K went into the office this morning and Finn and I accompanied him to the T. The cool gray 7:00 am hour was quiet. Pleasant. And, since I didn’t really sleep last night, it was good to get the walk in before I crump.
Came home, vacuumed studio and then cranked out a few collages. The clean up and organizing around here is gaining momentum. Garage and basement. Ooh boy! This rhododendron-hand collage has two sides. In part, this represents the long-standing quilter’s appreciation for the “other” side of compositions. It’s also a result of watching with curious interest as Jude creates two-sided quilts — each side with composed patchwork, the stitching going through.
I’m liking torn edges and learning to place dark colors under them to showcase them. When flipping a collage over, I find the serendipity of the other side of magazine pages fun — in this instance, the dishes in the lower left. Here, I made two variations of the rhodie/bubble digital collage and then split up a single Natl Geo page of an ancient sculpture. So the two sides are thematically related.
I’d already been working on the photo of bubbles provided by the Paris Collage Collective this week, using — what else? — house images. There are : some old photos of a house form stenciled in reverse on a page of the NYTimes, a collage from Acey’s 2019 prompts and, in one of them, a red version color xerox of a collage creates in SF of a Northampton house I lived in. Further down, are variations using three different house quilts.
We might get as much as one inch of rain an hour starting this afternoon. But it isn’t likely we’ll lose power. It took SIX TRUCKS working all day to repair the toppled street light and busted transformer around the corner that I mentioned recently. I cannot begin to imagine how long it’s gonna take Louisiana.
Communications seems to be up as an issue right now. My own and others’ blunders. Expectations dashed, then revised. Opinions yanked around. Sometimes I just want to crawl into a hole and suck my thumb.
I love the 2 sided paperwork…!!!
Me too! I’ve also been applying another thing I’ve learned from you and that is : building integrity between the layers. With paper collage I used to stop once I got the surface how I wanted it. Now I like to flip it over (even when not two-sided) and apply more glue and strips of paper to render the whole thing sturdier.
I’ve been thinking about the crossover as I reconsider paper. I think 2022 will be considering paper year, yay!
Two-sided collage, how fun! I like the prompt over your cloth houses. With that prompt, I’d be tempted to collage things into each big bubble, symbolizing this time…but of course lack of rain did not inspire seeing them as raindrops! Interesting.
That’s a great concept.
crawl into hole…..
but then,
there’s just going. and it’s the just going that wins out
Thanks Grace. I do know this. Just get to feeling defeated in a general sort of way sometimes.
love how the rhodo is transformed into something so surreal & futuristic by your colour variation
this weekly contest/practice has been so much fun. Part of what’s satisfying is seeing what others produce each week. MANY go the surreal route, with fish in the sky and melting staircases and mismatched heads and bodies, etc.
Enjoying your collage images and how you go about it with such creativity and then I came to your bit about communication. How it came to me that there are times when no matter how I try to write simply and clearly, there are moments when something lurks in the background as in…
This morning, I left what I thought was a simple, joyful comment on grace’s blog about harvesting my little planter box of Swiss chard. In my head, I wrote “another meal” but what typed was “antihero meal”…! I didn’t catch it until I got back from a trip to the library and went back to reading some blogs. Saw the glitch and left a comment on my “goofy” spelling but WHAT! it isn’t even political season and I’m already typing the word antihero! So wonder what is in my subconscious ?!
Or maybe in anticipation of finally being able to check out of the library, a copy of Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, I am readying myself for what will be a fascinating, hair on the back of my head read…I tried to get this book last year and I was 17th on the hold list. (Our library lets you check out books for 3 weeks and you can renew them 3 more times for 3 weeks each time.
Autocorrect produces some real choice meanings, doesn’t it? I’m often saying, “that’s such a food reason to do that…” or something like it when I mean “good reason”. I constantly mistype for as foe and I wonder why foe isn’t corrected. How many people are busy using the word foe in their sentences?
