Upcycle Collage

11x14 inches

collage elements and acrylic paint

I worked on this small piece yesterday and today.  All of the elements, except the paint, were upcycled.  I bought a really awful acrylic painting, just for the canvas, then gessoed over it.  All the papers were found - bits of blueprints, paper bags I painted, notes tucked inside old text books, an old calendar, old diary, stamps, sheet music, and so on.  There are lots of layers here, which was fun, because the piece changed lots from beginning to end.

Considering it was pure experiment, I like it.  In a way, besides getting the chance to use up some of my saved ephemera, I was psyching up for a workshop tomorrow, something called Collage Cocktail, With a Splash of Paint.  I may have signed up just because I liked the title - no alcohol will be involved.

Truth - I wanted to take another workshop, because the last one I took, two years ago, was something of a personal disaster.  It was far away, expensive, from a person whose work I admire.  But she took an immediate dislike to me and had nothing but criticism, and I came away badly shaken, and dispirited.  Recently I decided that that disastrous workshop would not be my last.  I would take a deep breath and try again.  Tomorrow.

Solstice

Today is the start of the winter solstice - a dark day.  I woke this morning to the dimmest of light, and a steady rain.  It was hard to haul myself out of bed, though the singing and tap dancing of the cat on my half asleep body was encouragement to get up.

The good thing about dark crummy weather is that I spend lots of time in the studio, though lately much of that studio time has been spent doing Christmas crafty things, organizing and cleaning, and reading about art - and not so much making of art.  Still, I have been playing around with some painting, and some collage work.

5x7 inches, paper collage

I am lucky to have friends who save old magazines and books for me.  This  little collage was assembled from a painting from a tattered guide to the Uffizi Gallery, a book of Japanese nature photography, and a picture of a butterfly from a very old National Geographic.  

I keep two separate files of collage papers. One contains all colors and textures from papers I have painted, or magazine pages that I have altered in some way. The other file contains photos and classic paintings, mostly from vintage books and magazines, but also old maps.  I have categories like Faces, Hands and Figures, Sacred Images, Animals, Birds, Insects, Plants and Nature, Diagrams and Graphs, Text and Numbers, and so on. Images for each category get stashed in a large zip close plastic bag.  I try to take out no more than three bags to rummage through to find materials that go together for any one collage.  

I like how this one turned out, and think it could be the beginning of a series

New Collages

I go in streaks, painting for a while, then going back to cutting and pasting.  On Friday I drove to Madison to deliver a painting to a WRAP show at the Pyle Center, and took the rest of the morning to visit Artist and Craftsman Supply, and the galleries at the Overture Center and the Chazen.  My favorite show was at the James Watrous Gallery, a retrospective of the work of Madison artist/illustrator David McLimans.  I had never heard of the man, but his collages of animals and insects created from bits of maps spoke directly to my heart.  So much vision vision and skill!  Unfortunately, he died of a heart attack last year.  Why had I missed his work before? Anyway, I wanted very much to clear away the paints for a bits and get out my own papers.

These are three recent collages I did, all from my stashes of found and altered papers. All are six by six inches, on gessoed watercolor paper, designs inspired by examples in a book by Randel Plowman.  Some of my old and now disliked watercolors are hidden underneath. 

Waste not, want not.

Revisiting Vintage Family Photo

12x24 inches, oil and collage on paper

This is a work in progress, something quite different from my usual approach to painting from old candid photos, much brighter, more stylized.  The original photo is of my grandmother, Bernice Tess, and her good friend, Elizabeth Thompson. I have several photos of them and their families together at the beach, hiking, on driving vacations and so on.  But the picture of Liz and Grandma reclining by the shore has always tickled me.  My goal here was to drastically simplify the image, play with patterned paper for their blankets, and use color for decorative effect, rather than try to imagine what the actual scene might have looked like.  I still need to paint over patterned paper at the bottom, and add shadows under the women, and I am still trying to decide whether or not to define their faces more.  Right now their indistinct faces appeal to me.

However it turns out, I'm having fun.

