Take Two

The 16" x 8" piece that I posted on May 24 was recently purchased as a birthday gift. When I made that one, I felt like it was a piece that could be bigger, so I decided to revisit the original photo this weekend. I realized we'd taken two photos that I could piece together to get a wider view of the Gallatin Range with the storm clouds enveloping the mountains. On this piece, I did an underpainting and put in areas of color for the ground, mountains and sky. Then I tiled out the altered photo in sections, tore the image and left little gaps between the torn pieces of paper so the underpainting could show through. It is 30" x 10"... but I probably could have made it even bigger! Who knows, maybe there will be a "take three" and I'll really push my comfort zone and go LARGE!!!

Going to the show!

I just found out today that this piece – The Road to Dailey Lake – was accepted into the national juried show "64 Arts" in  Monmouth Illinois!! The juror was Al Gury, chair of the painting dept of Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, and the show will run Aug 20 - Sept 25. It's so affirming to have an artist you've never met choose your work to be included in a show... sweet!

Double the fun

I decided to step out of my comfort zone and try one of these new bird pieces at a much bigger size. The first three were 10"x10" and this one is 24"x 24". I applied unprimed linen to a cradled hardboard and that is the brown showing through in the "cracks" ... my husband said it seems like there's an old stone wall behind the birds with shadows on it from the plants... I like how it has the feel of a cracked fresco. I added a decorative swirl pattern to the right of the birds and ghosted some of the thistle leaves at the bottom to add more interest to Audubon's composition.

2 more birds of the plains

I made two more bird collages this weekend and am really enjoying working with the Audubon prints from an old book and giving them new life. Many of Audubon's bird illustrations seem to have exaggerated poses or odd turns of the bird's body – like the bottom bird of this pair of catbirds – so I just used the one catbird in my composition. I altered the color to make the bird slate gray like it is in real life, added text about the catbird's habits, an illustration on the mechanics of flight, and more leaves and berries.

In the piece with the white-crowned sparrows, I added some very subtle Victorian filagree to the background on the left. I showed the first of the mise-en-scène series to a friend this weekend and she remarked that the background had an eggshell feel, so I've used that same technique as part of the manipulation of the art in these two.

Mise-en-scène

- an expression used to describe the design aspects of a theatre or film production, which essentially means "telling a story."
- stage setting

I'm planning on doing a series under the title of mise-en-scène using bird illustrations by Audubon and others. (I've done a few pieces for our November show with ravens and thought it would be fun to make some more bird collages depicting other birds found in the plains states.) This first one is "Mise-en-scène: bluebirds." I've altered an Audubon illustration I scanned, added art papers onto areas of the birds, and added more flower stalks and faux foliage -- which includes text about bluebirds from "The Source Book" of 1930. I'm essentially telling a story about bluebirds and setting the stage differently than the original production... this one is 10" x 10" but I think it would be fun to see at 36" x 36"!

Clouds

I said in an earlier post that I might make a piece that had just clouds in it ... and here it is! It is a 24" x 12" canvas with the imagery going around the four sides. I think I might try some with just a hint of ground at the bottom, too. I also had an idea -- after seeing the pile of cloud fragments left on my drawing board -- to just make a piece with random cloud sections. So, I glued strips of canvas to a board to start with an uneven surface (to add another design element), then glued down various fragments of clouds and sky, and decided to add a raven flying amongst the cloud bits. What do you think?

Productive Weekend

I made two new "High Plains" pieces this weekend.

I'm calling the one with the big rock "Sitting..." since the boulder has most likely been sitting in that spot for a LONG time... there are two rock cairns sitting on top of the boulder... and the shape reminds me of a fat Buddha sitting. This one is really a mixed media piece. First I altered the photo by placing a taller rock cairn than what was actually there (using a photo of rocks I'd brought home from Montana) as I wanted it to reach up into the sky area, and then I ran some painterly filters on the photo to abstract it. After applying the two sections of prints to my 11" x 14" cradled panel, I layered topo map fragments over the rocks, painted daubs of straw color in the upper grasses to help distinguish the rock edge from what was behind it, and added grassy papers, pine needles and raw flax to the foreground to make the vegetation more dimensional. (If you click on the image, you can better see the details I'm talking about.)

The second piece shows a two-track road up a hill in Montana that I'm calling "Rising" -- it is 20" x 16". I made three filtered variations of the image and tiled out the large images. Then I tore sections from each to glue down with acrylic matte medium to merge into this new image. I added fibrous art papers to the clouds and grasses to further alter the image.