Lotsa Trains!

We have an annual exhibit coming up at our Galesburg Civic Art Center where members can submit one piece for the "Members and Friends" show. Since BNSF has a large rail yard here, I thought it would be fun to try using my shredded technique on some graffitied train car photos I'd taken last summer. (I exhibited high plains landscapes at the art center in Nov-Dec, so I thought I'd submit subject matter that wasn't typical for me in my new shredded technique that I haven't yet exhibited locally.)

At first I thought I'd need to take new photos that had the train cars all intact in the photo frame AND all with the same horizon line. Upon further reflection, I realized that might be too static, and having the center image be further back in space and the train cars cut off at the edges would give more of a feeling of movement. The piece is the product of both digital and physical manipulations of my photos. The three panels are fastened together by metal channel, giving a feeling of train cars coupled together.

My husband said, "It's still technically a triptych even though they are fastened together, right?" I replied, "Sure, remember all of those altar pieces from art history? They were called triptychs but they were hinged together. This is like an altarpiece for commerce." His eyes widened and he said, "That's a perfect title!" And so it is.

(Click on the images above to see the details a bit better.)

U-turn

So my last post was about going in a new direction...and then I go and revisit the torn paper method I used to employ! Partly I wanted to see how it felt to work that way again, and I needed a bit more variety in my pieces to take to meet with a gallery owner in Iowa. (With 16 pieces on display in a physician's office and 18 of my recent pieces now in Montana, I have mostly just the shredded works on hand.) So... it felt kind of odd to be tearing my manipulated photo prints and I didn't really like how it looked after I covered the 12"x9" panel with imagery. So, the next day I tore art papers and added them to the scene, covering any white edges of the torn imagery and lessening the details in the image. I like it much better now.

New images, new directions

I've recently worked on two pieces with images from our trip west and tried some new techniques.

In the 12" x 9" piece, I put down the base layer of shredded pieces, then I used some new techniques with acrylics to build up a feeling of depth somewhat similar to an encaustic work.  Another new addition was to add 3 angled strips of imagery that echo the line of the hillside.

In the square collage, I experimented with using vertical strips in the mountain/sky/tree with a horizontal foreground.

Input welcomed!

Wild West Tour was Fabulous!

We were out west for the first two weeks of June. After spending a few days in art museums and galleries in the Denver area, we drove to Grand Junction for the opening of their 14th National Juried Contemporary Exhibition. I was really pleased with where my three pieces were hung in the multi-room exhibit and the feedback I received during the reception.

From there we drove up to Park City, Utah, and checked out a few galleries and went to the opening of an encaustic exhibit (where we saw two new pieces by our friend Madeline de Joly and met Daniella Woolf, whose book and DVD on encaustics I have!). Then we spent a week with our friend Karen near Bozeman, Montana and unpacked and unwound. This was one of the dozens of photos I took of the ever-changing view out her living room window.

We took my boxes of art into Visions West and unpacked them; the gallery owner said she plans to put a grouping of my art in Livingston and in her Bozeman gallery. (www.visionswestgallery.com)

Our trip home took us through Yellowstone and the Tetons, with a stop at an alabaster quarry to load up 675 pounds of stones for my husband to carve. What a great trip!!! We took over 1,000 photos, so you'll be seeing some art made from them on my blog sometime soon....

Fishy

The Visions West Gallery in Livingston MT (http://www.visionswestgallery.com) is having an exhibit in July called "Save the Trout Eat Catfish" that will be a group show of art with fish as subject. When the gallery owner was picking out what art of mine she wants for her galleries, she mentioned the show and said if I had anything fishy to include that as well. I remembered having fun working with some photos I'd taken of the sea wall on Galveston Island that is painted with fish and sea creatures, so I looked through those photos and chose one to work with. I've only done landscapes with my shredded technique to date, so this was fun to try something flat. Its title is Sunday Morning Ichthyology... couldn't resist a little play on words...!

Seventeen

I sent an email to the owner of Visions West Galleries who represents my work (locations in Bozeman and Livingston, MT and Denver, CO) and asked her to pick from 25 JPGs the art she'd like me to bring out in June. I was pleasantly surprised after a few days to receive an email saying "These are all wonderful! Here's the list:..." and she listed 17 titles!!!  All of the above were "the chosen ones"... good that we're taking the truck when we go west.  :-)

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.