The Black Gryphon (Elizabethtown, PA)

Once again, thanks to friend and fellow collage artist Anthony Morgan, Tony Thompson and I have a number of pieces on exhibit at The Black Gryphon in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania. If you find yourself in the Harrisburg/Hershey area, stop by for some great farm-to-table food at this great restaurant and enjoy some of these collages:

Thompson-Specht collaboration

Here's another collaboration I completed with a friend and fellow artist from the Utica (NY) area. Tony Thompson does great artwork inspired by his days as a tagger (graffiti artist) and his interest in psychological responses to nervous system challenges. For this collaboration project, Tony presented me with a few options for "base" paintings that he had done (and which he felt were "incomplete"). Here's the one I chose...

He titled this one "Deal". I was very excited to see what I could add to this already-cool painting. One of the challenges with adding collage elements to Tony's work is that I did not want to compromise his style -- which includes many loose lines. That is, covering with opaque elements would obscure those lines. So, of course, I was leaning toward some use of transfers. Here are some intermediates and the final piece (which I re-titled "Android Deal"):

A birthday present for Mary Carol

The majority of my time in the early part of the summer of 2019 was spent on music. I finally got a band together that seemed to work and we had a show in Boston and one locally here in Utica, NY. The second half of the summer has been dedicated to collage and golf. I finished a collage project this past week, just in time to present it as a 60th birthday gift to my wife, Mary Carol. The germ of the idea arose from looking at some of the beautiful vases and decorative framing that I found in a late 19th century volume of The Art Journal.

You can see the basic layout here. I thought I could "fill in" with some flower elements made into something like a "collage bouquet". I knew I was going to have to spend some time doing some "micro-cutting" with the intricate vase... and with the top element. That's where I started...

 

I am more comfortable using a single-edged razor blade than an exact knife, because I feel that my fingers are closer to the cutting and it gives me more comfort and control. I call this "micro-cutting" because I tend to cut VERY small pieces at a time. The middle image above shows you a cut portion under the wings compared to the uncut portion. In the last two images, my finger is pointed to the tiny piece that was cut from the element. I spent approximately two hours straight (I was "in the zone"... FLOW!) micro cutting these elements on Tuesday. Unfortunately, I kind of wasted a bit of time cutting the decorative vase... because after I placed the flower elements into the composition, I realized that this vase was simply too "busy" to integrate with the "busy-ness" of the various flower petals. Fortunately, I had prepared a number of potential elements for this particular piece incase I needed alternatives. The vase I ultimately used, was simpler and was a better complement to the flowers...

Here's the completed composition, entitled "Nouveau Flora Luna". I have entered this piece for consideration for this year's annual juried show of the National Collage Society. I hope it gets accepted (my work has not been accepted for the last two years, unfortunately).