Tumblr Categories

I have been amusing myself (now that I no longer have Netflix) by collecting Tumblr images in various categories: Art I Like, Crosses, Dots, Eyes, Hands, and Patterns to name a few of my favorites. I have expanded my sidebar list of Tumblr Links to 50 visually interesting sites.

I have a particular fondness for phrenological heads and palmistry hands so I was thrilled to discover the amazing piece pictured above. The artist is Simon Evans and you can see more of his work at the James Cohan Gallery.

The sections of color remind me of maps, particularly the ones that illustrate bedrock geology. I have a feeling that I will be doing my own version of hands, and perhaps even a head or two as well!

Marbled Paper

I've been collecting marbled paper for a while with the intent of using it for collage. It started with marbled endpapers in old books from the dump. And I bought some incredible hand marbled paper from Chena River Marblers out of Amherst, Massachusetts. I have a sheet like the fantastic multicolored one, and also the gold one shown on their home page.

But what prompted me to begin this post was the discovery of these fabulous marbled paper images from a really interesting site called Sheaff: ephemera. Don't miss the artistic printing album. I love these red and green hands, and also this cool hand postcard advertising the New Hampshire Craftsmans Fair at New Hampshire's Mt. Sunappe State Park. There's even an anti-tipping hand.

And also this view of the interior of the Park Street subway station in Boston. And how about this combination of dots and postage stamps, or this cool body in a bottle!

And if you liked the body in a bottle, you will love the collages of Muharrem Cetin. along with each image is a series of detail views of the piece. It's a very simple but effective site and the work is very thought-provoking. The collage detail above from Cetin's piece titled "False Five" with marbled paper provided a nice tie-in to my original subject. Seeing it has made me decide to pull together some of my marbled papers tomorrow.

Old Valentines With Hands

I purchased these from an antique shop in Essex, Massachusetts around 1980. I especially like the hands. And also the sentiment on the green bow: "Far from thee - be every care." The fan-shaped card has a red yarn ruffle.

Wishing you all a happy valentines day for this Postcard Friendship Friday!

How They Do That

The mystery solved, thanks to the 1923 Book of Knowledge. Very nice hands, playing cards and numbers.

Fame According to Andy

I quoted Andy Warhol over on Facebook this morning: "In the future everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes." Well, I feel famous today! Read the interview about my collage art that was published this morning on Marty Weil's blog, Ephemera: Exploring the World of Old Paper.

Marty has featured some tempting potential collage materials as found on eBay like these old underground newspapers from San Francisco's hippy counter-culture.

The illustration above is from my Zinc Pennies series. And the ones below are from The Mandrake Project, the result of trying to achieve animation in Photoshop. . . getting closer all the time. I actually got one sequence to move, but not quite as I had intended!

Treasure Shopping

This morning I visited The Treasure Shop up the street from my house in Wakefield Village and found this lovely book cover to use for collage.

Another cool find was a copy of Handbook of Early Advertising Art - Typographical and Ornamental Volume by Clarence P. Hornung. It's full of plates photographed from type specimen books from the 19th century and a lot of them ("Demented Darwinians" for example) reveal much about their time and are hilarious to read.

Also stuck inside I found a page of hands cut from another design book:

Some magnificent collage inspiration here, to be sure!

And I also added this gem to my collection of decorative endpapers: