This is a photo I took in Italy last fall. Rome was especially great for finding the weathered remains of posters peeling off rough stone walls, forming all kinds of new compositions. Found art at its finest. (I'm sure people were wondering WHAT I was photographing!!) I am especially attracted to the layering and the relatively unscathed row of graphic black dots across the top.
Beginning work on a 10 x 8 x 1" piece. Not quite sure where it's headed yet. The soft, warm colors are a delight to work with -- think I'm ready for some spring!
Most of what I use in my collages comes from the negative or background spaces in photos. I like to be sure that any image I use in my collage artwork is not clearly from a specific source -- so I am usually working with abstract parts from a larger image. In addition to bins of ripped out imagery, I keep a stash of magazines that I flip through over and over to find the next "right" piece. The one in the photo is so ripped up that several different layers of pages are now revealed. If you crop it in your mind's eye, the upper right quarter of the page (and layers behind) could be a found collage of sorts. It's always fun to see the layering that is created by the remaining parts of magazines. (Sort of like an altered book...) When they have little left to offer, the magazines sadly go into the recycling bin. Flipping through the lacy remnants one last time, I can usually recall the visual elements they have donated to multiple projects!
I see my studio as a collage laboratory and also like the word association with Colorado and collaboration, both of which inform my work. So that's how I got the subhead name for this blog... at least until I come up with a better one!
This piece is a portion of a collaborative work, one that got me really interested in collage. (I had been intrigued for a long time but hadn't done much about it.) Then in the late '90s I was at the International Design Conference in Aspen (now the Aspen Design Summit). The conference was focused on the human body and I signed up for a workshop on illustrating the body, moderated by Braldt Bralds.
A group worked together on a project -- each of us had a section of "Adam and Eve" which was roughly outlined on two 4 x 8 foot boards, each cut into 1.5-ish x 4 foot sections. We coordinated with the artists/designers who had work adjacent to ours so that the bodies fit somewhat together in the end when the pieces were assembled. But anything went as far as medium. My assignment was Eve's feet. I used all kinds of freebie materials from Aspen Magazine to hotel brochures, etc. and thinned Elmer's glue to assemble my contribution to the whole. It was a lot of fun and I enjoyed the abstraction that necessarily came along with working with the materials at hand. Somewhere (in the archives?) I have a photo of the whole thing assembled... I got a great response to my work, it was fun, and part of what started me on the collage journey!