Another face and some small abstracts

I wanted to see what other images I could combine with faces, so I used a Ferris Wheel from Navy Pier in Chicago, an image of the original Ferris Wheel that was made for the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, and the face of the inventor, George Washington Gale Ferris. (Ferris was born in my town of Galesburg, Illinois; he was named after the town's founder, George Washington Gale.) I turned the older wheel on its side for a more dramatic layout.

I have a growing pile of paper from "leftovers" after combining strips from three variations of images to build each artwork. So... I made some 6x6 and 8x8 abstracted landscapes using those leftover strips of paper. It was fun to work solely with color fields and design.

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.

The Murray

I'm having a show in January featuring Landscapes & Cityscapes. I only have 4 pieces completed that are NOT landscapes, so I decided I should see what photos I had or go take some. I found a series of photos I took of buildings in Livingston, Montana, and decided to work on one of the historic Murray Hotel. (You may have caught the episode of Anthony Bourdain's show a few year's ago where he

dined at the Murray with local author, Jim Harrison, and painter, Russell Chatham; the small photo is from the Travel Channel website.) I liked this view showing the fabulous sign, the bicycle parked out front, and the mountain at the end of the street. This is a 24"H x 18"W collage on cradled panel.

Adding more media to the mix

I had a realization a few weeks ago that the graphic designer in me was reticent to mess up those nice horizontal strips of imagery! So, I went back to a piece I'd "finished" a few days earlier and added acrylic paint to the grasses and in the road I daubed on texture gel with resin sand mixed with acrylic paint. If you click on the images to enlarge, you'll see in the bottom of the two that the grasses are more vibrant now and the gravel road has a gritty texture when you run your hand over it. :-)

Then I really went for it and added pieces of art paper and text from old books AT ANGLES (!) to the
bales and stubble in the field of the diptych below as well as strokes of paint. This wouldn't work for all subjects, but the straw bales were fun to layer up with fragments overlapping the strips going every which way. (detail at right)

Fundraiser donation

Here's how my diptych turned out that I made for the "live art" fundraiser. I might want to do a similar piece for my upcoming show in July or do this scene on a 12" x 24" panel; I like the sense of perspective in this. My husband took a photo of me at work; I'd forgotten my ruler so I was using a postcard to measure to make sure I wasn't going downhill with the strips!

Live art demonstration

I'll be participating in "Art Before Your Eyes" at our local Galesburg Civic Art Center on the 19th of April. Eleven artists will be creating art during the two-hour event, and the artwork will be auctioned off to the highest bidders as a fundraiser for the Art Center. I've spent about 4 hours on this diptych, completing the right side and getting a good start on the left. I'll finish the first layer of strips during the event and then add two more layers of fragments of imagery and art papers.

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.