Cynthia Ryan Kelly and I have been collaborating on a mail art project since 1992, sending postcards back and forth to each other to work on. These are just a couple of the ones she has sent to me. I could never touch these two.
We did a collaborative project in collage class, where we worked on a collage for a while and exchanged it with a partner for each to finish the one the other had started. This is one that I started and my collaborator Fern brought on home.
I really like what she did with it.
I’ve been taking a great collage class for the past few weeks. We work in class and create collages in a couple of hours. It’s a challenge because of the time and materials constraint, but it makes me work and think a little differently than I normally do, which is exactly why I took the class.
For our first assignment, we drew with scissors from a live model. At the end of the night I’d produced these, which were not at all finished. They were totally unresolved in this state.
I finished the first one at home, which I think is a massive improvement. I wanted to try and keep some of the gesture of the live model but give it some kind of theme.
It’s tough to salvage a bad collage when you want to preserve the one interesting shape in it. I gessoed over most of it, but had to scrape some of it off the figure on the left. Now I just have to finish the second one.
Sometimes when I’m shuffling through collage stuff, I spot a great composition created out of a random pile. It’s almost impossible to glue these down exactly as they are arranged, so I just take a quick photo. Here are two recent random collages.
I’m taking an excellent collage class right now, and our assignment was to do a narrative collage. I made these two collages in class.
I’d been inspired earlier in the week by an exhibit I saw online at the McNay Art Museum called Recycled, Repurposed, Reborn, in particular, a piece by Alexandra Exter titled Scene Design for an Unidentified Production. I just thought that would be a great concept for a collage series, so these are a really early attempt. They ended up being more surreal than dramatic, but they were pretty fun to do.