think the meaning (if there is one) to my work is fairly obvious, but that's never the case, everyone is generally baffled. This is about my teenage years with allusions to all the problems inherent in the age. I worked a little larger on this one too and I'm curious to go even larger.
Finally got around to getting remaining glass negatives on the scanner and the results are more conventional than the dancers I posted earlier but still nice. There's some kind of oxidation going on around the edges but the images are still very clear. I'd love to make a shadow box for these and put lights behind them.
The charming family portrait. I get carried away with images, wondering who these people were. It seems slightly scandalous to me that I could own even this part of them.
Thought at first this was a family picnic but noticed as I resized it that it's got to be a whole 1 room school house on display. What a teacher! She looks no worse for the wear though, I'll bet she shoveled coal in the winter too! I've read old teaching contracts that included that as part of the teacher's duties.
This is one of the (mostly) straight collages I do only when I'm at the lake, the water must inspire me. Inside those small frames only images from art history seem to fit properly. I'm still working on a short (very short) story for one of these. I think I'll have to call them (stories) because they're so abbreviated and obscure.
This one is in the NCS show in Virginia as I write. The concept of chance intrigues me and I combined papers from a gambling card in this one.
Some of the rest of the fishing photo from Florida 1958 landed here in this larger than usual (12x9, yeah, yeah, I'm a miniaturist) journal work. That's my grandfather Ralph fishing. It started out as journal work but I think I like it as is, maybe, after it ages a bit I'll know the words to put in it. I might write a story for this one....I already started a story for one of my art history collages but its not ready yet. I like good writing and that makes me shy about posting stories or (god forbid) poetry. But I will post it here within the week.
Question for you: How are poetry and art alike? Oh, and who are the wild women you have known and why do you consider them wild?
Anybody out there in the NE Ohio area need a sweet dog, this one is available and can't get into a rescue because they're all full. She had a litter of dead puppies about 2 months ago and needs some care. The lady who brought her over for a photo-op already has 2 dogs and 2 cats but is generous enough to foster her but can't keep her. She's a face-licking, head-tilting, eager to please sweet-heart but I don't know how much longer this lady can keep her, she's already doing 6 walks a morning. She looks like American Bulldog mix but also seems pretty calm. Let me know somebody!
My cousin Bruce brings me old photos of the family now and then and one of many great uncles showed up in this small work. The whole photo shows my grandparents in Florida fishing on the ocean having a grand time back in 1958 or so. They would go to Florida for the winter and then send back letters with pieces of Juicy Fruit gum enclosed and we really looked forward to those letters! I'd planned to use the original photo and them couldn't bear it and scanned it. Do you ever put your relatives in your art? It seems to me that their presence is stronger when I do that. How about you?
I love the word chine colle! It sounds slinky, brief and silky, something like a neglige (it could be that kind of collage I suppose) but it's just collage using transparent papers like tissue or tracing paper. When I was in high school we made chine colles (but didn't know the name for them) out of colored tissue papers and my hands were stained most of the day from the brilliant color. I still use the technique when I can find papers that aren't as commercial looking as color tissue. Even though there's very little actual depth in the tissue, it makes the piece look as though there's a layer of water over the rest of the collage. If anyone out there knows of a source other than the occasional flea-market find for interesting tissues, I'd love to hear from you!
Whenever I start to spend too much time on one piece, or put too many elements into a design (and I am just shocked, shocked to say I do that sometimes!) I look at at a composite painting I did in 1997. Its a collection of pc-sized works and there are 9 of them lined up in 3 rows on an 18x12 format. One day I noticed that there are only 3 pieces of paper in each of those small collages, some paint and some drawn or painted forms. Just lately, when things are getting way too complicated, I go back to that format. Oddly, they never come out the same, and if I've really got a complication jones I add a bit more paper. But it feels good to just deal with 3 pieces of paper and see what comes up.
And that made me wonder if anybody else out there ever has a strategy to simplify their process, what do you
do? I'm looking forward to some answers from the legions (OK then, 1 or 2) of observers out there....leave your comment with this posting! Thanks!
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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