I love doing sided works. Hard to get framed though? I took a big two sided piece to be framed. It wasn’t my work, it is a old Thai (maybe) script with drawings that my favorite art history prof gave me back in 1978. I took it to a really good framer who said it was too big to frame two-sided so I had to choose a side. I still think… there must be way. Sandwiched between 2 pieces of plexiglass in a stand? hanging from the ceiling? These two sided quilts you mention sound great. How big are these collages? just curious…
Weather. we spend the morning fixing (we hope) a breach in the bank of our little stream – thanks to Henri the breach got really big, actually redirected the stream and flooded down into my rain garden with *pebbles and rocks* and then out into the back field. Tonight we are also in the path of the remnants of Ida… very hard to predict how many inches here. Right, what must it be like in New Orleans? How long to recover? What next…? stay safe.
Oh no your garden! I guess it’s hard to get too upset, thinking about New Orleans, as you point out. The dead will be piling up there due to the absence of power (how long can generators keep a ventilator going?).
Yeah framing/display would be an issue if I was planning to do anything with these things. It could be sandwiched between glass or plastic and be reversible, like you say. It’s too small (5×8”?) to be hung and viewed from both sides.
I remember that you have your collage works protected in books or folder, and that works beautifully. Hand held, too. I always imagine them huge for some reason when I see them online.
“The dead will be piling up”. And the living are walking to TX?? I’d choose another state myself – unless I were invited to camp out on Beto’s lawn…
My rain garden! Thanks for your sympathy. Alas. There is a sliver lining that Mother Nature’s destruction gave to my hand hewn frog pond. First, she’s told me “it’s in the right place”. That was Dan’s precision measurements of slope of the french drain pipe exit. Second, the water flow from redirected stream was so strong that it brought a ton or two of rocks and pebbles down into pond, AND left behind a path of variable sized stones that form the most beautiful terrace, very shallow and gently, artfully, placed. Amazing. A Japanese Zen gardener couldn’t have pulled this off with a rake, and I’ll take it! But I will dig out most of the pebbles still in the hole, maybe rescue some of those native sedges buried in the bottom. But my back is saying, “not today”, and that means it may not happen at all. Gotta a lotta painting to do before winter. Maybe a Zen pebble rake is my next purchase.
Right now these collages are independent. I’ve been piling them into — guess what? — yet another plastic bin.
Texas. I’ve been yelling on Twitter. And reading. And listening to women who’ve advocated for women’s health their entire careers. As scary as the whole thing is, is it possible the extremity of the state’s position (vigilante enforcement? Really?) and the SCOTUS’s disregard for decades of precedent will rouse a huge backlash? And if it does, will it matter? (because of voter suppression — as Elie Mystal asked yesterday). Remember when KPOP got thousands of people to fake-sign up for one of TFG’s rallies? I’ve seen a way to send in faux comments to the TX whistleblower hotline. Let me know if you’re interested. It’s a little complicated. But not for you.
Wow. Your description of the creek overflow makes me see it in a much different light. All those rocks! And what about NJ ? We had more water in the cellar than we’ve had in a while , but that just means a skim coat puddle traveling from old part of basement to new. Didn’t get to my side.
And yes, PAINT!
Are you and yours ok there? How’s your basement?
I am in a similar place…exceptionally hard week but know that I am lucky in so many ways. Love the collage with the house and bubbles in blues/greens/the bit of red.
Hope in the days since you left this comment, things have shifted for you. Labor Day Weekend means nothing this year, another casualty of COVID, I guess. Same July 4, Memorial Day. I am wondering how we’ll manage Christmas already.
that first image immediately brought to mind Tansy Hargan’s “Finding your Colour Voice” class (which has me totally enthralled and therefore not at all blogging) … one of her exercises is “Colour mapping” a walk by noting the colors that jump out at you … “Share the Road” is the perfect example
you may or may not recall that it was/is your incredible use of color that inspired me to sign up for the online class … it turned out to be a very good call, so thank you!
Thanks for that. I want to hear more. I thought you were gonna take something with palimpsest parade? Oh I just checked over on Instagram. That’s her name, Tansy. HOW IS IT GOING? I just saw in one of my notebooks, Notes about her class earlier in the year. I was so tempted. Maybe next time? I cannot wait to see what you’re doing. Her sensibility very much lines up with mine.