World Collage Day 5.12.18

My page selected as one of the cut-out pages.

Kolaj Magazine has proclaimed Saturday to be World Collage Day. Celebratory events are happening all around the world, so you may want to check to see if there is something planned for your area. Or plan one for yourself! Hopefully people will also use the #worldcollageday hashtag and post their work online that day.

If you're unfamiliar with the magazine, and you're intrigued by collage, it's worth seeking out and/or subscribing. Besides in-depth articles and reviews, each issue typically includes a few fun cut-out pages for you to literally take apart and consider for use in your next collage.

For their World Collage Day Special Edition, the magazine included profiles of 14 artists along with a cut-out page for each. I'm happy to have been included (even though cutting is not generally part of my methodology, as I'm a ripper of materials). The cut-out page that I submitted reflects what I most like to work with: chunks of color, texture and pattern... in this case ripped and roughly organized in a grid. Happy World Collage Day! Of course, nearly every day is a happy collage day in my estimation!

Reworking the studio space -- the saga continues

It seems to be taking an inordinate amount of time to move everything back into my newly rehabbed studio spaces. I'm sifting, sorting -- and evaluating whether I will ever use some of the potential collage papers and art materials that I've stored for a long time. I've gotten rid of stacks of magazines, a behemoth of a flat file, and a worktable in an effort to keep more open space. I've only been in the space a couple of weeks and I've already rearranged the furniture a bit! I'm pretty sure I'll want to do more tweaking when I understand better how the spaces accommodate my process and workflows. And there is still a lot to resolve. And it feels like it should be DONE by now.

So it was a gift to stumble across a timely blog post, "Tidying Up," by Austin Kleon today...

"The best studio tidying is a kind of exploring — I’m re-discovering spaces as I sift through the objects that occupy them. The reason I tidy is not to clean, but to come into contact with something special that I’ve forgotten that I can now use. This is a slow, dreamy, ruminative, reminiscent form of tidying."

Really, I'm clearing space for future work / possibilities... plus making new discoveries and connections.

"...creativity is about connections, and connections are not made by siloing everything off into its own space. New ideas are formed by interesting juxtapositions, and interesting juxtapositions happen when things are out of place."

Glimpses of the process… studio vignettes.

Standing in the shadow of the moon

I was vacationing with my family in Oregon during the total solar eclipse this summer (08.21.17). We took advantage of an eclipse-related festival and attended educational / cultural events at my alma mater, Oregon State University, for a couple of days.

It was wonderfully nostalgic -- here's a photo of me in front of Fairbanks Hall, the art building, which seems almost entirely unchanged since I graduated. The atmosphere, with smells of paint and views out the old glass windows, is just as I remembered. The gallery inside was hosting a really well-conceived show, titled "Totality."

Me on the steps of Fairbanks Hall, the art and design building where I spent so many hours during college.

On the morning of the eclipse, we positioned ourselves in an open plaza area where we could see shadows cast by the trees and watch the sunlight project the eclipse through those openings and onto the ground, as if through a pinhole camera.

I was totally enchanted by the cast shadows that were the reverse of what we were looking at in the sky (with our special glasses on, of course).

Adjacent to the plaza was a sports court with a smooth blue surface. The images were even more distinct there, some of them looking like marbled paper. Even our shadows began to have some of those eclipse shapes in the negative spaces.

I was alternatively looking at the sun with my glasses and then taking them off to see what was happening on the ground. All the while the air was cooling as the sunlight diminished. (The white stripe bisecting the image with blue/green background is boundary line on the sports court.)

Below is a photo taken right before totality, when all the shadows of the trees went away as darkness fell mid-morning.

Just before the eclipse became total, shadows on the ground appeared that wiggled like snakes, kind of like the heat wave you see over the road when driving on a hot day. It was the glowing activity of the corona very briefly projecting itself onto us and the ground… an odd, almost dizzying sensation.

Suddenly it seemed like the moon snapped fully over the sun. I felt that I heard a sonic boom. Then it was dark above, with a glow 360 degrees around the edges of the horizon as if the sun had set not long ago... simply gorgeous. We were able to look up without the glasses during that time and try to absorb what we were seeing.

The image of the moon in front of the sun was so powerful. We were awe-struck. I feel like the image is imprinted on my brain -- I can be recall it in a very clear way. The eclipse tinted us and everything around us a metallic gray color. The shimmery glow around the moon was beautiful. Totality lasted less than two minutes and then the moon began to move off the sun. We put our glasses back on and watched the remainder of the eclipse until the sun shone fully again. I have a whole new recognition of the three dimensionality of the moon and sun in space now.

I'm wondering how experiencing the eclipse might affect my work in the future. I've always loved circles and have taught myself how to rip pretty good ones, if a little ragged, to use in my collages.

I was struck when I got home from the trip and looked anew at this collage, "Replay," made in 2012, which hangs over my desk. The correlations are rather interesting... it has a painted background with salvaged and painted papers applied on top. And yes, I ripped all those yellow-gold circle shapes and the half circle negative strips.

“Replay,” 2012, 36 x 24 x 2″, salvaged and painted paper on wood panel. ©Janice McDonald.

While the rest of the family has declared themselves to be total umbraphiles, I'm still processing this stunning experience... not sure if seeing another would diminish or enhance the power of the first experience. If you've never seen a total solar eclipse though, I believe it’s worth making the effort to get a location where you can experience totality... as my favorite commemorative t-shirt read, "Totality Worth It!"

Unrolling

Beginning the process

Galvanized stovepipes were used to roll and store the canvases

Unrolling, layer after layer of paintings

Dean Sobel, museum director, gives his initial reactions to the paintings

Huge canvases, layered and now awaiting conservation

One of my favorites… the energy in those brushstrokes!

Glimpses

The inventory notebook initially created by Still’s wife

This spring, at Denver's Clyfford Still Museum, I got to see the unrolling of a number of Still's works that had been in storage for years. Many bundles of paintings have been unopened since arriving at the museum. Packages are opened when the conservators are ready to begin working on them. A docent mentioned the opportunity and I'd signed up months in advance to be there, along with about 25 other curious people — plus a team of conservators, photographers and museum officials.

When Still finished a painting, he would remove the canvas from the stretcher bars so that the bars could be re-used to begin work on another canvas. Galvanized chimney pipes (the only easily-sourced tube that was long enough) were used to roll multiple canvases together. The rolls were stored in a barn. The rolls were numbered and some have notes and thumbnail sketches of what might be inside. However, even the conservators were not absolutely sure what was inside all the rolls.

Here are some photos, taken in the conservation room at the museum... The paintings looked pretty amazing flat on the table so it will be especially exciting to see these re-stretched and hanging in the museum sometime in the future. I've also included a photo of some of the inventory sketches, done by Still's wife, that the museum uses as reference. Charming as they are, it made me especially grateful for all the amazing tools we have these days to document, inventory and archive artwork!