Recently in Photo-based collage Category
mixed media on canvas
6" x 8" x 1.5"
$50
I'm very pleased with this piece. Look closely behind the heart and you can see the eyes of a woman "watching her heart".
I started out with a deep stretched canvas, building up the green and blue surface with beeswax, crayon and flecks of gold leaf. Once that was dry, I made the cut-out in the centre so I could recess the 3-D heart. The final step was to affix the woman's face from the back. The woman's face is actually cut out from a famous poster by Rossetti. I had the poster in my living room for years - it was dry mounted on foamcore board, so it worked perfectly in this project (gave a nice clean finish for the back of the painting).
This painting is flexible in that it can stand up on its own (on a mantel or bookcase, for example) or be hung on the wall.
Grrrl PowerMixed media on canvas
24" x 16"
$450
This was the second painting I did using photos and transparencies.
Whereas in Being 13 I
used only dry media (paper, photos, transparencies, oil stick), in
Grrrl Power I branched out into using a combination of dry media
(paper, vintage wallpaper, photocopies, transparencies) and wet media
(acrylic paint).
Grrrl Power began with a photograph that I had
taken of my ten-year-old niece Leonie and her friend Annie.
In the photo, Leonie is impatient with posing and wanting to leave, while Annie is clowning around pulling her tiger t-shirt over her face.
I enlarged the photo to 11x17 and then used a photocopier to make lots of copies in various sizes. I used a stretched canvas as the support, and prepared it by "building" a surface of texture using old wallpaper and fabric. I then played around with various configurations of the photocopied images until something surfaced.
What I discovered is that the most evocative part of the image was Leonie’s posture* - her outstretched leg and beautifully curving outer arm. I decided to feature the shape of her arm by repeating it in diminishing sizes.While I was working on the painting, I was thinking about what it means to be a girl in our society. To represent my hope that Annie and Leonie’s apparent joy and confidence would continue, I added the angel holding a candle. After adhering all the collage elements, I painted around and over the collage elements with acrylic paints.
*After reading this analysis, Leonie said "Aunty, I disagree. The most evocative part of the image is the relationship between Annie and me." Smart kid.
Being 13Mixed media on matboard
$200
This is one of my all-time favourite pieces. It was the first piece I did using photos combined with transparencies.
The girl in the photo is my niece Karla. She was thirteen at the time, hence the title Being 13. I took the photo of Karla as part of an assignment for my photography class and liked it so much that I turned it into this painting.
I've had this in my "can't part with it drawer" for quite some time but have recently decided I have to start parting with more things!