elements
At left is an interim photo of the collage in progress that I began posting about here.
Below is the collage when almost finished... at this point the collage in progress will sit in the studio, as I work on others, so I can study it and consider any other possible additions.
I've already added a couple of elements but they don't significantly change the feeling of the collage -- they just refine it a bit further.
Several times a day I find oddball bits and pieces* that I want to play with... and these elements most often don't relate to the larger collages in process. So, I've been experimenting with some free form collage compositions on lined banana paper, which has been coated front and back with acrylic medium, to add heft and some durability. The banana paper has a wonderful random speckled texture, and the brown ruled lines are in opposition to that... there's something quite delightful about working on it.Here's a detail from one in progress that includes a questionable bit of positive thinking. What struck me as unusual about it was the passivity of the comment. It seems there is a lot of encouragement in print, much of it the "shelf-help" variety -- which sounds good at first, but is entirely too trite for my taste.*Doodles, packaging fragments, snippets of text, stamps, junk mail, to-do lists, leftover scraps, fruit labels, receipts, handwritten notes, the photos you always meant to throw away... you get the drift, anything goes!
Recently I wrote about my prep work for these pet-inspired "Poundling" collages and wanted to complete that story by posting the finished pieces.The collages have been on display at a gallery gift shop here in Denver for a couple of weeks now. (Perhaps someone will permanently adopt them for the holidays!)It amazes me how much character emerges from careful combining of unrelated, repurposed paper. Probably a new record for fewest elements used: the dog at top left is composed of only four pieces of carefully selected imagery/color (not counting background).Each collage is 7 x 5 x 1/8," composed of contemporary papers with acrylic on hardboard support, unframed, and priced at $135.
Here's a new collage, entitled "Osmosis," just completed, still unvarnished and unsigned at the moment of this snapshot. Constructed on a cradled wood panel, it measures 20 x 10 x 1."
This is a very casual photo, but it shows how I typically wrap the collage elements around the edges of the wood support so that the work can be left unframed, if desired. I'll post a final photo to the Color Constructs gallery on my website soon.