More Experiments in Juxtaposition

Pretty much every week I visit my local consignment shop for coffee, gossip, and whatever old paper items I can find that catch my fancy.  Recently I picked up a small tabloid magazine from 1952 entitled Eye.  For $1 I couldn't resist the cheesecake photos of starlets, and stories about murder, deep sea fishing and bull fighting.  After paging though the magazine, I began pulling out photos and combining them with other imagery I have clipped of classic painting, from textbooks and so on.  This was my first try.

Here is a detail from a Memling painting combined with a desert scene from a glossy magazine spread, a 1950s bathing beauty and an image of a man with a shark.  In this case I also added some colored pencil to the black and white painting detail, and I used blue acrylic on the sky.  I keep looking for ways to unify the combined imagery, whether through scale, design, color, or a combination of all three.

The most recent experiment combines a man in prayer, Memling again, combined with a 1950s photo of the Texas state fair and a Marilyn Monroe look-alike starlet from the tabloid.  I'm not sure what to make of them, but the contrast between the images appeals to me.