DevineArt Web Journal

Exploring New Techniques

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 11:19:45 -0800

It’s a new year, and I have resolved to create more entries in this journal. 2009 was a year of change for me; most of it good, but there were challenges involved. Change always creates a certain amount of anxiety, and the greatest challenge for me has been learning to use my newly acquired glut of time wisely. Needless to say, some days are better than others.

Perhaps the most exciting outcome of all this change was the opportunity to explore a new collage technique. I became intrigued with the possibilities of beeswax collage after looking at some encaustic work. I love the layered quality of encaustic, and the flexibility of the medium. Many different materials can be incorporated in a piece.

I checked out the technique on the web, and found several helpful sites describing the technique, so I thought I would jump in and see how it worked. I happened to have some beeswax on hand, as well as some small canvases. All I needed to get was a melting pot, which is available in most craft stores. Alternatively, you can use a small crock pot, but whatever you choose to use, it must reach a temperature of at least 140 degrees farenheit. The brush you use for applying the wax will never be used for anything else. It need not be an expensive brush, but it should be of a quality that holds together well. The other necessary tool, is an iron. I suspect you could use an old clothing iron, but I have tacking irons that I use in my acrylic work, so I use one of those.

Basically, I just started by assembling various papers and seeing what would happen. If you go on the web and check out sites showing examples of beeswax collage, you will notice that they generally tend to use old photographs, and have a sort of retro greeting card look to them. While I appreciate the appeal of these works, they aren’t quite the style in which I work. I found myself drawn to the way the wax affected the translucency of the papers, and how the layers created color changes. So far most of my pieces have been abstract, focusing on shapes, colors and textures.

Another exciting aspect of this technique is that it allows the use of powdered pigment. I have been using Pearl Ex pigments in their metallic range. The pigment can be brushed on the waxed surface of the piece, and burnished to create a lovely glow.

Right now I have been working on small projects, but I believe that the technique will work on relatively large pieces, and I think that as I get more comfortable with it, I will probably branch out to work on larger surfaces. So far small canvases - 5” X 5” to 14” X 20” - have worked well for me. As the work gets larger, I think it will be necessary to work either on braced canvas or artist’s board. I personally like the gallery canvases or boards with a depth of at least
1 3/8”. I like the chunky look of the unframed canvases, and take a fair amount of time finishing the edges.

As spring arrives, I find myself using a wider range of colors, and am having a wonderful time experimenting with beeswax. Among all of the delights of the technique one of the best is the fragrance that fills the studio as I work. The fragrance lingers on the finished pieces and I think enhances their appeal.

I am hoping later this year to include this technique in my workshops, and I will be posting a schedule of upcoming workshops as I get them scheduled.

Working to a Deadline

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 18:43:54 -0700

I have been working on some new pieces for a show I am having in Astoria, Oregon on September 12th. I started thinking about what I wanted to do in June when September seemed a long way off. Somehow, here we are at the end of August and I’m still working away trying to make some pieces that I am both happy with and reflect where I am in my art journey.

It’s funny how having a deadline is a mixed blessing. Knowing that someone believes in you enough to want to exhibit your work is a real boost. There is validation that your work is speaking to others, and that they think it is worth sharing with an audience, and that should be motivation enough. However, sometimes knowing that you have to produce a certain amount of work by a certain time can be daunting. Will there be enough work that is good enough to show? Why is it that when you know that people will be looking at your art do you suddenly get self-conscious about what you are doing? There are all sorts of questions that rattle around in your head as you try to settle into a working routine.

I started working on the piece above by trying out a new (to me) product by Golden, Fiber Paste. It is an acrylic white paste that can be applied to many different surfaces and it creates a texture quite like handmade paper. I applied it to the surface of a small canvas, using only the left third of the surface. When it dried, it looked a lot like the stucco wall of an old building, so I began to think about images that might be complimentary to that surface. I settled on an image of the Mona Lisa and a couple of other bits of Leonardo images, as well as a photo of a woman sleeping and a door in a stone wall.

I painted the textured surface with a mixture of acrylic medium and Pearl Ex Pigment. I liked the result, and decided to texture the outer edges of the canvas and paint them with the same mixture. The canvas will not need to be framed.

I then took the Leonardo images, the sleeping woman and the door and scanned them in to PhotoShop. I colorized, resized and filtered the images until I achieve a result that I wanted. I knew that I wanted the door in the stone wall to be a three dimensional element, and that the doors would be open. I printed one version on clay coated paper, and then horizontally flipped the image and printed that version. The two versions were fused together and then cut out. The result was that when the doors were cut and opened, the inside of the doors were correctly aligned with the outside.