Good Medicine

The winter is limping along, and my immune system apparently is giving up.  Last week I had something like food poisoning that left me horizontal on the couch most of the day, content to watch the shadows move across the hillside across the street, and this week the worst cold sores of the century are making my mouth look and feel like I ran into the doorjamb.

But, I have been working a little on my newest mixed media piece - two men and their dog.  There will be a simple white farmhouse in the background, eventually.  So far I have some collage pieces of wallpaper adhered to my canvas, have a thin layer of gold acrylic paint over that, and have begun the first layers of the dog and men.  It is fun to work a little at a time, watching the image develop before my eyes.

And it does make me forget that I feel punky. 

Then and Now

Painting over scraps of wallpaper, using old found photographs still holds my attention, and I think I finished up with one last evening.

The original black and white photo featured five people, but the two who caught my attention most were an older woman and a very saucy little girl, so I focused on them.

The process involves drawing the figures on canvas, then adding the wallpaper with a soft gel medium. I only used three styles of wallpaper this time, and I used a larger floral motif to tie the two background pieces together.  In the original photo, besides more people, there were houses, some trees, and a horizon line.  The horizon survives behind the figures, but nothing else.  I learned the hard way that being very careful to press out air bubbles behind the paper, and making sure he edges adhere securely is crucial at this point.  Once the papers are in place, I coat the canvas with a clear gesso, so that the ground is unified. On this painting I also added a thin layer of gold acrylic paint, which will peek through a bit later.

Then I just dive in, painting the flesh tones, the clothing, and trying to paint thinly enough that the pattern from the paper shows through.  A stumbling block as I went along on this one was the woman's left foot, which was lost in shadows in the photo, apparently behind the girl's left foot.  I ended up creating a foot angled out more to the left, distinct from the girl's, but minimized by shadows.

This is about finished, I think. I warmed up the skins tones, darkened the shadows cast by their hats, and added a background that is mostly Indian Red, more opaque near the bottom, more transparent near the top.  I like the results quite well.

A side note here.  The internet is a way to make friends that I never imagined when I was young.  Some people turn out to be nobody I feel the need to every meet in person, and others reveal themselves over time to share all sorts of interests and attitudes.  My online friend Monique Jacobs died recently.  Monique lived in Belgium, was a keen reader, traveler, photographer, and artist. I met her in an online sketching group and discovered we also knew each other on Shelfari.  Over time we began emailing, sending each other small artworks and cards, commiserating when life threw curve balls, and celebrating when life was good.  While we never met face to face, we were friends, and I will miss her for a long, long time.  Rest in peace, my friend.

The Kiss

I've been working fairly regularly on a series of 11x14 inch oil paintings, done over wallpaper and other vintage papers, and based on found photos from my local consignment shop.  The picture I found of a man smooching his lady friend appealed to me very much.  It clearly is a snapshot, not a studio photograph, and her grin is wonderful to me.  I tried to suggest a horizon line, and initially intended to only include the figures, but as I went along I knew I wanted more to the image, so I added a tree.  That also had the benefit of providing something dark to set off the arm of his white shirt and part of her dress.

The challenge for me, besides making decisions about colors for clothing, hair and so on, is how much background to include (there was a house and some shrubbery), and how much of the underlying papers to allow to show through.  I want the papers, because they not only provide some visual interest, but also suggest bygone times. 

For better or worse, this is what I finally settled upon.  It's a bit silly and sentimental, but I think it's also appealing.

Another Work in Progress - More Personal

One of the things I especially enjoy about working from old snapshots is the opportunity to really look closely at the images.  I usually work with pictures of people I do not know, but this time I wanted to work with an old photo from maybe 1956 or so of my younger sister and me.

I scanned and enlarged the original, and drew us, simplifying the background so much as to be pretty much unrecognizable.  In the original we were standing on the covered front porch, in front of the wooden door that had an oval window filled with beveled glass.  The sun was in our eyes, and we were dressed in our good wool winter coats, trimmed in fur.  We both wore hats, tied under our chins. The shapes of the door and window behind us are only suggested here by using an old diary page, wallpaper and bits of a Wisconsin map.

