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Finished and installed: collage commission 5

"Rooted Together," original collage by Janice McDonald                The art consultants, Noyes Art Designs, have hung the collage in the surgical waiting room as planned. Unbeknownst to them, outlets for a flat screen television were installed late in the process and the area is now compressed. I'm not happy with how it looks — the lines of the white tree trunks are confused by the adjacent white boxes.  RToriginallocation_7441Still, people seeing the work for the first time at the grand opening tell me they were drawn into the work and didn't even notice.Over 7000 people attend the grand opening and most all the commissioned artists were there to discuss their work, including me. What a beautiful hospital. The views of the mountains are stunning.There is talk of adding another television, to the two already in the room, and moving the collage to the wood-covered wall about ten feet away (you can see a bit of it at right in photo). It seems that there will not be even one area of the waiting room where someone can get away from the visual stimulation of 24-hour news coverage! The wood wall also has a grid of silver detailing which I think may not relate well to the grid structure of the collage panels... But we'll see.

Stages along the way: collage commission 2

As you can see, I'm contining to add big areas of color via chunks of paper to get the background filled in so I can work into the piece with further detail.This collage is so big that I'm incorporating sheets of kraft, rice, and wrapping paper -- along with the usual found and repurposed papers. If I used my typical materials (the size of a typical magazine page or smaller), the overall effect would be far more busy and kinetic than what I envision. I need an interesting, but simple, band of layers upon which I can develop the root structure of the aspen grove.Can you tell that I have to stand on a stepladder and hold my camera over my head to get this all in??!! That's why these process images are a bit skewed... I'm working on a counter height table and don't really have any other way to see the whole image assembled!Collage in progress

TravelArt

Travelart1_5

I produce a series of small business-card-sized collages that I make into luggage ID tags, aptly called Travel Art. It's especially good work to do when I just need to glue something (!) and don't have time in my day to work on a larger project. Here is one I finished yesterday. The background is a pattern from the inside of a safety envelope. As you can see, I recycle all kinds of paper into my artwork!