Garden of the Gods Commission

A woman I know asked if I could make a piece from a photo she'd taken in the Garden of the Gods, Colorado Springs. We decided to crop the image and make a 12"H x 24"W collage. I made several digital alterations of her photo, cut those into quarter inch strips and added some 1800s-era topo map fragments and art papers as I built up the layers. I enjoyed working on the image of a place I'd visited a number of times myself, and she was thrilled with the end result.

Here's how it looks after the first layer of papers has been adhered. Kinda striped in nature, but the 2nd and 3rd layers take care of that. Close up shows the topo map and solid art papers.

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."

Expanding my horizons

30" x 10"... the biggest collage I've made using shredded papers! It was a bit daunting to figure out a scheme to keep this amount of skinny pieces of paper somewhat organized. What I came up with was to first print out the scene in sections, so I had six 8.5" x 14" prints of the scene manipulated with a watercolor filter... six prints of a drybrush filtered scene... six prints of a poster edges filter. I laid the prints out in the proper orientation for the whole scene and proceeded to shred one area at a time, starting with the prints for the upper right.

In this photo you can see that I'm working on the center top section. I have a print at the top of my drawing board showing me the whole scene, divided into sections. Under it are three sets of shredded pieces sorted into the proper order for me to easily pick from as I build the scene. I also shredded some pale blue paper from an 1856 ledger to use in the sky (you can see those by enlarging the top photo) and some yellowed paper from an 1879 ledger and prints of a 1904 topo map of Yellowstone to use in the grassy area. Those give an additional interest to the piece when viewed close up.

First art of the new year!

Having been to Yellowstone National Park in three seasons, I have a number of photos of the Hoodoo rock formations – including some great angles from hiking around in them last fall. I decided to rough up a topo map with some of the same filters used on the rock photo, and I made prints of maps at small and large sizes so type is readable is some and becomes more of a texture in others (click on an image to see the map pieces larger). I tore out and applied pieces to the rock photo – covering more of the image than I have done in previous collages. I sent these images to an artist friend in Montana to get her feedback. I love her response to the bottom one of the two images: "As a climber...I love the angle of the rocks as it looks like I'm looking up at a great new route. The map is subtle and beautiful...offering various potential meanings and depth to the piece."