Emergence example

As promised, I am sharing some sketches from the past couple evenings in my studio. These photos hopefully provide some documentation about how my creative process emerges as I spend time exploring and experimenting in my creative "laboratory". As I peruse the many magazines and books I have in my studio, I come across potential elements that strike me as either interesting, beautiful or evocative. I rip out the page, or cut out the image, and it either goes "on the pile" (I have thousands of individual elements in various stacks in my studio!), or it gets coated and goes on a wire rack, or it "floats around" from tabletop to tabletop for a while. Sometimes I get to a potential element right away; sometimes the element is untouched for years. These photos show several such elements. The skull and torso/half head images were fairly recently extracted form a medical textbook (a book I was given by a fellow artist whose OB/GYN husband recently retired). The pinkish/purple element was form a science magazine (I think it's a type of pollen spore, magnified with an electron microscope?). The dark B&W photo of the buildings came from a book recently given to me by my friend Goody, from Boston. I have been experimenting with various combinations of placements with these elements (you can also see the "collage" of my studio table with other elements as well). With design considerations in mind (e.g., matching patina; depth; color complementation; linear continuation), and through a bit of trial-and-error, a working composition begins to emerge from my experimentation (from my "creative play"). Of course, then the work begins, in terms of precision cutting, final arrangement, layering of elements, and tacking down of individual elements. This particular piece is yet to be finalized, as I am considering placement of a transfer element in the center of this piece. I am a little nervous with that decision; as sometimes a transfer can be incomplete (not matter how good you are with the technique). I wouldn't want to "ruin" the piece with placement of the final image (i.e., after ALL of the prior work has been complete). I will decide soon. One of the points of this post is to convey the fact that my work is very rarely ever a result of some preconceived thought about what I want to create as a collage -- my work is most often a result of what emerges from the interplay of experimentation and evocative elements. It's almost like getting lost on a road trip, sometimes you find that some of the most enjoyable times are experienced when you get lost and come across a great "find" that wasn't planned ahead of time.