Art for a Healing Center

Mercy Medical Center in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, purchased six of my collages to hang in their Healing Center. I'm thrilled they thought my work would engage people in their healing process! I love the idea of people getting up close to the art, seeing the cut strips of imagery and then discovering the bits of text, shredded currency, postage stamps and maps, and getting lost in the art for awhile.

Scene from Lake Titicaca

I had the good fortune to go to Peru last summer and travel around the country for two weeks. When walking down the path on an island in Lake Titicaca, I noticed these three row boats tied up to the rocks. The different colored interiors of the boats caught my eye, as well as the picturesque way they were bobbing together in the water. This 16" x 16" collage is formed of quarter inch strips of three filtrations on the original photo. I layered grassy paper over the image at the bottom to increase the textural aspect. I've titled it "Go Fish."

A fourth Italy collage

The five villages of Cinque Terre, Italy are so magical! I just had to make another collage from one of my photos – this time the village of Manarola. It is 18" x 24". I like the depth of this one with the grasses in the foreground, the surf against the rocks the village is perched on top of, and the Ligurian Sea beyond.

Artist's Trading Cards

For the First Friday Art Walk in Bloomington, Illinois, the galleries all featured Artist Trading Cards. Slightly bigger than a business card, these were first made by artists to trade examples of their work amongst each other. Now they've become ways for people to buy miniatures from artists -- and hopefully they'll come back for bigger art on another day! Here is the art I made for the event. Some are made with scraps leftover from larger collages. For others I reduced files from larger collages to print out at this small size.

A good start on a series

I've now made three pieces of art from photos I took in Cinque Terre, Italy. The five fishing villages along the Ligurian Sea are charming with their colorful buildings and boats in the bay and along the streets. I added faint script in the sky of all three works; the script came from letters I photographed in a museum at the University of Bologna. I like how it gives interest to the sky and creates a feeling of written memories or a story the viewer doesn't have enough clues to decipher. Additionally, I ran several different filters on each scene, cut prints of those into strips and pieced together the strips to create more of an impression of the places -- taking each beyond a photographic depiction of the villages.

Sharing - part two

This 9"H x 12"W collage uses a photo from a friend who has a business growing succulents. I liked the angles and colors in her photo and am pleased with how my strips of imagery add another component to the composition. I've entitled it "Diviner." A diviner uses a stick or divining rod to find water; I think it is clever that this little shallow-rooted plant found a home in a watering can.

Sharing

I recently met a young woman who has a business selling little succulent plants. She has some wonderful photos on her business site, and graciously shared two high resolution photos with me. This 14"H x 11"W collage is made from one of those photos.
See the original and her other photos at: http://www.shallowroots.pl

Revisiting

I decided to revisit some traditional collage techniques and made these two 5x5 collages on 2"-thick cradled panels. I used old ledger paper in the background, overlaid that with images on tracing paper and added pencil circles, stamped numbers and acrylic paint.

Winter of Art

Who knew winter could be a busy time for art?
- I have two pieces in a "Snow Show" downtown Galesburg at The Beanhive.
- I'm in a group show with two other women at the Quad City International Airport Gallery Jan-Feb (photos to come).
- I will be in a show of 8 local women artists at our community college (Jan-March).

Below are the six 8"x8" pieces I made for that "Women's Work" show. I did a "mash up" of leftover strips from landscape collages and engravings from 1890's issues of "The Graphic" - a London weekly magazine. I used women's names from my family for the title and had fun with long titles, too.

From the top, the titles are:
"Marie is unaware that Edgar has been forked by Beechums"
"Ursula has had it with this little game" (not a family name)
"Elizabeth is tempted to discourage Nigel's little adventure"
"Alma just can't get enough Salt Regal"
"Irene has never been one to be cautious"
"Mildred's children behave so much better after they've had their cocoa"

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.

Experiment

Several years ago, I made collages by tearing random segments out of my digitally altered prints to build up a scene. In this experiment, I'm trying to stay in the spirit of the horizontal strips of imagery that I've been doing for a couple years but tear the strips instead of cutting them. I'm pleased with how this 12" x 12" turned out, but I'm not sure I could handle doing a large piece this way! We'll see....

Upcoming shows

There is a national juried show in Cincinnati with an April deadline and one in Monmouth with a June deadline. I want to have some new, larger work to submit to those, so this is my first completion toward that goal. This is called "Listen - the grass is singing" and it is 24"W x 18"H. I used some colored pencil lines on yellowed book text and put fragments of that in the grass for some up-close surprises.

I spoke to an area church's Daughter Banquet last week and have two more speaking engagements lined up for women's groups. It's been fun to put together a 20-minute talk summarizing how I got into collage and then moved from traditional collage to what I'm doing with photographs. It was also surprising to look back and realize how many achievements I've made in seven years; good motivation to keep pushing ahead!

Abstraction of reality

My friend Linda and I went to the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (SMoCA) in December. They have a sculpture courtyard that is a restful area with walls painted in solid browns, white and bright yellow that the sun and shadows really play with. I took a photo of the plantings against the round and flat walls and then decided to kneel down and take a shot of an exaggerated view of the cactus and the light hitting the wall above it. This weekend I digitally altered the photo, then shredded three prints of those alterations and pieced them together to take the image even further from reality. I'm calling this 6" x 12" piece SMoCa Loca.  :-)

Sedona image

When visiting Sedona, Arizona, in December, I took a photo featuring this crazy blooming cactus in the foreground with a stunning red rock formation beyond it. My husband chose this image to try out a new stylus and a free paint program on his iPad. I liked how his painting looked, so I made a print of it – as well as prints of two digitally filtered version of the photo – and combined pieces of all three to make this scene. I love how abstracted it is up close, but then the eye tricks the viewer into seeing the scene pretty clearly from several feet away! (This piece is 11x14 on cradled panel; click the image to enlarge it to better view the abstraction.)

Busy start to the new year

How did it get to be the 4th week in January already?! I haven't done any postings as I haven't had a LOT of time in my studio, yet I've been very busy with art!



- I shipped the three Arizona collages to Xanadu Gallery in Scottsdale. Xanadu is doing a catalog of art every month this winter and I'm on page 39 of the January catalog. They sent out PDFs of the catalog to each artist whose work is featured and put my art on the cover of my PDF - is this gallery top notch, or what?!


- I decided to remove my art from the gallery in Montana since the owner had decided to feature only two artists in the gallery each month of the summer tourist season and my art was in storage during high-traffic times. I'm currently looking at other galleries in the MT/WY/CO region. My friend picked up my art and is storing it for me; I've written descriptions and placed some of it on the Xanadu website.

- Friends had purchased two small collages a couple years ago and asked if I could make a third to coordinate so they could have all three hanging vertically together. This is a scene in Yellowstone National Park; I've layered pieces of topo maps of the park onto the rocky areas and art papers to accentuate the red plants growing in the rocks.


- I'm packing up eight pieces of art today to send to Campbell-Steele Gallery in Marion, Iowa. The gallery owners are going to rehang the gallery with works of abstraction and asked for more of my art.


They also commissioned a small piece to coordinate with another abstract collage I'd made out of old ledger papers; an interior designer wanted two pieces for a job she was working on. Sweet.

- I DID get a piece finished last week that I'd actually run out the prints for in November! It was for my Women's Art Workshop topic of "River." This piece is 6" x 12" and entitled "Passing By."