In the Name of Art

And the Winners Are.....

My votes for the Brilliante Weblog go to:

1.Sarah Fishburn

2. Lisa Hoffman

3. Michelle Ward

4. Syd McCutcheon

5. Catherine Witherell

Now on to linking these. Hope I can remember. OK, so the first 2 won't link, please go to the list of blogs I frequently visit to hook up with these. And thank you for your patience.

He is the Eggman

I've been occupied  for awhile working on the Ohio Collage Society and making sure all my ducks are in a row for the exhibit at Mansfield Art Center starting September 21. The art IS being made but it tends to  pile up before I scan it. Then all I have to do is find time for blogging. Time has been in short supply, ergo, no blogging.

I got this brain-storm that shredded stuff would be cool for collage AND IT WAS. Why? 

1. The edges are slightly rough, almost torn looking.

2. The width is always uniform.

3. The material itself doesn't have to be exotic.

4. Its very easy to run a line of glue on it.

So I like Eggman but I'm afraid the bird doesn't. 

Shredded checks are wonderful!

Exhibit at Mansfield, Ohio

I've spent the last 8 hours attempting to get all my ducks in a row for the collage show at the Mansfield Art Center (it is the most beautiful place). I now understand why arts administrators get little art work done and why we lack volunteers. BUT, BUT, BUT...... it is coming together and I'm really excited about seeing all the work and meeting all the people who make it. It should be a fantastic time on September 21!!

So apropos of nothing, here's another of the tiny album collages.....

Tagged and Befuddled

So Sarah Fishburn has tagged me with this award that gets around a lot. I have my faves and no darn time to look at them! And since I'm low on time today, I'm going to have to put off listing them until tomorrow. Sheesh, what a slacker.

Battista and Albrecht Reconsider

So do you think Battista and Albrecht had a thing? It's no good hiding behind the numbers and Botticelli's gentle waves. The putti hanging out on the right certainly indicates something is afoot.... as usual, a taxing situation.

Francesca's Mystery

Here's another in the art history/victorian album genre (if you can call it that). I didn't imagine when I picked up the small empty album that it would lead me to make this series.

Loaded

Pieces of paper, scraps, all the paper cast-offs have an element of elegy. They indicate actions and attitudes that preceded their disposal and hint at what is valued. This is the quality that attracts me to papers that have no function beyond trash. The contrast of the heads from Fouquet's Melun Diptych and the torn pieces of crayon paper along with other "discards" creates a dissonant, unlikely but colorful unity.

The advantage of collage is that the material used to construct the work carries assumptions about itself and doesn't (always) need to be reconstructed with paint or other materials. The image is already loaded.

Waste Not......

These are 2 of the more spontaneous versions of my collage, I really don't know what they'll be until they decide. One thing calls for another and then they're done. The images were left over from a Buchtelite (Akron University) yearbook and I couldn't waste those glee-club girls. Those 50's attitudes and expectations live on in me even when I'd rather they didn't. When I lived in this past these women seemed like movie stars and goddesses, and now I'm more cautious (and jaded) about my assumptions. Since I'm so ambivalent about them, their images and what they represent fascinate me.

Surburban Geography

Some of you probably remember riding around in these station wagons, and some of you don't. My friend Gretchen gave me a pile of old photos that her family didn't want and many of them were pictures of the construction of a suburban house. There were also shots of interiors, presumably to showcase appliances, fixtures and furniture, all from the late 50s, early 60s. Oddly, with so much more stuff, people don't take these kinds of pictures anymore. These seem wistfully proud to me, as if they were absolutely certain that better living was assured from an accumulation of stuff. And the photo itself seems to be a trophy related to that accumulation. I wanted to create the same kind of enclosure with threads that I did for the portraits.

Caught

I decided to put bits and pieces of random stuff in the cabinet card compositions. One of my favorite arrangements is of small things floating in large spaces. Kids do that in their art when they're not aware of how things "should" be done. For whatever reason, they can't focus on a larger scale and can only bring their attention to scattered tiny drawings. 5 year olds do this a lot but even older kids enter a trance-like state where they don't give a fig about the viewer. That quality in a work of art invites me into the artist's state of mind (and I love it there).  I can't say that I've perfected that phenomena, but I'm working on it here.