This is a second piece that I am going to include in the show. Again, I worked on a canvas. This one is larger than the Leonardo piece, measuring 20” X 16”. This time I prepared the canvas with acrylic medium, and applied

The Dream within a Dream

tissue paper with a brush loaded with acrylic medium. This is almost like painting with the tissue, and as you apply the layers the colors blend together. Again, I was interested in the dream state, and I wanted to have faces of sleepers in the piece, and I wanted to add dimension to the piece. I played with clay in anticipation of making casts for plaster of paris. However, I enjoyed working with the clay so much, and wanted to simplify the process, so I created the faces using Sculpey clay which can be baked in the oven. After the faces were baked, I applied multiple layers of acrylic paint glazes and then sealed them with acrylic medium. They are epoxied to the canvas which was embellished with printer’s foil and a quote from Edgar Allan Poe.

These pieces are a reflection of the way I often dream. I see dreams as a doorway to thoughts and feelings that we don’t deal with during the day. The connections between the images we see in our dreams are not obvious, but they can trigger feelings that carry over into our waking. Dreams can be disturbing, but comforting at the same time. They have a way of speaking to us without words, and solving problems and issues by just giving us access to a different world where we can move without the weight of gravity and can see the unseen.

Completing a Commission

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Accepting a commission creates a set of challenges far different from sitting down to create a piece that comes out of your own inspiration. Of course uppermost in your thoughts is satisfying the expectations of your client, but there are other considerations such as trying to really understand what the client is looking for, the setting where the final work will be displayed, and how to incorporate your personal style into the vision that the client may have.

Because of my medium, collage, I have been asked to work with original materials supplied by the client. These can be photos or any sort of memorabilia that is meaningful to the client, so a great deal of care and respect for these items must be taken. If there is any question of damaging an item, I try to find a way to test the acrylic medium and heat on an unobtrusive area of the item in question. In the case of photos using scanned reproductions of them is an option.

Recently, I was asked to create a collage showcasing a collection of tickets to number of sporting events. The tickets had been collected over a number of years, and each one represented a memory of a game, which the owner cherished. Each ticket was very special to him, and I wanted to find a way to show them off to their best advantage. In order not to damage any of the tickets I made photo copies of them and trimmed them to actual size. This allowed me to try different layouts.

One big challenge for me was that I don’t know very much about sports, especially football and basketball, the two sports represented by the tickets. Also the tickets were a mix of college and professional games. At first I tried to find color patterns, and then tried putting tickets to similar events together in different sections of the board I was working on. I tried making geometric patterns with the tickets. None of these seemed to create a unified whole. After a great deal of thought, I decided to take all of the tickets for University of Oregon football and basketball games and work with them. They were colorful, and had a great deal of meaning for the client. In addition, they allowed me to work with a manageable size substrate.

I wanted something that would bring the tickets together; a background that would give the tickets themselves the chance to pop. I decided to try to find a poster from the University to use as a background. I found one the perfect size, 24” X 28”, showing four views of the football stadium. Now that I had a clearer vision of where I was going with the project, I started to work with the actual tickets. I still didn’t coat them with acrylic medium, but I tacked the poster down on a piece of glass with lightly gummed double faced tape, and played with various arrangements of tickets. I chose to arrange them based on the images on the tickets, but I was learning from the client a bit more about which were the tickets from “important” games, so I gave some of them pride of place. When I was somewhat satisfied with the arrangement, I took some pictures and emailed them to the client, and also asked him to come to my studio and see the piece in person.

Having him look over the layout in person was a good idea. He had some input on the placement, and commented on the ticket I had placed in the center, saying that it was from an unimportant game. However, after I told him I chose to place it in the center because it was the only ticket with the old Ducks logo he had, he agreed that it was in the right place. I knew he was very fond of that logo, and I wanted him to see it every time he glanced at the collage.

Having received his approval, I began the process of assembling the collage. I had to get a very sturdy substrate, so I got a cream colored piece of heavy board and cut it to a size two inches larger than the poster on each side. I taped off the two inch border, and coated the substrate with acrylic medium. I also coated all of the tickets and the poster front and back and let everything dry overnight. The ironing process was a bit tricky. The poster had to be ironed down very carefully, starting at the center and working outward so that it would be very smooth. It was a lot like hanging wallpaper and working from the center to get out all the bubbles. Once that was done it was time to place the tickets. Before I coated them I wrote the placement on the back of each one. I worked clockwise from the top center, and made a note for example, center top right. This made it very easy to get them back where they belonged. In any event I had the photos I had taken for reference.

