The long inadvertant silence ended

I was a little shocked when I saw how much time had gone by since my last post.  After my last collage was finished, I thought I'd take a little time to revive my late grandfather's 1968 Plymouth Fury VIP and Valerie and I would build an upstairs room in the attic during my vacation from the day job. Reviving the Fury went comparatively fast, home remodelling longer than anticipated. Below is a picture of the Fury and then on to the new collages I recently completed with some notes about the most recent Paris Artwalk.

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Material left over from the last collage, From Her Voice Came The Music of the Centuries inspired two more collages to make a triptych of sorts. The original image is below followed by the two new pieces.

From Her Voice Came The Music of the Centuries, collage, 11x14 inches

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My Longing Came In Music Soaked Memories, collage, 11x14 

inches

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I Know Now Who I Once Was
collage, 11x14 inches

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While I like viewers of my paintings and collages to come up with their own stories when they look at my work, I have my own stories in my mind as I make them. With the set of collages above, I sort of imagined a kind of Wilkie Collins meets steampunk tale in which a Victorian woman using some sort of tinfoil phonograph recorder reaches deep into the past and revives long dormant memories and longing.

It Was Then I Realised I Was Too Late, collage, 11x14 inches, Click on image to enlarge

In this image, a young man stumbles upon a scene in which one man seems to be channelling energy to another through some device he wears on his head as a woman stands transfixed in contemplation. I have no idea what this is about. Possibly the man wearing the device is a mad scientist and he is controlling both the woman and the other man. Or perhaps, the woman is in collusion with the device wearer. Or something else altogether different.

From Her My Thoughts Could Not Turn Away, collage, 11x14 inches, Click to enlarge image

The final collage in this entry was sold at the Paris Artwalk last Friday. I was just barely able to get this collage photographed as I had literally just finished it that morning and had not expected to sell it at the end of the day. The composition is as much accident as choice. The man's face had been partially cut off in the enlargement process but it also is what inspired the composition altogether. While listening to an cylinder phonograph, a late Victorian gentleman recalls the one love he could not forget.

There will not be a separate post on the Paris Artwalk as I usually do because for some reason I did not take my usual photographs of the set up and the visitors. But, having said that, it was still a most excellent Artwalk even though I was a bit off the beaten path. I'm now showing at the Paris-Bourbon County Public Library where I used to work. The set up was in the courtyard outside and even though it was terribly hot that day, still had a good time. Valerie wafted bubbles down High Street and her daughter made a small sandwich board out of one of my promotional posters and waded through the crowds on Main Street where most of the Artwalk took place. We were one block over with a few other participants. I spun gramophone records and while I did not have as many people as I normally saw, I got more people actually interested in the art resulting in the sale of the collage. Valerie had made some experimental steampunk necklaces that incorporated miniature copies of some of the collages. Of the ten she made, she sold four. 

I find it interesting that when I got a little off the beaten path, I broke my Artwalk sales drought. Everyone at the Paris-Bourbon County library was just great and I thank all of you for hosting a former co-worker. Look forward to being there in April!

And now for something a bit different

To Recall the Life That Arose Before My Eyes, 2009, collage, 18x24 inches.
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I Now Know What I Must Do, 2009, collage, 16x20 inches
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In late 1997, during a terrible painting block, I took up making collages as a way of looking at what I was doing through a somewhat different filter. I'm not in a painting block now because Amor Aeterna is very close to completion but I thought I would revisit the collage. There are a couple of different schools of collage that are incorporating Victorian imagery into their work. The current school is what I think of as the Somerset Studio school of collage which uses not only images but also text, small objects and may also extended to multiple movable panels etc.

An older school of collage is the kind where the image maker has a stack of Dover clip art books filled with wonderful Victorian images and from other sources they've saved of a similar type. Later practitioners of this school make use of computer scans to arrange their compositions etc while others still use photocopiers, scissors and Mod Podge (tm) to create their collages. I decided to be of the old Mod Podge school.

The first two of my collages are posted here. I've saved a lot of material over the years and started looking at it again recently. Instead of mounting my collages to a sheet of cold press watercolour paper as I did in 1997, I decided to mount them to canvas panels using the different sized panels allowed greater freedom of composition. This necessitated making enlargements of my backgrounds and then piecing them together onto the canvas panel. I cut out all of the elements I wish to place on the background and rather than just rough cut and slap them down, I cut out everything very carefully including negative spaces in say the crook of a figure's arm or some part where when cut out would reveal the background.

I also looked at the particular line quality of each element with a view towards matching it. I wanted the collage to have a visual logic to it so that each part would be believable as a whole. One of the developments of the modern photocopier is that you can print images in reverse if desired. In the closeup of the collage below, the lady in the middle ground has been reversed so that her shadowing matches the troubled gentleman in the foreground as well as the lighting of the ruins behind them. The composition is being treated exactly the same as though I were doing a paintings.

I Now Know What I Must Do, detail
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The use of colour is designed to stand out from the sepia toned collages I see so much of which is to say the collage is meant to be brand new rather than a weathered and aged object found in an attic somewhere. The colours also are tied to my normal painting palette but in the case of collage I use transparent glazes so as not to obscure the underlying original detail. My colours are described as jewel toned in my paintings, I wanted to maintain this quality in the collages.

I also want the collages to suggest their own stories in the viewer's mind. Fans of the writing of Wilkie Collins and J. Sheridan LeFanu and other Victorian writers of the mysterious and the fantastic will have no trouble conjuring up narratives in their minds. However, I found that viewers completely unfamiliar with the conventions of the Victorian novel easily came up with universal narrative to describe what they thought the collages were about. Steampunk is a fascination of mine and some of my 1997 era collages were definitely steampunk and some of the 2009 images will revisit some of that territory with a new eye. In the end, the themes of my paintings and my collages are not all that far apart if at all.

Your experience may vary.