25/52: It’s Palindrome Week!
And it’s pushed me into a different colour zone.
I’m new here, I haven’t visited this array of bluegreens and reddypinks before
The streaks of white are new as well. The collage continues, I can’t see that ending any time soon.
Rising up, looking forward…
Something of a Tribal Phoenix
amid musical mishmash. Here we go……..
“To see patterns is to understand.”
Do you know Jason Silva?
He’s media artist, futurist, philosopher,
he’s a ball of frenetic energy and enthusiasm and with a magnificent mastery of descriptive language he spills this energy out into the internet in Shots of Awe.
I like Jason Silva a LOT.
I was listening to him talking with Tim Ferris while I made the most part of this page.
I love the dance between the digital and the analog.
Set the pixels in place, print and then set to with the tools of a previous age:
Actual cutting with actual scissors
Actual mess with actual paste.
The combination of these colours and the sheen of the medium have given her heads a pearly purity.
(And all that baldness was bothering me.
It’s getting lost now under layers of cut out swirls.)
Poured paint, deluge of color.
But tonally bland.
Contrast added. A sea of souls.
Safe in my colours and patterns,
protected by the armor of my art,
I keep on reaching out into the future,
Into the unknown.
Ready or not, here it comes.
This recurring instruction: Create Your Own Map.
It’s what I’m endeavoring to do.
I’m mapping my way as I go.
I document when I remember,
I share when I think it might help.
Starting out in the usual fashion:
Colours and curls,
Cut outs, collaging the inconsequential,
daubs, dabs, smudgy smear.
State the intention.
Then populate:
Look up, look down. Look around
Remember it’s the journey not the destination.
Art journalers who embrace the unplanned,
who find their mojo in the serendipitous,
whose ideas bloom out of happenstance:
these folks will know this old trick: Squash that inky stencil between future pages of the book in which you’re playing and get the two-folded benefits of not wasting a drop of delicious colour and planting the seed for a creation yet to be born. That’s where this page began:
And another familar trick: glue in a load of the offcuts of paper that are littering the work table. Much of this was soon to be lost under layers of heavy paint. But that’s the nature of the ephemeral.
Last week’s pages were dominated by these faces. And where there are cut outs, there are the spaces from which they are cut. Add them to the gluings:
So I felt called towards bigger colors. More defining. Louder.
It came out as something a bit Easter Islandish, I like the way they are looking out:
One into the past, one into the future.
Another week, another page in the altered book to show you.
I notice sometimes when I’m working on a project, just how little control I have. It’s not that I don’t know where it’s going, I’m not even steering the way. It’s going its own course and I’m simply wielding the brush or the pen or the whatever-it-is.
Some sort of external force does all the decision making. It took my inner control freak a long while to learn to rest back and let this happen. (Sometimes she worries so. I distract her with thoughts of cheese and music and cushions. She chills, we move on)
This page was a bit of a hotch-potch til the latter stages when it seemed to start coming together.
See what I mean?
I mean it’s not lost it’s hotch-potchery vibe, but I feel like it’s crossed the line from uncoordinated chaos to cohesive vision. Although you aren’t seeing what will be the finally finished thing, it’s a large part of the way there. More again soon.
Some the pages in my altered book are already conveniently titled. The book began as an orphaned volume of short stories, and some of the tales’ titles just appealed too much to cover up.
Doesn’t Mirage just conjure such magic?
I haven’t embarked on any of these pages with a plan. Planning just isn’t in my spirit. I didn’t get that gene.
So to begin I just do something, and let that define where it wanders next. The first something that happened on this page took the form of sprinkles of Brusho swept about in circles with a wet brush. 
Oh my how I love how these dusty crystals explode with colour. This stuff is the definition of less is more. More than a wee bit makes for a super rich gravy of an ink, which is gorgeous, but when you use an imperceptibly itsy amount each tiny trace of this magic erupts into zingy pigment on contact with moisture.
It is more than gorgeous. It is actual magic.
Another early layer was gesso scraped through a stencil, then extra messy gesso scraped haphazardly. If you’re a fellow scraper of gesso you’ll recognise those characteristic windshield wiper patterns of clearing excess off the scraper 😉
In the years preceding this project I accumulated a shed load of design magazines, rich full of the most gorgeous graphics and illustration. Just lately I embarked on transforming the knee high heap into 4 boxes of delicious collage ingredients, and a small mountain of recycling.
Thing is, I don’t know who this half a face belonged to, and as an artist I’d like to credit the creator. Any reference to the inventor got lost in the snippings. If it was you – thank you – and I hope that you like the new other half I made. In the spirit of self-portraiture I’ve mismatched the eyes for a familiar wonkiness!
Hope you’ve enjoyed this little trip through the putting together stages. Here’s how the page developed as a whole………
I’m having so much fun with this altered book.
As it develops more meanings are attaching themselves. For instance, it h
as 42 pages, and as we all know 42 is the meaning of life, the universe and everything. So suddenly it has a theme attached… it’s a book with elements of life, the universe and everything. Reckon those are parameters I can keep within!
Plus I’ve brought in elements of Somerset Maugham’s writing. Seemed only fair as I’d already obliterated so many of his words in paint and collage and whatnots.
This page is titled from his quote:
“The Essence of the Beautiful is Unity and Variety.”
Here is how the page developed …………..
I shared recently how sometimes I’ll drop into the future and leave myself a note. Turns out I’d done it again for last week’s page:
“Each morning I am born again. What I do today is what matters most.” Last week hadn’t kicked off to the best start, so it was maybe just what I needed to read. (Well done me-in-the-recent past). That in mind, collage on:
Hey, d’u remember the whole paper-dying obsession I had a while back? (it continues, I just don’t go on about it so much these days). Of all the scrap paper I LOVE to make use of, I really like to use envelopes.
What is it? Idk, maybe how they’re so readily discarded, they appeal to the rescuer part of my character.
Also, so often have such pretty patterns hidden inside. So junk mail arrived this week and it was inside one of may fav prettily-insided style envelopes.
I’m aware that’s quite a niche in geekiness to have a fav prettily-insided style envelopes.
This week the page as a whole left me a little Meh, but if anything saved it from it’s feel of half-arsed mediocrity, it’s this tiny honeycomb patterns.
So here’s how the page evolved….
I feel like it isn’t really ‘done‘ and that’s why I don’t feel happy with it. But whatever, it’s last week and in the past now. I like the colours and the honeycomb and sometimes that just has to be enough.
Onward and upward!
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