Incoming: playing with daily discoveries

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!

Experimental figurative collage

Here are the quick experimental cut-out collages that I did for part of the commission proposal -- really needed to see if this was something I could pull off! The test, not to scale, helped me figure out how to approach the entire scene of multiple people, pets, and the tennis ball. The collages were just leaned up in the window seat at home so that I could get the ball up in the air for my photos. It's hard to see the black outline around each one. When installed, the collages will be mounted on a neutral gray wall and will stand out from the wall so that shadows will help to animate the scene, with some imagery falling behind others and appearing to be more distant. I'm just getting going on the final pieces... can't wait to start on the leaping dog I envision going after that ball! Fun to be working on something so whimsical. (Also challenging not to get too cute.)

Pets, posed and frolicking

I'm very excited about a new commission for the lobby of a veterinary hospital. I'll be creating six large, whimsical cat/dog portrait collages, similar to the figurative images in my Foundling series (Foundling 38, cat, shown above, is 7 x 5"). 

For another wall, I'll be producing a series of ten collage-created images of people and pets at play. This part of the project is quite different from anything I've done in the past -- should be challenging and a lot of fun to work on. I've done some experiments that were successful and helped me to secure the commission and feel confident that I can produce the inter-related, shaped, freeform collages that will float off the surface of the wall. Now, it's time to dive in and get to work on the final pieces! I'll post images of work in progress.

First in recent collage series, "Time and Balance 1"

First in the latest series of Time and  Balance experiments, this collage is 10 x 20 x 1", composed of contemporary papers, recycled imagery, and ribbon on a cradled wood panel. This piece uses the timecards as backgrounds, described in previous post.