Category Archives: Collage/Mixed Media

2003 Calendar – February

Here’s a project I did in 2001-2002 that I had forgotten about. Now, here in 2022-2023, I will take a trip down memory lane and show it to you, once each month.
Why this schedule? Because it is a calendar. For 2003.
I made three of these – one for my son, one for my parents, and one for my husband. It’s the last one that I am showing to you. They were all alike except for the covers.
I hoped this calendar could be a small record of a certain time in our family. I do not know if my son still has his version, and my parents now are dead and their things scattered and gone, but here is the one we still have at our house, a voice speaking up again from the past.
If you want to know more about this calendar, look here.

Here is the collage image I used for the month of February, 2003. It’s called “February Haven” and was 11″ x 14″. It depicts The Quadrant, a coffee shop/bookstore in Easton, PA, where I spent a lot of time during this time in my past, including having a couple of art exhibits in their upstairs gallery space.

Here is the page in the calendar.

Happy February!

As for the notes, #1, I love Valentine’s Day and making and sending cards. #4. We had large gardens at this house and enjoyed planning and planting. #10. I love playing double (or triple or quadruple) solitaire.

2003 Calendar – January

Here’s a project I did in 2001-2002 that I had forgotten about. Now, here in 2022-2023, I will take a trip down memory lane and show it to you, once each month.
Why this schedule? Because it is a calendar. For 2003.
I made three of these – one for my son, one for my parents, and one for my husband. It’s the last one that I am showing to you. They were all alike except for the covers.
I hoped this calendar could be a small record of a certain time in our family. I do not know if my son still has his version, and my parents now are dead and their things scattered and gone, but here is the one we still have at our house, a voice speaking up again from the past.
If you want to know more about this calendar, look here.

Here is the collage image I used for the month of January, 2003. It’s called “January Diversion” and was 11″ x 14″. I made this image from a photo I took when my son went skating with a school group at the Old York Road rink in Elkins Park, PA (He is the guy in green pants near the front).

I don’t think this rink is still in business, but I’m not sure. As a note, about a year later I decided I wanted to learn to ice skate, went hereto the first lesson, fell, and broke my elbow. The end of my skating career.

Here is the page in the calendar.

Happy January!

As to the notes, #1. Raquel and Jaspar were a couple of our cats, a brother and sister duo who lived another 15 years or so and died within 6 weeks of one another. As for all the others, you can see that this month, the depth of winter, required a lot of pampering activities to fight back the cold and darkness!

Explorations

You may remember some time back I began attending online Virtual Studio at the National Gallery of Art. It’s a free program that occurs every 2 weeks or so and is sponsored by the NGA in Washington, DC.

Sometimes a guest artist runs the session, which lasts about 2 hours; sometimes NGA personnel do so. In all cases, we as participants take our inspiration from a work of art and use it to inspire exploration of a genre or a form.

(Here’s info about the program from a previous post. I wrote about it on my poetry blog since the event focused on both words and visual art.)

Anyway, not long ago we concluded several sessions using collage work. We viewed work by Romare Bearden and the Gees Bend quilters, among others. I’m not going to go into a lot of details – I’ll just show you the work.

A couple of these were done in my current Sketchbook, so you will see them in their book locations down the road, but I thought it might be nice to have a look now.

And if you are interested in attending a session, look here and you can find out how to get on the list for notifications: Virtual Studio.

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In this session we were exploring surrealism using magazine papers and found images.I saw the red cape and that led me into this surreal world.

In this session we looked at a painting featuring some women and a branch of a lemon tree. The skill we were practicing was that of painting our own papers, then collaging. Well, I’ve done a lot of that over the years! So it was quite natural to me. I painted on magazine papers rather than plain papers, using acrylics.

We focused on the lemons in creating our collages. I chose to veer off a little and set the lemons sort of in space rather than hanging from a tree.

In this session we looked at quilts by the Gees Bend quilters and then created our own tiny quilts following a set method of putting the papers together. I made four different arrangements. Each one is about 6″ x 8″, maybe? The one in the top right corner, I’ve given it an edging, because it became a rug in a project that I made for my granddaughter. The others, I am sure they will show up somewhere later on…

OK, that’s it for now!

