Finished Commission

A couple from Peoria asked me to do a collage using a panoramic photo they'd taken. The photo featured purple martin houses and a bench dedicated to the man's grandfather who had instilled in him a love of purple martins. In my art, I added a purple martin in the foreground, fragments of a poem by Carl Sandburg about purple martins, and the park name and man's grandfather's name. The piece is 12"H x 36"W.

Successful Show

It was great fun to be the featured artist at C2C Gallery in Grand Haven, Michigan. The opening was Friday, July 7th and I thoroughly enjoyed talking with tourists and locals about my art process. The gallery sold 4 of the 20 pieces on display in 24 hours! To date, they've sold 7 works, and the show will be up through the end of August.

Piece #20 for my Michigan show

This piece is made up of two 8" x 8" cradled panels, the bottom panel is 1" deep and the top panel is 1/2" deep. The water has a poem about a fish overlaying the surface that is mostly readable...so I'm calling it Poem Fishing.

Boardwalk

I love walking up a boardwalk to Lake Michigan, cresting the sand dune and finally seeing the big lake stretched out before me! With this art piece, I'm evoking that feeling of anticipation and the quietness of being at a beach in Western Michigan. It's an intimate piece - 12"H x 6"W.

Special

I finished this collage today and will be giving it to my stepdaughter for her graduation from graduate school. Her late mother took this photo of her parent's farm. Very excited to gift it and to have worked with the photo that is so meaningful....

Photo Revisited

I made a collage with this photo of shells in March, intending to have it in my "Water's Edge" summer show in Michigan. However, someone saw it on Facebook and purchased it! So I decided to circle back and make a variation on the collage. You can see the first one in my March 28th posting. Which one do you like better?

Combining grayscale and color imagery

I've used some black and white photos in my collage work in the past, but decided to try using the entire background as a grayscale image in this piece. I used a shadow to help the color image "hover" over the background; I also combined horizontal and vertical strips in the featured color image.

I find that most of the appeal of black and white photos is the starkness of the image and how it makes us see it differently. I'm not sure that effect carries into cutting the image into strips...more experimentation might be called for.

This piece is 11" x 14" and depicts the Big Sable Light near Ludington,  MI. The background is a sand dune on Lake Michigan.