Lost ... and found

For the past nine months or so, I've been trying to locate a series of leaf images that I knew were in my stash. I looked in every corner of the studio, through the bins labeled "landscape," "flowers," "autumn," etc., even inside books to make sure they hadn't been stuffed in one. Though why I would do that, heaven only knows.

No luck ... 'til yesterday. I was tearing through the flower files looking for foliage for a jungle Grand Tour collage and spotted an archival envelope stuffed with paper. Voila! The missing plates.

I knew they were somewhere. It was quickly apparent why they hadn't been located earlier: the title page and a content page were facing outward, instead of images. So, I skipped over them. Happily, I was looking at every single thing in the files this time. Just goes to show that no matter how organized you think you are - and, yes, I believe that I am compulsively so - things go missing.  Here's a peek at four of the gorgeous chromolithographs, and that pesky title page ...

The ladies are touring again

I'm working on three The Grand Tour collages that take our intrepid travelers to the sky, sea and jungle. Definitely, not the requisite Grand Tour itinerary. It's been about six months since I did a piece in the series. As time goes by, the collages are getting larger, which presents a new set of challenges in terms of composition. I'm playing with scale on these, juxtaposing smaller and larger images to create the illusion of depth.

The jungle collage, now on the work table, has greenery composed of a vintage poster, an antique hand-colored botanical print, and a wallpaper sample with an antique map about the world's forests as the background. The "sky" is a feathery/leafy sheet of marbled paper printed in Australia that was a gift to me. I've been wed to that sky from the moment I pulled it out of the bin, but now that the collage has been photographed and I can view it on the computer, well, I'm not so sure it's the right sky.

I was already thinking about cropping the bottom of the collage to put more focus on the three travelers, and seeing the photo confirmed it. This means losing a lot of that beautiful map, along with the marbled paper. I was convinced that the marbled paper would fill the entire background, and was getting antsy, so I glued it to the mat board. Permanently. Gulp. I did the same with the map, gluing it over the marbled paper.

We'll see where this ends up. Meanwhile, I've learned the value of patience and will simply tack things down before making a final decision. That way, invaluable papers - such as that Guyot map - won't go to waste. Well, back to the studio ...

The evolution of a collage ...

I've been getting requests to document the making of a collage. I find it almost impossible to stop, snap a photo, continue, then, stop, take another photo, continue ... It interrupts the flow of ideas - and once I get into the groove, I forget to stop and take photos. Sometimes, it can take days - if not weeks - before a piece is complete, and I just don't want to bother to record it.  

That said, I gave it a shot with "Meditation," one of the collages in the Pulp Art exhibition at The Carnegie. The top image, was the jumping off point. It's an engraving published in 1888 in Frank Leslie's Popular Monthly, which included images of beautiful women for no reason other than that they were pretty pictures.

I wanted her to be more than eye candy and the title of the piece, "Meditation," gave me the idea of filling her head with some substantial stuff. 

I started by creating a background using the blank side of pages that described some antique engravings in my stash. My thinking was that an uncluttered background would offset the clutter soon to be in her head. Next, off with her hair - and the trees behind her.

Then, I begin playing around with what's going on in her head and with the idea of using the postage zone ruler. A bird lands in the picture, briefly, very briefly. Dozens of pieces of paper, ephemera and even a ceramic watch face went on - and off - during this part of the process. I wasn't happy with it and decided to let it sit for a dew days.

 

Not satisfied with the way it was going, I started to look around for something that could be streaming from her head, as thoughts might. Voila. I find it via an image in a vintage book of nature prints by Ernst Haeckel. Once the undulating underwater creature's tentacles are cut, it's the perfect vehicle for weaving in text and images.     

 

The angels wings make one final appearance, before they are ditched. Too cliche. The weaving is done on one of the cutting boards. Not that at this point - center - the top is trimmed. The section that was cut off is added to the right side, creating a nice gap in her thoughts. 

 

The bird man from early on reappears - and, this time, he stays. He adds a surreal, dreamlike feel. I toy around with putting a new pen in her hand. After cutting out about a dozen and trying them, the idea is ditched. Too distracting.    

At the last minute, flowers are added.