More Explorations

I wanted to try the spirals with a recognizable background so I used one of my favorite photos I took in Montana. Every time we'd drive the road to Karen's cabin, we'd pass this lone tree on the hillside with the clouds coming up behind the hill as if by magic. I decided to try using spirals in the scene to create kind of a magical feel – soap bubbles going up? ... but wouldn't that be going from large bubbles in the foreground to small in the sky?... something coming down from the clouds? ... something ethereal interacting with the tree? I hope it conveys a sense of mystery and magic. I'm calling it "Clouds Touching the Ground".

More Spirals

I'm enjoying working in a series while also keeping it interesting and evolving. I came up with a way to tear spirals more easily out of the nicer ricer paper that becomes more transparent when coated with matte medium. I altered some photos to add more colors for my backgrounds - can you tell what the original subject matter was?

Exploring Spirals

These were really like movement therapy to do! Tearing the shapes out and remembering what direction I was moving as I tore from outer to inner and back out... deciding roughly where I wanted to place them on the background image and then going with the moment as the spiral stuck down and changed directions on me... trying to create a sense of flow of the whole group of them as I layered up the varying sized spirals. The first two I made with rice paper shapes on top of very active photos of an old store's wall that had been painted numerous times in its 100-year history. In the third of the series (top most one of the post), I decided to tear spirals from a print of the old painted wall and place them on a field of text from an even older newspaper from 1890; I used some of the edges of the photo at the top so as to create a feel of the shapes spinning down out of it. These are all 12" x 9" canvas on board; hubby has an idea of how to frame them with a narrow metal channel....

Spirals

Last spring my women's art group had "an assignment" of working with "spiral." I revisited that idea with one of last week's collages and enjoyed working with the variations in torn spirals – how they relate to each other and their surroundings. I made a small 4x6 piece on Friday with rice paper spirals on top of a photo of colorful leaves on slate. Pleased with how it looked, I decided to pursue that idea on 9x12 panels on Saturday - wow, did I have a lot of fun with that! I'll post those once Rob has the photos processed, but here's Friday's spiral piece entitled "Becomes what it hears."

Getting Ready

I've been making some smaller collages for my booth at our local Art in the Park on Sept 12th. These are 6"x6" and 8"x6". The two deeper 6"x6"x2.5" pieces have imagery on the front, edges AND the back! I'm not going to put hangers on the back as they're kinda fun just sitting on a table so you can pick them up, turn them around and over.