Flipped the pages and look what I saw

Here is something I do every so often.

I take out one of my magazines I use for collage source material. I pick a well-used one with a lot of pages torn or cut in various ways.

Then I open it to a page. Flip an adjoining page over it. I need a page that’s been torn, so that the first page shows under it. If I have to, I just keep on going. Eventually there is a layering by coincidence that looks good to me.

When I find that serendipitous arrangement, I extract it from the magazine and glue it to a surface. Voila! Collage!

If this isn’t making much sense, then take a look at the photos. They each show several layers of pages, still in the magazine but ready to be taken out and glued.

If I want to. There is always the lure of trying just another page…Flip. Flip. Flip.

Tiny Bedroom Interior: Four

In October/November 2022 I took a class at the Smithsonian called Build a Tiny Interior, taught by Marcie Wolf-Hubbard. Yes, it’s an offshoot of a class I have taken a couple of times before taught by the same artist – Build a Tiny House!, and you have seen examples of my Tiny House work here on the blog.

As I have mentioned before, I have always loved dollhouses and as a child spent a lot of time building my own mini homes in various materials. Now so many years later, I am rediscovering this path with great pleasure.

In a short series of posts I will tell you about my Tiny Interior project.

Now we head back to decor, since the furniture is ready and waiting.

Inside the room

In real life, my granddaughter’s room is a restful white. But, in the Tiny Interior, I decided to make it colorful and lively, to reflect all the new thoughts and ideas a small person has as she learns about the world.

And, her granny likes a whole lot of color and pattern.

So…I let myself go! The room bloomed in vivid color.

Here is the back wall with the window:

Here is the wall to the left. You can see I have trimmed a corner. The artwork is a photo of an actual piece in my granddaughter’s room. It was made for my daughter-in-law, her mother, when she was little, by her grandfather. My daughter-in-law and her grandfather were very close and my granddaughter is named for him.

Here is the right-hand wall. It was hard to get a photo of it because of the narrow space. The artwork in this view is a painting I made for my granddaughter. It depicts me in the center, holding her, with my two grandmothers one on each side of us. Both of my grandmothers were very special to me and I feel their presence even today, though they have been gone for many years.

Grandparents and love and good wishes, that is the theme. Here are closer views of the two artworks.

Outside the room

Now, here is the exterior. I kept the decoration toned down so as not to compete with the interior.

This is the back wall of the room. In real life, it is an outside wall, and so I made it brick.

Here is the right-hand wall. It represents daytime. There are five flowers, one for each of us, my granddaughter, her parents, and my husband and me as her grandparents.

Here is the left-hand wall. It represents night time, just before bedtime. And there is a guard cat to keep the bad dreams away.

OK, that’s the structure. Next time, the whole Tiny Interior, completed.

2003 Calendar – December

Here’s a project I did in 2001-2002 that I had forgotten about. Now, here in 2022-2023, I will take a trip down memory lane and show it to you, once each month.
Why this schedule? Because it is a calendar. For 2003.
I made three of these – one for my son, one for my parents, and one for my husband. It’s the last one that I am showing to you. They were all alike except for the covers.
I hoped this calendar could be a small record of a certain time in our family. I do not know if my son still has his version, and my parents now are dead and their things scattered and gone, but here is the one we still have at our house, a voice speaking up again from the past.
If you want to know more about this calendar, look here.

Again! The December image is missing from my archives. It was called “December Journey” and it showed commuters getting on to the commuter train in Glenside, PA. I worked in the city for many years, as did my husband, and this scene was part of our lives for decades.

Here is the page in the calendar.

Happy December!

The notes all speak for themselves, I think.

Here’s another collage with a December theme, to make up for the missing one. It’s called “Driving in December” and it was 11″ x 14″. It depicts the bridge over the railroad tracks in Wyncote, PA, at the Jenkintown-Wyncote station, from the Wyncote side.

Tiny House: Multiples

You may remember some Tiny Houses I made a few months ago, Numbers 10, 11, and 12. I wrote a post describing in detail how I made them. They are smaller than my other Tiny Houses because I create them from the small cardboard boxes tea bags come in (such as Yogi tea or the like, with 20 tea bags).

