Well, good morning blog!

It's certainly has a long time since my last post. I have a good reason for the absence: one of my younger sisters had a stroke and went into a coma for six weeks. On top of that, my dad was ailing.

All this was happening 600 miles away from Cincinnati. So, I hit the road, and made a decision to skip all social media - blog, Facebook, you name it - until things settled down. They have. Dad's doing better, and my sister awoke from the coma. She has a long road ahead of her, so I'll be driving back-and-forth to New Jersey this summer.

Work has helped me relax. So, I thought I'd share what's on the work table. It's in the same vein as "Meditation," a collage made for a winter exhibit. I'm creating a series that will continue to turn these "pretty" Victorian women into something more substantive. She's from The Royal Chatterbox, a coffee-table sized picture book for children published in 1881. Of course, this is just a start ...

Here she is now (5.24), below. Oh, the tiny woman on the right in the first image should be on the second one, but I didn't realize she had fallen off til now. At this point, everything is just placed, not even tacked down ...

 

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.