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:

Marshall McLuhan

I'm reading The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man by Herbert Marshall McLuhan (1951; reprinted 2002 by Gingko Press). It is so perfect for me to be reading right now. When I heard about it on the design site You Work For Them I immediately thought how inspiring it would be for collage. It's full of old magazine advertisements from the 1940's. No wonder why TV advertising in particular is so twisted. It's roots are critically examined by McLuhan and his views are so cogent to me today that it is hard to believe they were written almost sixty years ago! It made me remember Wilson Bryan Key's book Subliminal Seduction which was assigned to me in college in 1977. I found an interesting discussion on subliminal advertising by Carrie McLaren.

What a mind! I think Marshall McLuhan is the person I'd most like to be stuck in an elevator with. (Well, apart from Leonard Cohen, especially if we could both be 20 years younger!) I especially love "How Not to Offend" (pp. 60-62) in which he notes the link that D.H. Lawrence makes with industrialization and the "cult of hygiene" and its disgust with the human organism. "Everybody stinks but Jesus" according to an old French Protestant hymn!

There's a nice list of Marshall McLuhan quotations here including one that goes: "I may be wrong, but I am never in doubt." I had a button saying that when I was a teenager but I never knew the source of the statement until now.

I was recently given a lovely stack of old Saturday Evening Post magazines (chock full of wonderful advertisements from the 40's and 50's) and I think The Mechanical Bride will help inspire me to make good use of them!

Moire Animation

A cool site called You Work For Them (which I discovered through Grain Edit ) offers some very tempting design books and videos. I really enjoyed the black and white clip from their video collection titled Moire 01 . Another in color is interesting also: Moire 04 .

Collaged Poster with Encyclopedia Dots

I have been making a poster for the art raffle fundraiser for the Gafney Library. My task was to create a design that would accommodate the names of the 38 artists who are donating work for the event. I'd planned to take photos to document every step, but as I got closer to finishing I couldn't break the momentum to stop and take pictures. I was under a little deadline pressure as well.

Working on a piece of 24x30 inch canvas board, I arranged 16 large circles (using a dvd as a template) to begin the design. I envisioned the names as radiating out from the center of the circles. There needed to be space for 38 names. I printed them out in Photoshop along with the text for the bottom of the poster. At first some names were displayed on the diagonal but I finally settled on a design where all the names were at right angles:

I had recently rescued a set of encyclopedias with the covers missing from the paper dumpster at the town dump. I was attracted to the lovely colors (lots of yummy yellow) of the endpapers and thought that recycled books would be appropriate for a library related event. I had seven front pages like this:

And also seven back pages like this:

I traced my dots to include my favorite parts and was able to get two dots (each yielding four quarters) from each page. The part that took the most time was deciding on the arrangement of the quarters. When I finally got a satisfactory arrangement, I photographed the piece and looked at it on the computer screen from across the room to check the light and dark areas. The hardest part was deciding which quarter to place in the central position. Here's an early arrangement:

All of the words and the encyclopedia pages were coated on both sides with acrylic medium and trimmed:

Then they were put in place on the canvas board which had previously received two coats of medium. I ironed the surface in one step to adhere the elements to the canvas board, using a large sheet of silicone paper to protect the surface from being marked by (and sticking to) the iron.

Then I used blue painter's tape to mask the outside edges of the main design and layed down some .5mm white cotton cord to delineate the boundry of the white space behind the names, taping down the ends of the cord on the painter's tape. I locked the cords into place by covering the square area of the design with a sheet of very thin Japanese white tissue. I applied acrylic medium with a small brush over the entire surface, being particularly careful of the area around the string. This made the top layer virtually disappear and allowed the colors underneath to show through. Then I trimmed the ends of the cord even with the thin tissue and removed the painter's tape.

My last design task was to make a decision about the small dots at the intersection of the names. After playing around with different versions in photoshop, I decided to use two contrasting colors in order to have alternating colors at the four corners to create some movement:

I selected dark blue and pink from my stash of colored endpapers (to comply with the recycled book theme). Dots were punched using an arch punch from coated paper, set in place, and adhered with an iron.

As a final step I applied two more coats of acrylic medium to the entire poster, allowing it to dry thoroughly between coats. The design reminds me of those Yo-Yo quilts where you gather circles of fabric and attach them at the edges.

Nature's Light Show

The fireflies were amazing last night. The back yard, the marsh, and the trees on the opposite side were full of them. Every once an a while something would stir them up, deer walking around perhaps, and their flashing numbers would increase. I stood in the dark and watched them for about a half hour.

There were no fireflies where I used to live. I would see them occasionally at campgrounds but never like I see them here. It was magic the first time I saw them all over my yard, thirteen years ago, right after I moved in. Maybe it's all the rain we have been having that made their show so incredible last night!