I also cover the surfaces with papier mache, and then I decorate them, as opposed to how I have done the bigger ones, where I collage, draw, or paint right on the surface.

I’ve sort of got a little sub-genre going here of TH’s, it seems, and I’m working in a series right now, constructing each one similarly but giving it individuality through its decoration or variations in roof structure, window placement, etc.

It’s fun, and I guess I’ll keep going until I get tired of it.

So, take a look. Here we have Tiny Houses 13, 15, and 16. I made the latter two at the same time, with #13 being done on its own. That’s why they are photographed differently. This is their front interior view. I think you could store little objects inside if you wanted to.

Here is Tiny House 13.

And here are Tiny House 15 and 16.

All right. I’ll keep drinking tea and there will be some more TH’s like these coming along sometime, I think.

Tiny House 14

I’ve been friends for quite a few years now with a wonderful artist I’ve never met in person. Sounds odd, doesn’t it? But it’s true. Here is the story: Nancy Bell Scott and I met through mail art, and we have exchanged artworks through the US Mail for some time. Next thing you know, we corresponded through email, and then…we are friends.

Before I go any further, take a look at her work. If you are like me, the glowing colors, the delicate papers, and the punctuation of the inked black lines will draw you in, again and again. I think you will also be interested in her use of asemic writing (it was through her work that I first heard of asemic writing, in fact). And I’d also like to say she gives her works the best titles ever – they are stories in themselves.

I made her a Tiny House not too long ago and sent it to her. Here are some photos. Here are views of the front, interior, and sides.

Here are some more shots of the interior:

And here are some angled shots of interior rooms. I know I am showing a lot, but I hope this way you can get a sense of how the decor appears in each room. With each wall that I construct, that is two surfaces to embellish (which suits me fine!)

A few more detail shots. I especially like the front door on this house. (You see it below as the orange rectangle. I used a hole puncher to make the array of holes (you might recognize the interior of the door in this way, in the earlier photos).

I think it would be fantastic to have a real door with small round windows scattered all over it like this.

I also like the roof – I used coffee holders for the roofing material.

How about a couple of views of the Tiny House 14 in an environment? Here it is on my desk:

And here it is out in the wilds of my back yard.

Well, that’s it for Tiny House 14, now settled in a new location. I hope it gives enjoyment for a long time.

2003 Calendar – November

Here’s a project I did in 2001-2002 that I had forgotten about. Now, here in 2022-2023, I will take a trip down memory lane and show it to you, once each month.
Why this schedule? Because it is a calendar. For 2003.
I made three of these – one for my son, one for my parents, and one for my husband. It’s the last one that I am showing to you. They were all alike except for the covers.
I hoped this calendar could be a small record of a certain time in our family. I do not know if my son still has his version, and my parents now are dead and their things scattered and gone, but here is the one we still have at our house, a voice speaking up again from the past.
If you want to know more about this calendar, look here.

Once again I am missing the image of the picture I used for this month in the calendar. It was called “November City” and depicted a view familiar to me from my years of working just south of City Hall in Philadelphia. This image is looking west on Market Street from City Hall.

Here is the page in the calendar.

Happy November!

As to the notes, #1 – the most important day in the year! My birthday! #8 – At this time I was taking Spanish classes at Arcadia University, just for my own enjoyment. I’m no longer able to speak or read much, but back then I learned enough to follow telenovelas. I taped each episode and then my family and I watched it, with me pausing the tape to translate if needed, but, telenovelas are generally very dramatic and the action spoke for itself. #9 Ahhh, that fluffy lavender robe!

As an extra, here are some other November-themed collages I made over the years:

A Slice of November
Last November
November Birthday
November Returns

Wordless Storybook Pages 23 and 24

In 2021 I completed a wordless artist book for my little granddaughter, who was about a year old at the time. I produced it by converting a discarded kid’s library book, using the same process I’ve used for similar books in the past.
Look here if you want to see more about how I make these books and to view one of my past books.
This particular volume does have a story, though. I had been working on it off and on for a long time and getting nowhere. Other projects kept coming along. One day I took it out to see about finishing it up and to consider what I might write to accompany the images. It struck me that it was fine just as it was, without words.
And I thought my granddaughter might like it when she is a little older, and she can make up stories to go with the pictures herself.