Art Wall

Our friend in Montana had three pieces of my art on her dining room wall, but realized it wasn't "holding the wall" and asked if a 24" x 24" collage of mine was still available. We arranged for her to pick it up when in Illinois this October... and then I emailed her several panoramas I'd taken while visiting her in Montana this summer. She asked if I could make a 70" wide panorama to hang above the other four pieces of art! It certainly was the largest piece I've ever made, so I was very happy that she was able to drive both pieces home with her. She sent a photo today of the end of her dining room; my  5 pieces hang on the wall and my husband's metal mountains and Italian alabaster sculpture grace the cabinet below. Love it!

Commission

I delivered these six pieces to Campbell Steele Gallery in Marion, Iowa, on October 18th for the Kirkland Community College. You gotta love a growing campus that devotes 1% of construction monies toward the purchase of art!

Collage class - weeks 3 and 4

In Week 3 of my collage class, we found imagery and printed it on tracing paper. This week's assignment was to make layered collages using the tracing paper imagery as the 2nd of several layers. These are all 4" x 5".

New gallery

I left some notecards with my collage imagery printed on them at The Danforth Gallery in Livingston, Montana, in July. They've sold a couple of the cards, and I finally had some time to make a couple of small collages to send out for their gift shop. These are both 8"x 8" and are Montana scenes.

2nd assignment for the collage class

We were to cut images from magazines, coat them with gloss medium, then assemble and iron the works to fuse the medium. Here were my submissions.

5 minutes

I just started an online class with Randel Plowman (author of "Masters: Collage" and "The Collage Workbook"). The first assignment was to make a number of 3" x 5" sheets of heavy watercolor paper, gather imagery, set a timer, and make several collages - each in 5 minutes or less. What a fun assignment!

Commission

I made this collage for a woman to give to her daughter and son-in-law for their first wedding anniversary. What a great gift idea from a cool mom!

Art Show -- July 26-Aug 13, 2013

I was pleased to have over 100 people come to my opening! I received a lot of good feedback and made 3 sales. It was nice to see all of my recent work on display together and get it out in public. Now to fine tune the work for my January show at the Quad City Airport Gallery....

Desert revisited

In looking at the art I had assembled for my solo show (going up this week), I realized I didn't have any desert scenes. So, I made this 8" x 16" vertical to go with my Montana and Illinois landscapes. I overlapped the horizontal strips at the bottom with some green fiber paper that looks a lot like vegetation when pulled apart into small pieces. Breaking my own grid!

Another face and some small abstracts

I wanted to see what other images I could combine with faces, so I used a Ferris Wheel from Navy Pier in Chicago, an image of the original Ferris Wheel that was made for the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, and the face of the inventor, George Washington Gale Ferris. (Ferris was born in my town of Galesburg, Illinois; he was named after the town's founder, George Washington Gale.) I turned the older wheel on its side for a more dramatic layout.

I have a growing pile of paper from "leftovers" after combining strips from three variations of images to build each artwork. So... I made some 6x6 and 8x8 abstracted landscapes using those leftover strips of paper. It was fun to work solely with color fields and design.

Faces

I've had people ask if I'd ever tried to work with faces in this method of making art... so I decided to try some. It was fun to go back to more traditional collage compositions, combining photos and illustration. I decided to tap into my collection of cloud photos and combine those with some black and white photos of family members. The girl is my aunt as a child; since all the women in my family love wildlife, I chose to add the bird illustrations to her piece. The boy is my father-in-law as a wee lad. As an adult, he was an Explorer Scout leader and the operating engineer of an office building in the Chicago Loop, so I added the compass for scouting hikes and the pencil lines for the engineer. Both are 8"W x 10"H.

The Murray

I'm having a show in January featuring Landscapes & Cityscapes. I only have 4 pieces completed that are NOT landscapes, so I decided I should see what photos I had or go take some. I found a series of photos I took of buildings in Livingston, Montana, and decided to work on one of the historic Murray Hotel. (You may have caught the episode of Anthony Bourdain's show a few year's ago where he

dined at the Murray with local author, Jim Harrison, and painter, Russell Chatham; the small photo is from the Travel Channel website.) I liked this view showing the fabulous sign, the bicycle parked out front, and the mountain at the end of the street. This is a 24"H x 18"W collage on cradled panel.

Adding more media to the mix

I had a realization a few weeks ago that the graphic designer in me was reticent to mess up those nice horizontal strips of imagery! So, I went back to a piece I'd "finished" a few days earlier and added acrylic paint to the grasses and in the road I daubed on texture gel with resin sand mixed with acrylic paint. If you click on the images to enlarge, you'll see in the bottom of the two that the grasses are more vibrant now and the gravel road has a gritty texture when you run your hand over it. :-)

Then I really went for it and added pieces of art paper and text from old books AT ANGLES (!) to the
bales and stubble in the field of the diptych below as well as strokes of paint. This wouldn't work for all subjects, but the straw bales were fun to layer up with fragments overlapping the strips going every which way. (detail at right)

Fundraiser donation

Here's how my diptych turned out that I made for the "live art" fundraiser. I might want to do a similar piece for my upcoming show in July or do this scene on a 12" x 24" panel; I like the sense of perspective in this. My husband took a photo of me at work; I'd forgotten my ruler so I was using a postcard to measure to make sure I wasn't going downhill with the strips!