Yesterday I started pushing back the paper background, suggesting a shadow of the overhead roof, and adding shadows behind us girls.  I still need to make decisions about the floor, and later when the skin tones are more dry, I need to warm up the flesh tones and deepen the shadows.

Staring at the old photo I remember how much Mother liked decorating the old farm house for Christmas.  I removed the homemade styrofoam-pipe cleaner-felt Santa head that hung on the door from my painting, and the bit of our Flexible Flyer sled that showed.  Clearly the picture was taken in December.  In those early days we always had green Christmas trees, covered with glass ornaments and heavy lead icicles that we kids liked to toss on the tree in a very un-artistic way.  Funny all those memories that return, just from staring at an old snapshot.

Bernice Ann

I've been down with a nasty virus,  and I had a week or so of just wanting to make sleeping my full time job.  It seems to be about done now, so I'm back playing around with combining painting with collage papers and wallpaper.

My maternal grandmother, Bernice Ann Adams Tess, was lovely her entire life.  I've meant to try painting her more than once, and decided to start with a photo I have of her as a young girl.  She looks very serious.  I think by this time her parents had separated, and her father was killed.  Her mother remarried to a man Grandma never really liked, so I suppose the serious look is understandable.

I'm still working on 11x14 inch canvas, and adding pieces of old diary and wallpaper samples.  Grandma loved flowers, especially roses, so I wanted to include elements of that in the portrait.  The issue for me is how much to allow the collage elements to show through.  Some of the flowery border originally extended on to her forehead, but I painted it out, since it almost looked like a tattoo to me.  I wanted the background to have a darker value to make her light hair, bows, and white dress pop.  I don't mind it the way it is, but I am still open to adding some blue areas.  I am just not sure, so I'll live with it this way until I decide.  Sometimes it's better to stop sooner, rather than later.

More Recent Painting

Sled

11x14 inches, oil over collage papers

adapted from a vintage  black and white snapshot

I have been painting lots since the weather turned colder. Lately my interest has been centered on vintage snapshots, and finding ways to paint over various decorative papers - primarily wallpaper and old printed papers.  In this one the children's clothing and much of the background is painted over wallpaper with rather delicate patterns, and the patterns disappeared under the paint - more than I originally intended.  But the background pattern still shows through, adding a bit of interest to an otherwise plain area.  I'm not sure of the year of the original photo, maybe the late 1940s or early 1950s?

Coming Along

The collage and oil painting I started last week is coming along. bit by bit.  Yesterday I finished the dress for the woman on the right, and just leaped in and added the background.  I want a very sheer and somewhat plain background that lets the wallpaper and old newspaper underneath show through a bit, and presents the figures out of any specific context.  I hemmed and hawed and stalled, and finally just did it. To my great relief that figures seem to pop much more, and the patterns under the paint do still show, though in a subtle way. 

Now the women's faces need layers of warmer glazing, and the shadows round their feet need deepening.  This is the point in a painting that gets tricky for me, since I rather like how it has turned out so far, but don't want to do anything to spoil the results.  No guts, no glory. 

I'm still thinking of a good title. and am leaning toward stealing one.  Maybe I'll call it The Three Graces.

Thankful

It is Thanksgiving, cold and snowy.  At our house we're staying in, enjoying our warm and cozy home, reading, petting the cat, listening to radio music, and later on enjoying a chicken dinner.  It's just silly to even consider a turkey for two people - though when I indulge in nostalgia, I miss hanging around the kitchen and snitching pieces of crispy turkey skin and stuffing from the roasting pan when Grandpa, or Dad, or even my brother was busy carving the bird. 

I am looking forward this afternoon to returning to a piece I've been working on.  It's from a photo I found at my local consignment shop,  of three mature women, friends, standing with arms around each other.  I love their happy faces, their long flowered dresses and roomy coats.  I suppose that's nostalgic for me since I remember my grandmothers wearing clothing like that.  I'd like to call it The Girls With Grandmother Faces, after the Fannie Flagg book, but that's probably copyright infringement.

