Out On A Limb: 12

© Out On A Limb: 12
mixed-media collage, recycled catalog cover
& wrapping paper, vintage illustrations, watercolor,
colored pencil, acrylic sealer. 6"x6" on wood panel (2012)
Price: $85 (contact me - e-mail's at the top of the page) 

Yesterday was gray, cold and wet, wet, wet. I thought I'd cheer myself up by posting colorful parakeets. This morning is equally drab, so here's another one of the bright bird collages I'm working on for March's Expecting to Fly exhibit at 5th Street Gallery.

I was determined to use this peacock - and following along with the black & white/color bird pairings of earlier collages in the series, it was paired with a black & white engraving. A partridge was also in the print, and it was echoed via a gorgeous, colored partridge.

So where are those birds? Well, the black & white ones are the backside of the parakeet print and the colored partridge is back in the files. Why? I goofed. It seemed that the b&w print needed to be toned down in order not to compete with the beautiful plumage of the colored birds. I wanted to use paper to achieve a muted effect and chose a golden-hued piece of vintage tissue. Well, it was a too opaque and obscured the background.

Onto Plan B, which turned into a challenge. Since the series title is Out On A Limb, I wanted the peacock on a limb. I hit on the idea of using a peacock feather as a branch. Piece of cake, right? Wrong it took hours to cut out the feather from a recycled piece of wrapping paper. Then, once it was done, gulp, I decided the collage needed another one. After cutting out another entire feather, only part of it was used. So it goes.

Out On A Limb: 16

© Out On A Limb: 16 (2012)
mixed media collage: recycled print &  catalog cover,
vintage illustrations, India ink, watercolor, gouache,
acrylic sealer. 5"x5" on wood panel
Price: $65 (SOLD)  

Just the other day, I was debating whether to use the beautiful images by artist Arthur Singer from Golden Press' 1961 edition of Birds of the World. Well, the die was cast when I paired a trio of Singer's vivid parakeets with a vintage, black-and-white illustration.

The latter's from Vol. I of the Encyclopedia of Source Illustrations: A Portable Picture Library of 5,000 Steel Engravings (Morgan & Morgan, Inc., 1972). The 2-volume book reprints the amazingly detailed engravings created for the multi-volume Iconographic Encyclopedia of Science, Literature and Art (1851). Expect to see more of the engravings cropping up in coming months, because they're my new obsession.

Flashy album cover pages

I've been mining a stack of Victorian photograph albums for a series of collages I hope to start in the spring and just had to stop and scan in the ornate cover pages. They remind me of how special photographs once were. It's difficult to see it in the scans, but each page is embellished with glowing gold ink.

I hesitate each time I pick up an album at a flea market, antique shop, etc. I feel as though I'm stealing someone's history and wonder how the album ended up there, who it belonged to, who the people are and what their stories are. More often than not, people are not identified or there isn't enough information to track them down (reminder to self: go through family photos and add captions).

As much as I'd love to know the true stories, I'm content to start creating my own narrative. I'll post some of the photographs from these four albums in the future.

Touring again, but having more fun

© The Grand Tour: Airborne (2012)
mixed-media collage, recycled book cover,
 antique circus poster reprint, vintage illustration,
watercolor, India ink. 11.5" x 8.5" on archival mat board. Price: $185. (SOLD)

The Grand Tour is back but evolving. I'll continue using the fantastic, hand-painted 19th century fashion plates from Godey's Ladies Book and Peterson's Magazine, but am not limiting myself to them. Something clicked when I created pieces for last fall's Cincinnati Dreams Italy exhibition and the series was suddenly lighter and cheekier, with women who were less passive.

The pieces are also becoming larger, not enormous, but bigger than they've been. I'm excited and working like crazy on these, as well as other pieces for my March show - "Expecting to Fly" - at the 5th St. Gallery downtown (link in side rail). Well, it's off to the studio. There's lots of work to be done!

So, it's back to work!

So, I've been back in the studio this week and after cleaning up and reorganizing - well, on a small scale, the bigger clean-up comes mid-February - I started on another eight collages in the Out On A Limb series. They're evolving so fast that these photos - shot on Thursday - are outdated already.

