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.  

  

Save the date! My first exhibit of 2013.

The Carnegie's Pulp Art exhibit has popped up in the blog a few times recently, so I thought I'd share the official postcard announcement. The exhibit will fill all six galleries with paper art, from large installations to more intimate work.  Here's a complete list of the artists with links to the web sites I could find. I think it'll give you some idea of what to expect ...

Kristine Donnelly

Mary Gaynier

Travis Graves

Jennifer Grote

Matt Kotlarczyk

Sara Pearce

Peg Rhein

Carl Schuman

Jonpaul Smith

Allison Svoboda

Roscoe Wilson 

Oh, tickets for opening will be available at the door, and can be ordered in advance by phone (859.957.1940) or online. Hope to see you there.

Garden of anatomical delights

Tender Cares. That's the name of the collage this detail is taken from. (Yeah, still have a larger scanner on my Wish List.) It's part of an untitled series in which I give genteel Victorian/Edwardian era illustrations of women a sharp twist. They're for the exhibit Pulp Art, which opens at The Carnegie Visual and Performing Arts Center on Jan. 11.

The original engraving was actually titled Tender Cares - and by the time I finished the piece it seemed like an apt - and wonderfully ironic - name. The image was plucked from The Royal Chatterbox (1881), a beautiful, oversized picture book for children spun off from Britain's Chatterbox magazine. It's been languishing in the attic, because I just couldn't take it apart. I'm, obviously, over that.

The cutting is more complex in these collages than anything I've attempted in the past. The anatomical illustrations are from a variety of antique books, including a few different editions of Gray's Anatomy. The background is another one of those made in 2010 at a Greater Cincinnati Calligraphy Guild workshop on creating background surfaces. Everything created then was stashed away in a box that I rediscovered while was working on the bomb series.
 
One more thing: These collages are larger than past ones. Not huge, mind you, but bigger. I expect them to be 18" x 22" when framed.