Aerial View

This is the third abstract I've done working with the idea of an aerial view of the landscape. I used art papers, a copper-colored envelope, an aged book page and some WWII ration stamps of my grandparents. It is 12 x 12 x 2.

Exploring Spirals

These were really like movement therapy to do! Tearing the shapes out and remembering what direction I was moving as I tore from outer to inner and back out... deciding roughly where I wanted to place them on the background image and then going with the moment as the spiral stuck down and changed directions on me... trying to create a sense of flow of the whole group of them as I layered up the varying sized spirals. The first two I made with rice paper shapes on top of very active photos of an old store's wall that had been painted numerous times in its 100-year history. In the third of the series (top most one of the post), I decided to tear spirals from a print of the old painted wall and place them on a field of text from an even older newspaper from 1890; I used some of the edges of the photo at the top so as to create a feel of the shapes spinning down out of it. These are all 12" x 9" canvas on board; hubby has an idea of how to frame them with a narrow metal channel....

Spirals

Last spring my women's art group had "an assignment" of working with "spiral." I revisited that idea with one of last week's collages and enjoyed working with the variations in torn spirals – how they relate to each other and their surroundings. I made a small 4x6 piece on Friday with rice paper spirals on top of a photo of colorful leaves on slate. Pleased with how it looked, I decided to pursue that idea on 9x12 panels on Saturday - wow, did I have a lot of fun with that! I'll post those once Rob has the photos processed, but here's Friday's spiral piece entitled "Becomes what it hears."

Getting Ready

I've been making some smaller collages for my booth at our local Art in the Park on Sept 12th. These are 6"x6" and 8"x6". The two deeper 6"x6"x2.5" pieces have imagery on the front, edges AND the back! I'm not going to put hangers on the back as they're kinda fun just sitting on a table so you can pick them up, turn them around and over.

Glorious Morning

This piece is 12x12x3 and uses a copy of one of the vintage postcards of Morning Glory Pool in Yellowstone alongside part of a photo I took of said pool and drawings I did on ledger paper. I've been using old ledger paper in collages for over a year, so I was thrilled to find some notecards in Bozeman of a native American's ink drawings on ledger paper from the early 1900s (drawn over the top of writing due to lack of paper!). That gave me the idea to do drawings on the paper I had – and have another subtle Montana connection in the piece.

Postcards from Paradise

My friend Karen knows I love to work with old postcards and photos and that I fell in love with western Montana when visiting her in May. She sent me these wonderful postcards she purchased in a shop in Gardiner across from the northern entrance of Yellowstone. What fun I shall have with these!!!

Projects

My art group's topic for this month was "drama queen"! I wasn't sure what I'd do with that and then remembered I had these early 1900s photos of seven Chicago-area women -- not in their long dresses but in men's suits and hats and holding cigars! Maybe not quite "drama queen" but dramatic and risque. I photographed the two pics on their heavy cards atop some handmade paper with a few old buttons next to them. I then collaged on a cradle board with a print of that arrangement and some papers evocative of period wallpaper and lace curtains. We drilled a hole into the wood cradle board to inset one of the buttons for a note of interest. (If you click on the photo, you can see the women better. I love it that they all have long hair in buns with men's hats perched on top and the soles of the two women's feet touching in the bottom photo is so fun.)