I enlarged the old photo with the scanner, printed it, and then drew the image on a gessoed canvas.  After that I added bits of wallpaper from a discarded sample book, and some old newspaper, and coated the entire thing in clear gesso, to provide tooth for painting.  The fun part comes next, and I am thankful to have lots of time available to work on it.

Distracted

Distracted - that's me.  I've never been especially good at keeping a razor sharp sense of focus, and now that notes in the mail - the postal sort of mail and the electronic sort - keep arrive telling me about deadlines for artwork, year-end dinners, meetings for groups, and so on, I find myself losing track.  This is despite two or three calendars and piles of small notes to myself.

There is is nagging feeling, am I losing it?  This week I had an event on all my calendars for Friday evening.  I did my hair and actually applied lipstick, and with my coat on looked once more at the invitation, only to see that the event was scheduled for Wednesday night.  Of course the invitation only listed the date, not the day of the week, or I might have caught my error  earlier. 

All dressed up and nowhere to go except the reclining chair in front of the TV news, to eat carryout pizza.  I guess it could be worse.

I recently paid fifty cents for this little snapshot, bought because I liked the way the child's attention was called away from her mother and the two dogs.  Did someone call her name from inside the screen door?  I like the mystery of it.  I also like the symmetry of the image, the mother with the large dog (a boxer?) and the child with the small spaniel.

I decided to try painting the image on a spare 11x14 inch canvas.  I gessoed over an old acrylic painting, covered the canvas with gray acrylic, then drew in the figures with charcoal.  After spray fixing the drawing, I used soft gel medium to adhere bits of wallpaper from a sample book and some decorative papers I bought on a trip to Italy.  The entire thing was coated with clear gesso, to create a ground for further painting.

After that, it was a matter of using oil paints to create the image.  It's not so easy to see here, but I painted thinly so that the designs and floral elements from the papers peek through a bit.  If I had been smarter I would have added the underlying papers first, then drawn over them.  I guess we learn a little something every time we try a new technique.  I'm not sure if the background colors will stay as they are.  The pink in the upper right was supposed to echo the pink roses in the wallpaper, but it attracts too much attention for my taste.

I think I'll let it sit and dry for a while, then see if I want to change it any more later.

Indian Summer

This weekend we're experiencing that sweet time of the season, Indian summer.  The leaves here in southern Wisconsin are almost past their prime, and some trees are already bare.  We're lucky different trees lose their leaves at different times, and especially lucky that there are so many oaks here, since they keep their leaves the longest.  I was at the final farmers' market on Saturday, and particularly noticed the ginkgo trees, which have turned gold.

Every October we take a drive in the Kettle Moraine to see the colors, and to find a supper club for an evening meal.  It started after my grandmother died, about ten years ago, at age ninety-nine.  her birthday was October 13, and she loved to drive near Holy Hill, and then go out to eat.  Grandpa had worked as a mason on Holy Hill in the 1920's when they were first married.  Anyway, we started going out for a drive and a meal and as way to remember her, and we've continued the tradition.

I haven't spent much time in the studio, mostly because I know once bad weather settles in I'll be living up there, but I did spend some time collecting and altering papers to use for collage, and I put together this little six by six inch one last night.  Fall colors seem to have crept in.

Collage and Paint

11x14 inches, collage and oil on canvas

This is another painting that incorporates collaged papers in the background, under the oil paint.  During the summer I go to a community figure drawing studio on Monday evenings, and this was based on a sketch from one of those sessions.  The model is usually brightly lit against a dark background, and I wanted to make the dark areas interesting without being distracting, so I adhered prepared papers and bits of wallpaper samples before I laid in the dark paint.  I rather like the effect. At some point I may lighten the top of the pillow o which the model is resting her arm, just to make it stand out a bit more - but for now it is done.

Rainy Days and Mondays

Dang - it's raining again on Monday, the day that, at least during the summer, I like to drive to Whitewater for figure drawing.  But the rain today has been noisy with rolling thunder and constant.  It is one of those gloomy days where the lights need to be switched on to read or do any artwork, and I'd just as soon be asleep, thank you.

