It appears that this blog has become a showplace for my collage work. I do other work as well, but the other things I'm working on now are either part of a larger series that I don't want to share until more complete, or not resolved enough to show yet. All in good time.
This first collage was just completed last night. Right when I was finishing it, I realized it was sort of a self portrait. For all the collage I've shown here, I have to admit that I've been struggling with it a bit lately. Ideas aren't flowing, nothing seems to quite work. When that happens, I usually put it aside and work on something else, but I've grown to depend on the immediacy of collage as sort of a creative Draino, clearing my brain of all the gunk that gets stuck there. After a particularly annoying couple of weeks spent simultaneously not working on collage and beating myself up about that, the mental Draino did it's job, and this was the result. I think it's me, moving around empty shapes in a futile attempt to make something interesting happen.
This one I finished this morning. Came together fairly quickly. I recently bought a stack of musty old 60's era Better Homes and Gardens and Life magazines at an estate sale, and after sealing them in a box with kitty liter for two weeks in a (partly successful) attempt to remove some of the mustiness, have just started looking at them. This is mostly images from those magazines, on wallpaper. By the way, I've also been scanning odd and cool ads from those magazines, which I'm posting (along with other things) on my Tumblr, You Fill Me With Inertia.
I made this one back in April. It drives my eyes nuts looking at it, but I like it. Made from a postcard and magazine clipping on wallpaper.
I really can't explain this one. Made about a week after the one above, I was looking through an old book and saw that illustration of a mushroom cloud, and had to do something with it. Definitely one of those 'don't think about it, just do it' pieces.
