My cousins took a trip along the Blue Ridge Mountains and shared a few photos with me to make art from. The active areas of autumnal foliage offered me a lot of places to embed handmade papers and sections of vintage postage stamps in red, yellow and green. Both pieces are 12" x 24" x 2"deep.
A Bradley art professor and I met to critique one another's recent work. She wondered what a solid area of gold metallic paper would look like in place of "photographed and filtered and cut into strips gold metallic paper" in my art. The top image shows my experiment with the solid area of paper. The bottom one shows what she was looking at that had started as solid gold paper but changed through the filters and cutting. Preferences???
I'm having fun combining photos of wildlife with collaged backgrounds!
I saw a painting of a shorebird with rectangles of black and white behind it, with some text and spirals in the color fields. That got me to thinking about how I could work with color fields behind a silhouetted bird. So I laid down some metallic gold paper with some blue ledger paper and cut out a great blue heron photo to lay over those. I photographed the composition and then added some white "spatters" and a white line between the colors in Photoshop. I ran filters on the image and printed out three versions to cut into strips. I built my artwork by combining those strips of paper with some of the original ledger paper and handmade papers. I then made a second composition using the same metallic paper, a star chart from a 1919 book and a cut out barred owl. In the final artwork I added in some of the gold metallic paper, script from an 1868 household expense book and some handmade papers. Lots of ideas for future compositions are building in my head....
The first two photos show the compositions I photographed and the second show the resulting 12" x 12" artworks.
I've made two pieces that are evocative of my walk on the Portuguese Coastal Camino route this spring. They each feature ceramic tiles of designs found on buildings in Portugal, the arrow and stylized shell used to mark the Camino route, and photos I took along the Atlantic coast. Each is 10"H x 20"W x 1.5"deep on a wooden panel. Filtered photos cut into strips, handmade papers and colored pencil.
While walking the Portuguese Camino de Santiago last month, we encountered this open door in a stone wall. It was standing open, inviting us to step through onto the rocky shore for a breath-taking view of the Atlantic Ocean. Don't you want to walk through this door, too?!
I took the original photos while on walks on the island of Curacao. I liked how the plants were featured in front of the plain, colorful walls. In each, I've embedded text or handwriting, handmade papers and shredded U.S. currency. Each is 12"H x 9"W. The shot of them together also shows some fossilized corral from the island.
After being away (in warm Arizona and Florida), I'm back in my art studio. I'd printed out and cut the prints for this piece in January as I wanted to try put pieces of blue ledger paper (from the 1850s) into all the blue sky in this artwork. I was anxious to get back to finish this piece and I'm pleased with the result. Some of the handwriting is readable and says "New Orleans" "Savannah" "loose cotton" -- the ledger was from Suffolk Manufacturing Company, a cotton textile business -- so I've named the piece "Southern Exposure". In addition to the photo prints and ledger paper, I've used some handmade yellow paper and colored pencil in this mixed media piece. 12" x 12"
It's been rather cold in Illinois this January, so I've been making art of warm vacation scenes.
"Blooming Desert" is comprised of multiple digital alterations of a desert photo all cut into strips and combined with colored pencil, handmade papers and vintage stamps. 14H x 11W.
"Steadfast" depicts a view up from the beach at a regal palm tree made of multiple digital alterations all cut into strips and combined with handmade papers, book text and vintage stamps. 11H x 14W.
"Join Me" depicts 4 chairs at Ephraim, WI facing Green Bay. The altered imagery was cut into strips and pieced together with additions of handmade papers, vintage postage stamps and shredded U.S. currency. 10H x 20W.
