Apparition

FINALLY finished this piece this weekend. It was sitting around for over a year (I think significantly longer than that). Anyway, I felt inspired to try to finish it... and I did. The woman and the owl/butterfly wing emblem are both transfers. I love the dark color contrast between the trees and the roses. The piece is 11" x 14" and will be framed as a 16" x 20". Enjoy!

Follow your bliss?

I finished this piece today. I struggled with whether or not I should include more elements. There are only three elements in this collage. Why do I struggle so much with what I "should do" in terms of adding more elements? My work tends to be "clean" and relatively "simple" in terms of number of elements. It's part of my artistic "voice" I guess. I REALLY like this piece as it is. I hope others do too. Finishing this piece and feeling the way I do about it has reminded me to follow my own artistic bliss. A bit of success over the past couple years has created a bit more "meta-artistic" effort in me. That is, I tend to think about producing "a good (or great) piece", rather than doing what I want to do and hoping others will like it. So, here is the result of attempting to "let go" again. Enjoy!
(btw, this piece is a tad bigger than usual, because the cityscape covered two pages in a magazine. It is 16" x 7").

interesting advertisement

This image is from a 1955 "McCall's" magazine. It reminded me of a presentation I saw at this year's Southern Humanities Conference about the imagery and sociology of women in appliance advertisements throughout the first half of the 20th Century. I found this imagery to be so weirdly "pop". Well, actually it is mostly "weird". Is it sexist? I don't mean to promote that. But I find that searching for collage imagery is also a journey through various aspects of visual history too. Enjoy!

Picasso's ubiquity

Whilst I was looking through some old magazines today for useful collage images, I came across this article in "McCall's" magazine for interior design. I immediately saw Picasso's "Harlequin" (1915) on the living room wall. Just thought it was interesting to see that as decor in this 1955 magazine. Enjoy!

Stink eye

Once again, I am in my studio area cleaning and rearranging. As I do that I am always open to inspiration. I had the image of this criminal from a pulp detective magazine laying around for a while. I came across a single eye that I had cut out from some magazine image months ago. I decided to see how it would look on this guy with such nice patina. It was only after I put the eye on the guy that I actually saw the caption (honest ;-) SO funny how it works. I may "work this up" into a full collage. Enjoy!

Yet more students

I did a mini collage workshop for the students in my Creativity Seminar this morning. They loved it. The piece shown here with the flamingo was created by Alexandra Indolfi. Yours truly created the other. I am never satisfied with the quick ones I do to show the students how the Talbot technique works; but this one is acceptable in my view. Enjoy!