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.

Noticed: Collage Journals by Peter Jacobs

One of the pleasures of blogging is the way it connects the writer to other people with similar interests, but who live in different places, who have their own special skills and viewpoints.  I have found too many interesting artists who maintain blogs to be able to follow as much as I'd like.  Recently I followed a link in someone's post to a collage artist named Peter Jacobs.  What grabbed my attention was the way Jacobs uses the daily newspaper to make series of collage/journals.  These collages are both interesting visually, but they also are a record of news events and trends.  Jacobs manages to be inventive with this mundane source material every day, an achievement that humbles me. Click on his highlighted name and you'll see a couple years worth of his work.

How many of us have been at an art show of some sort and hear a passer-by comment that he or she could do just as well, and marveled at the hubris of the statement.  If you could do it, why in heavens name don't you?  I didn't think I could do as well as Jacobs, but I did try news collages two days this past week.  My first reaction is that he must have a much larger paper with which to work, but in truth most of my problem was just in how to select images and text, and then how to arrange them in an interesting ways, rather than not having enough from which to choose.

 

This was my first attempt, and I didn't have too much difficulty with choosing material.  Pretty much everything in our local paper on Monday was about the Packers win over the Chicago Bears.  With so many unemployed here in Janesville after GM pulled out, home foreclosures, tight school and municipal budgets, having happy news is probably necessary for mental health.

Today's effort was less successful.  The text suggests some of our local issues, and President Obama's picture grouped with another Packer image, and some protesters in Tunisia anchored the piece.  I was interested in the way the football player's arms echo the arms of the African protesters.  The collage took way too long for how it turned out.  It might be interesting to try a longer series - say a month, or several a month for a year.  But I think that this sort of collage technique probably is not one that I will use too often.  Still, it was interesting to give it a go. It might be interesting to try with a new magazine that would have more color source material with which to work.

I be interested to hear from anyone else that has tried collage journals.

All I Can Do

12x24 inches, acrylic on paper, mounted on canvas

This is all I can do - or maybe want to do - on the design contest featuring scientist/explorer/socialite Roy Chapman Andrews.  Since I started I have learned all sorts of things about the explorer, about the Gobi desert, about searching for dinosaur fossils.  I have also learned more about working with acrylic, and the difficulties of adding text effectively, mounting paper on canvas, and using PDF format.   My brain is a little fried, in fact.  I have ideas for other approaches, but want to step away and work on something else - maybe some collage.