But I did spend a few hours up in my little studio working on a piece that I started about a year ago, and had no trouble abandoning - more than once.  It's turning out to be a mixed media piece, although when I originally planned it I thought it would be acrylic with gold leaf.  I'd done a series of 8x8 inch acrylic paintings with gold leaf backgrounds, and I wanted to try the same technique with something larger.

So, I drew out three seated children reading together from a flea market snapshot, and quickly realized I was in trouble.  I had primed the canvas in red, and started the under painting in black and white, and I knew that I did not know how to work out the background.  What to do?

Nothing.  I put it aside for several weeks and on a winter workshop day I hauled it out and dutifully worked on the value part of the painting some more. But the love was not there.  So, once more the painting leaned against the wall in the studio, neglected but not forgotten. 

Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task. ~William James

Then I had an idea. I had done a 11x14 inch nude study, with collaged papers in the background, glazed over so there was an interesting pattern behind the figure, but subtle.  Why not try something like that with the painting of the children?  I couldn't like it any less than I did already, so nothing to lose but some time.  So, I hauled out some of my bags of printed papers, wallpaper samples and the like and used gel medium to paste them down.  Then I used burnt sienna acrylic paint to tint some clear gesso and went over the whole thing to unify it.  Suddenly that old lovin' feeling began to return.

Now I am using water soluble oil paint and painting in the figures.  The background will be mostly dark, and I hope the patterns peek through.  We shall see.  But at least I'm moving forward.

What a relief!

Midsummer

6x6 inch collage, in my sketchbook

Unbelievable, July is nearly over.  When I was teaching July was the only month that was reserved just for vacation activities - camping, biking, gardening, or whatever was good.  I don't do much of any of those things any more, except a bit of gardening, and that has been curtailed because of my stiff and sore knees.  The  flowers that come back on their own every year are still a source of joy, though. The bee balm has been glorious this summer, as are the lilies.  I try to cut some most every day and bring them inside to enjoy.

This summer has mostly been about the series of cemetery tours that I've been leading in connection with a local group that is restoring the chapel that was built around 1900.  My tours, which highlight interesting people from Janesville and the surrounding area, and old headstones and monuments, is free, although the chapel restoration folks are there every time serving cookies and water, and accepting donations to help pay for the new roof, foundation work, and stained glass window restoration.  The tours, which have been well attended, are fun to lead, but take lots of time to research, plot out, time and rehearse.  I finished writing the last one this week, and I look forward to not having the constant deadline hanging over me. My last tour is August 9th.

I'm also nearly finished with an online workshop centered on composition in connection to collage.  The teacher does work I admire, and I very much enjoyed a one day workshop with her last summer.  I'm not so sure that I'm getting as much from the online lessons, maybe because they were very specific, and there were a lot of them.  So many of them, in fact, that I had trouble keeping up.  That, plus the limits the instructor placed on the materials we could use, began to wear on me.  The class lasted five weeks, and I'm still not finished. I only post some of my completed assignments, because I just used whatever paper I want, which it not what the instructor had in mind.  The little collage at the top of this post is an example.  I just I just have problems following directions. Surprise!

My other summer art involves the community figure drawing studio at UW Whitewater.  I've miss a couple, but the sessions I've attended were great fun.  Thing is, what do I do with stacks of drawings of undraped models?  I suppose I must just look at it as practice, and not worry too much about the drawings, some of which I quite like.

I try to get out and socialize when the opportunity arises.  I spent a week in Kewaunee and Door counties recently, visiting my dear aunt, who is 85, and my brother and sister-in-law, who are a few years younger than I am.  It was fun visiting, going to art galleries, and driving the convertible with the top down.  Seems like there aren't all that many days in the year for doing that sort of thing.

Carpe diem.

