Big collage beginnings

  

As promised, here are images of the early stages of my work on a new and larger-than-typical collage. Pages from an old book were adhered to the wood support to create the background layer. I like the casual grid of the type from these pages as a place to begin. Because I wanted to dim down the readability of the type a bit, I tinted the pages with acrylic (top photo). Then it's back to the easel as the first pieces are applied. 

The pages come from a 1961 edition of Who's Who in the Theatre, a thick tome that the public library was discarding. It was fun to skim the text as I glued... each entry has a space for "Recreation." My favorite answer was from a British actor, born in the early 1900s, who answered, "sauntering." Phone numbers had formats like: "Ambassador 5438." The volume also lists every part and play/film the actors were in... a time capsule of sorts from another era.

I'm working on several collages at once these days, but will continue to post photos of this one as it progresses. I have an idea of where the composition is going... but it's always an adventure to see where it goes. Serendipity* is a factor!

*Love the sound of this word (so appropriate to my work), and its derivation: coined by Horace Walpole, suggested by The Three Princes of Serendip, the title of a fairy tale in which the heroes “were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.” (origin 1754)

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!