Image & Word: Art and Poetry in Conversation

This summer I was invited to make an artwork based on a poem, then a poet used my collage as inspiration of a new poem, and so it went: eight artists, eight poets. Artists and poets worked in anonymity, so the unveiling will be a surprise for everyone involved, including: Chuck Ceraso, Susan Allspaw Pomeroy, Jimmy Sellars, Maria Melendez Kelson, Priscilla Fowler, Lisa Zimmerman, Jennifer Parisi, Bill Tremblay, Linda Armantrout, Aaron Anstett, Gayle Crites, Joseph Hutchison, Jared Smith, Monika Edgar, Kathleen Cain and myself.

You're invited to attend the unveiling of the works at "Image and Word: Art and Poetry in Conversation" on August 16th at 7pm at the Louisville Center for the Arts in Louisville, Colorado. Tickets are $12 and seating is limited so reserve your seat in advance here.  I'd, of course, love to see you there!Since I'm not allowed to show my collage, I'm showing you the debris field of leftover papers behind and around my easel! Anything could've happened...

Collage artist trading cards

A great collection of stamps arrived along with my pack of Collage Artist Trading Cards.

You've heard of baseball cards, but do you know about artist trading cards (ATCs)? They are artist-made miniature works of art to collect and trade. Collecting ATCs is a popular trend right now. (An internet search of "artist trading cards" + "your city of choice" will yield information on local groups that meet to trade cards.)

Along those lines but on a larger scale, the publishers of the art magazine, Kolaj, have begun issuing packs of 15 Collage Artist Trading Cards. Their goal is to further disseminate the work of contemporary fine art collage artists and to encourage people to learn about new artists. These are professionally printed cards, each measuring 5.5  x  3.5" with an image on the front and information about the collage and the artist on the back.I'm happy to be included in Pack One of the trading cards (issued late 2013) along with international collage artists Bev Butkow, Ewan Aparicio, Holly Savas, Jeni Bate, Joe Castro, Kamee Abrahamian, Lita Kenyon, Mongobi-Bibbiana Mele, Nikki Soppelsa, Pierre-Paul Pariseau, Ross Carron, Sara Winkler, Stephen Tierney, and Vesna Vrdoljak.

If you'd like to start a collection of your own, the cards are available for $10/pack here from Maison Kasini.

Waterfall, a composed landscape underway

View of the level three collage underway, a rocky scene with a waterfall. I've painted the edges of the cradled wood panels black so that some of my papers will wrap around the edge and expose a bit about the way the collage was assembled. And yes, I work with gallon-sized quantities of glue :)

Composed landscapes

Here I'm working mostly on the "above treeline" collage but sifting colors into piles for potential use in other pieces.

Collage work in progress… the usual paper mayhem ensues!

So I set to work. I had done very simple sketches of how the landing imagery would flow upward through the space. As you climbed the stairs, different views would present themselves. Beginning with level one, walking along a stream with broad views into the distance, level two at the edge of a forest, level three passing a waterfall, level four above treeline, and level five depicting the last few boulders at the peak with views of the sky and distant landforms.

Each collage would be composed of many pieces of paper ripped from magazines and repurposed to make new landscapes from my imagination. The studio quickly became filled with piles of sifted materials! These were more detailed and more realistic than any collages I've made in the past… they needed to be wildly interesting at nine times their original size so there was a constant concern about how they would translate once enlarged.