"Glass Heart" - digital collage

This is a third one from the personal collage series.

Crabs Gather Here!

Hmmm... this could be a suitable birthday card for a crabulous birthday. I wonder who'd be having one of those?

I Warned You

"Murex" - digital collage

True to my threats, the personal collage theme is becoming a series. The digital collage above is from the same personal collage (see below) as "Starfish."

I promise I'll have some actual, physical collages later this week, including the "word project" that so many of you have helped me with. It's taken an unexpected turn.

P.S. I can't believe my mother hasn't noticed the brooch I stole from her in this photo!

Digital Collage from Personal Collage

"Starfish" - digital collage

The other day I created what I've come to know as a "personal collage." I don't remember where I learned that terminology, but it basically consists of a photo image of personal items laid out in collage form. The digital collage, above, is created from the personal collage below with some bomomo thrown in (of course) for good measure. Since I only used a tiny corner of the personal collage, you can anticipate a series. ;D

Personal photo collage

"Still Life Still Night" - digital collage

In June of 2001, the Marine Corps pulled into my driveway, grabbed my first born child, and took him away from me.

Although I knew that day was coming, I managed to keep myself in complete denial until it actually happened; and then I fell apart. I slipped into one of my deepest funks and couldn't even bring myself to go to my studio. Even now, as I write this, I'm weeping uncontrollably at the memory.

I finally decided to give myself permission to take the summer off. I went to my studio and locked up all my pastels; my Senneliers, my Schminkes, my Rembrandts, in the storage cabinet and made up my mind to spend every spare minute by the pool. And that worked, for awhile.

The pain of the "loss" eased a little and I began to itch to be creative again, but in a different way. In August we made a trip to Ottawa for a family reunion and while there I suddenly decided I wanted to learn all about collage. I haunted the art supply stores in downtown Ottawa, picked up Nita Leland's book on collage techniques (see side bar) and a variety of beautiful papers. I was truly excited again.

Once back home I made a variety of new collages using all sorts of textural papers and materials. My early collages were very different than the pieces I make today. In some ways they were better. They were freer and over the top and very, very textural. They were also scary to the uninitiated (read: my husband thought I was losing my mind).

I had a show coming up in October at the co-op in Baltimore where I was a member, and up until that point, no one had ever exhibited a collage. But I charged ahead with my creations. One of the pieces I decided to make was a magazine collage, where all the papers used in it came from magazine photos. I needed a subject and I looked at the suggested October themes for the co-op and they were "still lifes" and "scenes of Baltimore." I got this idea to combine the two themes and I came up with the sketch below.

From the sketch I created the magazine collage and I loved the way it turned out and its very whimsical quality, but I was hesitant about exhibiting it. See the date on the sketch? August 29, 2001. By the time the exhibit was hung, the travesty of 9/11 had occurred and I was so afraid that someone would think I was making a statement piece. Pear = pair = twin towers? But I'd created it before the incident so it had nothing to do with it. Fortunately, no one made that leap.

 

I'm not even going to go into the terror in my my mind on 9/11 with my son in boot camp. But I'm very grateful for my art which helped me keep my mind off those terrors during a very difficult time.

Playing With Old Sketches Again

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"Bowl of Roses" - digital collage

Still playing with my new found old sketches. The original sketch is below. It looks to me like I was doing a quick contour drawing to warm up. I love the asymmetry of the bowl; it makes me smile. In real life it would never stand up! 

(Yes, Mom, that's your dining room wallpaper again. Your royalty check is in the mail!)

"Notes" - 4x4 - Mixed Media Collage

It pleases me that my childhood piano teacher wrote notes all over my music books. Her very rigid and old fashioned looking handwriting was always something of an art form to me, even as a kid. And she always wrote with pencil. She kept a box of pencils on the grand piano and kept using them until they were just tiny little nubs. She was the type of person who let nothing go to waste. She taught four generations of my family and in all that time she never charged more than $1.00 for a half-hour lesson and she taught seven days a week.  

This page of music is from Bach's 2-Part Inventions. I spent a lot of time working with the 2-part inventions. The numbers written in the notes are the increasing metronone settings that my teacher prescribed each week. My fingers could fly back then!

And, of course, the notes of Da Vinci have been raised to an art form. I felt so lucky when I discovered this paper in a small shop in France, only to discover you can purchase it online in the States, too. Oh, well. I still have good memories of the purchase!