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 ...

Traveling clothes

Well, here are the three latest The Grand Tour collages that I've been writing about, all framed and ready to be shown at Saturday's 7th Annual Art Affaire show on the grounds of the Promont House Museum in Milford, Ohio.

They are my largest pieces yet. When having them framed, I picked the same molding in different shades and opted for "museum" glass, which cuts down on reflections and glare. The glass is pricey but worth it, because it lets viewers see all the details. They even look fantastic in this low-res photo.

I'm showing in the dining room, which I set up early this evening. Just a few little things to tend to before the show opens at 11 a.m.

I'll be there until closing, which is at 5 p.m. And in addition to the Grand Tour pieces - there are 3 more - I brought along collage tags, and flock of Out On a Limb collages and three shadowboxes.

Their bags are packed ...

Hard to believe it's been 6 months since I made a Grand Tour collage. Well, the ladies are touring again as I make new collages for Milford's 7th annual Art Affaire on Saturday Sept. 22. As intrepid as ever, the gang is traveling under the sea (above - early working version); performing on stage; trying their hands at fly fishing; and there may be some time traveling, too. You will be seeing more soon but, for now, it's off to the studio ...

9.13: Update: The almost-finished collage with significant changes. I'll add more shadowing, seal it 
and whisk it off to the framers ...

The Grand Tour: Submerged (SOLD)
mixed-media collage: antique, hand-painted fashion plate (Peterson's Magazine, Sept. 1880) and illustrations (Popular Educator, circa 1880; Art Forms in Nature, 1899); vintage illustrations (Handbook for Shell Collectors,1948; Harter's Picture Archive, 1974); recycled wrapping paper; acrylic, watercolor, dye, marker, ink. 14" x 11" on acid free mat board. 

Counting the days

The calendars are coming! I've been hard at work designing four different calendars for 2013. This time around, they'll be done before the first week of December. Way before.

The two above will be joined by an Out On a Limb calendar featuring new collages in that bird series, and a general Paper With a Past calendar with a mix of imagery.

Like the 2012 calendar, they will be a handy 5.5" x 8.5" and will be packaged in a clear box. But this time around, they'll be wire-bound and on heavier stock.

I plan to offer an advance order price of $12, after which the price will be $15. More as it happens ...

Flights of fancy

It was 1907 - just a few years after the Wright brothers took to the skies - and the world was entranced by the idea of flight. So, how would an illustrator imagine the future port of New York as anything other than a fantastic Sky Harbor? That's where artist Arthur T. Merrick's imagination took him in the November 1907 issue of Saint Nicholas Magazine. The popular children's monthly included many whimsical spot illustrations. Here's another one from the December 1907 issue featuring artist E.B. Bird's musing on Santa's chosen mode of transport 100 years in the future ...

The Grand Tour: high-wire shenanigans

©The Grand Tour: Marie, Honore and Lily Were Ignored by Their Travelmates
But the Venetians Were Enthralled (2012)
mixed-media collage: antique illustrations (The Delineator, Dec. 1895, Sept. 1903, Oct. 1904)
and engineering engraving; vintage illustration (Picture Sourcebook, Dover, 1978);
recycled greeting card, book endpaper, circus exhibition poster and catalog;
 watercolor; ink. 11.5" x 8.5" on archival mat board.  Framed with conservation glass.
(Sold)

I knew from the outset that one of the new The Grand Tour collages would have at least one woman walking a high wire - just not who or where. Well, Venice's St. Mark's Square seemed a natural. After all, no Grand Tour could be called complete without a stop in Venice.

The original illustration included the sky, the plaza floor and more people. I cut those out, saved the tiny people to cut out and reinsert later, replaced the sky with an engineering engraving and the plaza with end papers fittingly decorated with lions - Venice's mascot.

The hoops - recycled from a pop-up, greeting card I received - came into play after scouring my stash for a sun or something astronomical to place in the sky. I liked that the blue hoops were decorated with stars and that the golden one's measurements complement the engineering engraving. The hoops also draw attention to the trio, who are close in size to the figures in the foreground who are so pointedly ignoring them.

Arnold Guyot: Putting it on the map

While searching the archive for images for a collage series called "The Grand Tour" I came across three books I had forgotten about. You'll read about two of them sometime later; the one that has me captivated now is "Physical Geography" by Arnold Guyot, published in 1872 by Charles Scribner's Sons as part of Guyot's Geographical Series. I'm unsure whether I knew the extent of the maps when I bought this - that seems unlikely given how wonderful they are. Six are double-pagers hinged in so that they can be removed intact.

For collages, I use materials in not-so-great shape. Even then, I feel guilty deconstructing, okay, ripping up, books (in my past: a masters degree in library science). But I took this apart, because damaged pages needed to be removed before they impacted others. It was hard labor; the volume was meant to stand up to classroom wear and tear. It was glued, stapled and had tapes running from the spine through the pages. I try to be careful, so I end up looking at each page closely, the upshot: it became obvious the maps were not headed for dissection. At least not by me. So, they were cleaned, scanned and tucked into archival sleeves.

I'm unsure what's next. Conservation and framing? A sale? Give away? Donation? But I do know that now that I've rediscovered them, I want to ogle them a bit longer. As Guyot wrote in the preface "the numerous maps constitute in themselves a work as laborious as it is indispensable. They have been prepared with great care, and are thought to embody the results obtained to the present day in this domain of scientific inquiry." They are colorful and handsome, especially the pulsating maps charting Temperature of the Air; the Course of the Annual Isothermal Lines (detail, below); Rain Over the Globe; and The Course of The Tidal Wave In the Three Great Oceans and the Great River Basins (at top).

I try to step back in time and imagine the thrill of looking over the maps, and the beautifully engraved illustrations of natural phenomena, exotic animals and foreign lands. It must've been something to have one of these in a classroom.