Because the tickets were of different thicknesses, the ironing process took quite a bit of time. I had to make sure they were all down securely, and none of the edges were at all loose. As usual, I found that once the ironing was done, the image became very smooth and unified. As a final touch, after I removed the border tape, I re-taped the border 1/4” from the image, and laid down a couple of coats of acrylic medium. When it was dry, I applied printer’s foil in a couple of shades of gold. After the tape was pealed away, the foil created a nice little border that gave the image some extra depth. A final coat of UV varnish, and the piece is ready for framing.

I hope the client will enjoy the finished work, and that it will help him preserve all those happy tailgating memories.

Being You is Enough

Tue, 12 May 2009 17:03:23 -0700

I am hoping it is never too late to learn life lessons. I have been going through some transitions in my life lately, and have felt at a bit of a loss. A couple of months ago I retired from my 9 to 5 job, and the change has thrown some surprises my way.

When I imagined the luxury of having all my time to myself, I was certain that I would know exactly how I would use it. I envisioned long days in my studio working away, having time to work in my garden, and catching up on reading. All of the things I packed into the weekend and vacation time would be attended to at an leisurely pace. Oddly enough, it didn’t work out that way.

All that time felt like it needed to be used “productively”. In other words, I felt like I needed to get the business aspect of my artwork up and running, so I plunged into networking, both locally and on the internet. I spent time developing this site and getting a presence on social networking sites. I soon began to feel that old hamster on a wheel feeling - running fast and getting nowhere. That only made me feel like I wasn’t doing enough and cast a pall over everything I tried. I did learn some interesting things along the way, and met some wonderful people, so the time has not been wasted.

The other day I had a revelation, well actually two revelations: first, I was ignoring what is really my business; my artwork, and second, I don’t really know who I am. Now the last bit may sound odd from someone who has been around for a while, but the better part of my life has been spent (mostly willingly) filling roles. I have been mom, breadwinner, co-worker, but not just me. I had lost sight of the fact that just being me is enough. I saw that I was chasing around working on building a business because I needed to have another “role” to assume. I suppose it is easier being in a role than knowing who you are and living as though that is enough.

I can see now that I need time and space to get to know me and to believe that being me is enough. This is integral to my art as well. I don’t believe that an artist who is out of touch with who she is can create authentic work. Art comes from the heart and soul, and if you aren’t in touch with your essence, you don’t have much to say. The work becomes technical and chilly. It may be pretty to look at, but it doesn’t have passion. Passion my not always be comfortable, but it certainly has something to communicate.

If I am going to have a viable business based on my art, it has to come from the art and from my heart. I will be a better teacher if I am at peace with myself and the art I create will be something worth showing, and will be a real example to my students.

This site will be very active with more journal entries about what I am learning and my work, as well as photos of work both finished and in progress. I hope the site will reflect the authenticity I am moving toward in my life and my work. It will be an interesting journey. I am going to be taking workshops and classes and will share what I am learning with you.

It’s a little bit like being in one of those dreams where you are standing in front of an audience stark naked, but I have a feeling that when I get to the point that I really know that being me is enough, I won’t care if I’m dressed or not.

Bookbinding Workshop

Thu, 7 May 2009 16:11:50 -0700

Last night I took a wonderful workshop at the 23 Sandy Gallery in Portland on creating books. It was taught by Alex and Magu Appella from Argentina. Alex makes beautiful books that combine collage images with her writing (see photo above). Some are very personal about her family, many are prose or poetry influenced by her travels or her life in Argentina. Her binding techniques vary ,but they are a big reason her books are so enchanting. Her books often have pockets, pop-ups and other interesting embellishments that are integral to the story, and the binding techniques she chooses enable her to construct the books with these special enhancements.

Alex showed us how to create an accordion binding, a technique that is simple, but is flexible enough to create many different kinds and sizes of books. The technique allows you to create almost as many pages as you want, and can support special enhancements like pockets. If you can imagine it, you can probably make it with this binding technique.

In addition, we learned Japanese stab binding. This ancient technique involves sewing the book blocks and covers with decorative stitches. It is a beautiful technique that allows you to create books without glue or adhesives of any kind.

Book making is a wonderful companion to collage. For a one of a kind book, original collage can be used both on the covers and on the inside pages. If you plan to create multiple copies of your book, creating the collage on a computer is a good option. If you keep a journal and want to create one that is unique, a handmade collage on the cover, and hand binding the book will give you a book that is completely yours, inside and out.

Alex’s books are on display at the 23 Sandy Gallery, 623 NE Sandy Blvd., Portland, OR 97232. Gallery hours are 12 - 6 Thursday, Friday and Saturday, or by appointment. Alex and Magu are holding a poetry reading/acoustic latin music event at the gallery this Saturday, May 9th at 5 PM. Please visit the gallery web site www.23sandy.com for full details.