In the Name of Art

My Self-Portrait Ship Has Come In!

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 Collage a Day

I've decided to work on my problem with preciousness by doing a collage a day and limiting myself to 45 minutes to do each. The time constraint, oddly, is very postive. I didn't expect to really finish or come up with anything terrific. Instead I look at this process like target practice, some days I'll get a bullseye and most days I won't and thats OK, I just keep working. But looking at the clock has made me trust my first instinct and thats an improvement! These aren't a command performance (as my mother would say) but I like them and will continue the experiment. They don't have paint because set-up is part of the 45 minutes and I don't have enough time. But they seem OK without it.

Some with Paint

Mid-January is way past time to get some art up here. These are old postcards that I started gluing over with this and that. I don't like to let failures go, though some are beyond hope. These 2 developed on separate tracks. The first with the repro by Reni is a continuation of my interest in Jupiter and his philandering, this one is Europa and you can just barely see the bull under her arm. I want to do a series of these and call them Jupiter's Buttons. The men at the left are peeking again and they came from another Renaissance painting.

The 2nd seemed to make itself. Another case of one part calling for another part. The pink rectangel at the bottom right is a photo section of somebodies toys set up in a row, the photo came from my bud Gretchen. the flower form grew out of that, it has a child-drawing sense to it.

Io in Ohio

The illustrations in old art history books are so beautiful that I keep the books that fall apart and use many of them in collage. This started with Io and the border and then those guys just had to have a voyeuristic peek!
Maybe I was thinking of Gentileschi's Suzanna and the Elders, but I hope this is a little more light-hearted and Monte Pythonesque.

Lucky

I walk  Louise the dog, (sometimes she's  more  a  kangaroo, or squirrel, or  cat) around the block and down the alley every day at noon and look for 4 leaf clover. Since I'm also on the look-out for garbage, which Ms. Louise loves, I can only scan the mounds of clover growing madly against the alley fence, but I find quite a few big ones. The smaller ones are missed because my concentration is spotty looking for tasty treats like, ahh, you don't want to know. Anyway, they end up in my collage. This one uses faces from an old  yearbook and all the guys then were supposed to be lucky and successful. Sometimes it didn't work out and the weathered color of the surface hints at that .