When you accumulate many bits & pieces, many partially finished art attempts, duplicate images, and early artworks you no longer love, turn to the art of collage!

Of course it is a fuzzy line between mixed media art and the art of collage. When I layer a few embellishments onto a drawing, photo, or painting, that doesn’t feel like collage. Maybe I have made a collage when the focus of the work is actually made up of multiple parts? Or at least when the context is critical to the piece and that is built from many parts?

I am not good at determining firm distinctions in art categories. For one thing, I don’t see the point of doing so! I will leave that to others. Here are some recent efforts, collage, mixed media, or other:

Note that the first two images are two photos of the same piece. The first with the work placed on the studio floor, the second with the work placed in a window. This piece is intentionally translucent, but not necessarily to be backlit through a fly screen as above! The gridded mesh is NOT part of the artwork…

A bit of finish work can turn an older drawing into a new piece, and an older extra part the wrong size can be repurposed in a brand new concept. At left I embellished a drawing for a concept that ended up very differently, and at right is a beginning of a new work which may acquire a few more moons:

I have been thoroughly derailed from my more usual artistic pursuits recently, and have had to find my art in remodeling work. I have been converting a storage room into living space, and it is taking several months to complete. My studio has been chaotic and full of extra “stuff”: furniture, supplies, and more, making every activity more difficult. I cannot find things I need, and cannot put things away properly.

Now I am starting to get some relief; the project is almost complete. However I am still not able to really move in to my newly remodeled space! Maybe next week will be the week!

Here is an attempt to incorporate some artwork into my project. I added some custom artwork during the painting phase, in order to hide the boundary between two different “whites” on the back room wall.

My remodel modified two rooms that had been joined by a double door. Now they are separated, and both now have previously missing closets. Yay storage!

The above bubbles rise from floor level and spill onto the ceiling and the closet door. I painted the first stream of bubbles by hand, but then created different sized stamps from a piece of adhesive backed velvety fabric, then used various techniques with my paints so that each bubble is unique. The effect is satisfactory: not fine art, but not too silly either! So I did find an opportunity for art in remodeling.

This new collage, A Small Prayer, came about from my studio cleanup, during an interval in my remodeling intensive. I am delighted to make any new artwork at this time, no matter how small! A Small Prayer is approximately 7″x7″ (not quite square) and it consists of quite a few different pieces from older art, along with a couple of found objects.

I started with the one remaining remnant of another much older artwork. This was a rather unsuccessful work that slowly decayed to nothing outside, leaving only the small figure below. I evicted the original low relief artwork from my studio, along with several other early pieces! Yard art!

I rescued the small kneeling figure from the grass while tidying up the yard, and made it the focus in my new work. I probably made this much older and now weathered figure from polymer clay, and added layers of paint.

In addition to the figure, A Small Prayer consists of a construction byproduct circle of metal roofing, a lovely scrap of birch bark, and several pieces of my collograph prints. I mounted these to a square of door skin plywood. Then I mounted that to 3/4 plywood, so it is painted, edged, and ready to hang.

These bound and wrapped mummies are a chine colle photo etched print with string, mounted on honeycomb cardboard packing material.

Here is another artwork that I started long ago, now completed by adding collage elements. The images left to right: the early version, the new version, and then the final mounting:

I am afraid that the earlier version was already sufficient. It consisted of the watercolor window with cutout trees superimposed, with the tracing of purple shadow painted in.

I may well have cluttered and spoiled it by adding the newest elements: a leaf, a bird, and a crescent moon. But it is done, and now the work is mounted on a chipboard panel eady to hang.

I am currently very discouraged about most of my artwork, so I will put this away and hope that I will like it again later! Wouldn’t it be lovely if someone wanted this. But really that is not very likely. I am doing no marketing here. Although I did sign up for the August studio tour, so maybe I will sell a few pieces then.