A New Direction, as Old as Time

This latest collage took a turn that's Southwestern or tribal or something; I've done a few of these o'er the years and attribute them to my Native American heritage. I'm not a Daughter of the American Revolution. No, we didn't come over on the Mayflower. We met the boat...... and paid dearly for our hospitality.......but I digress. I'll show you how this piece evolved over about 10 days.


I began by loosely painting a sanded birch board with gold, tan and beige thinned acrylics and then did the same on 4 small gallery wrapped canvases. Not sure at this point where we're heading, but collage always feels good when it's evolving.

With those dry, I pulled out a piece of cloth that I had painted a while back using bright acrylics. It's good to spend a day now and then just randomly painting, spattering, scribbling, and generally abusing cloth or papers for future use, and then it's like having your own specialty art store to browse in for beautiful collage media. I'll pull out a piece from long ago and say, "Oh wow! I wonder how I got that effect!"

As always, Marley was on the table beside me, helping, and the day I was working on the woven piece, made of strips I cut from handmade papers and later sprayed gold, my sister and I were talking on Skype with my netbook on the table as well. Obviously, my art doesn't require intense concentration.

Next came the white paper sculpture pieces, and I cut them out while watching TV with Marley on the recliner footrest. Each feather is one piece, and the big central, stringy piece is one sheet of paper. When Marley occasionally gets overcome with love and plops into my face for kisses, I try to incorporate whatever cuts result from the crash to make them look intentional, but his main contribution at this point is that he chewed up a whole cluster of feathers......That furry little critter is lucky I love him so much! It was his way of saying, "Mom, that feather cluster just wasn't working!" Good to have varied points of view.



Now the collage is taking shape, and I've got a clearer notion of what comes next. I pulled out the 3 found objects, that were pendants in another life, and thought they worked well.

I harvested the 5 sticks from the woods behind our house and varnished 3 of them, finally wrapping colored twine around the ends. The dark doorway on the third canvas is watercolor on heavy art paper.

Of course I made up a story about the meaning of my collage as I went, trying not to make the elements too blatantly symbolic or obvious in order to allow the viewer to create his or her own story about it.

Before attaching the papers, cloth, sticks and amulets, I glued the four canvases to the board, but it didn't feel stable, so Jim put in 8 long screws from the back for me. Now it's solid.

And that's our latest masterpiece. The flash makes it look a little glitzier than it actually is, but it's a chilly, gray, winter's day here. We're awfully glad you stopped by.
As ever,
cat & Marley

Paintin' Away!

Okay, here's a quickie post. Colleen, Annette and I each bought a DVD called Painted Papers by Elizabeth St. Hilaire Nelson so the 3 of us could paint together, though I live in Arkansas, Colleen is in Colorado, and Annette is in Texas. It has proven to be a fun technique, and we're all planning on doing more. I've always loved to work in mixed media, collage, and paper sculpture, and this technique showed me how to take it a step further by beginning on a birch board.

I bought a board @ Home Depot, and Jim cut it into 3 pieces, each 16X24 inches, even sanded them down for me, and I covered the front of one with clear gesso, loosely drew on my image of blueberries, then painted on watery acrylics, enjoying the oozing and runny effects. I had a stack of rice papers and mulberry paper, along with some printed sheets that I'd painted with more watery acrylics in shades of purple, green, blue, yellow, and near-black all ready for tearing and gluing.

The collaging process can either be tedious or relaxing, depending on your current state of mind. I tend to enjoy involved techniques and loved tearing tiny scraps of paper, aiming for shapes that reflected their destination, curves and circles for the berries and graceful strips for the leaves. When you're tearing, the shapes are never perfect, and that's a part of the artsy charm of this type of collage. You can opt either to cover all the under painting or leave parts of it showing. I wasn't giving up those pretty drips and runs, so I left quite a bit of mine showing.

I added some leaves that I cut from the painted paper and glued them loosely with the matte gel in order to give more dimension. As the piece neared completion (or where I considered the stopping place to be), I painted in touches of highlights on berries and leaves, some hand writing here and there, touches of gold leaf, and a few embossed stampings using a verdigris powder I've had for years and dread running out of it.

And now I still haven't decided on a design for my Christmas cards, so I'd best get going on that, but I'll be sharing more painted papers collages when there's time. Don't you just love this time of year??
Love, cat

Paper Sculpture

If you're like me, your inspirations come in waves. When I admitted to myself (after 4 intense years) that digital art wasn't doing it for me anymore, I went through a fairly scary dry spell, but lately, the waves have been crashing on shore so constantly that I'm making lists of inspirations, lest I forget some of them. How do I know when it's a worthwhile inspiration? I forget to breathe. That, and my heart beats faster, and sometimes I get tears in my eyes. Sounds like a religious experience, doesn't it? It is, sort of. When we create something from within, we're connected as though with an umbilical cord with El Shaddai, The Great I Am, Cosmic Consciousness, or whatever you choose to call It. Anyway, it's a rush, and it makes me happy and gives me a reason to get up in the morning, to wake up expectantly with plans already milling around in my scattered little brain for my current art victim.

I was working happily on the project I thought would come next in this blog when I went rummaging in a supply/storage closet and came across 2 paper lamps I'd bought years ago at Pier 1. One of them got damaged when visitors were rough-housing in the living room (nobody ever admitted to the crime; I guess it jumped off and impaled itself on the table corner), and I liked the lamps too much to throw them away. They're useless as a light source, but they give off such a soft, golden glow. How could I not love them? People talk a lot these days about repurposing objects. I like that term. It's good for the planet, and it speaks to the reverence for the stuff we bring into our lives.

A few years ago, I began doing paper sculpture. I didn't know that was the name for it. Actually, I thought I'd invented something when I began cutting shapes from paper and gluing them together. Then I saw online that artists had been doing it for a long time, even making a living from it. So much for my invention. I did several ambitious pieces, one of them being a 4-foot picture of peacocks in a tree, all white. I never was satisfied with it, but Jim made a frame for it, and it hung on the wall for a while. Then I decided I couldn't take it anymore, but I'd spent hundreds of hours cutting out those feathers, and I couldn't throw them away. Do we see a pattern forming here? So I stripped them from the backboard and stuffed them into a couple of Wal-Mart sacks and stuck them in the closet. Here's a detail of the feathers, and the image at the top is a shot of an iris watercolor/paper sculpture that hangs in the hallway.

So, there were the lamps and the feathers, waiting to be repurposed, together; Breathe, Cat, just breathe.....I abandoned the other project for the moment and began feverishly gluing feathers to lamps, making sure to cover the damaged spot. It took about an hour, and I could hardly wait till dark to see the full impact of my new lamps! Well, I'm in love with them. They're not really repurposed; they're still lamps but with a new attitude. Hard to do them justice in photos.


'Scuse me now, I started yet another project yesterday, and it's the kind that involves the house, and Jim will be impatient with me till I get it finished and everything back to normal. He likes my art, just not the messy part between inspiration and ta-daaah!