I'm still combining antique & vintage images, as well as black-and-white & color images on each piece. These are being created on box-like boards just like the last five, except that these are birch and are 6" x 6" instead of 5"x5." That may sound like a minor change in size but it is HUGE when it comes to selecting images. I quickly figured out that the vibrant Victorian scraps used in the previous round are too small now.

There are plenty of black-and-white images in my stash that work but I had to look elsewhere for color ones. Luckily, I found more Singer songbird trade cards. I also nabbed a copy of Birds of New York, which was published in 1910 (Vol. 1) and 1914 (Vol. 2) by the New York State Museum. It's beautifully illustrated with painting by Louis Agassiz Fuertes. I got it for an unbelievably great price but after some research, I discovered that Fuertes was/is world-renowned. Gulp. I may not be able to bring myself to use it.

Happily, I lucked into a shabby copy of the original 1961 edition of Golden Press' Birds of the World for a mere $8 at a used-book sale. The over-sized book is chock-full of vivid paintings by Arthur Singer. But a little more research and what do I find? You got it. Singer is a renowned bird painter, too. Sigh. Stay tuned to see how this plays out ...

Here's to a fruitful 2012!

Well, with the holidays winding down, I'm back at the computer scanning, scanning, scanning. These beautiful chromolithographs from the 1905 and 1909 U.S. Department of Agriculture yearbooks seemed a fitting start to the year. I plucked them from the attic for a new collage series I'm about to start.

Just as now, the antique and vintage yearbooks make fascinating reading, and are full of all kinds of research, charts, tables, etc. But - you guessed it - it's the pictures that interest me.

The USDA hired 21 artists from 1886 to 1942 to create images for its bulletins, yearbooks and other publications. Here's the cool thing: its National Agriculture Library has archived 7,584 of the paintings, lithographs and drawings. Wait. Here's the other cool thing: it sells high-quality reprints and - get this - part of sale proceeds go toward conservation of the collection. How cool is that? Find out more here.    

Stick to it. No, not New Year's resolutions ... I'm talking glue.

Ages ago, I promised a post about glue. I even took the photo above, showing some of myriad adhesives and sealers in my studio, then, promptly forgot about it. Well, my memory was jogged by a message this week from a friend pleading for help in creating ATCs. Her problem: getting them to stay flat once they were glued.

Wait, let me back up a minute to tell you about ATCs, which are Artist Trading Cards. Like most trading cards, they are small, generally 2.5" x 3.5." The difference is that each is an original work of art. I knew nothing about them before making collages and still have yet to make - or get - one. I ask other artists about them all the time and usually get a quizzical look and a shrug as a response. That belies the facts: ATCs are big business these days, with books showcasing them, supplies geared specifically toward making them, virtual archives, workshops, swap meets, etc. Just Google the phrase and you'll see what I mean.

Now back to adhesives. Wish I had an easy answer. Mine vary depending on the base (i.e.. watercolor paper, mat board, canvas), the papers being adhered, the weather, my mood.

Over time, I've become a fan of Yes! paste, which holds most papers flatter than matte medium, dries clear and is water soluble - making it a cinch to clean up overflow. There's been debate about its archival qualities but the formula was changed in recent years and it's acid-free. It can be hard to use, though - you need to learn how to spread it around; it took me a long time to discover that a little goes a long way - and it tears delicate papers.

That's when I turn to acrylic medium in varying weights - usually Golden; sometimes, Liquitex. I'm also a fan of PVA - ie., polyvinyl acetate - an archival adhesive used by bookbinders. Elmer's Glue is a PVA and I use it at times but it's not archival. So, I turn to Hollander's in Ann Arbor for PVA, which I usually can't find locally. (Note: they don't ship PVA when temps are below freezing). Over time, I discovered that mixing standard PVA with thick PVA provided the consistency I liked. The main drawback? It dries fast - as in FAST. Mixing methyl cellulose with it extend the drying time but I don't mess with that, I just work faster. As for how flat the final product is, well, again, that depends on the paper.

For a crash course in archival adhesives, head to the Talas web site. One alternative offered there: dry mounting sheets and tapes. They leave pieces flat, flat, flat but I've found that wrinkles pop up sometimes when sealing pieces.

Bottom-line: experiment. But you knew that was coming, didn't you?