Rescue from Indecision

I'm so happy that I got insight into the completion of one of my archived collages. The solution came to me just now as I am sitting here with my tea. It needs some flames at the bottom. . . more red! I'll probably paint the flames because I doubt that the right photo is at hand. Well, there is one but it is ear-marked for another project. Although I could use it as a reference for the painting.

Or maybe I can find an old engraving that I can scan, enlarge and hand-color. Something from Dante to evoke the flames of hell.

Another Photo Opportunity Missed!

I was monitoring the chipmunk activity on the recently filled feeders behind Anita's Beads last evening. Whenever I notice the birds being outnumbered I call out the window: "Who's chippie's out there?" and they usually jump off. The newbies run for the hills, but the more seasoned ones come closer in anticipation of strawberries or some such treat.

Last night as I called out I noticed that one of the feeders I had filled not one hour earlier was already one third empty. And the one stubborn chipmunk still feeding on it refused to retreat, scattering seeds furiously every time I repeated the call. Somehow he had managed to squeeze himself into the feeder without removing the top but could not get himself out!

It would have made a great picture but I missed it. This photo of the feeder outside my studio window gives you an idea of the type I'm talking about. Picture it containing a chipmunk having a panic attack.

Linked to Roderick Slater

I've mentioned the influence of my first favorite collage artist, Roderick Slater, once before. I actually own one of his pieces now. It's hard to find images of his work anywhere. From what I understand, Slater leads a quiet unconnected life somewhere in Maine.

Jonathan Talbot (another collage hero of mine) has an image of Slater's collage called Mnemonic Device on his site. And once and a while I see one on eBay. Which leads me to the reason for this post.

An eBay seller called "slaterworks207" is offering Taste Contained by Roderick Slater. In the description mentioning artists influenced by Slater, he links to AnitaNH: Collage & Life!

Pictured above is "Landslide for Erin" by Roderick Slater, with more details below.

Dumpster Diving

Here's a beautiful example of 1901 endpapers from the "Encyclopedic Dictionary of American Reference" to add to my collection for collage. My favorite friend procured this cover-less book for me by climbing into the paper dumpster at the town recycling center. Now if that isn't love, what is?

Clearing My Head

Have things been weird for you over the last couple of days? Some find the rain depressing, but it hasn't bothered me yet-- it's making everything so green. And it also serves to keep the chipmunks from raiding the feeders so often.

I am recovering from a severe technology snit. I won't go into detail here because there is no collage about it forthcoming. You can read all about it at my new weblog called The Temporary Blog, created to solve a communication problem.

Why I Love Being Here

A deer was born in my backyard this morning. I looked out the back window to see what the chipmunks were chattering about and saw the mother leading her newborn across the yard. When she reached the tall grass in the shady corner she laid down with it for over an hour before moving into the trees.

It was such an amazing sight. At first I was surprised that the deer was crossing the open area so slowly. . . usually they just go bounding through. Then I saw the tiny newborn following her. The mother could see me standing in the window and I was amazed again when she came to rest so close to the house.

I didn't want to intrude with the binoculars or camera. But this picture taken last fall shows where they were resting. The grass is longer now.

Romare Bearden

I watched The Art of Romare Bearden last night on Netflix CD. His collages are absolutely amazing. What a good documentary. I'm going to watch it a few more times over the weekend before I send it back. Most of the work shown is stuff I have never seen before. If you love collage you owe it to yourself to check this one out!

A show titled From Process to Print consisting of 75 of Bearden's graphic works is traveling around the country. It will be near me at Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine from October 1, 2009 through January 3, 2010.

The Cult of Done Manifesto

I came across this cool manifesto of "done" while blog surfing this afternoon. Point five states: "Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it." I'm visualizing all of the unfinished collages I have banished to my Archive of Indecision and wonder if that amounts to abandonment.

I can thoroughly embrace point six: "The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done." From an artistic standpoint, to be finished is frightening. To me it means that I am totally out of ideas. But the idea of finishing one thing to get other things done implies a continuum of new things to do.

Point eight which states, "Laugh at perfection. It's boring and keeps you from being done," is probably the key to getting art finished. Otherwise I might keep on playing it safe and stop before I'm done to avoid missing perfection!

Original Source Material

In creating my found image collages I recycle books, turning their pages, endpapers, covers, and dust jackets into art. Some images seem to be attracted to others and hitherto unrelated topics suddenly connect into stories populated by dots and symbols of significance.

Lately, however, my librarian side has begun to reassert itself. Old discards arranged on shelves by topic become fond friends.

So one possible plan is to make more use of scanned and printed images. I'm conflicted over this, however, because the original papers and inks are so rich. The paper of the jacket above is rubbed and worn to perfection!