Stamps

I don't collect stamps, although I admire them.  I have occasionally bought bags of old stamps, or children's stamp collections, for pocket change at a local resale shop.  I tend to organize them by color, for use in my collage work, like this:

I have bags of blue stamps, violet stamps, greens, and oranges/golds/browns, as well.  Some are from the USA, but many are not.  I also have little bags of stamps about writers and artists, the Olympics, holidays, and stamps commemorating US states and territories.  Frankly, I have no idea what to do with those. 

At any rate, I recently checked Nick Bantock's most recent book, The Trickster's Hat, out from our local library.  Unlike Urgent 2nd Class, which discusses more of the artist's technique and materials, The Tricker's Hat is a series of exercises meant to develop creativity both in writing and visual arts.  Perhaps some of the activities are from his workshops.  One of the exercises was to create a small (1.5 x 3 inch) collage using old postage stamps.  The idea was to work quickly, and create a small landscape using bits of stamps torn by hand.  He recommends cutting off the perforated white borders first.

This is what I came up with.  It won't set the world on fire, but it's interesting.  I have a real fondness for tiny artworks, especially those which incorporate bits of paper ephemera.  I find that people can often glide past a large painting and murmur sweet nothings, never really stopping to look closely.  But these little artworks make people stop, stare, and try to figure out what they are seeing. Here it's not only the wee engraving and portraits, it's also the cancellation stamp that leaves a bit of visual texture.  I was fascinated by the results.

This is my second attempt.  This time instead of  working completely from imagination, I had an old photo from a vacation. The original featured green fields in the foreground, a sliver of water, distant fields and a pale sky.  I'm not sure I like this collage as well, and perhaps it is because the torn stamp in no real way resemble the source.  Perhaps imagination is better for this sort of thing.

Ladder Collage

8x8 inch paper collage

based on a quilt design by Nancy Crow

Lately I have been spending much of my studio time thinking about ways to use my big collection of papers in abstract design.  A design I created last month elicited a comment from a friend who suggested it reminded her of the quilts from the ladies of Gees Bend.  When I tried to get the book from our library I learned it was stolen, and when I ordered it inter-library loan, the wrong book arrived.  So I searched farther and discovered a book of wonderful designs by Nancy Crow.  

This little collage is similar to one of her marvelous quilts, though certainly not identical.  I used altered pages from National Geographic, papers I bought in Italy, a paper bag, and a page from an old atlas - all glazed with acrylic paint.  I'm not sure what it was about the ladder design.  I know ladders can symbolize striving, for spirituality, for success.  But I think the dark colors and ladders stirred up memories of our dairy barn.  

Dad used to send me scrambling up a ladder into our hay mow to throw down bales of hay or straw for the cows. I loved it up there - loved the darkness, the high roof, the ropes and pulleys, the bales that could be arranged into forts.  I loved the slivers of light that entered the mow through gaps between the vertical boards, and the bits of hay dust and chaff that sparkled in the slices of light.  There were ladders along the side of the hay mow too, and sometimes my friend up the road and I would climb up high and jump into the hay.  That was probably a good way to die, but we never were hurt.  There was a ladder inside our cement silo too.  I remember climbing to the top and looking out over our farm, feeling that I had a bird's eye view of the world.  

My knees would never stand for anything of these activities any more.

King Billy - Monarch Collage

7.5 x 7.5 inches, paper collage

contact me if you are interested in purchasing

Winter has been a beast, long cold, full of treacherous roads, and dim days.  So after I finished Barbara Kingsolver's novel (Flight Behavior) about, among other things, the way climate change is having a lethal effect on monarch butterflies, I decided to create something more colorful than much of my recent work.  The characters in Flight Behavior refer to the monarch as "King Billy", after the royal colors of William of Orange.

The papers in this collage include origami sheets, old magazine pages, sheet music, vintage receipts, and painted tissue paper.  The black part of the wings is acrylic paint, since the tiny white detail work just was beyond me. I started the piece about two weeks ago, then set it aside because we spent a week on the Pacific coast of Mexico.  When I returned to the studio the bright colors spoke to me even more, and I was inspired to finish it up.  This weekend I'll cut a mat for it, and then we'll see where it ends up.