As mentioned in the last blog post I was looking forward to continuing my explorations of the mono print collages I have been making since being in quarantine during the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s been almost two months since my last post and indeed there has been an evolution in the collages. First of all there are many many more of them! To date I have made over 100. I’m not sure I am done yet, so this may end up being an obsession that stays with me for a while.
I have spent part of the last month playing a back and forth art game with a friend. We agreed on a time frame, a theme and a paper size and we were off: I make a collage and send a photo of it to her, then three days later she makes one in response and sends a photo to me. I respond to hers, and so forth. While the idea started as an expression of a “Catiwhompus” world, it evolved to be something more for me. The compositions became more intricate and involved. Stick-like shapes were poking out here and there. I became more interested in the negative shapes and the irregular shapes around the cut paper. The images started becoming buildings, machines, constructions of all sorts. They evolved to take on a life of their own, so to speak. They told me what they wanted to be and I responded. Here are a few examples of the collages I created during the last month of our back and forth.
Then the shapes started overlapping more, whereas before they had been side-by-side or closely spaced. (And I must admit the closeness of my home life was starting to feel a little like we are all on top of one another at times.) Here are a few examples of that series.
All of the above images are on 11 x 8 paper. But my latest collages have gotten larger, and I am now doing some on 15 x 11 paper. (I currently am using Arches 88 but past collages have been on whatever paper I pulled from my paper stash so are on random papers, mostly Rives BFK.) Here are some in the larger size.
Evolving. That is all I hoped for this series when I started it almost three months ago. I wanted to just let the work go where it would, to allow myself to discover along the way, to have each piece be individual and yet part of something. Hmmm…isn’t that what we all want? To be ourselves and yet part of something bigger than ourselves? Again, the art speaks to the heart.