Well... I had intended to work on finishing the "paired" project last night; but I got distracted by some elements that were laying around the tables in the studio. Not sure if anything will come of this rudimentary start. But I am digging the way this looks (a bit of surreal; a bit of Warhol)...
I've been very pleased with the number of hits that this blog is getting on a daily basis recently. One reason I am posting today, is to let folks know what I have been up to recently. I consider my life to be very collage-like. In addition to loving my activities as an visual artist, I am playing more music with friends -- old and new. We play mostly improvisational music (jamming?), rather than playing "cover songs". Last weekend, as part of my birthday celebrations, I got together with my good friend Goody and a new person who we have not played with before. He played guitar; and an instrument called a "duduk" (an Armenian flute-like reed instrument). It was an awesome 2 hours of ambient, spacey, jazzy improv. On Saturday, we played with a full band, including keyboard, sax, and drums. SO much fun! I also dealt with a sewer back-up in my basement (yuck). Life is like a collage, with so many interesting elements. But I have also been working on a collage project which I "teased" about in an earlier post (regarding a potential transfer element). The project involves a paired set of collages. Not done yet... but here is some progress.
I finished this piece yesterday, for the National Collage Society “Small Works” exhibit. ALL entries need to be 4” x 6” and mounted on 8” x 10” mat board. I wasn’t going to submit this year, but this came together rather quickly. Although, in my haste to finish it (it HAS to be sent out today), I failed to do the “micro cutting” around the face (dammit! sloppy). I will still submit it. This one is entitled “In Someone Else’s Hands”.
I meant to post this first image the other day, as a teaser (what will become of this?). But I ended-up posting about the piece I had just finished. Anyway... I had already decided on the answer to the "teaser" part if it... I wanted to use it as a source for a transfer. So now the "teaser" has moved along one more step. Here is how I used it for two different, complementary transfers. I'm still not sure where these final compositions will end-up; but I am interested in the process, and the idea of doing a complementary pair. The third image is a quick collage (like less than an hour!) I made for a friend of mine. It's a very small piece (3.5" x 4.5"). I missed some micro-cutting in my haste to get it done. But I think it's a nice, simple piece.
I am happy to have finished this piece today. It's a "sister" piece to another one I created recently.
While going through a box of old stuff from my office, I came across this quick sketch I did when I was on faculty at Lebanon Valley College. The eyes were drawn around what was then two coffee drop stains (the brown color of the coffee has since faded) on my desktop blotter. The sketch was made circa 1993. I recently put UV coating on it the other day, and will re-frame it soon. But I realized that perhaps, unwittingly, this represent the only "self-portrait" that I've done (at least that's what I am now thinking). This doesn't have much to do with collage, but I thought it was interesting nonetheless.
Well, I'm not exactly sure from where this metaphor came, but it seems to capture what I was doing in the studio last night -- dancing. I was chipping away at a potential composition for the National Collage Society's small format exhibit (the guy with the dog); but was also playing around with other elements. I also have a partner frame for the gold-braid frame I posted recently (with the beautiful woman and the graph paper composition), which is silver-braid. I experimented with elements that I thought might go well with the silver. I ended-up creating a composition that is very atypical of my normal style. It was exciting to open-up more possibilities for future directions. Here are some of the images from my dancing...
